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Comment by babelfish | Hacker News Reader

My company announced a couple of months ago that they are planning on having everyone come back into office starting on September 1st. I request a "full remote exception" three times, and was rejected each time, one of which coming straight from the CTO. So I found a new job and put in my two weeks - somehow, everyone up the chain from me was incredibly surprised and disappointed, and even offered me a "full remote exception" if I stayed (I declined). How long are companies going to pretend that Pandora's Box hasn't been opened with regards to remote work? Why are we pretending that employees aren't as productive when at home? This last year and a half have shown tech companies posting record profits, so it's clear that employees are just as productive from their homes as from the office. Those who can adapt to this new world will be able to hire the best talent, and those who can't are going to really struggle and lost talent.

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As a new grad, onboarding during covid sucked so extremely hard. It started off with a lack of productivity, a lack of understanding, and an extreme amount of anxiety from being unable to tell what is expected of me and how to achieve that.

Going to office has been the best possible thing for me. I can see my coworkers, understand the expectations set for me, get instant help from coworkers (and often provide instant help). My anxiety is better and my health is better. I'm not distracted by the 10,000 things around my house that I either want to do or need to do.

That being said, that's only my experience. I think the research shows that remote work is just as productive, if not better. It's better for people who really need to take care of personal things during work hours. The opposition to remote work is far too forceful, especially when companies don't even intend to back up their threats (like in your case). Leadership in many companies seems against the idea for WFH for all the wrong reasons. They need to understand it's a real risk trying to force employees to come back to the office, and you can certainly lose some very important talent by doing that.

I mean, here's the thing. Most new grads are drastically overestimating the importance that they're onboarded quickly. The median productivity of a new grad is approximately zero for the first year. Maybe even negative. Nobody really expects much of you anyway. So just, chill and focus on improving at a slow and steady rate.

The whole reason FANG companies hire new grades is because a small fraction will become superstars in a few years. And a small handful of those superstars will stay out of loyalty/comfort/inertia. New grads are basically deep out of the money, long-dated call options. Companies aren't going to care whether it takes them 3 months or 6 months to get acclimated to the org's culture.

That's easy to say as an experienced employee, but when you're a new hire and you have no clue what's going on around you because there are no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of, and no way to interpret your boss's apathy about your existence...

Plus reading here about certain companies' interest in pruning people ruthlessly...

I could see why morale among new hires would be problematic in this rather chaotic time.

>> no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of

That's all done in chat now. Which on a personal level, that's how I've done it for a quarter of a century, but it's like that at work now too.

I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats, or in specialized channels that particularly newcomers won't be a part of.

Additionally, someone who's new is much easier to spot and thus be reminded of when they're physically proximate. Someone new on chat who doesn't have much to contribute yet can very easily vanish, so while they may be able to pull information from others, much less information will be deliberately pushed their way.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but we have millennia of culture and evolution built around in-person interactions.

>> I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats

I haven't seen that. What type of conversations that used to be public are you seeing being moved to private now that things are done through chat?

Any time someone wants something from me specifically, or vice versa.

Exactly .

If you turn that 1 year into 2 years, though, you HAVE changed things dramatically in terms of the value of what you're paying for.

So if today's new grads are telling you "I'm drowning" and two years ago they weren't... maybe you should listen.

And measured productivity is only half of it if a sizable fraction of those frustrated new grads leave much sooner than they would otherwise.

Or if "new grad" experiences also tend to match "new hire" experiences even for experienced folks...

I think your advice to relax and focus on slow, steady improvement is on point, but imo you are really overstating the bit about low expectations for new grads. no reasonable company will make a new grad solely responsible for some critical part of their product, but most will be disappointed if your main accomplishment in your first year on the job was "got onboarded". the expectation is that you may need some hand-holding, but ultimately you will get stuff done. at my company, the people that assumed the expectation for their productivity was "approximately zero" were quite surprised to see the difference in second-year raises between them and their new grad peers.

I'm no longer a new grad, and was onboarded long before COVID. I think those same problems, lack of productivity, understanding unable to tell expectations all applied even in-person. It seems to be more of a supervisor problem than a remote work problem. And as dcolkitt said, unrealistic expectations on how fast that's supposed to take. A lot of new grads are used to an internship which is only ~10 weeks, or a 16 week semester as a timeframe when you should be able to get entirely up to speed and done producing what's needed. But that's not necessarily long enough to truly learn how a team works and what the expectations are at a lot of companies.

I can absolutely empathize why graduating into this could be a really bad experience for people. Was just talking with someone about this earlier in the week. I admittedly started work in a very different time with very different and more limited tools but it's hard for me to imagine.

