Big tech makes a big bet: Offices are still the future
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sam Jones, a co-founder of a nonfungible token start-up, Honey Haus, said his company had been renting a four-person space within WeWork for $1,850 a month since October.
“I am just way less productive at home,” Mr. Jones said. “People are definitely, I think, realizing that physical space just has something special to it.”
Why do people have to ruin this for the rest of us. No, I don't want to go back to the office (I don't have to; my team is now fully remote forever) and I see it as a huge perk and a MASSIVE boost to our productivity to be at home.
I imagine an NFT startup is 100% sales/marketing and 0% engineering/science/innovation, so going fully in-office might make sense for them.
Engineering will remain flexible because of all the virtue signaling big tech is doing in order to retain their talent. It's almost comical that they are struggling to bring people back to the office after being the biggest promotor of work-remote while the rest of the service-economy had to show up every day to their Walmart jobs...
Look at how I used the slashes in the earlier part of that science ("sales/marketing"). Do you think I think that sales and marketing are the same thing? If not, why would you think that I think engineering = innovation? It's the exact same grammatical structure.
What I did say is that an NFT startup probably isn't doing anything innovative, and also is probably doing mostly sales and marketing, and that this combination of factors means that their in-person stance makes sense. I stand by that. My mental image of an NFT startup is that it's a boiler room of the sort that pump-and-dumped penny stocks in the 90s. That type of work benefits from rapid feedback loops among staff. The boiler room structure makes sense for a business trying to generate revenue from the NFT ecosystem.
The rest of your post is an odd rant that has almost nothing to do with how I think about businesses or the world. It's not even a strawman... just kind of a completely off topic rant from my perspective.
I have no idea what stereotype you're projecting onto me, but I'm not even an engineer.
Remote work eliminates a lot of career climbing opportunities and a meaningful class of tech workers depend on that.
I don't understand - do you think fully remote companies never promote anyone?
I think this is pretty obviously true - even though I don't endorse the state of affairs.
This is already true - even pre-pandemic those in remote offices far from HQ have a distinct advancement disadvantage vs. those who have face-time with senior leadership on the regular.
I've been remote for years prior to the pandemic. I've found more advancement since.
It's certainly from a disadvantaged position, not to imply otherwise. I attribute this more to my employer and personality - if something is wrong/broken I make it known
Being essentially on the speed dial for everyone and maintaining this image of vocal participant has helped mitigate this. Fix a couple incidents in stellar fashion and the C suite starts to love your Slack alias
Quite the opposite in my experience!
Even today in the snow, I kitted up and went in. Working from home really makes me unproductive.
Is this not conflating one's work life with one's life outside of work?
I don't doubt that being at work with people is good for socializing with them since people seem to be better suited to that format of in-person interaction (even though that's not necessarily "doing work"), though there's also nothing preventing you from seeking out events outside of work, be it with your coworkers or other people.
I think that claiming that you'll spend your "whole life" on Zoom calls is a bit far fetched, unless all of your life is work and the kind that is done primarily throughout meetings. While the argument that you make is noteworthy, i think i should point that out.
Personally, i rather enjoy being able to step away from the computer and into fresh air, to go and play with my dogs or so on, as well as to not have to spend hours during commute for no good reason or live in a city with polluted air (there was black soot on the edges of my windows when i did live there).
I actually wrote more about this cultural divide in preferences on my blog, which i mentioned in another post in this thread: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...
I think both one's personality and preferences in regards to modes of work are relevant here!
Schools are taking the leap. If commuting is obsolete then catchment areas are stone age. Education is poised to finally free itself from the Achilles heel that has plagued its entire existence: the fact that other children in the room are more interesting than the lesson. It's poised to be a renaissance -- in student performance broadly, but especially in equity, whether other students being disruptive or creating an anti-learning social climate are the actual nuts-and-bolts makings of a "bad school." There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences. Room and board costs for college will be a thing of the past; even the parking dramas that plague commuter students seem silly now.
Now of course human beings can't be "on" 100% of the time; there are also downtime activities like going for walks, playing with pets, and consuming media. Maintenance activities like cooking, cleaning, and exercise. It's true that remote workers, remote students, and remote socializers also partake in these activities. But I don't think that's life. I think the things you do with the majority of your focus and energy, with the majority of your daylight hours, are life. And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and plenty of like-minded friends, why not also work together in person there? And if you're going to live any old place, without any good schools or a reliable supply of like-minded friends, then how are education or socialization going to happen in person?
