Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
reuters.com
reuters.com
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
Having to do things not essential to a purpose is better to make them optional.
If I like working, I can walk around while on the remote meeting
I love walking and think it’s great for creativity and other purposes. I’m not against walking. I’m against having to walk just to get to and from a meeting.
I love whistling and singing. I would be against a requirement to whistle for 30 seconds before every meeting starts.
There may be a few ADA and liability issues with these ideas... ski lifts would be a fairly accessible fun option.
Of course, drowning on your way to a daily standup would be an ignominious way to leave this world.
Turn this on it's head though, now you're fully remote, maybe it's time to buy a zipline for the house? Maybe your house could be more fun.
You aren’t making any sense to me
At the same time, I think walking is great. It’s good exercise and good for the brain. But it has nothing to do with being a requirement for a successful meeting.
So I’m not against walking. I’m for it.
I’m against forced, unnecessary tasks.
Like...one time I was deep in the mental flow, headphones on playing some nice orchestrated video game music. Totally entranced. Someone came up and tapped me on my shoulder and I damn near shit myself.
Only when I was really junior did heads down code all day happen.
That works for companies with less than 100 engineers. Everyone seems to have forgotten the good ol days where you had in person meetings and had to dial in half the team from Europe or include Fred who is working from home.
The actual time to get feedback in an office is between four hours and two days. Managers are almost never at their desks because they are attending meetings all day. Same for senior engineers. If you need a quick response IM is your best option.
Your whole team of engineers will almost never be in the same place. Someone will be in a meeting, somewhere. Or hiding trying to get work done. You might get lucky and the person you need to talk to is at their desk, but they will be busy trying to catch up before or after a meeting.
In office communication is already asynchronous. Every day you will run into these problems. The idea of (especially open) offices fostering communication is a complete fantasy.
Email and chat are the way actual communication is done in corporate America. Synchronous communication isn’t feasible.
Most big tech companies are public. Record earnings and stock prices throughout the pandemic prove more than just not crashing and burning.
B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input
C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects
The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.
There are pros and cons to remote work, and I wish more people were honest about the cons. I think a lot of people hand-wave it away because they like the idea of living where they want.
Most of the big tech companies could have laid off 90% of their workers over the past 2 years and would have had even higher record earnings (and maybe stock prices).
What the big tech companies are concerned about is their continued ability to be productive and stay on top, and the fact that everyone had to move a ton of spending to online over the lockdowns doesn't mean that record profits during that time are sustainable.
Wage earners have a couple percent more dollars every year, but the rich have massively more dollars. This is basically clathrate-gun inflation, insofar as while it's true that the rich don't compete for, say, food staples and therefore the illicitly printed money is often considered "harmless"... it goes into investment, which is a different market, we are told... the rich can and given the right circumstances will compete for other things people need, such as housing (see: Blackrock's invasion of residential real estate).
If you look at the S&P denoted in, say, houses... which I've chosen because housing is most people's biggest expense, it's actually been a mediocre market, the past 20 years.
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[1] There won't actually be "back to normal". Just as 9/11 World didn't really end but blended into GFC World, which blended into Covid World... this one's going to blend into either European War World (if the current situation gets worse) or Climate Change World. The upper class will always need a crisis to hold over our heads (and, of course, several of these represent real crises that the upper classes did not intentionally create) to keep power.
Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote.
I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up. But I think it's probably quite a bit harder for people to be productive when they are new to the company, less experienced, and don't have that existing foundation to build on.
I think it's a solvable problem for companies that want to prioritize remote work, but I definitely don't think "managed to get through the past two years" means "it's a piece of cake".
What a miserable work culture it must be for them to even have the nerve to declare this.
Downvote away, I’ll be hiring some of them! ;-)
Worked for many tier 1 investment banks in the techiest corners of each org and some cases felt like startups with all the shiny new toys everyone else was using vs the dark ages of customized software straight from the nineties or some other entirely-in-house-built abomination in other places.
You need to make sure you aren't replacing them so fast that the median experience level is dropping, but it's certainly the case that the average experience level of the incoming cohort is expected to be lower than the outgoing one.
You see it at institutions, hundreds of individual "low bus factor" risks spread throughout the organization. The company would survive, but it would be a tough time, and a terrible place to work, during a large knowledge exodus.
I hate threads like these because people will circle around generic talking points while missing all the nuance and context behind this actual decision, like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks, giving a heads up, having a well-defined policy.
Do you have the policy document or data to back that up? Asking because I am friends with a Google engineer who asked to go remote and was denied (even though nothing about their role requires them to be in-person).
Full disclosure I work at Google.
https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?distance=50&has_rem...
They tend to promote from within and along the engineering track, which results in engineers reasoning from "What would I (a high-performing engineer) do?" and not necessarily what's best for the team.
The people who applied and were accepted for fully remote aren’t the ones that need to go back. Only the people with an assigned desk in the offices that are re-opening are mandated to go back.
You’re getting tripped on the wording of an article that was hastily written after a reporter got wind of an email
But you are still using the same word that I was getting tripped up on. Either the return to the office is optional or it is mandated. It can't be both.
The decision to work as remote-first or office-first is, as I understand it, much more broadly available than it was. You are given the option to go remote-first and not return to the office at all. Returning to the office is optional.
If you choose to go office-first, then you will be expected to actually be at the office. In that sense, return to the office is mandatory.
The only thing that's really happening is them saying "you need to commit to one approach or the other, and act accordingly". This is understandable, you need to plan office capacity and other such practical considerations
This seems win-win to me. Teams and orgs that consider remote-friendliness important can operate that way, while teams and orgs that don't think that can keep the team colocated. Ultimately, it means the vast majority of people's preferences are accommodated. Worst case, changing teams at Google is very smooth.
If it were truly "optional" for everyone even without manager approval, that's effectively "remote" because some people not being present means the team works in a largely remote fashion, and it also means space planning for expensive offices is very hard and result in office layouts that are not as productive.
For a big company with 100k+ employees, this seems like a good call IMO because it allows all working models to co-exist, and it can easily be tweaked after seeing how RTO goes.
Googlers with assigned desk will be expected to show up to the office. Applications for remote transfers have been available for like six months and in the cases where engineers are unable to work remotely due to their role or their management disapproving, transfers within Google to other teams that are remote-friendly are nearly trivial.
It is mostly orgs like Sales that have hard rules against remote work where the word "mandate" with its connotation of a hard and unpleasant rule makes sense.
That seems weird for outside sales (i.e. large accounts) given you're often near your customers and (in normal times) should be in customer meetings rather than sitting in an office.
No. These are shitty capitalist ploys trying to tell you the above is true when it's blatantly false. And well, they'd work you for no money, but they wouldn't have workers.
If anything, I'd claim to live in a high CoL area while being in the Midwest. They get their quality work, I get my commensurate compensation. Fuck them for thinking otherwise.
Your compensation is not absolute dollars but what you can get for those dollars.
Ideally the same dollar would get you the same everywhere in the world. That is not the case atm.
Instead, people at your new location will provide the same quality of work for fewer dollars, because they see what they can get for those dollars. That is your capitalist competition.
Well, actually it is.
As others mentioned, if Google ignored supply and demand and paid for quality of work only, why would they pay everyone the high rates that were originally set by supply and demand in Silicon Valley? They’d pay a normal living wage for someone in India.
On the other hand, in theory the bottom markets will see their rates rise quickly (because they merged into one wider remote market) if remote is as popular as it apparently is.
15% is still something I consider significant. Why were they denied? Are there people getting preference based on manager or their own personal reputation?
They may have reversed stance after I left, but I'm pretty sure the "15%" number cited is "15% of people that were considered eligible and had their manager support were declined."
I'm not going back to the office ever there's no need to.. the company I work for has experienced explosive growth since we went remote ..brought on and maintained 100 new hires.
If they try to force me I'll find something else!!
Cities are dying some cause of remote work but aren't we tired of the govt controlling our lives (Biden's remark of all remote workers must go back..ha lmao). Umm the solution is to innovate cities and offer programs for remote workers to come live there for three to six to 12 months ..have a startup that owns buildings in all cities for remote workers to live in and congregate as well let's them jump from town to town every many months. City living Innovation not more govt control/lame ideas is what is needed to spur the economies of cities and their future prosperity.
If you get some talented engineers to join you because of the shortsightedness of Google then kudos to you, and more the loss for Google.
People they want to keep will be able to continue WFH if they want. People who are on the margins or destined for the Performance Improvement Camps will have to come in and warm seats if they want to eke out a year or two more of existence.
At my work at very anti-remote employer, there are so many people who have obtained permanent remote. So I wouldn't be surprised people who Google thinks valuable would get individual arrangements and other who just themselves think they are valuable are in for rude surprise.
That's how tech companies usually do layoffs. Rather than admit they overexpanded and have to cut people (or that they are cannibalizing their own people to boost executive compensation) they blame it on departing workers by increasing the PIP-rape cutoff.
Basically a company's last effort to cover their butts before firing you. If you contest the termination, they can claim they gave you fair warning and a chance to improve.
If you're ever on one, the sensible course of action is to look for another job. You're next on the chopping block.
(1) people who make their bosses look bad are first to go.
(2) next are people who are perceived to cost their bosses time, regardless of whether it's their fault.
(3) after that, it's usually the infanticide cases: i.e., the people who did nothing wrong but haven't been there long enough to establish themselves.
The infanticide is especially ugly, because (a) it means the company is firing people basically at random, and (b) it rapes the shit out of the resumes of the people affected, because they now have <1 year jobs to explain. The reason it happens is that, empirically, most of the people cut in mass stack-rank purges are new members of underperforming teams... who, by inspection, have had the least to do with the team's underperformance.
Underperformance does get people fired, but rarely. It's at least as likely to get someone promoted, because underperformers usually have a career's worth of experience of being shitty, and therefore have developed such political skills they can easily fail up every time.
Not at Google, you can't. Firing someone who's performing abysmally still takes up to 6 months, between all the process and PIPs and paperwork and shit.
This sentence amuses me a bit. Does that also mean that American Democracy has only been proven to work for up to 245 years? :-)
OP's point is that 2 years of remote work isn't a test that a company can successfully go through a lifecycle of a team of employees. You know, onboard a grad, get them up to speed, get useful productivity, maintain whatever system/documentation, have them leave AND repeat this until the original members of the team are all gone AND then check that things are still ticking along well.
It may be that said companies are "going well" because there is 1 person left holding the fort while a bunch of new starters fumble around with their remote work, not getting up to speed properly.
Unlikely maybe? But the point is that 2 years isn't a proper test of such working conditions.
EDIT: remove political rub.
Remote work in a lot of roles, especially knowledge working, is just the way forward and will be how these things function in 50 years. Companies that are able to scout talent globally will simply out compete those that insist on a local labor pool. It makes no sense to perpetuate commuting, just in terms of the environmental damage it causes, when we've shown that this work can still be done without having to load a single ~200lb occupant and spend energy moving them + 3000lbs of metal around for two hours a day five days a week. If you are finding your juniors are falling behind, then step up instead of giving up and work hard to come up with a viable pipeline that isn't "well hopefully in two months we are back in the office." Plenty of companies and organizations and research groups have functioned entirely distributed for years now even before covid. It's not rocket science.
We applaud ourselves for self-studying, being fairly educated on average with backgrounds in being taught to self-study effectively and finding information online. Yet somehow the idea of juniors doing those exact same things, with or without digital aid of seniors, is unthinkable to many.
Surely somewhere this story feels off.
Of course this is at a company that was remote before the pandemic.
When a person signs in the first day, they already have a bunch of meetings scheduled (meet and greets, explainers, etc...), some work assigned (I like to have a bit of a goal when exploring a new code base, but this work isn't expected to get done right away), etc...
It can be done well, but takes some thinking through.
We don't need to imagine it. Those of us who lead teams have tried, and we know it's harder to onboard people, and to socialize as a company, when you're working remotely.
I think the advantages of remote working greatly outweigh the disadvantages, and I will continue to work remotely if I can, but there's no need to pretend everything is better. It obviously isn't.
I think it's worth separating the two parties in this (the employer and employee). IMO too many comments focus just on the employee view and then wonder why the employer behaves differently.
Most employees seem to love it, although some certainly don't (I fit in the second category) - but most seem to find it preferable.
However my experience leading a remote team is that IMO it is worse for our particular company from a corporate perspective. On-boarding and knowledge sharing is worse, relationships degrade and it's hard to distinguish someone who is just struggling/slow and needs help with absenteeism.
Like, when an existing team goes WFH (e.g. when lockdown first kicked in), everyone already knows each other. You have your banter channels, you know who knows what about what, and for those conversations you'd prefer not to have on Slack you have non-company backchannels (e.g. WhatsApp).
But in the long term, after new people join the company and others leave, this degrades. It takes far longer for newbies to get to know people, social ties weaken, and trust falters. Doubly so for early-career joiners, who likely haven't worked an office job before.
That's all true if you let it happen. You don't have to though. If you recognize the problem you can put resources into addressing it.
I wouldn't say it's worse, but different. It requires thinking through the onboarding process in a deliberate manner. I think a lot of companies used to get away with onboarding by having the new person spend a bit of time with HR and then throwing them in with their team and hope it works out.
My onboarding process now is scheduled out and takes 1-2 weeks depending on the position. I make sure the new person has their computer a couple days before they start. I ask the new person during and after the process what's working/not working and refine the process from their feedback. I keep an open block of time every day for the person as long as they need it, etc...
I should add that we were already remote pre-covid, but still had to deal with all the same issues when we went remote. One of the biggest challenges we had and I see is that remote magnifies already existing issues around communication and management. I remember one of my managers asking 'how will I know if someone is working if they are not in the office?' and my response was 'how do you know if they are working now?'.
I'm also not going to argue in absolute terms that in-person or remote is better/worse than the other. They are just different.
For many, the exact forced socialization through work, commutes and office culture that's going on is what drains them to the point of isolating themselves afterwards. I expect most people no longer working under that system to find a way out of their social isolation, given the friction for those venues isn't too high.
Maybe if we stop pushing people into a catch-all environment and give them time, money and means to solve their problems, they will.. solve their problems. All of those three have been dwindling over the past few years.
I don't get this idea that you need to be friends with your colleagues. Hpw does that improve productivity?
Professional yes, friendly even sure but friends? That's for leisure time and it shouldn't matter if their your colleagues or not.
> It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person.
Two years is nothing. You just got warm in your cloths and started to perform.
Edit: There most be impossible to have a stable engineering "culture" in such companies.
And when I say I am now working 11 years remote and was always more productive compared to be before (9 years in offices) you'll immediately say "anecdotal evidence", right?
Maybe look into your bias. It does look like you're trying to find scientific reasoning to support your subjective preference. That's not OK. Let's at least have an objective discussion.
Demeaning the positive results of remote work by pettily narrowing down their results to super specific borders, while at the same time implying that office work is the go-to thing to do is not being objective.
I think a key question here is how long and how often do you need to see someone to establish and maintain those relationships.
There were exporters/importers and othe long distance businesses relationships for a long time, so I don't think its every day for years.
wut?
2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody within 1min.
I think the poster has an issue with their company that they are projected onto the industry.
Couldn't the same be said of you? I don't think anyone is asserting that one system is the best. If an entire team/company is able to be happy and productive in a remote-work situation, then more power to them. Its often the case that some people prefer remote, some don't. The ratio varies between companies. Personally, as a manager, I would prioritize overall team happiness and efficiency over placating a few individuals.
People like this don't want a structured workplace because they prefer it; they want a structured workplace because they need it, because they never figured out how to live by themselves after university.
I 100% agree with them.
I’m more productive as a remote employee, my coworkers seem to greatly prefer remote work, and there is a 0% chance the next job I pursue will be at a remote company.
It’s just not my preference.
There are a few things that I've realized make the difference between remote work and in person. When you are needing to talk to a team mate, working remotely you can just message them and get a response quickly, but this has the effect of interrupting them (or you), which can derail their train of thought. Sure, your still interrupting them when in person, but you can see that they are actively working on something and wait a minute or two for them to notice. They may also see you out of their pariferal vision, which alerts them without really interrupting them, so they can continue their thought before moving on to yours. It's possible to delay replying to a message, but for me personally this means I might take longer to reply to the message than I should because I forget to come back to it (also I swear Slack doesn't always play the notification sound).
The other thing I've noticed is that the lack of interruption can actually negatively affect me. Seeing others getting up for a break can trigger me to also take a break, which can prevent me from getting too lost down a tangent (or spending too much time on Reddit). Since it's in the preiphery though, this allows you to continue with your train of thought while still also being able to see it as a reminder. This allows you to better choose when (or if) to respond.