IMO this is an institutional problem at your workplace. I know my company's grown a ton and I've actually put in more hours ensuring one-on-one, high-touch onboarding time with all our new engineers so that they never feel unsupported and unknowing what the expectations are.

It's absolutely vital to recreate the same onboarding experience (seeing someone all day, being there whenever a question is asked, etc) virtually, and that means putting in the extra effort in making onesself available, checking in, and being proactive.

Hmm ... I hear what you're saying. At the same time, I recognize some of the new-kid-on-the-block problems you describe here.

I was a new grad in the analog world. The same kind of uncertainty existed for me. Sometimes a coworker who was supposed to help me just didn't talk to me. Many managers were just as poor then as they are now, in person or online, at setting and communicating expectations.

And there were additional problems in person that don't exist in the same way online. Particularly for women ... bullying and inappropriate attention from the men; envy and criticism from the women.

Also, early on in this pandemic, people and companies were scrambling in general. So, the chaos of onboarding may not have been a problem with onboarding per se, or even with companies not handling it "well" but just a shared difficulty.

My first SE gig did remote days, and I used to dread those when just starting out.

Nurturing early career engineers in a remote setting is definitely something companies need to get better at.

> get instant help from coworkers

You helped your company by saving senior engineers' precious time.

Unless maybe the primary value of a lot of senior engineers is onboarding and coaching.

honestly, because some of us aren't nearly as productive at home as we are in the office. I'm glad you are, and I'm glad you found a remote job, and I wish you success in it. But I'd like to get back into the office where I don't hear my dogs bark at every bird that lands in the back yard, or constant interruption by my retired neighbors, UPS/FedEx/USPS, etc etc etc.

I miss the delineation between work and home. I've lost it.

OP isn't demanding the company become all remote. They aren't dictating how you work. They want everyone to have an option to work in the manner that is best for them.

And this creates a bad dichotomy. If half team is remote and other has is in office it creates a really unbalanced interaction pattern.

I agree with both perspectives and not sure what I prefer but do think the team should be consistent (all remote or all in person). I don't want to have standup with 8 engineers in person and 1 engineer remote on VC.

Can you imagine a football team half remote / half on the field? It can be only one or the other (when they all play it coop via a game console). And yes, the specifics of our work is different (software development happens in the mind) but the underlying principles of human communication are the same. Fully remote communication works but worse than on-site unless you are outsourced or one of the 1k employees where they measure your productivity by the lines of committed code. Seriously, this road of thinking popularised by the latter type of employees because they are the majority I am afraid.

>Can you imagine a football team half remote / half on the field?

On gameday several members of the coaching staff for football teams are in skyboxes in the stadium removed from the players and coaches on the field. That is because they prefer to have an aerial view that allows them to see the game better. It works better for them and therefore it works better for the team. Your analogy doesn't provide the obvious answer you think it does.

Yes, working for a remote-only environment is vastly different from mixed. I don't know how companies are going to handle this without committing significant effort to making sure remote workers are kept in the loop.

An interesting question that's still TBD is how well companies can operate with a significant in-office team and remote team. I think this past 18 months has proven that fully remote can work, but it may be the case that a 50/50 remote/office split is significantly harder to manage.

Anecdotally, my company had an office team and a remote team split about 50/50 before and unrelated to COVID, and it was tricky. We don't have a lot of meetings, but when we did, it was hard to have a physical group in a conference room with a remote group on a screen. We solved that by effectively going fully remote for meetings that involved remote employees - everyone who was physically in the office would connect to a video call at their individual desks. I was personally fine with it, but some people definitely prefer (and work better in) that physical conference room setting.

All of that to say, the way one person works might be a forcing factor for others, even if they don't intend for it to be. Tricky problem.

If I'm in a meeting of any size, I'm dealing with people spread over offices and remote across North America and Europe anyway.

>We solved that by effectively going fully remote for meetings that involved remote employees

Yes, this is the process that teams within my extended team mostly follow.

I've been in physical/remote meeting splits. It's not really that hard. The trick is having everyone sign into the meeting with their own PC.

Yes, thank you for clarifying this. Let everyone work in the way that's best for them.

What if your employer agreed to rent you an office space? Or converted your office to more of a WeWork style space where you can reserve a desk?

I'm thinking this is where companies will be headed. For employees who want to work remotely, let them. For everyone else, either rent them small offices or allow them to come to the office as they choose.

I'd rather be in a space with other coworkers at that point.