This is a personal choice and one i can get behind: seek out whichever people satisfy your need for social interaction in whatever medium you're comfortable with. However, my argument is also that work isn't the same as your private life or at the very least those shouldn't be inherently coupled with one another.
> There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences.
This is debatable.
While the argument sounds nice in principle, at least in my country it appears that students are having difficulties with passing tests as well as they did previously, though it remains to be seen whether that's due to their environments not being adequate for learning, them not having external motivating factors to learn (e.g. a paid pedagogue of some sort who encourages them to pay attention and discourages the opposite), a lack of skills necessary to study productively in a remote setting (which could be solved with time), or something else.
On the bright side, it seems like nowadays many younger people are coming together and having digital study groups, for example, on platforms like Discord. I actually maintained a forum for my fellow students in university to help them deal with unclear questions in study subjects etc., way before the pandemic, but either way a technologically capable new generation is probably something to strive towards!
> And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
That's just the thing - if i can do my dayjob in X hours and spend the rest doing whatever i want, why should i have that X number be inflated to something larger due to a variety of inefficiencies?
Sometimes meaningless small talk in the office with people who don't always respect the fact that others need to concentrate which could be replaced by a call when both parties have the time or even a Slack thread or e-mail (for the more formal inquiries), even other engineers that want to do a bit of bikeshedding that might be replaced by an async thread in a merge request discussion, or being stuck for hours in commute even though there aren't always good reasons to be in the office?
There is a flip side to it, of course. Team building exercises and in person interaction, though perhaps those are better done as informal events (laser tag, gokart racing, escape rooms etc. come to mind from my current workplace), in person workshops that are also recorded so they can be viewed later and quite possibly the fact that the older, less tech savvy, or maybe the differently inclined people might not have organic async discussions because they're just not used to those, much like how another segment prefer them to in-person interaction in many cases.
There is a lot of nuance to all of this, as there are different types of people, all of which have their preferences which will oftentimes be the exact opposite. The push of many developers for remote are just an example of one group realizing that things can be done differently, who are now attempting to ensure further comfortable experiences for themselves, which might be at odds with other groups of people.
Either way, one shouldn't let their work become their life and vice versa, so conflating those is bad in my eyes. Similarly, one could drill down and say the same about "getting things done" at work vs just interacting with others (and the reasons for doing so - for some people work is most if not all social interaction that they get).
> Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and plenty of like-minded friends, why not also work together in person there?
That's just it - many people out there don't get to pick where they're going to live or even study. Have you seen the real estate prices recently? What about the rent prices? What about the salaries of many people across different countries and professions within those? Software developers are in a privileged position, but even that isn't true always - many in India find themselves relegated to positions of "code monkeys" and definitely aren't paid too well. That also holds true for a certain segment of developers in Eastern Europe who work for local companies, not foreign ones, myself included. By my current estimates, to be able to afford to buy an apartment without going into debt, i might need approximately 5-10 years of saving money at my current salary and i'm paid better than most teachers and many other professions here.
Alternatively, even when living in a nice place, there's no guarantee that all of the people will be "nice", whatever the criteria for that might be. That example about a coworker that likes bikeshedding? That's from real life. That doesn't mean that they are a bad person, just that if you intend to get things done efficiently and do whatever else you want with the rest of your time, you need to optimize your working conditions for success. You get to pick your friends. You don't get to pick your coworkers, unless you want to job hop often in search of the best possible environment or sour your relationships due to not having excellent diplomatic abilities to set boundaries.
> And if you're going to live any old place, without any good schools or a reliable supply of like-minded friends, then how are education or socialization going to happen in person?
As someone who went through that, i can probably respond: poorly. That's exactly why online relationships and communities were so nice in lieu of any welcoming ones locally. Of course, one can eventually look into the direction of gradual change, such as i did when going to study in the capital of my country and found some friends, since i got the government to pay for my education (for the most part) due to good grades, however it is definitely nice to have interest groups or even to be able to keep in touch remotely, especially given the pandemic. Of course, there's quite a bit of variability there - you can meet someone online and it can turn into an in person relationship, or on the contrary, you can meet someone in person and keep in touch with them online.
Apart from that, of course, you can also seek out groups or events that concern topics that you enjoy, likeminded people that you might not have known otherwise, to hang out with them and get to know them better in events. It might take a bit of going beyond your everyday routine of commuting to work and back home, but it's certainly doable, whether your interests are movies, boating, anime/TV shows/music, tabletop games, hiking, cars or anything else, really. It just takes a bit of personal initiative in that regard.
This is perhaps one of the better aspects of urbanization, given that these groups tend to require less travel, even though there are further arguments for/against living in a city or even nearby it.
