I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions.
Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
It’s not just me: As a remote manger I can almost always tell when summer break starts for everyone’s area because there’s a stepwise decline in productive when people’s kids aren’t in school.
Likewise, the office environment makes all the difference. I’ve worked in open-office spaces where everybody respected each other and concentration was the default. I’ve also worked in private-office spaces where I could expect knocks on my door every 15 minutes or less because the culture was so bad that interrupting the engineers was the default practice.
Lately, I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. Comes down to culture, but Slack makes it easy for people to quietly interrupt people directly whereas it was much easier to police the interruptions (as a manager) when I could literally see the offenders bothering the engineers.
I lived in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom for five of the last six years, with my wife and two children. My desk was beside the front entryway, with no door.
> Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
That's a problem of setting boundaries. It never gets easier, but at least the spouse works and the kids go to school and day care.
> I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack.
More setting of boundaries. Be firm and say no. Better, don't respond outside of your core hours unless you're explicitly on pager duty.
Whenever I hear about somebody's hellish Slack culture at their workplace and they blame Slack I always think, "That sounds like a bad office culture that would be bad even if Slack was removed from the equation."
Slack builds a culture of hyper-immediate distraction which seems difficult to avoid.
But tools have their own culture as well.
I've loved email for 30+ years
With effort it can be tamed. Filters and so on. But I've never gotten to a great place with it in modern times. With new sources of crap pouring into my inbox every day it is, at best, something that can be tamed but requires constant attention and maintenance.
Of course, this is all subjective and personal. It's working for you! Kudos. =)
Yes, that is the key.
Beauty of email is that it can be done because it's all open protocols.
I've been dragged into a signal channel and that's one untamable firehose. Sequential stream of messages via proprietary UI so there is nothing I can do to automatically file messaged into various folders. Nothing I can do to auto-process certain messages, nothing I can do to mark some things read and some unread, etc..
Email allows for infinite flexibility in configuring it just how you need to work best.
If you have just one inbox and everything lands there all the time, I can see how that's a firehose that's not going to be pleasant. But with email the tools exist to customize this away.
Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from
every angle all day long.
(above paragraph edited for clarity)
It's been awesome. Very respectful environment. People @ you but you are not expected to stop what you're doing.
By the same token, I can @ others without fear that I'm causing them an undue interuption, because asynchronous messaging is the norm.
The point being, if you need an immediate reply, you're expected to explicitly mention that. Otherwise it's assumed to be async.
It's working well IMO.
Where I work people can call me on slack or otherwise of it is urgent (no one has abused it so far).
If I am in hyperfocus, anything in text is assumed asynchronous and won't get looked at until I resurface.
Thanks!
How does this work?
Becuase the problem as a recipient is that now I still need to read every.single.message.all.the.time to see what it says, which is ridiculous waste of time and source of continuous interruption.
I much prefer to check email + slack once or twice a day at most, batch process them then. It's the only way to get any work done.
When you have a moment, read the message.
Go back to what you were doing before.
It literally takes seconds to read a message and decide “is everything on fire and I need to respond to this or can it wait until later”.
Mostly, it can wait.
If it can wait, wait. Ignore it. Go back to what you were doing.
Take your time folk, you dont have to respond to every email or every message ten seconds after reading it.
…to be fair, it is a bit rude to leave it for 4 hours before you even look to see what it was.
But hey, as long as you set expectations with your coworkers, that’s fine too.
Slack is only a problem if you can’t control your Pavlovian response to the little red icon.
You’re not a dog; you can choose how you respond to this stuff.
You make it sound like this part is zero-cost, when it absolutely is not.
This comic expresses it more clearly than I could in words: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
I guess your company has a lower message rate than what I've seen. In current company there are 30+ channels and a message arrives on average about every minute.
Each of those "few seconds to read" is a mental interrupt. Happening every minute. This leads to not being able to switch onto concentration mode to do actual work all day long.
The only solution is to switch it off entirely, only check at specific times. But if the company culture is to expect prompt response at all times, that's a conflict.
I guess your company has a lower message rate
than what I've seen. In current company there
are 30+ channels and a message arrives on average
about every minute.
Regular vanilla channel messages should never be expected to be synchronous. As you noted, that's completely unworkable.
DM's and mentions should be IMO be "semi-synchronous." Don't expect an immediate reply unless you've explicitly told the recipient that there's a blocker or there's some other time-critical situation.
Admittedly yes, that does require some attention on the recipient's part, because they have to scan the incoming message to see if it's critical. And some discipline on the sender's part. And even a few seconds of interruption can (worst-case) result in 20-30 minutes of lost productivity if one has to dump their entire mental stack.