I think what message apps need, is to slowly fade in alerts, instead of harsh instant alerts. So you notice them, but aren't interrupted. This won't necessarily help with the tangent (or Reddit) problem, but it will help with the interruption of teammates.
You're wrong. When I need to stay focused on something I may ignore messages and be 100% productive. However when I'm at the office most people don't care if I'm working on something with my headphones on, clearly in the zone. They'll just approach me about the most benign matters most of which can wait for days even.
There are plenty of people who say they don't go to work to make friends, they go to do their job, and any kind of interruption not directly related to the work they're doing is unwelcome. Plenty of others who will go to great lengths to stay out of any conversation and work as independently as possible because "they're just there to write code" or whatever.
If it's not so wrong to say you want to go to work and be completely left alone, why is it wrong to say you actually go because you prefer the dynamics of office life and find it less disruptive than a remote equivalent?
An MBA - not so much.
Then I went back to engineering as there's much more actual value in it and less politics.
I'm the kind of person who simply doesn't have a social life if i'm not already out in town at the end of the working day; I just can't overcome the inertia of being at home. So for me, working remotely has made me the most depressed, and physically unfit, I've ever been.
This was the state I was in and I tried medication for anxiety/depression for the first time in my life. It didn’t work well for me, but it gave me the impetus to change something.
I ended up going WeWork and it’s been great for me. Gives me people to talk to (all the staff there are friendly and some of the other people there like to chat) and a reason to get out of the house. I run/bike commute to get there so I’ve been much more active since I started going.
Good luck, and I hope you find something that makes it better for you. I know how rough it is!
Personally I think I’m right! We should do it my way.
Some of my colleagues struggled to maintain their health without their daily walks to the train, or just overworked themselves adapting to remote meetings and tools. Others are physically and mentally much healthier after substituting extra sleep, exercise, or preparation of healthy meals for the commute time.
A close analogy might be weight loss: "nothing" is stopping anyone from eating less, yet most Americans eat more than they should.
Going to the office meant a baseline of 7,000 steps a day, plus quite a few flights of stairs. Plus it was easy to go to salsa and gym after work (because I was already out of the house, so it was easier to to talk myself into going).
I struggle to do any of those things when i'm remote. I know perfectly well that I physically can, but that psychological inertia is extremely powerful.
Plenty of people benefit from imposed structure in their lives.
Yes, it's bad, yes, it's sad, but that's life. It's not all idealism and dreams.
Being stuck in a chair all day with people watching you is not a good life. Being forced to adhere to arbitrary social convention instead of speaking sincerely and expressing yourself is not a good life.
Choosing to lay in bed, work in the sun, recline on the couch, say hi to your cat, be your most authentic self, is a better life. Personally not dealing with the anxiety and body pain makes me more productive. But maybe everyone is right and we can get more productivity out of people by gutting their personalities and self-appreciation; but if that's the cost, I sincerely do not care. I'd rather everyone enjoy their short lives than spend them colorlessly and regret their choices on their deathbeds.
Iirc it's very roughly like 20-30% want full remote, 50-60% want some type of hybrid (where there's a wide spectrum of hybrid models, from rarely-in-office to usually-in-office), and 10-20% prefer always or almost-always in office.
The ideal situation IMO is to have all options available: some teams are remote, some teams are in-office. The proportion over time should hopefully work out such that everyone can get what they want.
Personally, I'm happier and healthier with a hybrid model (where people work in office the same days) than full remote. And like you, I also know I'm not alone because of people I know who are very unhappy right now due to forced remote during COVID. I sincerely hope we soon enter a future where everyone has options that best suit them.
I'd like that too.
I am curious, why do you like going into the office? Does it give you something that you need, or does being remote too long make you uncomfortable because of something your mind is doing to you, which you have to escape?
I'd also add that I've always had and prioritized a short commute, and I like where I live and wouldn't want to move, so the cons are minimal for me. (The one thing I prefer about remote work is being able to take a 2hr mid-day break those days my brain is just fried; much easier at home, and I can then be more productive after that break.)
Now I know that isn't always guaranteed wherever you work, or wanted at all stages of your life/career. But I understand if people do crave those things.
But, when work ends (quit, layoffs, terminated), those work "friendships" almost always dissolve into nothingness whence they came. When there's no more 40h/week together forced time, they dissolve. The after-work drinks are directly related to work. No common work? No common drinks. No more forced socialization means that fakeness is made apparent.
The real key: focus on not-work. Focus on clubs. Focus on get-togethers. Or parties. Or hell, hookups. Focus on things that don't use the "work" glue to force together. Those things will last when your job changes, or gets bought out, or whatever.
I could do those other things you say, but none nearly for as much time as the time I spend at work, so work friends come quite easily and naturally by comparison. Proximity has a big effect on making friends[0]. And I could do those activities you suggest in addition to getting to know people at work, because those other things happen off work hours. (Though realistically, I'm too old for parties and not single enough for hookups :))
Though, club thing has actually never worked for me. Those acquaintances end up feeling the most distant because we meet too infrequently. Probably requires a hobby you're really into so that you get more frequent exposure to one another (IIUC this makes CrossFit a good way to make friends).
I can't really disagree more with this comment.
Some of the people most important and amazing friendships I've ever made have been created in an office. So many people ex-colleagues are still great friends and over time, our friendships have even grown over the years, even after not working together anymore. Like seriously, I've made friends with incredible people living in cities and working in offices which I don't imagine will ever be replicated with online working.
I now work for a 100% remote, I love it and while I do make friends, there's no way the bonds are even sightly as strong as those I formed hanging out with people, in-person. Since working remote, I've had to make new friends to hang out with and what's funny is, those friendships seem way more lucid and difficult to maintain because it's usually just based around hobbies and the friendships can be soured by the slightest bit of annoyance / jealously or whatever because there's no real consequence to treating each other poorly.
When it comes to my peers that I've worked with face to face, we had to trust each other, share hardships and work through problems and that made us become closer.
What I believe will happen is there will be people who work in offices together, and they will have more leverage over the "remotes" because they'll be a core group of people who share closer ties. Eventually this socializing is what will bring people back to cities and offices, that's where the power will be.
If you could say your school friends were "real friends", you can say your work friends are real friends. Modulo some child-like naivety, you were only friends with your schoolmates because you had to be at school with them. Hell, say you're homeschooled, and you're friends with kids in your neighborhood; you're only friends with them because you have to live around them. You can always make this argument for all except purely Internet friends you plucked from the æther of some Discord server.
No-strings-attached friends are different from school/geographic/work friends, in terms of quality of life threat and the social strategy that should govern your interactions, but I don't think you can't say they're all friends.
So as always one size does not fit all.
I wish it wasn't so popular for people in tech with mental issues to project them onto everyone else, instead of looking at the early family life that made them. Your parents failed if you are so afraid of the other. It is not everyone else's fault that they don't hate people.
Those who it's fake for are not allowed to throw it off. I get my socialization in groups I choose to be a part of where I don't have to curtail my every thought to avoid political retaliation that affects my livelihood.
And get a PhD before you start throwing around words like "mental issues" for things you disagree with.
Wittgenstein was not wrong. Language is meaningless without its connection to the rest of humanity.
If you're remote, you don't want to be left out if other team members are in person.
If you're in-office, most of the benefits depend on other people also being in-office.
Just like you don't want to be forced to socialize, others may not want to be forced to work on a remote team, and a team that has a free-for-all remote policy is effectively a remote team (as others have noted). If the decision is made at a group level, most everyone can get what they want.
You can address this with some level of coordination, hence why making this a team or org decision is win-win for everyone IMO. You will never have to take a job that doesn't align with what you want, nor will most anybody else. Seems like a great outcome to me.
Ultimately, the market will come to a conclusion at some point, and perhaps that will show what the comparative value of in-office vs remote is :)
I don't think this is true in the sense that you (or possibly the original commenter) mean. I think what happens is that if, e.g., 1/3 of a team is remote, the rest of the team has to choose between either excluding them by doing most interactions in-person, or leaning heavily on remote even though 2/3 of the team is in-office.
Okay, sounds like you prefer remote work then? I don't see what's wrong with someone else preferring in-person work.
> The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency,
Disagree, there's definitely conversations that are much easier to have in-person. Both just "locally" for individual conversations, but also in terms team bonding and trust that allow other kinds of conversations to happen at all.
That said, I think it is _also_ about socializing.
> they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.
You cannot get around needing others to fulfill social needs, that's what social means.
In what way is this "forcing" in a way that's different than how other social interactions work?
Covid showed that as a lower limit remote wont wreck companies atleast. I am convinced remote is a little bit better for the company (unless hardware/machine/industry centric) and alot better for many employees, especially in hard commute places.
Well said. At these point, anyone who suggests one is superior to the other without discussing the pros and cons of each is probably too biased to have an honest discussion.
Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.
One thing I’m certain about, though, is that a lot of people who want remote work don’t necessarily do better when remote. I recruited, hired, and managed remote teams for a long time. The number of people who insisted they focused better at home but then couldn’t get anything done without constant performance management or nagging was surprisingly high. This even included several people who later transitioned to our office and did substantially better. A lot of people struggle to stay focused and productive when left alone at home to themselves. Going into the office can be the context shift they need to get productive.
I think a lot of the difference is that the people who prefer remote are just asking that they be given the choice to go remote. However, many of the people who prefer in-person are also expecting everyone else to go in-person. I recognize pros and cons to both remote and in-person, and believe what is right for me might not be right for others. If you give a team of 10 the option, and 9 of them choose remote, should the 1 person who likes in-person be able to make everyone else go in-person, so he has that "in-person experience"?
What company did you work for in-person where any issue could be resolved quickly?
Seriously, what’s the difference between this and instant messaging?
I would argue that the ability to defer interruptions is enough to rely on IM, instead of physical interaction.
The situation is much more symmetric.
And I'm one of those managers who kept extra mouthwash and altoids at my desk too...
A big part of the equation (for some) will be what kind of office they are being asked to return to? At the office my company used to have before it was acquired in 2019 everyone had a cube, not big by any means and not with full walls, but enough space to have a few pics of family, maybe a plant, personal nick-nacks, whatever, a sense of some sort of boundary to it. I could have easily been persuaded to return to that environment 3 days a week, because I did enjoy being around my peers. The acquiring company however, had plans underway to bring us into long elbow-to-elbow tables before work from home happened in March 2020. What would you call a food trough to work at instead of eat at, a "productivity trough"? I am open to tolerating that one day a week for cross team meetings (some have started trickling in already), anymore than that and I am out.
But this arrangement is only available to peoples who don't interact with the students, so it create some resentment. The workers who don't have that privilege have started to call us: la gagne de laptops, a derisive way to says the laptops class/cast.
Not everybody at Google is in one location to begin with.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person
I think this was more true for me when I was earlier in my career and remote tech really sucked. But now I see it as generally negative to have to sync with someone else to resolve an issue they (or I) am working on. In my experience, in-person bias is a symptom of a team that does not communicate well in writing (emails, Slacks, Jira, etc.).
> where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity
There is literally decades of published research that refutes this for knowledge work. IIRC the first studies were done in the 1950s or thereabouts, and I am not aware of any big studies that have come since that concluded differently. (IIRC Microsoft's campus was originally designed to give every engineer a solo office because Gates read _Peopleware.)
I will admit that working in interrupt-driven style does produce the feeling of getting more work done, whether or not that is actually true.
As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It measures a controlled thing, but certainly nothing I would use to extrapolate that software engineering teams work less efficiently when people can interrupt each other with questions easily.
If you have any studies that you think are good feel free to link them, I'm open to being wrong.
It's unfortunate that companies and individuals, like yourself, can't respect the fact that others _are_ more effective remote and when they're not getting tapped on the shoulder by random colleagues.
As your GP comment pointed out remote vs in-office productivity likely breaks even. Companies should treat their employees like adults and let them work where they feel most productive and not cater to the preferences of upper-management or a desire to return to the status-quo.
The entire team at an in-person org pays a global commuting tax. Employees are not an idealized frictionless surface; if they have to commute to work, that comes out of their productive capacity in some way.
What you are describing here is a team that is not managed well. If I had to guess, that team would exhibit features such as:
- critical information only shared in meetings and not recorded in writing (or recorded in a place the team does not use as habit)
- that same critical information re-discovered in subsequent meetings because it was not written down
- team cadence extremely sensitive to PTO because key knowledge is only accessible by speaking to the relevant person
- team cadence extremely sensitive to staff onboarding/replacement because both of these require hands-on in-person time from existing staff
- etc.
It's worth noting that all of these inefficiencies are experienced as "progress" by the team: "we made a key decision" (that we had decided and not written down a month prior) feels like something positive. "I spent most of today helping X get ramped up" also feels like an accomplishment rather than the more correct "our documentation and process is so opaque that we lost $X of engineering time today when an engineer was required to help another get onboarded."
Essentially, teams that need to be in-person to function typically underutilize the old technology (writing) and because so many teams work that way, most people do not notice how much time they waste.
This is not every team that leans heavily on in-person interaction; obviously there are outliers that are capable of using the technology of the written word while also augmenting with high-bandwidth interactions.
This research is categorically different from the research on working from home in that:
- it measures a facet of the workplace that is commonplace and standard
- it has been studied for several decades, and the results have held up. (IIRC the first such studies were done in the 1950s or 1960s.)
IMHO those arguing that people have changed enough that now they can better recover from interruptions than their predecessors could 20 or 30 years ago have the burden of proof, not the other way around.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop someone from writing code.
Additionally, I can't push myself to be productive for 8 hours straight. My productivity has gone way up now that I can have a good long break in the middle of the day. You can't really go and have a 3 hour break in the office and even if you did, what would you do? - at most you can sit in the cold kitchenette and stare at the wall, at which point I'm literally wasting my life.
I actually think offices/the rat is a large part of our sickness we have as humanity. People are "forced" todo what they dont want, and therefor, they are less empathetic to others plights. If "i have to, they should". "i need to goto work, slug it out, they should do. they shouldnt leech of the state. they shouldnt take our jobs. they shouldnt.". It feels like the root cause of so much conflict.
Atleast thats how it played out in my immigrant family. They came to this country, dedicated there lives to work, made money, and died before they could appreciate it. Ive now had an education, and realised that their way of life, back on an island, is more satisfying for the soul. So im trying to bring both of those concepts together and live the dream they had for me. Instead of how their parents slugged it out 12hrs a day, and never spent quality time with them... Which resulted in little growth of grow social/parental skills, talked to everyone like they were a client, and were easily manipulated by conservative media because they never had any time to understand world events for themselves.
No longer does remote mean isolation. I have better relationships with my neighbours and community. I have internet access at the level of any city folk. I have less worries, i can take breaks in my workday that are meaningful for me, and therefor i give more of myself to my job. Thats how being FLEXIBLE to your employees brings about efficencies. Much more complex then a simple commute.
I like keeping the windows in my flat open, and two years of working from home made me extremely uncomfortable breathing the bad air of an hermetically sealed office.
This has been one of my main complaints about the full time WFH during covid. If we were all in the office I could turn around in my chair and ask whoever I needed to a question. With WFH I have had to sometimes wait 24 hours or more for a response. So I was stuck spinning my wheels for hours because I was blocked without knowing which esoterically name database table to query.
Many things at a big company like Google require working with people in different timezones. I would say more often than not, if requires working with someone in a building far enough away that you have to do a video conference anyway.
I’m an in-house video producer for a tech start up. I absolutely do not need to be in the office most days, let alone every day.
That's the real part highlighted by the pandemic: people are extremely reliant on their jobs for social interaction. With all the problems that come with it. We're practically raised to be dependent on jobs for way too many things.
Any examples that you've had success with?
You can get all of that in a cowork space while others work remotely.
I say this as a very social person. I like having colleagues. But the fact is I just don’t need to be in there most days, and they don’t understand what I do beyond “video,” so they don’t offer a lot of opportunity beyond that if we are being very utilitarian about it (which I generally don’t).
Its been shown by example, this distinction doesn't change the fact that money and productivity go hand in hand. Counter examples are counter examples and certainly they exist, but several large scale examples of it not being sustainable prove the risks are indeed real if it's mismanaged...
And I disagree with your "tap on the shoulder" problem. That is easily resolved with a one line email/message which can be answered equally quickly with a one line answer without all the social BS ... if it needs more than that then it is interfering with productivity at that moment and a short or appropriate meeting can be scheduled to elaborate. Anything else and ... sorry, you don't value good work.
--
Bless your heart.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.