Add up the numbers in that Atlantic article you cited: 33% + 20% is only 53%. That means almost half the people surveyed do not want to work remotely at all, and a substantial majority want to be in the office at least a few days per week.
If, to get work done, you need your ass in a seat of your employer's selection, fine, but almost all jobs have already been like that since the beginning of time and there's no shortage of those. So I understand "you're ruining for the rest of us!" to chirp too loudly about it just when WFH is finally gaining real traction but doesn't necessarily feel like it's here to stay.
The covid-induced WFH option at most companies seems precarious, like any moment the company will reverse it.
We're not 'ruining it' for you, we just want to work in an office.
I’d suggest your view comes from a bias towards red queen races being arbitrators of value rather than… you know… productivity.
A few years ago the bar was wearing a suit to work every day with sock suspenders. Look up IBMs uniform dress code. Now we all accept that as antiquated, distracting waste.
Which wouldn't be so bad if, you know, I found the experience relaxing or had the slightest inclination to get to know these people [beyond how they can help solve a given problem].
Maybe I just see work differently from everyone... but we're here to do the thing and get paid. I'm not putting in anything more than what's required.
[ edit: if Bob won't do $thing because we don't have enough social points, that's between him and our employer ]
'Team building' through things like these idle pleasantries and bombastic 'collaborative' seat-filling meetings are draining for people like me.
Put it on my calendar, if I think I can help or have an interest - I'll stop by the call... I'm already on your side if we're trying to make things better.
I really like to exercise my salary benefits of finishing my work and doing something else. Seeing the meatbags breaks asynchronous work
If your business wants to demand in-person, then you know what kind of people who you will get: - people with kids who dont have a good grasp on what work life balance is (maybe because of extended debt) - people who are single or otherwise unhappy at home, looking for companionship - people who cant feel good about themselves without chit-chat - people looking to increase their social circle - people who will think they can use social engineering to forward their career
You know, you’re right. It probably is the most efficient way to work, to continuously subject employees to this torture. The problem is I’m a fucking human being and there’s only so much abuse I’m going to take from you. And by being a remote worker you are, necessarily, subjecting your coworkers to this abuse every second they have to work with you. It is inherent to the notion of video calling with consumer-grade hardware on a packet switched network.
While one shouldn't discount those that are stuck in circumstances like that, no, we don't. And when their surroundings are noisy, they can just mute their microphones until they'd like to say something, which is just basic etiquette for communicating online. Or you can even pic up a microphone with a polar pattern that doesn't pick up much background noise for about 20$, which is what i did.
> So wasting 1-2 hours a day being non productive
Wasting in what way? Commuting? I love my commute, it's a nice 25 minute morning stroll on the cycle and provides the necessary motivation/pressure to get out of the house. I'm fine with people wanting to work remotely, I'm just not okay with working together with them (unless they're here at least 2-3 times a week) as it's wildly inefficient, and also not okay with people demanding that any company must offer full 5 days WFH as if it's a god given right.
Good for you as you can always vote with your feet. If others don't want to come in and work with you, then you must find a new job. But don't expect anyone else to conform to your idea of how work should be. If for nothing else but for the same reasons you are using, personal preference.
Sure, that's fine. It's why I'd never apply for remote positions. Luckily, where I work people still come into office.
Commute time is a choice against other expenses. I live 10 minutes from the office because I didn't want to commute. I don't begrudge you for living further but I will say it was a WLB choice the employee made, not the employer.
Remote is absolutely possible if your job doesn't require meatspace/atom manipulation as part of your work product, and to say that it isn't possible 3 years into a global pandemic demonstrating sustained levels of productivity while remote across various sectors is simply laziness and stated in bad faith. I understand that we are just randos throwing opinions back and forth, and that the only recourse available in countries where remote work isn't mandated by law as an option is to hope for remote orgs to continue to cannibalize non-remote/less-remote orgs for top talent, until non-remote orgs concede on their physical presence demands.
I understand the desire to have a cake and eat it but the job was to show up and put in the time. To go back and argue that showing up is now a WLB violation for previously existing jobs is just not defensible.
That said, sure, more jobs should just be WFH. If you want that, find it.
Based on your reply, I don't think you truly understand the situation. The work arrangement is always negotiable, and demanding remote when it's proven it can be done at a reasonable productively level is entirely reasonable from an employee perspective. One does not need to put up with unreasonable employer demands in the current job market, and showing up on site five days a week is arguably unreasonable. The job expectations are to deliver results, not warm a chair with colleagues. Of course, if your job performance was based on warming the chair versus delivering, of course, measure that instead of results.