So, yes it doesn't scale up endlessly. Multiple "semi-synchronous" mentions/DMs per hour would be a real attention drain. Possibly appropriate for managers, but a real deal breaker for individual contributors.
But at that point I would see it as an issue with the role or with the culture itself.
The only solution is to switch it off entirely, only
check at specific times. But if the company culture
is to expect prompt response at all times, that's a
conflict.
It is unworkable! But becomes the expectation.
> How would you establish a healthy office communication culture?
The same way it has worked well for the ~30 years of my career before slack-obsession. Have something to discuss, put it on the calendar for the relevant people. For smaller things, send email and don't expect an immediate response. If things are truly on fire right now, make a phone call.
Curiously, in decades past we always used IRC which is basically same thing as slack. But IRC never grew this culture of obligated insta-response, it was more for chatter that one could read or ignore depending on how busy. Not sure why. Perhaps because slack is a paid product, it's now part of the business so everyone is expected to take it Very Seriously and be on it all the time.
The same way it has worked well for the ~30 years of
my career before slack-obsession. Have something to
discuss, put it on the calendar for the relevant people.
1. Physically walked over to my desk and interrupted me in person
2. Sent me an email, often expecting a near-instant reply, requiring me to choose between "getting work done" and "monitoring my email."
This is why I feel that it's more about company culture than the tools themselves.
To be clear, a couple years back I did work at a company with a horrible Slack culture. I don't mean to defend Slack per se, and I definitely don't think it's the answer, but I don't think it's the problem either. Inconsiderate coworkers gonna be inconsiderate.
Curiously, in decades past we always used IRC
which is basically same thing as slack. But
IRC never grew this culture of obligated
insta-response, it was more for chatter that
one could read or ignore depending on how busy.
"Back in the day," generally it was the tech/engineer types using IRC. We all generally understood the concept of focus time and understood that IRC should not be used with the expectation of synchronous responses.
Now, with Slack, we have a lot of corporate/managerial/whatever types using an IRC-like tool, and they often just don't "get it." Much like my elderly father initially struggled to understand that text messaging wasn't something that guaranteed an instant response.
IMO full remote can eliminate the need to live in a small house in an expensive city.
I get way more work done in a lot less time, save time and stress due to the commute, see my family more, and have significantly better mental health due to all those previous points.
I did miss the office a bit earlier in my WFH career when video conferencing wasn’t as common, but these days it’s not an issue at all and you still get face time with your colleagues etc.
Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.
Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable.
Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs
from the gun range, but I think most of those are
pretty uncomfortable.
Ideally, everybody struggling to work in an office would wear big, absurd earmuffs.
Maybe if management looked around and saw that 80% of their employees were geared up like they were working on the tarmac of a busy fucking airport just to get some work done, they would rethink the hell of open offices.
Nah. They wouldn't.
The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with.
I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again.
All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home.
I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.
Can walk, get some exercise/sunshine, nap, even have a quickie with your partner or look at porn, etc. No matter how awesome one's office is, those things are generally not options.
And even if you bike to work that latter point still stands due to the passively homicidal assholes driving cars out there.
I get the occasional day off to go do things that don’t require brain. They only pay for bites of the donut with the jam in them.
It’s a net win for everybody.
I think of the benefit of the office being the opportunity for continuous partial attention. It affords the ability to be aware of what's going on about you, to learn & see a lot more. But one has to be attentive-ish, have some receptivity, to benefit from this. I feel like I can work without interruption in an office. But it's a risk or a sacrifice to do so: giving up my option of awareness, giving up the chance to share, the chance to learn or teach, the chance to discuss, to focus on my own things.
Rather than argue against open office as a bad construct, my main grievance is that most engagement points are synchronous & exclusive. Those not in the room at the time are not included, in most organization. Most learning, most deciding happens in the moment, in confidence. The open-office works because people are unable to find good forums for important conversations, and so ad-hocracy is an acceptable all-connected fallback.
Remote tends to be way more deliberate. Ad-hoc interaction is replaced by smaller networks of who-wants-to-talk-to-who. Most actions are private & hidden. It's even less communicative.
I'd far prefer an organization that can find more enduring, participatory, accessible ways of communicating. True for organizations which are remote, and those that are in person.
Exactly this.
The "hmm I should get lunch WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S THREE O'CLOCK? CRAP" days are the most productive.
I absolutely cannot get anything done with open office floor plans. And commuting is life wasted.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between the number of people (partner,family,kids) and how much people enjoy working from home.
I live alone in my apartment and going the first year or two of the pandemic seeing people I know once every few weeks drove me mad.