There's probably more than one variable that went into that phenomenon...
It's "proven" better for me and I'm, never going back and that's all that matters to me. I feel like this is a trend.
Do you experience Zoom fatigue? The sensation that, while this technology is convenient and useful, you're missing something important?
I think this whole debate is really about whether people have this sensation or not.
Zoom meetings are less tiring, because I dont have to care about how I look like. I can focus on content ... or not. I can make myself comfortable.
There's virtually impossible to refactor big corporations into real remote organizations - they're "remote bolt-on". For them, to remote is only to cope with COVID, other than that it's mostly a liability.
We probably need to wait for another half-decade to see it unfold - to see if there could be any "remote native" company that can disrupt the market and challenge big corporations.
It certainly works in the short term, in an emergency situation where everybody in a sector is operating under the same conditions out of necessity.
Whether it has long-term detrimental effects remains to be determined. My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past.
Have you maybe considered that it's actually not your team's fault but rather how the organisation transitioned into and approached remote working? That or you're an MBA :)
Disagree, I think this leads to poor productivity, generally speaking. When I'm in the office, I'm honestly amazed anything gets done at all. There are so many disruptions, side conversations, etc. that I treat it as a "week off" on my schedule any time I have to go into the office. Once back in my home office, I can get back to writing code.
That said, it likely depends greatly on the job, but this is tech, and coders and engineers need a lot of uninterrupted time to think. It doesn't mean there can't be collaborative time, and in fact it can be helpful when scheduled appropriately, but I think productivity is better when you have a way to turn off interruptions when needed.
On the flip side, there are people that prefer a company where everyone is remote. They want to be able to resolve any issues quickly over voice calls or slack, and do not want to feel at a disadvantage because they are isolated from in person discussions that could have just as easily happened over VC.
I wish companies would understand this.
Yes, your team may be fully in one office, but it's pretty rare to work in a team where 100% of your work in handled in-team. If your meetings include other teams, they're probably going to involve video conferencing, at which point, it's actually worse to use a meeting room, because it means that some people are going to have audio/video problems.
I also like working in an office, but I also understand that real life means that being remote-first is the best approach.
It's better for me. That's the part that I care about.
"Allowing remote work has been proven to be better."
Because it increases the supply of candidates. I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.
I get that I'm leaving as an exercise for the reader "how to implement hybrid teams" and "how to fairly evaluate employees who are remote and not."
I've spent roughly a thousand hours of time with my family since quarantine began, that I otherwise would have spent commuting to work. I can hardly tell you how valuable that is.
Let me just glance real quick at how profitable my company has been over the last two years... oh, hmm, yeah, it seems like it can take the theoretic productivity hit from being forced to use IM to solve problems.
In person interactions literally stifled some of our team members. It’s going to be a challenge to keep this going, but we must - we owe all of our coworkers a voice. These interactions also drove meaningful productivity. I bet we more than offset losses from other lack of in person collaboration.
100%. Email and Slack are great for DEIA. In person meetings end up dominated by whoever is loudest/most aggressive. I know a woman who just left and in-person company for a fully remote position because of issues in person. She would tell me stories about a taller man who would purposely stand over people to intimidate them.
The tap on the shoulder is the most annoying thing working on site. There's no respect for the urgent & critical tasks.
You would want others to spend 2 hours commuting, wasting time on parking, food & fuel just to be able to physically speak to them.
What a waste of our current technological advantages.
Why bother working in tech, when you don't use it to better yourself and others?
It was insanely annoying. And when I told him to please stop, he started to wave his hand in my peripheral vision.
I pretty much gave up trying to make him behave. I mean those headphones are not that good you can just speak ...
Just the risk of such things makes it hard for me to concentrate. They need not have to happen, just that they could is enough.
I think it is the walking up behind me on row desks that is the problem. I have a private office now with my side to the door and in no way I feel the same.
e.g. you could answer, but state you are in the middle of something, can't focus now, and please send you an email. If you are politely obstinate enough they will soon learn they are wasting their time with the interruptions and will be trained to send an email straight away instead.
The second day I just worked from the hotel.
Switching cost from constant interruptions is a real phenomenon.
We've proven that companies/organizations can go fully remote and thrive.
If you like working on site, good for you. Many don't like it, and are less productive working on site.
You made a bunch of baseless claims.
Any assessment looking at remote productivity during a pandemic vs. remote productivity with periodic in-person meetings and considerate, purposeful norms will get wildly different data.
Google's stock looks the exact opposite of crash and burn, it doubled during these last 2 years of pandemic and remote work.
First of all, not everyone is in same building or on same floor, or in same country of a large organization. Google account managers, for example, don't tap tech support people on the shoulder.
Secondly, a related anecdote: An overly friendly project manager in a previous job used to physically tap/slap me on shoulder on a regular basis. I politely asked him to stop doing it. He kept doing it, and my polite request became an awkwardly agitated request in front of colleagues. I am male, and his unwanted physical contact had nothing to do with harassment or intent to irritate me. He was "just that kinda guy". I want to be tolerant of people's different ways as much as anyone, but please keep your hands to yourself.
I am happier and more productive working from home, away from the awkward grey areas of personal interactions and distractions at work.
What I know: the industry likes to emulate google, for example they like to emulate the google job interview process and google coding style guidelines. Now my question: does this decision imply that most places will start to work strictly from the office?
You do understand that "I personally prefer" and "actually works better" and "better for everybody involved" are three different things, do you?
We were told for years that it's an established fact that remote work is inefficient and untenable. We have proven - with an experiment that we wouldn't rather go through, but we had no choice - that this is false. That doesn't mean it is for everybody - but it doesn't also mean that the thing you prefer is for everybody. So why it's ok to force one of these things onto everybody? That's what the managers should be able to answer.
If you mean this literally (i.e. walk over to someone's desk/office the moment you have an issue to resolve), this is highly disruptive and partially the reason why some people hate going into the office, particularly engineers.
I understand some people prefer to meet in person but it's not an absolute necessity.
me too. however, the reality is that I haven't worked in a company where everybody is in the same location in over 15 years. under that circumstances, fully remote is the better choice and I will not be forced back into an office.
This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave.
Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation.
Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
Neither of which have an appreciable business use in the near to mid term & are therefore totally irrelevant to an employer.
they may agree, but may not have the fortune of choice. Not everyone is being well compensated in a cushy office space. Google people certainly are, but that's a small slice of an industry that's a slice of an entire society.
To continue the analogy, isn’t the jailer/warden also a prisoner? He too is stuck in the prison, perhaps for different reasons but stuck nonetheless.
Choice is what prisoners and slaves don’t have, and we have plenty of both.
This reminds me of unvaxxed people pinning yellow stars to liken the situation that they cant visit cinema to holocaust
You think that saying “I’m a modern day slave” will garner you sympathy. In reality it makes you look like a muppet.
There’s actual slavery and human trafficking still happening today by the way. These people aren’t helped in any way by you clawing for sympathy.
"You’re not compelled to offer your services to any particular employer." But you are compelled to offer your services to an employer, whose ways of working are almost all similar to each other. And it's not like you have infinite choice.
Is it really a choice to move alone somewhere else just to find a decent employer, but sacrifice friends, family, and so on?
Is it really a choice not to work and become homeless, a social outcast?
Is it really a choice to be an entrepreneur, in such a competitive environment that most startups fail, and you need considerable savings to sustain yourself in case of bad times?
Is it really a choice to find such a unicorn of employer that fits a modern day humans needs for privacy, sense of autonomy, sense of progression, good work-life-balance, good compensation, good responsible manager who doesn't micromanage (...), when most employers (have to) follow the same corporativistic mindset to get as most profits as possible out of employees in order to survive in an extremely competitive enviornment?
Is there really a choice when you have children to take care of, a mortgage and are just too tired or barely have any time whatsoever to look for jobs or invest time into your own startup?
Should I continue?
Where is the choice? Where is it?
People are not bound by physical means with the threat of death. Sure. But if you can't see other more subtle and equally powerful binds, then you're blind.
So yes, this is the modern equivalent slavery, in short - modern slavery - and please you stop.
You want some things that are available for money and need a way of getting money. That is very far from slavery. Every day you can choose to with or not, and what you want to work on.
1. You want to not be compelled to do any work to meet your daily needs.
2. You aren’t prepared to be self sufficient so you also want others to render goods and services to you, for presumably no charge.
Are these contradictory? If work was optional for everyone, why would they work and give you goods and services for free?
Sure maybe in future everything can be automated away but right now do you think it’s reasonable to want to do no work and also not want to be self sufficient?
And it still exists, so the modern equivalent of slavery is still slavery.
What you are talking about is the social obligations of being part of civilization. Yes, there is no free lunch. We must all work to live unless someone else is willing to foot the bill for us. But if that is slavery, then literally everyone in the world with a job is a slave and the word loses its meaning.
If a situation fits for 80% and there is no other single word that better describes it, i see you would just do nothing and leave a clearly wrong situation in confusion and undefined. People need a word and a clarity of meaning to rally behind it. Slavery fits really well, even if some things don't fit the historical original definition of it. If you can come up with a better fitting word, be my guest, otherwise please don't stand in the way while people are trying to raise awareness for the tragic lack of freedom that so many of us experience.
What I understand from your post, is that you want access to opportunities without making any sacrifices. It's an interesting discussion topic on its own. But the opposite of it is not slavery.
With how your health insurance depends on employment in the US, I kind of have the opposite impression that people actually do work under threat of physical harm; or violence, in other words, not unlike the working conditions of a slave.
A strong word better carry a stronger metaphor. No matter the framing, you are
- it is a choice to move alone somewhere, that is a chocie many make for college and post-college work
- it is a choice to be homeless. Not a comfortable choice, but a choice to make
- it is a choice to TRY to be an entrepreneur, but success is never promised when your job is to convince other people to give you money (which is THEIR choice).
- it is a choice to spend your time expecting perfection. Again, you are making a choice contingent on someone else's choice, success is not guaranteed.
- it's not an easy choice, but children can be given to others if you cannot provide care, and mortgages can be sold if you cannot afford payments. You not having the time/money to make your own company (which is a RISKY endeavor, and always has been) does not entitle you to free money.
I don't see how any of these relate to being a slave. Or even a minority/woman 100 years ago in the US. They didn't even have the option to work most places, let alone start up a business. homes would deny them for not being white or not having a man to backup expenditures. Still a step up from slavery, but still very much restricted because of who they are, not due to life factors they want to maintain (they had few to begin with).
So no, I don't see the slavery metaphor here as a valid one to make. There is more than one type of slavery, but we're in an american website. so you would basically need to very specifically frame your form of "slavery" if you're going outside what people commonly associate it with.
But if you do not participate in the system of employment, you will either be left to the mercy of others or die of starvation. Even if you own land which you farm and make all of your own stuff, hunt your own food - you will still have to work for someone else by selling them stuff you farmed, made or hunted yourself so that you can pay property taxes.
Modern capitalism is a world-encroaching system of slavery, made necessary by scarcity (mostly of land).
Capitalism is the opposite of slavery, you control who you sell to, work for, buy from.
But I do agree property tax is theft. Less taxes, smaller government, more capitalism.
Focusing on the context of this article specifically, what makes you think that workers of a company worth 1.78 trillion dollars are slaves?
Here's what modern day slavery looks like: "Harassed, insulted and raped – that is everyday for thousands of women working in tomato and strawberry fields of Spain, Italy and Morocco. The vegetables and fruits they harvest are sold in German supermarkets and all over Europe".
When some historian looked at it they found that on average a serf of a French baron say 700 years ago worked less than 40 hours per week on average. Perhaps even less than 30. And there was no commute. David Graeber in his «Dawn of everything» discussed that.
I’m very good friends with a medievalist professor. Something they said to me recently was interesting. Today, most medievalists don’t really like the term “feudalism” and instead see serfdom as an extension of Roman slave systems. Not chattel slavery, but definitely not a mutually agreed upon and beneficial economic relationship. I’m not so sure that “serfs didn’t actually work all that much” is aligned with current consensus.
David Graeber is the one who wrote this:
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"
And I'm guessing his knowledge of what happened 700 years ago is going to be much less accurate than his knowledge of times he lived through.
The word cannot either have been misused as people have subsequently expended great energy defending its use.
This.. this is exactly what Google did - everyone had the option to go fully remote.
Somewhere else I remember reading this would also cut your salary by 10%.
Some people did have requests denied. In my org, every single person who applied was approved. It is easy to change teams at google, so people who really want to work remotely can make it happen.
It totally depends on where you're living. It could even be a salary increase if you were previously working in a lower CoL office but have since moved to a high CoL region -- in that case your salary would increase. There's definitely no blanket single figure that applies (in either direction) to people who go fully remote.
E.g. my grand-boss is a fully remote worker based out of Manhattan. He's getting the highest pay tier.
Are we still talking about Google?
perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)
Being forced to live in expensive cities … and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
In your attempt to throw everything against a wall to see what sticks you’ve contradicted yourself. Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment.
You want to work from home—own that instead of trying to pretend you are fighting for some great moral cause.
Citation?
There are a lot of factors to consider when making that comparison, and if you're going to criticise upstream commentators for handwaving justifications of their own lifestyles, it seems important to consider more the availability of public transit.
My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach.
Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired. If someone wants to bail to a seaside town during the worst of winter, no problem.
People aren't forced to live in overpriced urban areas, they can live where they choose to!
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.
Since the pandemic began I have been putting under 3000 miles a year on my car. I am eating home cooked meals every day. Mid day I can walk down to the local grocery store and pick up food to cook later for dinner.
My QoL is insanely improved.
If I need maintenance work done (Late last year I bought a house that was built in the 1950s, so, yes, lots of that happening) I am here all day long if need be. I don't have to worry about when expensive packages are delivered, I am always here to pick them up. I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be. I can schedule doctors and dentists appointments at any time of the day and not have to take a day off of work to make them.
And so on and so forth. WfH rocks.
A manager I worked with once pre-pandemic had his idea of "business hammocks" for the office repeatedly shot down. He was a genius though.
Sounds like nap pods lol
I had the most ridiculously comfy couch in my office. Blue, threadbare, worn-in. Every time anyone sat down in it I warned them that they were going to fall asleep if they stayed there too long. Without fail, I'd hear wood sawing after a manner of minutes. Vendors, colleagues, the CIO, the CEO, my wife dropping by to visit, that couch was insidious.
The one we had was pretty great too, but not quite as intoxicatingly good as yours.
But, it had a big, brass buddha at one end. Rub the belly for good karma...
This thread is getting me to seriously consider another one. Just started a new company and we all know how that is. A comfy couch might be just the thing.
What about all the people who already knew spending 2 hours commuting was a terrible use of our time before the pandemic, regardless of how much of a bigger house we could get?
So we lived in dense cities, in walkable neighborhoods, where the office was a 15 minute walk away but so were restaurants, parks, grocery stores, and theaters?
But part of the exchange we made was that our houses/apartments were small, and were for LIVING not for working. We don't have a spare bedroom to turn into a segregated office, so instead the work/home life has been an overlapping mess for 2 years.
Also, if WfH spreads, many of the people who made the same choice, getting a small apartment in a dense city for living only, will probably make a different choice now and move somewhere else. I know many people who did just that. I expect this will lower the prices of housing in cities, which means you could live in a bigger apartment if you wanted.
The only option here is either having a member of the team always one step behind, or changing the entire organisation of the team to revolve around that guy. People who prefer "in-office" work would rather make the effort of commuting so that they do not have to deal with that. So they expect the other people in their team to do the same, otherwise there is little to no point.
My point is that "let's invest in great offices for those who want, but let people do what they want regardless" is not really an option, because you are paying the organisational and financial price, and not really getting the benefits of either.
I believe most organisation working in "hybrid" model will impose fixed days at the office - so they can get the full benefits of the "in-office" time. And let other days at home, so that people working better remotely can enjoy that as well. Teams will organise around that, eg by schedule most meetings on "in-office" days.
This is awfully close to sunken cost fallacy - we have invested so much in it, therefore we have to use it no matter what circumstances.
> I believe most organisation working in "hybrid" model will impose fixed days at the office - so they can get the full benefits of the "in-office" time. And let other days at home, so that people working better remotely can enjoy that as well.
This is the worst option for many people because it would force them still live within reasonable commuting distance, resulting them not being able to move to lcol area or closer to their parents/communities/etc. What's the point then of allowing them to go remote when it's not really remote, but rather "not here, but still close"? Yea, it will work with some pople, but for others it makes things worse.