If you want to work on site, wonderful, go for it. That does not appear to be the direction the market is going based on available data.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/jobs/2022/02/24/why-remo... (Why remote jobs are changing work for good — if you’re working in the right place; Over 40% of employees say they would look for a new job if required to go to a worksite five days a week.)
https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/recruitment/west-co... (West Coast tech firms increase hiring throughout U.S.)
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b... (Are Firms Using Remote Work to Recruit and Retain Workers?)
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/workers-quitting-ov... (The People Who’d Rather Quit Than Give Up Remote Work)
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/02/16/covid-1... (excerpts from this link below)
> Working from home is a relatively new experience for a majority of workers with jobs that can be done remotely – 57% say they rarely or never worked from home prior to the coronavirus outbreak. For those who have made the switch to telework, their work lives have changed in some significant ways. On the plus side, most (64%) of those who are now working from home at least some of the time but rarely or never did before the pandemic say it’s easier now for them to balance work with their personal life. And many (44%) say working from home has made it easier for them to get their work done and meet deadlines, while very few (10%) say it’s been harder to do this. At the same time, 60% say they feel less connected to their co-workers now. Most (72%) say working from home hasn’t affected their ability to advance in their job.
> Looking to the future, 60% of workers with jobs that can be done from home say when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time. This is up from 54% who said the same in 2020. Among those who are currently working from home all or most of the time, 78% say they’d like to continue to do so after the pandemic, up from 64% in 2020.
Extreme example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15942945
> If you want that, find it.
And create it, if possible. By putting market pressure in favor of WFH so that employers are forced to adjust to worker demands.
I'd like to know where people are working that they used to work with people in an office. I've been developing software for 35 years - a lot of start ups even - and have always worked with an engineering team that's geographically distributed - either in different countries or in different locales. Yeah, most of us went to an office to work, but we were working with maybe 1 or 2 people in the office. About the only thing I got out of working in an office was soul-destroying gossip. For some reason WFH has cut that crap out by at least 75%.
That's substantial. For many people it adds up to hours per day.
Really. I have no problem with people executing tasks from wherever. But Zoom is vile.
Who has to show up is decided by the company and to a lesser extent by the market: if your contract says you have to show up, then you get fired if you don't. And frankly this is what I expect to happen to many of those which discovered working from home during the pandemic and now behave like extremists and want to force companies and their colleagues to change for their sake.
By all means, argue for hybrid or home office, but don't pretend this is normal and anyone that's against it is some barbarian.
The cynical view is that a lot of people are lonely at home, and can already go back to the office but it’s too empty for their tastes and want to force people back.
I’m happy to bullshit for a minute, ideally not when I’m trying to concentrate. I tried things like putting headphones in, not making eye contact, cussing at my screen while they’re mid sentence, nothing worked. (Engineers amirite ;) )
I finally escalated it and the visits have since stopped. I get the questions over email and chat now. I still chat with the same people for a minute if I see them in the hall or a break room.
I don’t go to work to entertain people. I have 3 young kids at home. I don’t have time to work hardly at all when I’m not in the office. I have come to resent people who essentially expect me to entertain them AND can’t seem to take a fucking hint.
/rant
I know way less about the other persons lives for sure, and there is less "personal" discussions (perhaps half less ?). But regarding work related communication, dealing with emergencies or anything that mattered in a work context I don't see critical missing bits.
Sounds like you got what you wanted when you stopped hinting. Don’t hint, say!
Trying the same thing over expecting different results etc etc is madness etc
It's very nice to be able to discuss with colleagues impromptu about new projects, what they're working on, what new tech they're studying, etc. Or to walk into a discussion in the kitchen about a refactoring, new libraries, etc.
But if one just stays on their chair X hours with their head in the monitor and never talks to anyone they won't miss the above either. Same for people working for 5 person start-ups where everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
I don't really blame people who want to socialize with their coworkers (I want to as well, sometimes!), it's just unfortunate that we've gotten to this point where leadership seems to be really insistent on choosing the worst way to go about this.
It's an unpopular and superficially brash opinion, but I honestly do. If someone wants social contact during work hours there's a really good chance that they have multiple neighbors who they could meet up with for lunch. Instead, work is misappropriated as a social venue.
I'm not suggesting that we should be unsociable robots for 8 hours each day, either, or that productivity is paramount. Quite the opposite. If someone can only get 4 hours of (highly) productive work every day, and used to spend half the day chatting with coworkers, then double their pay and halve their time.