Let's be honest, most of us didn't have a problem with the office, most of us had a problem with the open office and the commute, both of which are solvable. This remote work trend will peak (I don't know when, but it will), and we will come full circle back to offices again, and the ones that offer an office with a door will reap the rewards. Hopefully by then America has also figured out the infrastructure issue.

I had an office with a door for 11 years at 2 different companies. It was great. Then I had to switch jobs where we had cubicles but we worked from home half the time. My current job is all cubicles even for managers. People are always talking on conference calls the entire day. I have been work from home since March 2020 and I get so much more done.

We are planning to start 2 days in the office in September. I'm hoping it gets delayed. I would love to have an office with a door again but I'm just happy we don't have a giant table with an open floorplan like some of my friends.

> Let's be honest, most of us didn't have a problem with the office, most of us had a problem with the open office and the commute, both of which are solvable.

I kinda agree with this. at least, I wouldn't mind going to the office if it was a pleasant ten minute walk from my home. but how is the commute a solvable problem? many offices are located in suburban office parks. no one wants to live there. and desirable neighborhoods within walking distance of good employers are, well, desirable. you can't pay everyone enough money to live in the same nice places where everyone else also wants to live.

> but how is the commute a solvable problem?

By holding politicians feet to the fire when they've acted like infrastructure is their number one priority for the past 30 years. We should have high speed rail connecting every major city at this point but for some godforsaken reason we don't. We should have light rails and cable cars, and other green forms of transportation lightening the car load, and down the road, heavier investment in driverless technology (as well as supporting infrastructure) can almost eliminate congestion.

Sounds like a lot, but America has done more in less time. We just have allowed cynicism and paralysis to take over.

> I'd like to get back into the office where I don't hear my dogs bark at every bird that lands in the back yard

I'm enjoying working from home along with the sights and sounds, except for leaf blowers. I can look out my window and watch squirrels play. Luckily I only have one neighbor with a dog and it doesn't bark much. But this comment makes me wonder why you bother having a dog if you don't even like the sounds they make.

Leaf blowers should be outright banned in cities as their main effect is to blow dirt onto everyone else. Maybe now that so many people are working from home, we'll get some pushback on such "affluenza" that otherwise went unnoticed by commuters.

it's great that you have a private office. But most of the tech world are in open office floorplans now where the distractions are vastly greater than any at home.

And I'm not ready for spending 3 hours in a car everyday. That's a slow suicide

Few people (some, but few) are asking for companies to eliminate the office for people who want to be there. From what I've read, there are even more people who prefer 2-3 days in the office to a fully remote lifestyle.

The real sticking point seems to be attendance requirements.

Having to go somewhere every day even if it takes 3 hours to get there and back, whether you're more productive there or not.

Having to be there certain hours, even if a slight shift in hours would save you thousands of dollars a year in childcare expenses.

Having to sit at the desk until 5 pm (or longer) for show, even if you're a salaried employee, are fried from numerous meetings or an intense thinking job, and spent other time -- not at the desk -- thinking about work problems.

Having to work all of your 8-10 hours in a row, even if you would be more productive if you broke it up into 1-4 hour bursts spread throughout the day.

I take it you do not work in an open office.

I'm not the person you replied to. But I do work in an open office for a small startup. My productive went straight down the drain when working from home. I much prefer working at the office. I guess people are just different.

Improve your home, you can control that. You have almost zero control at the office.

The real amateur move here was to have the CTO decline and then change position. Of course you already lined up a new job, have no loyalty to your current employer, and will tell anyone who is willing to listen. They are now going to have others shopping for remote offers and giving their 2 weeks notice just to get the exception.

> Of course you already lined up a new job, have no loyalty to your current employer, and will tell anyone who is willing to listen.

God. Damn. Right.

It literally astounds me that managers don't understand that if you force people to shop around to get any improvement in their situations they will resent you for it. It costs time to secure another position, and if you only needed to pay me or give me X + Y initially to retain my employment, if you make me get an offer to negotiate it is going to cost you X + Y + Z because you wasted my time.

>it is going to cost you X + Y + Z because you wasted my time.

And because it is most certainly apparent no loyalty exists and now I have to factor in the risk you let me go (a.k.a. fire) me in 6 months if the right opportunity arises. To hell if I want to keep working in a place where I'm always needing to watch my back and be ready to find something else anyways. Good riddance!

Taking a step back, I've dropped hints a few different ways at previous positions, "I need X to happen to be happy", "Y really hurts my jobs satisfaction", etc. Yet they always seem surprised when I eventually try for something better, or at least a change, and leave. My last job I dropped what I thought were clear hints at 6, 3, and 1 month before leaving (I had my own private ultimatum timeline).