Some agree with the idea that remote is strictly "better", but many do not. Bear in mind that we had the opportunity to create fully remotes companies for a long time, and some succeeded, but most companies were still office-only or office-first. Similarly, some companies will move to remote-first post pandemic, but it does not look like everyone will - far from it. And everyone is making their pro-and-cons analysis.
> What's the point then of allowing them to go remote when it's not really remote
Here is the point: this is not remote. It's office-first with some days were you are going to be allowed not to come, in order to lower the commuting time and get more "alone" time. For people who want to work remote, from anywhere, this is not cutting it. And it's not trying to. For people who still love the office but have some complain about having to go every single day, this is a nice option.
Amazing how the realities of our financial system and transaction structure basically necessitates projection of a management groups will on others isn't it?
Couldn't have anything to do with the overrepresentation of psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies amongst corporate decisionmakers...
deanCommie's argument was around a choice of living arrangements based on the idea that work would happen at the office, and there not being any space for work at home, so a purely logistical one.
Coordination between on-site and remote workers is a separate issue, though I agree it is absolutely important.
> People who prefer "in-office" work would rather make the effort of commuting so that they do not have to deal with that. So they expect the other people in their team to do the same, otherwise there is little to no point.
I guess it works both ways. People who prefer "from home" would rather make the effort of communicating by text / visio so that they don't have to deal with the commute.
Precisely ! That's why it's important to communicate clearly to every person of the team the working agreement that are expected - and to enforce them. If the agreement is that no one is expected to have to commute, and everything must be done so they don't have to, that's perfectly fine - as long as everyone plays the game. And any person still insisting to meet "somewhere" because they don't like emails/IM/zoom needs to be talked to.
Similarly, if the rules are : you have to come to the office 3 days/week, expect that some things will happen in person, show up, and play the game. If you start insisting that everything needs to be organised in a way that allows you to stay fully remote and not show up, you need to review your position.
The important part is to ensure that expectations are clearly expressed - and enforced. Which Google is doing.
But it's frequent enough you can still hold most of your stuff for inperson if you didn't want to have the overhead of remote working.
Yeah that only works for very small teams the moment you are like ten or os, even in an office first setting will be away for whatever reason, tradespeople coming, feeling sick etc
> Going on lunch and discussing about your project ? Too bad.
> . Got an idea you ran by a colleague at the coffee machine ?
> . A state of the project on a whiteboard in the office ?
> No, you need to use Jira.
Too bad that you need to put that into writing so later it can be referenced or you end up headscratching at a git commit which doesn't refer a ticket three months down the road
WfH means not needing to buy for commute. Buy for lifestyle. Still want to live urban? Get a co-working space.
I would also argue that small apartment can be very limiting also for living. I mean, sure, if you spend all your free time in those restaurants, parks, grocery stores and theaters, then it may actually work. But if you wanna do anything that requires personal space, then living in a small apartment is very limiting.
If that's the style you prefer, then you need a co-working space to replace the office, in the same way your place probably isn't big enough to entertain people for dinner so you use a restaurant. And it's too dense with the neighbours to throw a proper party with dancing, so you use the bars and clubs.
At least this is my understanding from having done a bit of both.
I love my solo lunchbreak walk just to empty my head or just think instead of having to talk or interact with team members.
International companies have been doing this for decades.
Until I retired at the end of 2017 I had worked for over twenty years in a team which had developers and domain experts in the following countries: Norway, UK, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, USA (several states), Canada, Poland.
Occasional collaboration is different from day to day, and I'm sure that's why GP emphasised 'asynchronous' - doing it with your close colleagues requires a shift in how you work, async written communication not chats, PR review not pairing, etc.
Hey look it works for them too, everyone is a winner!
Which part of the Google offer significantly changed thanks to work done during the pandemic ? All these profits come from something that was built - in person - in pre pandemic work organisation, so we know that this was was successful. The only big thing that I can think of on Google side that was supposed to take off during the pandemic is Stadia. I own one, and it's an understatement to say that it did not deliver on its promises. It is not the first Google product that fails, and it is hard to say if the failure is due to remote work, but still something to consider.
This is very true.
It is also true that these built products were operated in a remote work environment - meaningful, and significantly enhanced profits were extracted when operating these assets remotely vs operating them in person. Sample size is small of course and time will tell.
Stadia, not a great example, build in person - launched and operated remotely. Was its failure due to it being poorly built or poorly operated? Fellow owner and former user of the service, I didnt think it was that bad technically, but understand I am in the significant minority on that one.
Most Google products and services were mature in 2017.
I imagine maintanence. Even if they decided not to pursue any new products, features, or other major updates, keeping their services updated and providing various B2B support is a big part of keeping the whole thing running. It's not glamorous, but it is very specialized and requires top talent even for bug fixes, security patches, etc. at that level.
Well, at least those of us who work in Windows can have a pretty great experience because RDP is the shit. Leave a session running at work with a bunch of shit open, connect to it from home and everything resizes and rearranges to fit however many monitors and at whatever resolutions you decided to pass to it, disconnect the session and login locally at work again...
See your POV easily though.
A decade ago, maybe a bit more, I consolidated into a backpack. Laptop, often second portable display, various adapters, chargers, clipboard, writing tools, phone, earbuds (I still prefer wired, if nothing more than the crazy good mic mine have), sewing, grooming, first aid...
Seems like a lot, but it isn't, and where I go the pack goes.
I can go from cold, arrive somewhere, and be up and running in a few minutes. Have not maintained a dedicated office for years now.
I do have dedicated work places, and have a few things, cheap things, duplicated for convenience.
These days, I have a home lab, work space, well equipped. Can do most anything I need there. This was not expensive, but I did also get gear over time too. Most of it was opportunistic buys. Total deals.
At work, any gear I need I either use where it is, or it is in my workspace.
The end result is a very mobile way. I am currently out of State for a week, and am pretty much fine, minus some gear, but I am also not needing to handle the associated roles either.
For quiet, I am on cell phone, no desk phone for the last decade. Use a spare room, my car, at home space, whatever.
The big perk is being where I both want and need a very high percentage of time.
Would hate full time at office. Would have to have one to start!
For many people with younger children (and therefore early evening bedtimes), having or not having a commute is not a difference of an hour or two of your day - it's the difference between spending time with your family during the week versus not at all. I've heard this from many friends (and some family) across different industries - hardly any have wanted to stick their heads above the parapet and single themselves out as being a problem.
I already empathised, but this whole thing has really thrown a light on what working parents (specifically those with primary care responsibilities like school pick-ups and drop-offs) in the workplace have been dealing with this whole entire time.
tldr; A great many people have had an increase of 150% of the time they care about the most by working from home - this proposal takes that away from them.
Haha, you say. But my 3 year old doesn’t sleep before 10 :P
That said, being able to pick him up and drop him off at daycare without having to rush is really nice.
- Noise cancelling headphones work as well at home as they do at work. I love mine.
- Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.
Anyway, person-to-person and day-to-day differences in productivity are pretty large in my experience. Of course you could be in a bust-your-butt-for-a-promotion kind of situation, but you could also take the attitude that you're getting paid for what you actually do, and the fact that you are not top 1% productivity is reflected in your current "help-at-home-when-I-am-needed" salary.
This is actually the bug, not the feature. These people have bought noise cancelling headphones, so when they join a meeting everyone else it bothered.
>Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.
Why are you doing work outside of working hours? That does not make sense.
If that were the case when everyone was at the office it just couldn't get done.
If you are just picking up a call from your boss to work without being paid overtime then don't do the work. Only exception is if you have flexlible working time e.g. 32 hours per month then you just do a shorter day at some point.
Noise cancelling headphones have directional mics that typically do a very good job of only picking up the wearer's voice.
If people really want to sound clear, a headset with a mic boom is every better. 0 background noise gets through.
These are all very well solved problems.
Heck my laptop back in 2005 (!!!) had a directional mic array. I could use an included utility app to control where in the room I wanted the mic to record from, I could record from in front of my laptop when going to lectures, or have the mics pointed at me when recording myself.
(That was a super cool laptop!)
That is me, and I account for time off during day to play with my 10 month son by spending an extra hour after dinner finishing up work.
WfH gives me the flexibility to do that. WfH also means I don't have to take an entire day off if my son has a mid-day doctors appointment. Everyone wins.
> Also the constant background noise of kids crying or some kids show playing it pretty annoying.
Your company should spend the few extra $$ on good headsets for everyone.
My company uses WebEx, which in 2020 had no background noise elimination, but now days it does it quite well.
I can be in a room with another person talking, loudly, and it won't come through on my mic. But I also have a nice Bose headset.
My wife's headset with a dedicated boom mic also works really well in this regard.
Airpods, eh, not sure how much I trust people using airpods. :)
FWIW unless I am talking, I mute myself, and all of my colleagues do the same.
OTOH, WFH people living alone can go many days without any human interaction.
There is no arrangement that is "best" for everyone.
dont threaten me with a good time
You can't really get time with your kids when you work from the office, but you can get socialization when you're not working.
Remote or in-office, that's not healthy. Go outside. Make real friendships with people you don't work with. And if you're struggling with that, then seek help. But don't force me into a car for 10 hours per week, just to help you fake a social support network.
Believe it or not, a lot of people do make friends at work. I can see why that might happen less for you.
They didn't say anything is wrong with having friends at work, only that using work as your only social avenue is unhealthy.
What's stopping you from doing the same?
Many people WFH and their kids have been stuck at home, they dont feel safe popping to the coffee shop for a few hours of work, and they dont feel safe going to social events.
Once people feel fully safe doing those things and the kids are back in school in person WFH life will elevate for so many.
Then if it turns out the coworking mates are a bunch of jerks, you can switch without wondering if you'll be able to pay rent next month.
Seems pretty cool to me.
It works when the team is used to and knows how to connect with each other online and to keep those connections going through the day/week. I'm an (highly functioning) introvert and even I hate video onboarding. I've done it twice during pandemic and it sucks big time if the team is not ready for online lifestyle/workstyle. Several months in and I still don't feel like I belong, it's just all the people busying away on their own, like in a univerity groupwork. I miss my old work when the chat was actually a place for smalltalk, instead of a place for just sharing technical knowledge or updating progress.
Feels like some companies think that remote work is exactly like onsite, just virtually. Well, it's not. Dynamics is different, workflow is different, everybody has to adapt. I genuinely want to work remote, I don't think I'll be back to office anymore, but I still need the team that knows how to actually be a team online.
I recently switched jobs, and have been to the office once (to pick up equipment and get set up) and it's a completely different dynamic. I don't really know any of my colleagues, chatting online occasionally isn't the same as meeting in person, etc. I still game a few times a week with people from my last two jobs, but I can't see the same happening for this job.
On the whole though, I do prefer it. My work relationships are probably lacking more but my quality of life is greatly improved.
So I went in and... it worked out really well. Quality of life is fantastic, productivity too. It's like we've never done it another way. For the contractors it was even an improvement, because now they were on the same level as the rest. Based on this experience, we have started to hire people from abroad and whoever wants can stay remote.
Advantages of remote:
- 100% focus as long as you have a proper working place.
- Perfect time management as you will interact at planned times and under an agenda.
- No more smells from my colleagues atrocious culinary choices.
- No more being annoyed by sales guys trying to jump the queue for their deal this quarter.
Ask anyone in hardware.
Sure, many and myself included here, setup home labs. Those really help, particularly when boards are small and or one can setup or build a test harness or other suitable device.
I currently work a mix, and onsite is needed, but not always.
My current preference is to do both, and my company just moved. We downsized office space, added a common work area, and I have a home lab and another person is building one up now.
Being sick is bot such a big deal.
We all got much better at the various comms tools too.
As for your other items:
Sales people, who are effective, will find ways. (As they should by the way. New money feeds everyone else.)
Point taken on the smells, but for me I don't care.
Perfect time management? Lolol if it works for you, great. Tons of people will struggle with this anyway.
Having a place to focus is all about the workplace. Can be at home, at work, rented... this one is not really an argument for work at home as much as it is workplace advocacy generally.
That sounds more like a company culture issue. It's surprising that there isn't a small talk channel. You should suggest one, they can be pretty valuable
My company always had offices spread around the country that worked close with one another, so going full remote was a change, but honestly not a huge change.
We have regular coffee/tea breaks every afternoon, no work talk allowed. A variety of online social events helps round things out.
Is it the same as working in an office together? Of course not. But while I have worked on some great teams that gelled really well, IMHO the majority of work teams don't have deep bonds.
What WfH really did kill was the ability to create informal connections between teams, the types of connections that help Get Things Done faster than usual. I feel that is the one true, huge, drawback of WfH.
> I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be.
You have somebody else come over to cut your cat‘s claws?
I know a number of people that don't feel comfortable doing that, or have cats where you'd need multiple people, or to wrap them, in order to clip their nails.
I definitely don't clip as short as they do at the vet, but I have a great set of clippers, and learned that what works for our cats is to keep the clippers on my desk and clip one or two nails when they come for a midday sit on my lap.
Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
Commuting is different in different places. For me it is 15 minute drive to the office from a neighboring smaller city where property prices are 5x lower.
I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.
I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.
I live in an apartment complex so the super has the keys to do whatever work needs to be done without my presence. I could take my deliveries at the office (and I often did since I saw clear improvement on delivery dates when they delivered to a business instead of residential address). Doctor visits were never an issue, because remote work was always an option and many people did work a day or two every week remotely.
If past experience is anything to go by I will get flooded with people saying that I should just do better and be better remote worker (like I probably shouldn't be writting this on company time) instead of acknowledging that different people are different and working at the office fits me and my life style better and that I've optimized for that lifestyle long before the pandemic hit. I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.
Wouldn’t that snow be just as annoying to deal with for getting to work?
And waking up early just to walk to the gym and back feels weird.
People spending time on other things could be a sign that they either don't want to can't do full 8h anyway. I can't, just can't, my mind does not work that way. I can spend 2-3 days at the lowest gear just barely ticking boxes and then get everything done in one productive day. I'd be happy and I dare say more productive for the dollar when working 6h for 20% reduced pay. I now still work 6h but stretched to 8h and I don't have guilt free extra 2h for my own stuff because I feel like I should be accomplishing something no matter my health, the weather, my emotional state or other factors going on in my life.
It's a shame that people working in, say, low paying jobs in restaurants, care work, supermarkets, cleaning or factories can't say the same.
I'm going to be honest with you, I occasionally play video games during work hours at the office too. Way I figure it, if no one is saying anything about my output then they are receiving the value they expect for what they're paying me, and I'm not charitable enough to give them more than that.
I was only able to work from home during this whole thing for 2 weeks when the entire department had COVID (myself included). I played through Factorio[0] during those two weeks and nobody noticed.
[0] I didn't like it. It's very well made and I cannot say it doesn't successfully implement exactly the experience it intends to, I just didn't actually have fun.
Also one guy doing this overtly errodes the whole team. Like why should I work all day while you play video games or go skiing or whatever in the middle of the day? Yeah nobody is complaining because they are being nice and/or assuming that your productivity has dipped do to the pandemic.
> assuming that your productivity has dipped do to the pandemic.
Why do you not assume that productivity has dipped due to the pandemic and instead believe it is because people are working remote?
as long as their tasks are done, who cares? i take a 30min nap after lunch almost every day but i could also do a FFXIV dungeon instead.
You sound like a micromanager. If you have notable metrics that show decreased output, then raise the issue and correct it. But don't say that everyone should be subject to losing privileges due to your team's poor performance.
Instead you should be an advocate for mixed teams. Why can't your remote coworker just zoom into the meeting with you onsite?
We can all be accommodating to each other.
Second it the actual logistics. It was always pain to accommedate the one or two remotees by having some kind of conference phone-thing. Over all it is just way more convenient and nicer to talk face to face. In my opinion even all online meeting is better than hybrid one.
Yeah, kinda guilty of that. Zero gym and during the winter hours where end of work = end of sun, I've had times where I take a walk. Usually more than 1 unproductive day leads to me just using a bit of the moonlight oil to catch up. Nothing super drastic, but e.g. last month there was a day where I just had a burst of productivity to ride for some 3-4 hours at 18:00.
Game wise, I'm never going full "well time to boot up the PS5", but I have been playing a lot more mobile games on the side while stuff compiles.
>I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine
Well, tech is an even hotter market than a pre-pandemic so in my industry I'm not too worried about anyone pursuing full remote. It can go vice versa for those companies that go full remote and for people who want that separation of life.
I still want some office to go into, but I do hope that this pandemic changes some attitudes about the times where I made need to take a "sick but still productive" day at home, or when I travel and need a week to just report in remotely. Flexibility is nice in a pinch and in previous companies that was a pain.