Then there's also the environmental and infrastructural impact of people commuting daily for no practical reason. Everyone else, especially essential workers (who's job is usually casually linked to a workplace), suffers in traffic.
Need time away from kids? A stipend for a shared workplace would cover that, instead of renting huge amounts of unused office space.
Commuting (where remote work is possible) is a terrible and selfish idea no matter how you look at it.
I think your real complaint is socializing at the office. I had a German coworker once who complained about the same thing. He said,
"In Germany we come to work at 9am, we work until 4pm with a 15 minute break for lunch, and we don't talk to anyone about anything other than work. Then we go to the beer hall and drink and chat until 7pm and then go home to our family. Here in America I come to work at 9am, chat with my coworkers all day about personal things, take a 1 hour lunch to chat some more, and then go home at 7pm. It's the same amount of work but none of the drinking!".
45 minute is the usual break in Germany, who can eat lunch in 15 minutes? Usual workday is 8h work + 45 min break. So 9-17:45 would be usual. Or 8-16:45. There are people in union jobs with 35h work week though, that work one hour less, but if they go in at 9 they stay until 16:45.
If you work over 6h in a day you have to do a minimum break of 30 minutes by law.
So in your example I guess Americans stay 1:15h longer per day than what is normal in Germany.
It’s no different than before Covid - some people stayed in the office late because it was a quiet place to finish up work, some people went home and wrapped things up.
Nobody was forced to stay late.
There are many places where management are demanding people come into the office. Those are "forcing", for all intents and purposes.
There are people who want to work in the office. My understanding is that those people can all do that if they choose so. They can even choose to go every day of the week if they want to.
So what is the problem? Why is there a debate? People can do what _they_ want, after all, right? Except that some people not only want to be in the office, but they want their coworkers to be in the office as well.
That is what is meant by "forcing" in this discussion. And that is where I have read the most pushback (especially for the big tech companies with huge, mostly unused, offices.
If someone decides to come in and you work remote that’s not forcing anything.
Employment conditions are a constant tug of war between employees wanting a better life and employers wanting to extract more value from them. Don't pull on the wrong end of the rope.
That's why in my company the hybrid solution will probably look like "everyone from the team has to be in the office on day X of the week".
So rent your own office. Why does it have to involve anyone else?
This is a bit un-self-aware isn't it? The other 50% of us could ask the exact same thing.
A significant portion of companies already accommodate hybrid work environments, whereby some meeting attendees are remote. This would be no different.
There may be legitimate cases where physical proximity is a key advantage for a specific team, but the current WFH situation has demonstrated that those cases have likely been exaggerated, as people are demonstrably productive (in the case of my company, results in record profits) while completely remote.
> No, I don't want to go back to the office (I don't have to; my team is now fully remote forever)
Even if my company opened the office again, I've now got all of the ergonomics they can offer with no sneezing colleague next to me. And it's on me if there are dishes in the sink or the coffee needs a rebrew. Plus, at least one member of each team is geo-remote, so every meeting will be a better experience without being "hybrid"
Also, not all offices provide decent work spaces. The permanent humming of the AC, background chatter, cheap monitors, ridiculously low quality peripherals, wonky chairs… I could go on all day.
In the end, it's almost as if there wasn't a single, universal best case…
And I think this is what grates people, trying to apply a universal blanket policy when each person's situation and preferences are different, and they could all (or most of them) be satisfied at the same time.
But no one is currently talking about that very much right now (the Tech Workers Coalition seems pretty quiet lately), because we're all dazzled by the roaring market and unable to see the dim future when it cools down and we're no longer hot commodities.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388223
Collective action should preserve work location choice, not enshrine any one specific choice for all cases.
yes they are.
I quite like my employer, but their return-to-office policy is non-negotiable, so I am going to start looking for a new employer.
This literally ruins an otherwise wonderful working relationship and likely will result in years of tribal knowledge lost (as the senior engineer on my team).
And yes, I have reached out to my manager, and this policy is non-negotiable (as it is company-wide), so the writing is on the wall.
It takes two sides to have a disagreement like that, and it's wrong to portray it as though one side is responsible for ruining everything.
WFH was instituted as an emergency response to COVID-19, thus it can't really be stated that employers forced WFH upon employees capriciously.
Enlightened employers can and have seen the value of hybrid policies that take employee preferences into account: those who prefer at-office can choose to come in, and those who prefer remote can choose WFH.
The disagreement is when an employer is unwilling to work with the employee to reach an understanding that benefits both mutually.