It's not very professional, but I feel like I have to say, "do X or I'm going to quit". Not very professional, and probably wouldn't go over well, but saying it politely doesn't seem to get the message across.

It's like dating. They are what they are and you want what you want, and telling them, "well maybe I would be happy if you changed in these specific ways" is just not going to work for you or them. Not if you drop hints, not if you drop ultimatums. They are what they are.

Just go find what you think will make you happy.

It's going to be tricky. I personally can't wait to go back to the office, and reclaim some space in my apartment by tearing down my WFH setup. Plus all the free Diet Coke I can drink, overhearing coworker's conversations and never being "out of the loop", etc. I think that people who feel as I do will simply go back to the office, and we'll incidentally enjoy the benefits of faster communication, which will make WFH employees feel left out, so they'll come in or go hybrid. Sorry about this in advance.

I’m personally on the hybrid boat, but one thing I’m worried about is whether full remote just leads to more outsourcing. Out sourcing has a lot of issues, but the actual differences between an onsite employee versus a remote employee in Prague are bigger than a remote employee in Montana versus Prague. And the perceived difference to a cfo may be even lower, so maybe they’ll go with wherever is cheaper.

Are these concerns of being careful of what we wish for too premature?

The folks who consider themselves un-outsourcable who have to interact with the devteam often won't consider someone in Prague to be a substitute for someone in Montana since it will fuck their schedule up timezone-wise and/or result in tanked productivity through massively harder coordination challenges.

Canada or Central or South America, on the other hand... could be a lot of opportunity for people there.

You might be very well right that the colleague from Prague outclasses your Montana colleague.

Does that worry you?

No, that’s my point. If they’re already remote then the difference is diminished between someone who wanted offices remote so they could move out of a high cost of living area and the remote person in another lower cost of living country. There is value in having people onsite, but without that consideration then the supply of workers is higher.

Is this necessarily bad? No, but be prepared for more competition and maybe needing to move to an even lower cost area than you’d imagined.

There is no doubt that some people are more productive remotely. But employees should also realize that the company’s definition of “productivity” is different from their own. For example, some engineers are happy to avoid random interruptions by working remotely, but the company might see those interruptions as how junior engineers learn the build and dev toolchains. That doesn’t show up in your peformance review, so it might not be worth anything to you, but it is worth something to the company.

I don’t think the solution here is for every company to become “remote-friendly.” I think it’s for remote companies like Automattic, Gitlab, and Invision to exist, and for remote-desiring engineers to get jobs there.

I would have told them, you had your chance, now it's too little too late

This +20. Screw the managers they always held back progress.

The vast majority people at my org enjoy hybrid over full remote.

Maintaining productivity while WFH comes at a huge personal cost for some people: family, lack of space, destroyed life/work balance etc.

There should be some colloqualisms around this to recognize that there are valid positions across the spectrum. I'm a hardcore WFH'er, an introvert with a dedicated office in a beautiful spot in the woods and no colleagues at my work location which is a 45 minute commute each way.

On the other hand I work with extroverted young folks that are sitting on the edge of their bed all day in a stuffy bedroom with one window so they can work from the top of their dresser in an apartment with three other roommates.

Not to mention that some roles requiring tight focused interaction (such as mine) benefit greatly from in person meeting.

Ideally, for me, I'd be in office two days a week (and no more). I'm much more productive on my technical tasks at home.

I like to think that different places serve different purposes for me. When I think of the woods I think of a place to relax, connect with nature and to take my mind off of work. To make that my workplace where I am introducing the stresses of workplace challenges or even the occasional work crisis, only serves to corrupt that space and my connection to it.

Disclaimer: I realize not everyone would share that point of view (and clearly having an office in the woods is working well for you), but that's my perspective on it.

Maintaining productivity in the typical office comes at huge personal and professional costs for others, and I'm kinda frustrated that this situation hasn't resulted in more empathy from fans of the office (because, you would think that having been forced into a suboptimal work situation, they'd understand more how much that sucks).

Honestly, yes, thanks for saying this. I literally had to move, I lost roommates that are now close friends but it's not the same. My monthly expenses are up even considering I don't commute, and I'm cooking/blending so it's not that, just the rent and stuff I had to buy. I held up for a year but when I saw it was going to be another year I had to pull the trigger and move to a bigger place.

I'm chill and think I respect the "WFH forever" crowd a lot. I just would love to be able to have my home office be for my hobbies again and it was hard to even mention this at work without someone aggressively jumping on me because I'm a shill for the big tech executive caste that wants us all "trapped" in the office again. I changed employers recently because of this to a company that has more of an office culture.