I don't get this. If you are sick then be sick. Instead of working 3-5 days in half capacity just take a rest day or two and you'll be back to 100%. As I've understood some countries have limited sick days, but that's not a thing here. I always tell my team members to take sick day if they don't feel 100% because over all it will be more productive if people work they they are healthy.
And as per pre-pandemic remote working days were always an option, just not full time since there were days like sprint start and ending days that were much smoother when everyone was present in person.
Dear god, people enjoying their life. This is the worst. Clearly society can't function unless everyone is miserable.
Have you ever considered that maybe the entire 8 hour work day is bullshit? That it is entirely possible for people to contribute productively within different time-frames?
>I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.
What does this have to do with working from home? What could remote work possibly have to do with your inability to stick to a gym routine?
>I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.
You won't "lose some people". Unless your company has the pay and clout that Google has, your company will be decimated by a wave of people quitting.
Have you considered some reading comprehension? Read the first sentence you quoted again and stop pushing your own opinion and gospel.
>What does this have to do with working from home? What could remote work possibly have to do with your inability to stick to a gym routine?
This too is super disingenious line of questioning. How aobut not being able to go to anywhere else? Feels pretty weird just to drive to the gym and back.
>You won't "lose some people". Unless your company has the pay and clout that Google has, your company will be decimated by a wave of people quitting.
ROFL
That has nothing to do with working from home though, it has to do with the pandemic. I go places during my lunchbreak in work from home now that there are vaccines and things are open again - it's so convenient, if I need to duck to the store or the chemist or I want to pick up food from a local cafe.
We as humans are not designed to be productive selves 5 days in a row, for 8 hours a day. If I'm not feeling well or having a bad day, I might finish working an hour or two early but make up for it by working overtime another day that week. It doesn't matter that I cut that day short - I wasn't going to be very productive if I wasn't feeling well anyway.
The 9-5, 8 hour work day was designed for PHYSICAL labor during the industrial revolution where output was directly correlated to time. This is not the case anymore. If someone can meet/exceed their responsibilities in 5 hours, why do they need to spend 8 hours just because slower workers need that time? This just punishes efficient workers.
That is no issue. In fact in my company we don't care how long you work per day or when you work. People tell us how many hours they can work per month and they get paid accordingly. Of course the union sets some minimum and maximum numbers we can do, but in essense it is normal to work flexible hours. Even to just take days off and do either longer days or work on a weekend/holiday if that's what you want. Or work hours "into bank" before hand and then take days/hours off. No problem with that.
My problem is guys literally working 9-5, expect "lunch break" takes 2-3 hours since they are playing a video game.
>If someone can meet/exceed their responsibilities in 5 hours, why do they need to spend 8 hours just because slower workers need that time? This just punishes efficient workers.
Except people will always find excuses why it wasn't their fault the feature/release/product didn't ship in time.
You missed the entire point of my comment. If they take 2-3 hour lunch breaks and meet/exceed their company and performance goals, then it shouldn't matter how long they are working. Results matter, not time.
I've seen people playing ping pong during work hours in the office. They even have tournaments sometimes.
The horror.
My team used to play street fighter or super smash bros during lunch.
However, a decrease in output is a separate issue that needs to be addressed by the employee's manager/leader.
> I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.
My company's office is close to only a couple worthwhile restaurants (WTF Downtown Seattle, if you aren't next to cap hill you are boned). While at home, I have multiple good options within walking distance to me.
Check if you are within shef.com's service area. Home made meals from local cooks. Great stuff.
> I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms.
Once they reopen, WfH means the time saved on commuting can be turned into gym time!
Prior to WfH I had to bring workout clothes and a towel with me if I wanted to hit the gym before lunch. Because my commute was on a bus, that was crammed full standing room only shoulder to shoulder, adding a gym bag in the mix was no fun.
Just so you know, this is not legal. I hate it.
Your blanket statement is wrong. If you’d said “likely not legal”, you’d be correct. Someone could very well get work visas and have their employer approve the travel and accept the likely required nexus in said country.
My question is: how did people not realize this before the pandemic?
The workers of Silicon Valley (and other urban centres) literally created and sustained this problem all by themselves: "You have to get to Silicon Valley!"
I'm in Uruguay, South America, so the pandemic has been an incredible boon to me. I even got a remote team management position !
I went mobile over a decade ago. Had some work travel to do, and it made so much sense I basically reorganized, ditched a desk phone (literally put it into a drawer, left VM announcements that I do not do VM, and have not had one since), setup a nice backpack with the goodies and never went back.
Through that time, I setup a home lab and just did more and more there, until about the only thing that matters is where stuff to work on actually is and whether I can move it.
I can still work from home when I have errands to run or medical appointments, but I much prefer being in the office.
Yes, I like working remotely most of the time. But I like living close enough to the office that if needed, I can go slap someone upside the head on a whim.
Even those are easily matched in quality with zoom/slack and draw on screen features.
Pretty obvious from the rest of your comment.
Some things:
- make sure your laptop setup is documented (install x, y, z: setup like this) - document where all resources are, confluence, repos, dashboards, everything and how to access - setup virtual meetings with peers, in team and across company - one place suggested you reach out to 5 random people for a 10 minute chat - you could reach out to the lowest or highest person and the people being reached out to expected that random people would do it and it was fine - this really helped - setup virtual calls with managers, their managers, their managers - just ten minutes to introduce yourself to each other
I’ve had better remote onboarding that starting onsite and twiddling my thumbs for over a week not knowing anyone or doing anything - I’ve suggested I leave places if there isn’t anything for me to do or any way for me to work before.
We need to have better productivity tools. No one has leveraged text to speech well in work communication, but somehow YouTube and TikTok can transcribe any video via AI... No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection... I'm not saying any of that could or should happen first, but nothing has really changed about workspaces, yet leadership is still expecting new results without further lockdown to make them feel better about paying ridiculous fees for their massively uninhabited work campuses.
The Pandemic created a situation in which very very basic (and in many cases dated) tech was foisted upon us for over 2 years as "new innovation", but it's simply not. The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 is the absolute scammiest most overly-abstract pyramid scheme ever foisted on our grandparents since Amway as well...
We are simply not innovating any more and there is a major ruse over that fact pulled by the entire IT industry) driven of course by the constant need to drive investment hype... And we're putting everything behind paywalls now so much that most of it is becoming pure clickbait, even on well known news sites.
We're praising people for marginally recycling old ideas now more than ever. We're also all paying way too much for the underwhelming mediocrity of it all. Take a look at how every year most of the latest tech advancement going on with mobile and other software-driven devices is the ability for major corps to better track and harvest data on everyone. Data mining, subscription services, and embedded advertisements are nowhere near as profitable as true innovation, but somehow most companies are even stuck on even rehashing those old ideas and calling them "winning".
If we could just fix all that s*it and get back to true innovation and listening to, funding, and hiring people that truly deliver real innovative results, the working world would be better in remote work mode, and it would connect us all better as if we were in an office with less risks and without another lockdown to no sort of accountability from decision makers again.
It's too easy to make such statements without measuring anything. Are issues really resolved quicker, or they /feel/ like that? Is overall productivity higher? Let's measure that?
Isn't this the main problem? I hate everyone who comes barging in and wants to "resolve issues" quickly. Not saying I love remote work, but I cannot stand working a place where people are "allowed" to disturb me. I don't even log into Slack/Teams/Skype or any of that nonsense; I don't even want to be disturbed in my virtual wold.
Onsite is ideal for management; endless meetings about progress/status, we can all "align". Issues can be resolved quickly. But for those who need to concentrate for long periods at a time; this is hell. And during the pandemic, many people got used to not being interrupted all the time, and I don't think any of them want to go back to that hellhole.
Yes that is a problem with my current team, but I can't really do anything about it. Working from an office would mostly sidestep it.
I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.
I would 100% do all my coding from home though, unless work returned to the “good old days” of offices with full walls and doors that closed.
Imagine Scotty beaming the team down for a meeting and all of them are in their pajamas, unshaved and groggy, some still holding their cereal bowls.
TBF, that's not a problem with remote work. If the only way people will respond to a valid inquiry is through in person harassment there are much bigger issues at your employer.
depends on office space and potential home accommodations. Like, if you have a dedicated 8m^2 office room in your house, it still may not be worth teleporting into an open space office. But if everyone can get a small private room to some more open floor structure for collaboration, it sounds like the perfect solution.
You sure your priorities are of so much more significance than what the person is working on that they justify destroying the concentration of intellectual property creation and forcing a preemption of this other person’s task or reorder of their stack?
If you’re blocked for lack of a task switch, what are you blocking in turn by causing a new interrupt and switch?
Instead of crashing the thread they’re on, why not go to the scheduler and reorder the queue or better re-weight the threading so priorities are worked more optimally?
If in attempting that, you find you run into contention, it could be the most effective overall output is if your task is the one in an occasional wait state.
Being a productive member of a team is about finding balance between what you're personally trying to get done and helping your teammates accomplish their tasks. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.
Your formulation of local vs global optimization of priorities is exactly the correct way to view this problem. My priorities and my colleague's priorities are approximately the same priorities, assuming we're on the same team or on adjacent teams. We are both shipping the same product and serving the same users at the end of the day.
That's why, like everything else in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle - interrupting someone 10 times a day for trivial stuff you can look up yourself by reading code or documentation is a waste of the other person's time. But wasting four hours running around looking for an answer to a question that your teammate can answer in two minutes is also a waste of time. The end user is not well served by either behavior.
My rule of thumb is 30 minutes. If I can't find an answer in 30 minutes, and I think a teammate knows the answer and can answer immediately, I will ping them or come to their desk.
Obviously you have to read the room. If the teammate you want to bug looks deeply concentrated in what they're doing, they're in the middle of typing, or you ask and they say "sorry I'm in the middle of something, come back in an hour", I'll leave them alone and probably take a break or something. But if they're just back from a coffee break or a meeting, or finished up a discussion with someone else at their desk, there's just no reason to keep banging your head against your desk.
And of course I hold myself to the same standard. Being dismissive to someone who needs your attention is immature. I always assume good intent, and if someone bothers me too often, I just tell them; for some people I will ask they show me what they've already tried. I find this almost always works.
Me more important then you right?
Not saying people shouldn't want to be productive just that understanding delays and simply pyschologically dealing with them would go a long way in modern culture. Not everything needs to happen 5 minutes ago, is late, or is so critical it can't wait a few hours.
being blocked on a task due to missing knowledge isn't really "efficient". Especially when someone can point you to the right place in the span of a single slack message line instead of spending hours wandering through legacy code and still missing the full scope of the change I want to make.
Sure, if it's a one-off bug fix task someone internal discovered, it can wait a day. But these kinds of issues when highlihgted are never because "it happened once" One is coincidence, twice is happenstance. thrice is probably a habit and you learn that certain people aren't a reliable resource in terms of, well, co-working.
This is how you make "progress", by disturbing people who are working?
It's probably for the best that we work different places :-)
I suggest you try to figure it out for yourself first. I can't count the number if times I sent a message, "hey, bla bla," then 5 minutes later I return "never mind." If you can't figure it out, have some respect for the other person's work and time and send an email or message. They will most likely get back to you by the end of the day if not sooner.
I used to commute 1 hour every single day to an office building downtown, and my nearest colleague was in another office some 200km away in an entirely different city. Half of the team isn't even in the same time zone as I. Sure I did have other people hired by the same company sitting at desks around me, but we worked with entirely different projects so we never interacted beyond the daily "Morning!" and "Aight I'mma leave, see y'all tomorrow!"
Even my manager was located in the other office some 200km away, so I had no one to report to (be observed by!). My work was and is entirely measured by my contribution to the team, and not by where I happen to be located.
Remote working isn't a new thing that has never been tested before. It's just that you do remote working from home instead of from an office.
What is really hard, is being a remote newcomer to an otherwise mostly on-site company.
"We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it."
No, that's not about it. We've also proven they're able to have record profits. Whether they would have even higher profits if it was fully office, it's another story, but saying all that is proven is that they won't crash is false and just shows you're emotionally invested in having people back in the office because you want them to.
1) I can start work 2 hours before i normally do. I can skip all the "getting up from bed and get ready". I literally work until noon in my underwear. Then i usually go for a 30min run and get a shower and lunch. I also save 2 hours per day commuting. I save a shitton of money on expensive lunches too.
2) The "can you check this, or could i have a list of that" annoyances have all but vanished. People (usually manager kinds) have actually had to dig up their own stuff and do some work themselves.
3) As i work MORE effective hours from home i sometimes take fridays off and just do my thing. I'm always way ahead of schedule.
I firmly believe the "in office nine-to-five" kind of work is in the past. It's a legacy way of working and it has proven to be very unproductive compared to remote work.
(PS. As most of you guys i'm in the software industry, so i cant speak of other fields of work. My points are purely my own discoveries and strictly related to software development)
Just don't be surprised when your colleagues leave for more flexible companies that don't feel the need to control their employees like they're in kindergarden
Within the first six months, I realized there is no single answer that works for everyone. It really depends on the ability to institute async communication, self-regulate and whole lot of other factors IMHO.
Aside from all the other advantages of WfH that have already been mentioned in this thread (like no commute, healthier eating, more fresh air and exercise, better work/life balance etc), I really don't think this description of office-life fits my recollection of reality, at all.
In the office it was much more often that wanting to discuss something in person with a couple of colleagues would involve:
1. locating colleague 1
2. going in search of colleague 2 who isn't at their desk
3. disturbing people in the open-office environment asking where colleague 2 is
4. deciding to check again later
5. noticing that colleague 2 is back at their desk
6. looking around and seeing that colleague 1 is not at their desk
7. going over to colleague 2 and asking if they have 5 minutes
8. colleague 2 is deploying, and will be done in 15 minutes
9. ask around and discover that colleague 1 has gone to early lunch
repeat again after lunch
Now with WfH:
1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2
2. problem solved after 5 minutes
Even better imho, anytime working together with more than 1 person you don't have to awkwardly huddle around the single 22" screen on your desk squinting at the code. Everyone has the shared screen in full view and can even draw on the screen (yay, no more finger smudge marks) to point at what they mean.
OMG, I've been remote so long I had forgotten about this that literally drove me nuts.
1. Ask in Slack/chat if colleague 1 and 2 are avail
2. Colleague 1 is avail, colleague 2 no answer
3. Start call with C1, share the screen... something crash or C1 has network issues
4. C2 is still MIA
5. C2 joins, we work together for 5 minutes, than C1 doorbell rings, they have to leave
6. C1 is back, we work for 10 minutes but now C2 has to go to a meeting
7. you get it..
So, every rose has its thorns...
What if many of them switch to companies that allow fully remote working? Google will lose out on a lot of talent and will eventually suffer in the quality of its products.
I personally believe there's no difference in the volume of work produced by people working remotely, providing they don't have small children at home. All these drawbacks are made-up by managers fearing to lose their jobs if workers keep working remotely.
And that's what is wrong about being in office, especially as a software developer I hate having my focus interrupted because someone can't send an email
You stated your preferences. There are many (probably most in programming roles) who don't, so they'll go elsewhere.
Have you only ever worked for companies small enough to be co-located in a single office? This wasn't true at big corps even when we were all in the office.
Hey, the team that owns this is in Boston, 3 time zones from the West Cost. Oh, wait, that piece of software was transferred to the Zurich team, 9 time zones away, so they'll respond tomorrow at the earliest because there's no workday overlap. Bob might know about it, though, he's on the other side of campus - you can get there in 30 minutes on the campus shuttle.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote suddenly and unexpectedly, without specific preparations, planning or training for that scenario, with employees in an especially stressing and taxing situation (pandemic uncertainty, childcare issues that wouldn't exist outside of a pandemic, with some people needing to work and care for children at the same time) and still be productive.
I'd say that's a rather strong result for remote work. Not proof that it's universally "better", because obviously things are complicated and the answer is always "it depends", but at least I'd take it as proof that it should probably be taken as the (or a) default option rather than an exotic alternative.
Obviously it’d be ridiculous to say it helped our business grow outright, but it’s clearly not a hindrance and 6mo in there’s been no discussion of ending it. Hell our CEO has discussed canceling Friday entirely.
People eating at their desks - we have a kitchen.
People having meetings and "quick chats" around their desk - we have many, many, meeting rooms.
People with other annoying habits (which I almost certainly have too) that make me sound OCD but... sniffing, throat clearing, drowning themselves in aftershave or perfume and so on.
Same awful 60min+ commute on a train.
Versus my home office with just me, quiet background music, and exactly zero distractions.