Taken from the other perspective, were a company to become entirely remote, then it could be seen to ruin the relationship for employees who had wanted to come into the office.
That is the case here: what is ruined is that no attempt has been made to reach a middle ground, whereby those who wish to remain at the office can do so, and those who prefer WFH can do so.
It is this reluctance to appreciate the learnings from our collective covid experience: that WFH is a significant boon to a large percentage of employees, and indeed is a competitive advantage, that has ruined an otherwise wonderful working relationship with an employer.
And thus, the only response is to look for employers who appreciate WFH as the competitive advantage it is.
a) datacenter/telecom space
b) field technicians with vans, sets of tools and diagnostic equipment. and in metro areas a storage room/logistics space in a warehouse or industrial area somewhere to receive incoming shipments and keep spare inventory, consumables inventory.
c) fully remote engineering staff, admin staff, literally no office whatsoever.
That is very different from a situation where an engineer works in the office, works from home during the pandemic, is asked to go back to the office after the pandemic is over (which they agreed to do before the pandemic!) and decides not to do it.
Going to a physical location to work is how things were done and continue to be done for most people on the planet. This is what you signed up for when you accepted the job; if you don't like that and the company does not allow you to work from home you always have the option of quitting and finding another job. You signed a contract and now want to force a renegotiation. That's not how things work.
This is exactly how things work. Contracts are renegotiated all the time and either of the parties can initiate it.
Yours will too.
He's zero percent productive regardless of location.
It sounds like it's impossible for anybody to ruin it for you, then!
That's great. Same here: I was fully remote before the pandemic, and will continue to only work at fully remote or remote-optional companies.
So, if other people want to return to offices, it doesn't affect me at all. I wish them well (and secretly think they're nuts, but: different strokes for different folks).
Maybe some companies will insist on people returning to the office, but it's really hard for me to imagine a future where it's harder to find a remote job than it was a few years ago. So I don't feel threatened by this. This feels like there's more variety than there used to be, that's all.
I don't know. I'm switching next week to a fully remote position, partly because of the fully remote work aspect. I am looking forward to work in a team that can handle asynchronous and well written communication and use that by default because I think that's way more efficient for me and such a team. I'm also looking for saving the commute time so I can spend more time on my own things and friends, the possibility to take breaks at random times in the day, the possibility to cook for lunch if I haven't had the chance to cook the days before, and many other things.
However, I have been enjoying my last days in the office at my current position, in particular the in person discussions, lunch and peer programming. I appreciate that people are seeking this. I also know people who just can't focus very well at home, and that's not always because of the children. My flatmate is one of them. I don't think they are nut for preferring office work as a consequence.
Everyone else just ain’t having it.
I have a hunch that there might have been a trend towards remote work even before the COVID, but it was happening gradually under the radar, people had a choice based on their choice of job, and could arrange their lifestyles and workstyles (making up a term) to be more or less compatible. Of course companies that paid more, could also demand more of their workers, including inconveniences of commuting and office life.
I think the deal with the pandemic was how sudden it was. My work group agreed to clear out of the office, and we were gone that day. Managers didn't know what hit them, and had to re-imagine their own jobs.
It strikes me that we are still coming out of the phase where the situation was forced on us, but we haven't figured out long term who the winners and losers are going to be in the future. It will be interesting to watch certain people: The ones who are strongly motivated to advance their own careers, and see what workstyles they choose for themselves.
Plus, "telework" has been effective since the late 2000's. People might say "yeah but there was no video conferencing back then" to which I reply that I worked at a large bank in that timeframe and 99% of all interactions with people not physically in our location were over the phone.
There was, I remember reading a paper that said it had gone from 5% to 10% of the working US population over the previous decade.
Recently changed jobs to a company that is adamantly opposed to remote working. However the compensation was too amazing to give up, and aside from the anti-WFH bit, is otherwise my dream job. Goal is to get into a fully remote company within the next five years, even if the compensation is lower.
It just goes on to show that there is a lot of excess money in SV, not to mention greed and arrogance.
Once the government gets better at cracking down on them I suspect their values will plummet.
It's a mix of extroverts who see the office as a way to socialize, sandbaggers who see the office as a way to waste time and not do work, asskissers who just say whatever they think their bosses want, and control freaks who think the only way to manage people is by seeing them in a chair for 8 hours.
In short, it's mostly people who are already ruining something for us even at the office.
Which is of course every meeting for the last two years, but a national emergency is bound to cause some low-grade suffering. Making the vile space of Zoom into the center and essence of working life permanently is a whole other thing that I didn't sign up for and I'm not on board with.