Question (I'm not being facetious; I actually wonder this) - Why do companies (and some workers) seem to believe that to have a great office culture people must be trapped there?

This is one of the sticking points in this discussion, I think.

(Leaving aside the issue of long commutes.) Why do people's actual hours sitting at the desk need to policed?

In my experience, policing desk hours doesn't do much for software engineering and most creative fields. Sometimes it is necessary though, if someone is checked out and lying about getting stuff done or being able to hit a milestone if they are just forced to sit and policed they will get stuff done but otherwise they will not. I find this latter case to be the exception. People with this attitude are already toxic when being policed, I think with WFH there's going to be a multiplier for their toxicity.

I think in a great office culture people are going to the office because they want to, or because they are more productive there. In my experience this is what will happen once a bunch of people are already at the office and remote people can't catch up or feel left behind on some stuff. Also on meetings when there's like four or five people on a room the people on videoconference just can't work at the same level and it's very hard to accommodate for them.

I think it's ok if some companies don't want to go back to the office, but I just think colocated teams perform better. I'd rather be on the teams that perform better. I think maybe for a giant like Google letting everyone go home is not a bad idea, but if you want a tiger team to skunkworks something up for you I think WFH won't cut it. Maybe a few days a week or every other week if you need to a lot of alone work, but not all the time.

>> destroyed life/work balance etc.

This is what the 75min/direction commute to SF would do to me

Remote work doesn't mean you have to literally work from home. Before the pandemic, I worked remotely, but rarely from my actual home.

Because not everyone is productive? Also, I want statistically significant proof of the correlation between working from home and company profits. I doubt there here is such research because it is nearly impossible to prove due to many other factors. For example, my company profits also increased but not because of home office but because of ppl doing more stuff online. Why? Because 2 out of 3 colleagues complained being unproductive and demotivated at home.

What about letting each person choose for themselves. If I want to work remote 100% of the time, I can. If I want to work only in the office, I can. If I want to work remote 3 days and in the office 2 days, I can. If I want to work 10 hours 4 days and take the 5th off, I can.

> I want statistically significant proof of the correlation between working from home and company profits.

Let's start with statistically significant proof of the correlation between working from the open office and company profits. That game cuts both ways.

Or, simply let everyone work as and where they wish and apply the same evaluation and retention criteria to everyone. No need to discrimiante against one group.

So "because not everyone is productive", everyone should be mandated to go back into the office?

No, but I am in favour of communication this beforehand during the interview. There are on-site companies and companies who allow remote as well as companies working only remote. Also, I am in favour of making exceptions if you can prove that you are more productive within the course of several months and afterwards while being completely remote. You can tell that I am suspicious to the remote == productivity mantra. Because we are working in a team unless you’re a freelancer or a one man project guy (which in a well managed company is a rare thing) and as human beings need eye to eye communication to work efficiently.

Why is the past year and a half of ratings while working remotely enough "proof" of productivity? Really, why is my opinion as an employee about how I work best not enough? You are exhibiting the same issue described elsewhere in this thread - you do not have enough trust for your employees to allow remote work.

Because it is always always more about the team dynamics and chemistry than about you as an individual. If you’re a lone wolf and do-all guy this doesn’t mean you will be valuable in a team, well connected with your colleagues OR on the other hand, outperform several people. In the end of the day, the company size, business domain, etc. has more impact to whether you work remote or not and have to be evaluated and assessed. We allow remote but these are exceptions for those who cannot move easily.

So explain my company. My team is split into two primary locations. The HQ, where I work is a typical multistory office building, while the remote site is more stripped down. The remote site has no managers for my team, our managers are all at the HQ.

So essentially, the workers at the remote site have been working (tada) remotely for over 13 years. And they do a great job. We communicate via email, by Teams/Webex, and there's no real difference.

And then COVID comes along and we all WFH for the last 18 months. Now when things appear to be getting better, mgmt is all in a rush to "RTO."

So not only have we proven that we can work well remotely in non-COVID times, but under the immense pressure of COVID, we had record profits.

So now we're going with the worst of all worlds for my team; hybrid. We're allowed to work 1-3 days a week remotely, but the other days we'll be in the office in desk hotels. Sounds like so much fun.

It really boils down to old school VPs/Managers who think butts in seats is how you get work done. And I say this as someone who's closer to retirement age than most.

Why should "more productive" be the standard?

If a person is equally productive but happier, why not let 'em be happier?

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