I'm glad all the multi-million salaried bosses that live a few minutes walk and have their own private offices want every one back...
This comment right here made me angry and for reasons totally different from the discussion. Its about people who thinks they they are entitled to interrupt my workflow to solve their issues.
I am infinitely more productive when it comes to coding working from home. The constant office interruptions made it impossible to concentrate for any length of time.
On the other hand, any in person meeting felt equally more productive than the zoom ones. Same goes for discussing issues, explaining them out loud to other people etc. without having to set a meeting.
So, for me, the _preparation_ for work is best done in an on site environment, the actual work I do better from home (where I actually also have the much better setup and equipment than at the office)
The open office is the absolute worst possible environment for being productive. I could probably be more productive in the middle of a highway.
:P
I found that actually opposite was true in my case. Less distractions ,less interruptions and we cleared A LOT of our backlog. It turns out a lot of those "urgent taps" turned to be not so urgent, or other person being just lazy(it was faster to walk 1min than to do a 5min read on our internal docs, or just google it)
That's bonkers. When people message you on slack you can prioritize and respond without breaking pace and train of productive thought. In person, if someome is talking to you and I also prefer to chat up, I will delay the conversation indefinetly or book a time wasting meeting that clutters your schedule. If you need someone else to comment and they're on a meeting you might schedule another meeting instead of asking them questions they can answer while listening in on the current meeting.
I could put in a good effort to be lazy and unproductive at home and I would still be more productive overall than in the office. I disliked wfh after covid for a while because I was so busy all the time. No more chatting with extroverts and walking to/from meeting rooms half of the work day (at best!) and I use to leave my pc off or at the office before, now I constantly work before and after shifts, on weekends,etc...
It makes me feel like my job is at risk because I don't have enough time to show desired output/kpi at the office. At least now I overwork and have better assurances of stability. They pay me well enough to where I don't worry about taken advantage of.
This productivity fetishisation is so weird
However, it is important to adapt your company to a remote working culture. You can't simply replace your physical meetings with Zoom meetings. In order to ensure a good team spirit, it is also important to organise regular meet ups between all your remote staff at least once a quarter.
And regarding your approach to "quickly" resolve things, I shall refrain from repeating the words that software engineers use for people like you. You are assuming that your issue is the highest priority issue that needs to be resolved immediately. This can be highly disruptive for Software Engineers, especially when multiple business stakeholders tend to do the same.
I think the situation has proven quite a bit more than "the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn". Can't say the degree to which it has impacted business without studying it. It could have been great, not great, or a drag but to say "crash and burn" or nothing seems a bit touched.
And maybe I'm just crazy but it seems like software even from the big companies has gotten worse through the pandemic. Which wouldn't surprise me that it's hard to keep everyone working together and on the same page through online calls and chats. I personally feel like I'm not quite as engaged being at home, surrounded by distractions compared to being in an office where my brain goes into work mode.
I find the idea that all your regular human interaction comes from people you work with infinitely more dreadful.
I did this, but now its just slipped into actually just checking slack at 10am then going back to sleep till 11:30.
Have you considered bars?
My own opinion is let the people decide what to do. Once a week, everyday, once a month, only when needed... Let people and teams decide.
I suspect this is the real reason for a push to return to the office.
If you expect that literally every business going forward is going to be happy with WFH then you're taking an unreasonable stance. The same is true in the opposite direction - as much as I'd like it to be the case, not everyone is going back to the office, structural changes have taken place that would make that difficult even if it were desired.
It follows then that some people will have to switch companies. This really isn't a big deal, the entire point of having a job market is that people should be continuously doing this otherwise the market isn't efficient.
You can see it in the rhetoric here - "forced to go in". There is no force involved.
Okay, we have two years of data. PROVE to me that you need to spend $Xm per year on office space for this company to work. Prove to me that you have to pay top of market SV salaries
I think the time is now to reframe what needs to be proven...its a business not a social experiment. Coming in costs more money, prove to me its money worth spending on a case by case basis. If you don't run a handson manufacturing line what evidence supports paying for a building where everyone has a space? We've already ditched offices for cubicles and cubicles for open plan offices just to save space (i.e., cost). At this point the burden of proof isn't on 'work from home is okay' just from a financial perspective.
But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own. I have had coworkers literally disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time, constantly miss deadlines etc - and as a manager, that is very hard to manage underperformers with a remote work force.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
Let's hope they don't ruin it for the rest of us.
How is this not an immediately fireable offense? At least at the point of reestablishing contact where a doctor’s note or equivalent excuse can’t be furnished…
Doesn't sound like the kind of person you should put all that much effort in for.
If you build an org like this, the inevitable outcome is all the top performers leave (as they're tired of covering for low performers) and eventually nothing gets done at all.
As a manager why cant you call out this behaviour when you see people slacking off?
I don't subscribe to the idea that you have to be at your desk to get work done, and I do my own best work usually hiding away somewhere quiet. However, with the middle- to low-performers, I admit it's disquieting to suspect that some people are working only an hour a day, but I have no way to confirm.
But regardless, I disagree with your premise. Software engineering, as a profession, is based largely on trust. This isn't a factory where you have to solder a set number of devices to meet your target numbers. This isn't an animation studio where you have to animate a certain number of director-approved frames ("footage") a week in order to meet your performance expectations.
In our field, the engineer largely decides on their own how much time a task should take, and the manager hopefully trusts their estimate. The *assumption* (and it's not spelled out in your employment contract because we're supposed to be professionals) is that a day of effort means a "full day" of 7-9 hours (or whatever, the precise number isn't the point).
So if I, as a manager, ask you, the developer, how long this feature will take to build out, and you tell me "5 days", well I think it's fair for me to expect you meant 5 "full" days. And because I trust you, I'm not going to look over your shoulder or try to pre-solve the problem you're working on -- I will ideally just trust that it takes you 5 days. And because I think highly of you, I will trust that the work takes a dedicated and fast-working developer 5 days to finish, and that's that.
If I find out that all along, you really were working only an hour a day, then I think it's fair for me to say: "What the actual fuck, you tell me these tasks require a week of effort but they really could have been done in one day, and the project could have been moving 5x faster than it has been."
But... the other option, I suppose, is for managers to decide by themselves how long each feature and bugfix should take, and not ask the developers or take their feedback, and then the manager can evaluate the developers' performance based on that. As a manager, I'll look at a task and say "I want this done in 1 day" and when you tell me "That's not possible, it will take at least a week" I'll just say "Too bad -- get to work". We don't want that.... do we?
Wait you don't have KPIs?
A tiny minority might be doing that but I dont think the vast majority work only 1 hour a day.
Are also saying that you can figure out an employee is working only 1 hour a day when you are in the office?
And no, I can't tell if someone is "actually working" just by being in the office. I have no interest in standing behind them at their desk all day.
On the other hand, I had one case where someone on my team had like zero committed code in weeks, and was WFH'ing several days a week (pre-pandemic) as an arrangement he'd made with his previous manager. When we had "the talk" about his low performance, one of the things I asked him was to stop with the WFH except for emergencies. That did, in fact, help keep him more accountable for his time, and being physically present helped him interact with the rest of the team and spend time whiteboarding, etc. And performance overall improved.
Is there a lesson there to generalize? Maybe, not sure. It's all very context- and individual- dependent.
Not that I did that.
I think peer pressure, visibility, and lack of non-work distractions are probably the bigger thing, though. Not just in terms of playing video games instead of working but you don't have the option to get up and do the dishes, or take breaks as frequently to read, or any number of other things that are less "slacker" and more "ADD brain".
"Being managed" could also be called "outsourcing executive function"--make your manager think about what you're supposed to be doing.
Reserve that executive function for what you love, your escape plan, or whatever.
Just do a decent job while preserving as much of your mental energy as you can for your family and your actual life
I dunno. On some grander level, I know companies mostly just see us as numbers, but (and perhaps I've been lucky) most of the managers I've had have been basically nice folks, some have even given good career development device (some of which seemed much more beneficial to me than the company).
And I bet those nice folks did a good job of taking executive function burden off your back :-)
I might have misread your emphasis on being managed by others, but it’s not what I meant.
Maybe it was general mental health, partly. I live alone, so getting out of the house daily and seeing other people is good for me. I had office friends who it’s hard to keep in touch with.
Structure was another part. I had to get dressed and leave the house at a certain hour, then I had to get my stuff done by 5, when I came back home.
And general peer pressure. I had an open office desk, and I hated that, but in hindsight, it did help me stay on task. Which is kind of hilarious, because the open office floor plan was so distracting that I was terribly inefficient at my desk, so I hid away in corners most of the time to get real work done.
There were tons of negatives to being in the office (god I hate the open office floor plans), but for whatever reasons, I was more productive before the pandemic than I have been during.
Here's an example from my life:
I'm having a terrible time getting myself to the gym. Two options come to mind to fix this:
1) Use discipline (very hard) and shift my mindset so that going to the gym is not optional (also hard).
2) Apply a structure to my day to where I leave the house by default (not that hard) and have to go to the gym before going home (not nearly as hard as going out of my house specifically to work out).
Otherwise a majority of people wouldn't become obese in developed countries, many people wouldn't be single, etc.
A lot of remote work people are very preachy. It's not helping your cause. You're dealing with imperfect people, that's just fact. Adapt to that.
+1 to the preachiness. You have done zero to help me or anyone else with your comment, GP. But it probably made you feel good to sneer at me.
I hope you get to work 100% remote for the rest of your career though.
edit: for those interested in the empirical science available around discipline, willpower, executive function, I point you to Dr. Huberman who has an INCREDIBLE podcast about these subjects: https://youtu.be/vA50EK70whE
We have, a limited amount, of executive function capacity.
People who are "disciplined" actually don't have any more.
They have good personal habits which automates all the executive function stuff.
Some people just have personalities better suited to this or had a more structured upbringing.
It's one of the hardest problems in a person's life, sustaining good habits over very long periods of time.
It goes above normalcy, it's extraordinary, proven by the fact that most people can't do it.
It goes above normalcy, it's extraordinary, proven by the fact that most people can't do it. - You have to live through each and every second of your life, if you don't set yourself up for success, you'll only have a harder time developing good habits. Life is 100% about developing coping mechanisms. I walk on a treadmill for daily standup, I'm out the office/desk at 4pm and spend time with family/the dog/ a good book. The book thing is key because I've found it levels out my mental state and makes it less erratic.
> which is why you try to tackle the problem every day
Yes, every day I tackle some of my problems. Many days the effort I spend on a problem is to think about how I can develop habits using less executive function.
Today I plan to check out the gym around the corner, because it's closer than the one I've been going to downtown. So close that I could walk there in <5 minutes. This will be easier than any of a 25 minute walk, a 10 minute bike ride (on streets that people drive recklessly on), or a 5 minute drive (that has a lot of friction, especially parking).
None of these are excuses for not going to the gym, but rather than forcing myself through a high friction process, I'm spending those "discipline points" creatively acting to reduce the friction (while managing the rest of my life).
I'll just add one more anecdote to this. I'm also far less healthy during forced-remote COVID time. Try as I might, I just can't get myself to be active and eat healthier.
In the office, I biked to and from work which started me off well, and the structure of the day kept me more on top of everything too. During WFH, I don't exercise - I should, but I just can't make the habit stick. I sleep in cause it's easy - I shouldn't, but I can't seem to stop myself. Making and keeping friendships is harder than it used to be, giving me less reason to go out too. Everything spirals from there. Doing things has become hard.
I've tried habit-forming tricks to try to make it work. I've tried different routines to see if one sticks better than others: different times of the day, different exercises, different types of breaks. I've gone to a psychiatrist and therapist to help improve that "even little things are hard" feeling. I've tried medications like anti-depressants, which I never needed before. Ultimately nothing has worked, and I've spent almost 2 years now at a personal low for mental and physical well-being.
I very much wish I could be like the other people who thrive working remotely. But it's just incompatible with me on a level I can't really explain, and seems silly from the outside. If the tech industry goes full remote, I'll probably consider a career switch, because this isn't sustainable for me. And to be clear, there's only an issue when remote work is involved: I've spent time unintentionally unemployed, and was very happy and healthy. It's really working remotely in particular that does me in. Working in general is hard and stressful, and I need the positives of working in person to counteract that enough that I'm still happy and healthy.
I'm very happy for the people who've found happiness in remote work, and am happy many more people who want it will have that option going forward. But it really isn't for me, as much as I'd like it to be.
I've somewhat recently started socializing with folks outside of work. That's helped as it gets me away from my computer for a while. I can only do a few hours at a time and at most twice a week before I get stressed out, but it's something.
TBH my biggest issue with working in an office was the commute. If I could get to work in a reasonable amount of time (10 minutes, no more) then I would be pretty happy to work in an office again. I'd put up with the interruptions at my desk, kitchen stink, and more interruptions if it meant I could have lunch with my peers and leave my work at work.
Unfortunately, a reasonable commute isn't in the cards for me. I could get there if I switched careers, which I might do when I retire from this one.
I had people that were rockstars in the office that just didnt do work at home.
Maybe its the removal of distractions (no TV, I may walk by, etc). But even for things that were totally fine remote (ie: Ticket Queues) i noticed very quickly if my status showed "in" they were on it. If my status for any reason showed away, tickets would straight up get ignored. Mentioning this would enact change for a day or two, but ultimately it would return back to status quo. What did happen is that those that were self motivated were quicker/starting to burn out. I had to get with them and intervene and encourage them to take time off, encourage them to let the queue go for their teammates to pick it up etc.
I had other colleagues asking my ops teams to check in on their direct reports and I often had to have meetings telling them thats not a IT/Tech issue and they need to deal with it, just like I am having to..
Frankly i had a mouse shaker on a side box not for MY Managers, but for my direct reports...
As we transitioned back to the office a lot of these issues mostly disappeared. EXCEPT for those with weak/timid managers. A lot of those guys are still slacking, but they were slacking before and the manager just didnt want to handle it.
But my teams....most of them are mostly back to normal. We all have burnout to deal with, myself included and I have had to manage to balance pushing them and encouraging them to do things that dont cause burnout, front structuring your workday, to taking mental health days etc. But ultimately the return to the office was a relief for me, and a lot of that just went away.
I personally think its the removal of distractions coupled with the "threat" of someone walking up that doesnt exist at home. And its worth saying, I'm not one of those old school butts in chairs kinda guy. In fact im pretty laid back, and have been told so by peers and reports alike, and in many cases I have been asked how I am able to be so laid back and still have productivity like I do, but covid made it harder.
And thats beyond the fact that I have colleagues in other divisions that i KNOW are using their WFH days to be out fishing, playing golf, hiking whatever. Personally for me thats an ethics issue, i take days off for that. But I work in a small sector, im not going to tattle tail on someone i may cross paths with down the line, karma will catch them anyhow.
Please also keep in mind that we didn't just shift from in-person to remote work. Among other things, many parents completely lost child care in March 2020. It was slow to return. Where I live, it wasn't until August 2021 that the public schools were back to (almost) normal from a child care perspective: students there for the full school day every day, and at-school after care programs available. Speaking from personal experience, 2020 was horrible for my productivity, and I noped out of the workforce in early 2021 and am finally looking for a job now. I don't feel it was due to the shift to remote work.
I think it's true that some people will "try to get away with absolutely everything they can", but I'm not sure about "an awful lot of people". There are other reasons that productivity and availability tanked.
edit: and let's imagine that I didn't have the finances to quit despite other demands preventing me from putting in a full workday (and me not feeling up to one anyway). I probably would have kept plugging along, sort of working, as best as I could. We could debate the morality of that, and maybe remote work makes it more possible to get away with that, but I wouldn't say remote work is the underlying reason people aren't putting in a full day's work. Maybe for many, "get away absolutely everything they can" should read "get away with absolutely everything they have to" or "do only what they can".
There's a reason it's protected. You can't just expect business as usual when the entire support chain of society falls over. Everyone and everything has to adapt - people, businesses, etc.
Agreed.
> and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.
Depends on who you mean by "others". When I was working and struggling, I was grateful to Google, my coworkers, and my managers for their patience with me at work. I was also angry with our society: voters and politicians who prioritized reopening @#!$@#ing bars over schools, even though my understanding was science was saying (still is saying, AFAIK) spread through the schools is relatively little and the difference to kids' learning is huge. And on parents, which is important but not as important as the impact on kids.
Our society as a whole doesn't care about young families, and it's never been so clear. There is someone to blame.
btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
> btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
Yes, if you can objectively prove that a parent isn't working then they wouldn't be protected. This is very obvious and easily quantifiable in an in-office environment, but with remote knowledge work it's much harder to prove—especially since the result would look like you're suddenly targeting parents for "not working hard enough." Most companies are risk-averse and simply prefer to tolerate underperformance.