[0] https://slate.com/business/2014/01/the-existential-despair-o...
I'm a lead, my job isn't 100% hands on coding anymore. But the number of "this could have been an email" meetings I have attended in my life is high. Mostly in person.
There are many reasons why one would want to work in an office at least part of the time besides efficient communication/collaboration: socialising, access to equipment, access to facilities, cafeteria/restaurants, change of scenery, biking/walking, etc and so on. Any of these can be argued against or replaced by other things, but when the office can give them to you in a package why go to the extra effort? For many people things were fine before the pandemic and now they want to get back to their lives.
Working from home is an exceptional situation available to very few professions and only to parts of the staff that has yet to prove how good it works at scale in the long term. Based on my own experience before and during the pandemic, people painting home office as some kind of heaven were either in a terrible situation (commute, noise, etc.) or haven't figured out what the costs are yet (isolation, loss of professional social support, less chances for promotion, blurring of borders between work/home, slacking off, etc.)
Crossing the remote work gate and getting off the fence will provide a massive advantage to companies. I think the only advantage that many co-located companies will have is higher pay due to the massive monopolization/concentration that has been going on where, e.g., Google can pay a staggering larger amount to persuade you to work in their offices the only they can afford in the Valley. We shall see if they have enough money and wherewithal to shift expectations.
And if you want to attract both groups, well... you still need office space, even if everyone doesn't come in every day.
... if they live close, or are otherwise easily able to relocate to be close.
... and the cost of relocation and commuting doesn't erode the advantages of that employer.
Whereas remote employment gives you a much larger talent pool to draw from, without all the considerations of relocation and commuting.
Housing and transportation - two of the biggest expenses anyone has (along with food.)
Feel free to correct me if you have tools to do it, but I found training someone new like that over Video calls way too hard. It slows them down it slows me down, and their time to become productive goes up 4x. While I don't want to return to commuting I'm willing to compromise 1-3 days a week (at my discretion) to make training possible.
Sort of like discord but its code instead of games.
I save money and time not having to commute, not having to buy lunch to be social, and best of all I get to spend more time with my growing kids (priceless).
I prefer remote, so I left my previous job and only applied to remote companies. Now I earn more than before and have 2 extra hours every day. I feel even more productive than before. And I feel a tiny small bit better with myself as I'm now contaminating less the environment. This multiplied by the total remote employees my company has, makes me feel still better about it.
1. Besides hybrid <5 day per week in-office cultures, what about expecting only half-day attendance? Would it be feasible to expect employees to only be in office during a certain set of core hours, where in-person meetings and collaboration takes place? Almost like Khan Academy but for work.
2. Getting rid of open office layouts and giving people their own offices. That will drastically improve the in-office experience for nearly the majority of workers. People have forgotten about the scourge of open offices but pre-pandemic, they were almost universally despised, at least on places like HN.
Funny enough this reminds me of ~20 years ago when hot startups like Google started spending big money on fancy campus facilities and perks like free meals and massages. The establishment at that time scoffed at the idea, but soon those who couldn't adapt to this new office concept were weeded out.
There will be those that dig their heels in hard but unless the company is 100% remote forever such stubbornness is likely a career limiting move.
If not, I think remote/hybrid employees should be equal class citizens to on-site employees, and that should be reflected in a consistent composition of those roles thru all levels of leadership.
My gut tells me that a lot of people are expecting for things to go back to the way they were when they won't. If half your team is OOO whenever you're at the office, is it as exciting as it was before? It wouldn't be for myself.
But the companies will try to make it sound literally every other way except the truth. They have to save face after all, plus "admitting defeat" has real consequences on your stock price.
So business as usual really.
I'll be eating a lot of popcorn in the next few years. I can bet many people will leave their jobs if the company enforces return to office. The fallout will be long and interesting to watch.
The strong talent will move someplace else. You can dangle big pay checks and perks only for so long.
Any other Notables?
Nvidia completed a huge new campus in late 2020 and it just sits empty.
I wouldn't assume that's a big factor. If you own office space you don't need, you can lease it out. Or if you don't own but lease it, then you can often sublease it out.
Depending on market conditions (whether remote working is a trend or a permanent change), the demand may not be that high, so it's unclear how much money you'll get. But whatever it is, it's more money than not leasing it out.
I do concede that going in once a week is terrific. Those days of face to face spawn the best conversations and brainstorming sessions -- but those days I get zero code work done.
t. worked from home as a software dev since day 1 of my career for 14 years.
That’s great, I’m happy for you. Luckily we live in a world where I’m sure you can find wfh employers long term and I’ll look for in office employers.
It's for my own mental health. The complete and legally enforced isolation during the lockdowns was too much. I can't work in permanent isolation. It really made me realise that I'm not actually antisocial, just very introverted.
Don't get me wrong, I was super productive for several weeks. Less distractions and I got in hours of solid coding and loved it. But after several weeks my motivation just fell off a cliff, and I started going back one or two days a week.
It very much depends on one's specific situation. I'm working with hardware and software, so I do need to be onsite for some time out of necessity. But one point which I haven't seen brought up in the rest of this discussion is that the nature of our discussions can differ greatly online vs in person. Also depends upon the company/team culture. There is value in face-to-face time. Meetings tend to be focussed upon specific topics, but informal chat about random stuff also leads to useful discussion about things which wouldn't be covered by meetings, and those can also be of high value. And there's also the camaraderie and team-building aspects as well.
I go into the office explicitly because I have a family. It’s hard to work from my house now that my wife and I have a baby. We have two bedrooms so now my workspace is in the living room and working while there is a screaming baby in the background is not great for concentrating.
There really are too many MBAs given out these days!
EDIT: Oops my comment doesn't make sense, they mean "trillion dollar companies", not "there are trillion+ companies."
Given that, I don't think there are a lot of "trillion dollar companies" period. So lots of smaller companies making bets on offices.
Source: 8marketcap.com
There will probably be some companies that remain fully remote and some that attempt to get everyone back into offices ASAP, as well as some in the middle that will try to embrace hybrid modes of work. Each type will tend to attract employees who are compatible with them, though it's hard to say whether the percentages of people that want a particular mode of work and the percentages of companies that actually offer it will match up, especially if people who make these choices on policy within the companies are not aligned with those who want to work there and vice versa.
It'll probably lead to many seeking out other employment opportunities and taking their domain knowledge and skills with them, which will be somewhat problematic in the months or years to come. I know for a fact that i don't enjoy commute or having to live in the city, so i might just look for some other place to work if/when the "return" to office policy comes into effort. Sadly, in my case i only have about 50k euros in savings so perhaps it's a bit premature to think of starting my own SaaS, since i earn a bit above 20k euros a year (after taxes) in Latvia now: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
To sum up my point: it's nice to have the choice rather than having just cultural norms be passed down (which is one of the silver linings of the pandemic, as bad as it is), but it will cause some strife in the future until everything settles.
This is a very specific date range to compare! Wonder if anything interesting happened around the start of the second quarter of 2020?
Am a free range human now, can’t be crammed in with 20 other nerds coughing and burping and sneezing everywhere all day
* body language, nonverbal communication, whispering / spatial audio, passing notes, and other "advanced" communication techniques not easily achieved in enterprise chat and conference software today
* the ability to immediately multiplex / "break out" / traverse conversations and events / kibbutz / hang out at the water cooler
* to physically share collaborative or immersive objects like large whiteboards, prototypes, machinery, exhibits, etc.
Will all be solved digitally in the next 2 years and offices will seem even less appealing and companies will just redirect rent expenditures towards lunch vouchers, team outings, and awards ceremonies.
For any role that has a heavy teamwork component, having some people in person and some remote sucks.
Add on top that face-to-face has value - managers remember people they interact with, not email they receive. Over time we'll see that people who favor face-to-face interactions will be the ones getting promotions, raises and the interesting work.
This was even true before Covid - we had people who were fully remote. They loved it, but they also got the grunt work. Shoot them an email and tell them to send it back by X date. They never got included in last minute calls
it’s not black and white
But working with a mask all day is really hard for me, and our company still requires it, even at our desks :(
But once they do I'll come back like I'm supposed to. I like going for lunch with the guys.
McMaster-Carr and Mouser Electronics, thank you!
Signing a 10-year lease on a commercial building is. Those are the days that are over.
For instance let's say the company is in Berlin, having an office there means employee will need to be at a commuting distance from Berlin wether they actually commute or choose not to. Recruiting someone in Amsterdam becomes a difficult decision, and employees in full-remote still have to pay Berlin area living costs just for the potential commute they could have to do.
And that's assuming online discipline is exemplary and you don't have a "left out" effect between those on premise and the others online.
Basically the choice would be between solving the privacy issues you raise, or solving the logistics/disparity issues raised by other solutions. I kinda feel like the privacy issues could be easier to solve than the others.
Given that today most offices seem to have an open plan, your two sentences seem contradictory.
Try to have some empathy. I'm glad you like working remotely, but it's not for everyone.