I don't know what to make of the teachers' unions. My personal experience with individual teachers is that they work plenty, and what I saw during remote school was no exception. (Being a kindergarten teacher over Zoom is hard!) And I never heard a particular teacher in my area advocate for closed or remote schools.
But school administrators blamed the teachers' unions a fair bit for being slow to reopen. In general I suspect school administrators were looking to blame someone else for their own leadership failings, but there still might be some truth in it. I could see how the unions might have adopted the position of the most risk-adverse (and/or laziest) of the teachers.
Yes, there are definitely some individual teachers who care about student learning and work hard to go back to in-person.
Unfortunately, the unions adopt the most risk-averse/lazy possible regarding remote learning. Even in 2022 there are unions pushing hard for effectively indefinite remote learning.[0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/us/teachers-unions-covid-...
There is nothing about teachers unions priorities that align in anyway with students & parents priorities.
We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.
Citation needed. There's a ton of evidence that learning has dropped dramatically with remote school. Especially for elementary students, I suspect it is near-zero.
> We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Whether teachers like it or not, a significant part of their job is childcare. Society would not fund schools at anywhere near their current rate if they didn't also provide childcare.
Schools owe students an education. As you can see from this thread, it's controversial whether adults in tech can work productively remotely. Elementary school kids by and large don't learn well remotely. Unless that changes, it's a moot point whether childcare is just a bonus or something that is owed.
As for the "pandemic" part: I agreed with the closures of schools, preschools, and day cares at the very beginning of the pandemic. It seemed reasonable at first to believe kids spread COVID-19 as much as they seem to spread colds and flus. But it was't long before there was evidence that spread through schools is modest [1], especially with reasonable precautions (e.g. masks). And it was painfully obvious education was suffering. Schools should have reopened a full year sooner than they actually did in my area (and many other areas are worse). Society has a risk budget, and this should have been the priority for spending it, not bars or travel or indulging mask/vaccine denial.
[1] I remember a fair bit of this in the news; a quick search found https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/7/618 from June 2020. I believe it's been consistent since, e.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103420118 from October 2021.
Almost every societal group suffered in one way or another, from school kids, single adults, the elder, small business owners and the list goes on.
There wasn't anything specifically targeted at young families. These last years sucked hard for a lot of people.
Same experience here.
Of course, management shares some of the blame. People will push the boundaries of remote and flex time until someone tells them they’ve gone too far. If nobody in management is doing anything about the abuse, or if someone is openly breaking the rules without any consequences, the bad behavior will only get worse.
The bigger point being that childcare expectations were thoroughly disrupted and folk were thrust into it, rather than planning. Coupled with the "will they won't they" come back to work dates, it's made it not super incentivizing for those of us who could afford to figure out better long term options chose not to. Ex. If you knew it was going to be two years before you were expected back in office, moving closer to family might have made sense. Or setting up a home office. Or any number of things to better our home productivity.
Are you saying that it's "dishonest" to estimate that at least 1% of them are grandparents involved in childcare? By napkin math this more than works out; I'll also hint that if you spend even a minute researching, the stats on how many of these people are likely to be grandparents, and how many grandparents are child carers, are readily findable. If you care to engage in an honest discussion.
It's not that they're trying to "get away with absolutely anything". It's that their survival incentive is not to get fired, and they've been operating in that mode for years if not decades. The less you do, the less likely you are to inadvertently piss someone off and lose your job. Overperformers get fired faster than underperformers, who can usually kick around in the system for years.
Take a risk and win, and your boss makes more money. Take a risk and lose, and your income drops by 100%. The incentive structure rewards doing as little as possible, and that's not even necessarily a bad thing, because there are organizational situations in which it's better for people to be underutilized than overtaxed and therefore unpredictable.
Capitalism is an abusive system, but there's no escape because the legal system is on the abuser's side. How do you survive an abuser, if you can't get away? You become meek, reactive, and passive.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
They weren't getting much done in the office, either. In fact, in the office regime, the problem employees were interfering with other people's productivity. In the WFH world, they do less damage.
Maybe they're in a blind spot for you, but I guarantee you they exist, and they're probably the majority.
The environment that you work in has an effect on how well you can do the work.
My suspicion is those people probably don't do anything while at the office either but they are good at making themselves very visible and appearing to be productive when in an office situation.
Often they'll just shunt them into low prestige tasks, and hope they'll get the hint and leave on their own.
I have feeling that in 5 years companies will mostly revert back to only hiring new employees on site but grandfather in previously remote employees who have proven to be able to handle it. In 10 years, it will be almost entirely back to how it was before the pandemic. Not saying this to be a contrarian, and I think there will always be a place for fully remote teams/companies or exceptions in large companies (just as there was in the before times). But it’s really hard to see someone be unproductive or not work much and not attribute that to them being remote - and being remote will be even more likely to be blamed when a large portion of employees aren’t remote already.
As much as life is cyclic, in 10yrs time we AR/VR will be worked out and there will be even less reason to be in a physical space with someone.
Same, I've been remote for 10 years with another decade+ on-site prior to that as a SE.
I have no issues with remote work. When I need people I can easily schedule calls, send them an instant message, email them, etc.
Every single thing I do is timestamped and logged in a database somewhere at some point. If anyone wants to know what I was working on at 2:13 in the afternoon they can query for it. Reports can be run on what issues I've resolved, what code I've checked in against them, who I was on a meeting with, when I connected to remote machines, what time I started/ended at, etc. at any given time.
I have not noticed any productivity declines, but have noticed huge QoL improvements.
In my experience, a majority of the workforce requires some degree of regular supervision or things will go off the rails quickly. Hell, I am full-time remote (pre-covid) and I don't think I should be left alone on something for more than 2 weeks.
I applaud all shirkers, they are the winners in your story.
It happens if your company, originally on site, suddenly become remote. Nobody knows how to do remote works.
My manager is one of them. I am slacking because there is literally no tasks (no tasks given from him). Also same when in the office, but he has a habit of initiating small talk and assign / proceed tasks there, which isn't possible in remote world.
Changing at how you work remote is crucial at maintaining productivity.
Are you sure they were doing more work while in office?
If you look at OSS maintainers, a lot of times their written communication is excellent, and they obviously manage their time really well. These are people who by the very nature of what they maintain are distributed.
A lot of OSS software is also of excellent quality, because they don't have the luxury of being able to be in an offer, fire people, etc...
I would argue to the people who complain about not getting stuff done or that they need structure... don't take those feelings as a sign that you need to automatically return to what you know. You can also take it as a sign that you have an opportunity to grow, but it's just hard... which is totally ok and normal. If you can overcome this, you will become an excellent engineer as a result.
Why does that matter? We should probably start asking how much does it actually correlate with productivity, before assigning it importance.
I have a hunch that even if there even is such a thing as self-motivation, and even if there is a correlation with production, the effect size is probably not high and is conflated with other factors which explain a much higher proportion of the variability.
An employer which cares about their workers will (a) grant them the freedom to work from home, and (b) provide them with the structure to do so effectively. In the absence of such structure I can see how motivation could replace it and make up the productivity, however that should not be the worker’s responsibility. The loss in productivity is 100% on management for failing to provide to structure to keep the workers productivity while remote.
self motivation seems to me to be a poor excuse to shift the responsibility of management to the worker.
But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk. Also, I worked on teams that had people worked out in many offices, mostly not Mountain View. I was surrounded by Googlers in an open-plan office, but it was often lonely. I ate alone sometimes. It was often not worth the commute.
I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.
This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.
First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility ("Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said. Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.") But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
In the old days, they drew the line at going full-remote. When the Atlanta office closed, everyone there had to either move somewhere else or, eventually, leave. I guess that's changed.
We are opening a new larger space (in the next few months), and have over a thousand people here now.
Why would that be true? Trust your staff to behave like adults, and trust your team leadership. This feels like a cop out from leaders who don't understand how to manage uncertainty, as opposed to an actual requirement.
Some had “multiple jobs” and both or more employers were getting the short shrift.
Small orgs are like small towns, everyone knows who’s up to what. Large orgs are like cities…
My point was that in a city people are semi anonymous and others don’t keep tabs in you and know whether you’re a slacker, a thief, the town millionaire, the job producer or not. In a small town folks know to some degree who is vandalizing, doing the graffiti, stealing the cattle, helping farmer John with the fences, bringing food to the widow, etc.
You can thank capitalism for that.
The "cities" metaphor is actually pretty apt. In small towns everybody polices each other, and you don't behave badly because your life will become pretty difficult if you do. In a big city, you either have lots of rules in the form of municipal codes, or people start behaving badly along some dimension, eg. crime in SF or zoning in Houston.
This reads like an argument against single management for large organizations. If you need to fit thousands of square pegs into holes, perhaps it's not the best approach in the first place.
A central government delegating most of the day to day management of citizen's environment to local, highly autonomous entities is a common pattern.
Central is certainly easier for the rulers though and they have much more power and resources.
> But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
It isn't a contradiction but these two statements seem to at least be in a bit of tension, right?
Disclaimer: Just going from your two comments, never saw Google's offices.
"Wow, this looks like a call center; I'm glad I'm not in customer support", I thought to myself.
And then one of guys sitting at those big tables stood up, extending his hand: "Hi, I'm ...., glad to meet you guys". It was that senior engineer. Yikes!
Makes me want to drop by and crank that giant net up and down a few times just so everyone in the south wing can hear that soothing creaking sound again.
That said, let me know if you find yourself again stuck in KIR-D and want to escape while still working on the eastside.
When you work at Google, it means technology for avoiding a walk.
This is a solid point; I work for a company that had four key buildings in two cities at the start of the pandemic; in reality, we were a "remote company" who were just rubbish at remote practises. The pandemic forced us to be remote-first, which fed back into being better organised for day-to-day.
I suspect most companies have this sort of mixed-model, and are just shitty at remote work.
(I will also note, as always, that there is a rich irony that big tech firms who push cloud-everything, remote collaboration tools and so on, won't eat their own dogfood. How much of Google watching Zoom walk away with the video calling market was due to their intransigence on this?)
I do pair programming very frequently with my coworkers remotely. We share a VNC connection to a Linux host. It works great.
I think a lot of people just wanted to put in their hours and get home to their families. I love pool but never played with anyone on the table one floor down because it just wasn't a make-friends environment. I think I shot the shit with someone when I got into work a handful of times in the more-than-a-year that I worked there. Huge reason I left.
This isn't even coming from a social person. I prefer WFH. I don't particularly like going out. However, if I'm gonna be forced to be around people I'd at least like it to be pleasant.
At Facebook I was part of a startup acquisition. Those members were battle buddies. Facebook also had a cultural value that you should bring your authentic self to work, which I think led to people bonding better. That or it’s because Facebook threw lots of parties with inappropriate amounts of alcohol
“Bring The Best 90% Of Your Self To Work”
Honestly, we all have a part of ourselves we should leave at home.
I've attended the weddings of multiple friends from my first job. I'm still in touch with 4-5 people from my second job. I haven't spoken to anyone from my team at Google since the day I left. I had good, cordial relationships with all of them, but it was also incredibly impersonal. I don't even recall learning anything about anyone's spouse, for instance.
I remember when I got my first job I was extremely social and would try to make friends with anyone. But now that I'm on my nth job I don't feel the need to socialize as much and would prefer to put in my work hours and move on with my life.
I don't think it's a good thing though. Middle aged men especially, I think, generally could do with a wider circle of acquaintances.
I try to keep in touch with a lot of my ex coworkers every 6 months.
Some of them are actually very keen to catch up, years after the job.
I'm friends with people who I was not very friendly with on the job 18 months after I've left the place, after sending them a text message saying "how's it going."
This may be because I'm a middling-social person; I'm an introvert by nature, and don't mind long stretches of alone time, but I can also hold a conversation about non-work topics. All it really takes is two extroverts (or at least reasonably friendly people) on the team to change the dynamic.
this false dichotomy again, who said that pair programming was to replace code review, or vice versa?
It sounds like an absolutely terrible way to learn and grow as a developer.
My company: - Started with a strong in-office culture - Communicated to managers that all employees now have a choice between being fully remote, hybrid, or in-office; there’s never a mandate to be in person - All new roles can be based anywhere in the country of the roles’ origin - All salaries are being standardized to one city per country (NYC for the US.)
By contrast, my partner’s company: - Mandated return to work date 3 days/week minimum unless you’ve transitioned to remote (and they don’t seem to be making that easy for existing employees) - Significant, growing attrition problem causing serious concern among leadership - Growing pushback from employees asking great questions… for example, why they should be required to sit on zoom at an office, conferencing with their remote colleagues
If I had to put money on which company will thrive and which one will seriously regret it’s decision a year from now… the answer seems very clear.
This is what bugs me about the hybrid set up. If the company onboarded a lot of permanent remotes and also doesn't have people sync up the in office days, then there is no point of going into the office. It's the worst of both worlds.
Yes there's variance but it's being left intentionally vague for teams to set their own cadences.
I was remote for 13 years and I definitely missed the option of the office, though not the mandate of it.
So in my biased opinion the hybrid model is to keep people like me happy. And my bet is these will eventually become the new senior management, comfortable with remote but happy in the office, just like the current managers who set up the hybrid thing for similar reasons for themselves.
Doesn’t help people like me who can’t do the jobs they want in the cities they want without being remote, but I think we’re a pretty small minority.
Well don't I look stupid for initially being skeptical... surely your company, with "no management or oversight" over its employees, is clearly set up for enormous success!
Why wouldn't this occur, in even greater magnitude, at a company with zero accountability regarding the whereabouts of the employees? Where an employee can wake up any morning and just decide not to come in? Where nobody can say with any certainty who will attend a meeting, or be in the building, or available to be on a call, at any time? Where nobody has any responsibility to ensure co-workers schedules line up, or that the person responsible for Task A completes it within a timeframe to allow the Task B person to meet his/her deadline?
I do think that companies that allow remote are going to see an influx of workers as people leave other companies with in-office mandates. So many people have adjusted to remote working that it seems somewhat crazy to me to try and walk that back. There’s a clear preference based on what we’ve seen for some level of remote work among existing in-office workers who probably aren’t going to put up with a shift back, especially when tech jobs are in such high demand.
I arrived, checked in and was shown to a meeting room. A few minutes after the meeting was supposed to start the receptionist came scurrying in and connected me to the meeting via that cube looking meeting machine they had in every office. Everyone appeared on the screen from various different offices, some at home, and one person in the same building as me.
I regretted that trip the entire flight home.
So even when I went in, I never dealt with team members.
When people are camping in meeting rooms all day, you have no idea who's "in" just by skimming the seating.
That was the loneliest job I've ever had. I was alone in a bank of desks, basically every day. The nearest group of people had nothing to do with my team.
those folks have a reserved physical desk / office space at which they will be required to go 3 days per week starting apr 4th. They may switch to fully remote but cannot keep a dedicated physical spot if they do so.
source: googler
Living in Pleasanton is cheaper than living in Mountain View, but still commutable. Living in Tracy is cheaper still and people still commute to the Bay Area from there. Living in Fresno or Sacramento is even cheaper and farther but still some people will do that commute daily.
That ship has sailed, and it’s got a nice tail wind as well.
E.g. I live in a low-CoL area, but I pay you, someone living a high-CoL area, $100 to nominally be your "flatmate".
If company can pick arbitrary locations around the world to be their HQ, or Trump can use Mar-a-Lago as his residence, then so too can every other citizen following the law and paying their taxes.
> every other citizen following the law
For criminal fraud to happen, there has to be a defrauded party. If I follow my local tax laws and negotiate a better salary with a corporation based on Location A, while potentially living elsewhere at Location B/C/D for prolong periods of time with lower costs of living, that is not fraud.
Two parties entered a contract with the understand you would live in location A if you don't that's fraud objectively.
https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-contr...
https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/business-laws-and-regu...
https://www.upcounsel.com/intent-to-deceive-contract-law#:~:....
If you follow whatever local and state laws apply to your situation, you're perfectly in your right.
The topic is whether a global corporation with access to a global workforce should be allowed arbitrary salary negation privileges because of the circumstances of a candidates geographical circumstances, while robbing the candidate of the same privilege.
Just sounds like another way to exploit labor at a time of record profit windfalls for corporations.
Someday if most employers switch to remote-first, this won’t matter and salaries will be equal everywhere (a lot lower than we’ve seen in tight labor markets, and probably the first world in general).
A company telling me my worth is based on where I live at that exact moment definitely feels like wrongful deception intended for financial gain.
A company can be registered in a tax haven but have its main office in the US.
I used to drink with a bunch of fireman who lived about 300 miles away - they had to live in the city or adjacent county. They’d have a flophouse in the hood shared by like 20 guys and crash there once in awhile when they pulled overtime as well as get mail.
Travel scams are similar too. If a company will reimburse travel if you’re 50 miles from home, people will “move” so they can bill the mileage tolls.
It works great until it doesn’t. If you want to give up your cushy Google gig for a few thousand bucks, good luck.
It's slightly more true that it's based on the local cost of labor, but even more so that it's just based on the state, with carveouts for MSAs (which are defined based on county) surrounding certain offices commanding higher salaries.
You'd make just as much working remotely in Matamoras, PA as you would working out of the NYC office in Manhattan.
5 -> 0 is a pay cut based on where you live.
5 -> 3 is not a pay cut as you're still working out of the same office.
If I were to go fully remote, I would take a pay cut ... but it would be almost identical to my commuting costs, once you account for rail fair, parking, vehicle mileage, taxes, snacks, etc.
I don't know how representative my case is, but the pay cut ends up being a non-factor in my decision whether or not to apply for full remote.
If the employees move away rent goes down, so does demand for their properties.. so yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
If this were indeed the reason for the salary adjustment, it wouldn't matter whether an employee was moving to Santa Cruz, San Mateo, or San Salvador. Either way they're remote, and unless one city has markedly different internet bandwidth, the value that a given employee delivers from any remote location should be the same.
Next time I hear someone making this argument, I'm calling BS. It's a bald-faced attempt for the company to capture value which rightfully belongs to the employee.
Only the horribly uninformed would ever make such a bad faith argument. You've never been paid based on your "value" but rather what it takes to keep you as an employee. The company only wants to pay you enough to keep you and if you move some place cheap well they don't need to offer as much.
I think that depends what your other options are. It might work if everyone in the industry offers you less based on where you live, which is almost collusion in my opinion.
Nevertheless, it's one that I've heard repeated quite often.
If you're in Sacramento, you're definitely not in the same MSA as either San Jose or SF. Pleasanton on the other hand is part of Alameda County, which is part of SF's MSA.
Meanwhile, if you opted to be in Santa Cruz, "just" 32 miles south of San Jose, you'd be SOL.
Interestingly, Seattle is only in the premium price tier, not the premium price tier. This is because there's no state income tax in Washington, so a lower salary goes a longer way. So it ends up being a wash even factoring in NY/CA state taxes. Because CA taxes are higher than NY (but not NYC taxes), your best bet is living in upstate NY (Long Island is outside of NYC too but it's eliminated because CoL is higher there).
Yes. I know somebody working remotely about 10m driving from the office.
To keep your salary you'd need to stay in the SF bay area, which is defined according to country lines.
This has some failure cases, with some weird places being included in regions like NYC while some other places where people really do commute to NYC (though it is extremely far) are excluded. I don't actually know anybody who has been impacted by this, but clever Googlers made a pretty compete map of all of counties in the US and their pay region once the tool for getting salary information for proposed moves was available.
I'd like to understand how these market values are calculated. It can't be supply and demand, because if you move to a place with 0 supply you do not maximize your value.
I should be able to say to them "hey, I create $x for you now and I cost $y, but if I move I will make the same $x for you for $(y-z), and it will make no impact on means or ends since I'm entirely remote."
https://www.vox.com/recode/22691275/googles-remote-work-home...
<awkward silence>
I'm curious, though, why that would make you think that racial discrimination is happening? It could just as easily mean that racial discrimination is not happening and that Asian candidates are equally over-represented in the underlying qualifications (e.g. university degrees, prior experience -- both of which are indeed the case).
Also, at a level removed from tech, what criteria do you use to determine whether some system which does not equally represent the general population is discriminatory or not? It seems like the numbers alone here aren't sufficient, but I reckon you've probably given this a lot of thought, so I'd love to hear your mental model there.
The fact that it is not representative of the general population (and I'm not even talking about men vs women, that's another huge can of worms), means that something is wrong somewhere along the pipeline.
Either at university level, or at high school level, or before. Or at company level.
Plus diversity gets worse and worse as the pay grade goes up.
In any case, I think affirmative action works, long term, for the affected minorities. As much as people outside those minorities hate it.
That said, I don't think it has to be that way. Companies and teams do have the ability to choose their cultures and communication styles in an intentional way. It's just that very few actually do. And this is a situation where you absolutely do not want to accept the default configuration.
Unless I'm outperforming my entire team, since everything can be seen and reported on.
I was confused why 1/5 was so much more powerful than 0/5. I sorta get 3/5 if you have a commitment to in-person culture. Anyway, the 1 per week doesn't at all line up with your more credible 3 per week.
Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
But ultimately, I have no desire to waste an extra 5 to 10 hours of my life just driving back and forth to sit at a different computer.
I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
FWIW, I found synchronous interruptions to be more of a problem when remote. Too many people used Slack messages or video calls for everything because it was only a click away, as opposed to having to get up and walk over to someone’s desk
> Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting…
Slack is terrible for documenting. It needs to be reserved for ephemeral communication.
Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
Slack is not usefully searchable, true, but its purpose for documentation is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. If you have a link to the conversation you have the whole conversation; that can be useful to share context. Likewise meetings; being able to record them is HUGE. But either way, you mention Slack should only be used for ephemeral communication...all in person communication is ephemeral. Slack at least has it saved, even if it's a pain to find; in person does not. I can share a Slack link; if you missed it, forgot it, or disagree about what was said, you're out of luck with in person.
>Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
The OP was comparing it with someone walking over to his desk to tell him something, which if you are busy and eager to get back to what you were doing, is easy to forget. At least Slack has a record while vibrations in the air have none. He also said Slack or tickets, so you weren't even attempting to refute his actual argument.
At my company, we send messages when we need help, but the expectation is that the reply comes at the convenience of the person being asked.
Sort of, yeah.
That’s not an issue of Slack, IM, or remote work, though.
Incidentally he accidentally posted porn in the slack.. and never made a deal out of it from then on.
This assumes some messages are urgent and some are not, and that you can't know which is which until you open the chat and thus mark it as read.
"Remind me" is time based, which is too arbitrary. I want to instantly see everything unanswered, not have it trickle in at random intervals. Using the "Save" button as "Move to inbox" as nthj suggested makes more sense. It's also easier to click.
I recently found /r/overemployed [1] on VC Twitter, and a lot of folks are using this setup to work two (or more) jobs. They know that they'll only need to dedicate 4 hours a day to any given job and as long as they can schedule non-overlapping meetings, they can get away with it.
It's got me thinking though - this might be an opportunity for startups to knowingly hire less than full time employed engineering staff at a reduced comp rate with low stress / low pressure work. Say, 10-20 hours a week, choose your own hours. You might be able to grab a few MANGA/FAANG folks and get them to work on your project instead of their "110% time" pet project at the giantcorp. It might be an operational advantage.
Has anyone looked into this?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed ; the lingo is J2 = "job two", J3, etc.
If companies don't want employees working for anyone else, then they should compensate those employees for that privilege. They don't own anyone's free time unless they pay for that privilege.
Let's say you work strict hours 9am to 5pm M-F. On Thursday at 8:47pm you happen to think of a solution to a problem you're having at work. Are you suggesting the company should pay you more because the idea occurred outside of your strict hours?
In general, companies pay white collar workers / knowledge workers, for their knowledge. That happens regardless of when that knowledge is acquired. It seems pretty common sense and there are also plenty of laws to it up. Any other arrangement would seem full of issues.
* Microsoft
* Amazon
* Netflix? (Why not META?)
* Apple
* Amazon
* Netflix
* Apple
Source: https://twitter.com/MorningBrew/status/1453797543096238080
Not exactly.
Some organizations have limits to how long historical chats are stored.
I feel the same way.
I have been remote for over 10 years but prior to that, it was another 10 in an office.
That included an hour commute each way, random downtime and interruptions.
I honestly have no doubt I am more productive now, given that was "leave at 7 AM get home at 7 PM".
There is no way in any given day I am getting less work done in 12 hours than I was then.
I will never again go back to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the expressway again, even if we end up in a race-to-the-bottom on salaries. QoL is more important to me now.
1) a super highly paid tech salary
2) an affordable house
3) a short commute
There are options for any 2/3 all over the world. Nowhere has all 3. You can't pick the two you chose and then get pity for not having the third.
"Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added."
"Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said."
It's not to say that distributed teams can't be high funtioning it just takes 3x the effort from a management perspective. Good management is in even higher demand than SWE skills. A good manager will gravitate towards teams that are colocated because they know they can be more effective for less effort.
To level the playing field it has to be all colocated or all remote. Talent currently holds the cards because of demand but talent+colocation will always win in a contest.
Completely agreed. The way I see my situation playing out is that all of the employees who went remote during COVID will be tolerated, but that the company culture will revert to in-office first. That will eventually lead to the remote cohort slowly being relegated to irrelevance and passed for promotion until they disappear (including myself) through attrition. When that happens I will start looking for 100% remote companies. But for now I really don't care though, as long as they are paying me a Bay Area salary to live in the midwest.
Your job is what you make of it. I personally see WFH as the progression brought about by the internet; not covid. Covid just sped up the transition that was already happening. Covid brought about collective PSTD which forced peoples hand like any other trauma in ones life. It was the reason people stopped putting off there happiness, for the dream of success.
I don’t agree with you that colocated teams have an inherent advantage, or that they require more management to be productive than a remote team on average.
I knew someone who worked and lived in a houseboat. She showed up to the office for meetings, but her job was sales so she didn't have much use for a desk anyway.
"employees not prepared to return"?
"remote work extension"?
and transfers?
Around 15-20% have gone remote, are you claiming that 100% of the people who had the option have taken it?
Are you including TVCs?
If half of those transferred locations, that means 95% are coming back to the office.
Before Covid:
5 people in the same New York office, 1 remote in Europe
Today:
2 in New York, 2 in California, 1 in Ohio, 1 in Europe
There is no single office to return to. Though we could meet up with other coworkers on different teams and projects. But in essence we've become a remote team.
Has anyone else's teams become geographically distributed since covid?
The pandemic hit, we went remote, and there was basically a mass exodus out of Seattle. I think only about 20 people were still in Seattle by the time I left (for another job that's 100% remote with people scattered throughout the globe). It took the company almost two years to start adjusting salaries...
It is strange to walk around an office and see a bunch of workstations, desks and PC's that are all setup to do work in person, but only the PC is being used remotely and the only other people in the building are a security guard or janitor.
Do you believe remote work is less efficient because your organization hasn’t adapted to remote work, or do you believe something about remote work somehow makes it inherently less efficient?
I'm full remote with teammates in various states across the US. We have no problems to speak of related to our locations.
I refuse to ever work in an office again assuming my role doesn't require me to physically be at a location for reasons other than 'we want you to be'.
I recall someone pointing out that a Sun Microsystems office in Colorado existed because someone you might call a Staff or Principal Engineer today said, "I'm moving to Colorado. If you want to open an office there I'll keep working for you, but I'm moving to Colorado".
"Monopoly does what it wants" is not interesting, nor is it big news to me.
What's more interesting is all the companies that are never going back, and all the companies started in the last 2 years that will be remote-native going forward. Given the tight market for talent right now, and falling stock prices for growth companies, I'm already pulling out the popcorn now.
Google executives have never had to think seriously about silly things like "cost-structure" before. In this next market cycle where Growth takes a back seat, it will be very fun to watch decisions like these pile up to eventually bite them in the rear 5-10 years from now.
I can see it now, investors tanking their stock price in 2026, wondering why an old company that hasn't innovated in 10 years is paying 50,000 engineers half a $million a year to sit inside the most expensive real estate on earth and do nothing.
This is actually a major red flag if I'm an employee. There's no half way with remote work. Either everyone, including execs, works remote, or no one does. I've been in hybrid situations and it's complete hell. My suggestion is pick what works best for you, and then find a company that's committed all the way to either one.
For me, there's no amount of money that doesn't start with billion that could convince me to work in an office. I understand some other people are different, and they should find companies that support forced-commute co-located working.
I’m sorry you’ve only been in toxic environments, but you really think “we are in office t-th” is impossible?
No one thought it was weird to close offices sat/sun, why would that change (now that we all have remote set ups by force)?
Isn’t this what “friends” are for?
I don't know what kind of job you do, but I find this the symptom of a highly inefficient work environment.
I've been a member of several manager-centric forums since before COVID.
This was definitely not the case for most teams. The sudden switch to remote was not a productivity or even a morale boost for most.
Average employee: "I am just as productive (or even more productive) working from home than when I was at the office. This is totally sustainable."
Average Manager: "I've noticed a huge drop in productivity from my employees since they have been working from home. This is entirely unsustainable."
This is what I hear from friends in other occupations, not just software, but also from my friends in software too.
Of course, both can be true if just a small percentage of employees drop productivity immensely while everyone else's remains the same... But it's probably more likely that the employees are... not great at judging their personal productivity.
I just find the dichotomy fascinating. - I don't have a race in the horse as I never went remote.
> it's probably more likely that the employees are... not great at judging their productivity
At my company "let's get everyone stuffed back into the office asap because productivity" was mgmts slogan, but that position became pretty much indefensible after they announced that 2021 was literally the best year ever (highest revenue, highest revenue rise yoy absolute and %, largest increase in headcount, highest number of projects shipped, highest number of new projects etc.)
I personally prefer working from home, I have my test devices here, I set up my own home office, I don't need to waste time commuting, I have more time to take care of things around my house and/or my family if needs be, and I actually find myself working more focused and wasting less time than I did when I was in the office. I know this is not for everyone but the fact that my other team members might or might not be in the office has pretty much 0 effect on my work performance because I wouldn't even know nor care about.
Just my two cents.
When I've lived train distance, a 20min commute has been quite fine. I'd say neutral, which is sufficient to make the point.
Most of my hobbies would be in the city as well (meetups, concerts, board games, dating). All that has took a massive hit but the city is slowly coming back.
My current team prefers working remote and TBH I don't like it. I want to be in an office with others. It's nice having a clear separation of work and home. I don't like how companies are able to subsidize business costs (electricity, rent, maintenance, food, internet) through my home. They aren't reimbursing me for this, nor would I expect it.
IDK, I just miss the old ways.
I wonder how much of these remote vs. office convos are effected by the maybe unstated fact that commuting in the Bay is maybe especially bad?
Obviously upgrading to a place with a dedicated office would probably be comparable, but that makes some assumptions on my part that might not be accurate or reasonable.
Never once have I pointed out an obviously ridiculous contradiction in practices "but won't this actually hurt our customers?" and had the response be anything near "oh no! you're right, better fix that!"
Remote work is a great example: long before pandemic most C-level execs and other important personal were almost never in the office, always attend meeting remotely (sometimes even just by phone), and yet love to talk about how work can't happen without everyone being in the office. Trust me if you can manage the entire company from your Florida vacation home, I'm sure we can get these models deployed to production from my home office.
I hope everyone gets to choose their option, but I find it really tiring to be told by either side that I *WILL* be more productive or be happier one way or another. I'm perfectly capable of figuring out that myself.
I expected a small fraction to be extremely pro return to office but actually these didn't appear at all in our survey. What we did have is a couple of people who said they'd resign before returning to the office on a regular basis.
I wonder how different attitudes are at Google or if this is more of a top down push?
Cost of extra hour or 90 minutes of child care is also stratospheric.
I'm willing to bet the super commuter effect is stronger, but I'd be surprised if it were strong enough to change it to 5%. E.g. almost all my coworkers live close to the office here in NYC.
If they paid average Chicago tech wages and didn't have free healthy meals then they would have had a hard time recruiting to that office location choice even before COVID.
I still know people there, several of whom started going in again as soon as they brought back the big perks like cafes even though it was fully optional.
(The companies I've worked at since then seem to have fewer people going in during this optional period, though still some.)
I think many here think of an office as an open office with 500 desks crammed together and nothing else. I know those offices - I've worked at plenty. I do not want to go back to that. I've seen what my current work has done for their "renovations". It's soul draining and will be a terrible office environment. Needless to say - I'm looking for a new job because I do want some office time but I don't want a soul sucking office like the ones we currently have at many companies. Google's isn't perfect (and it is huge YMMV - I've seen some that are fantastic and some that are horrific!) but it's usually far better than others. At least there's an option to enjoy some nice perks and office culture! Many places don't have any of that. No activities - no team building - no peer bonding - no anything!
Amazing if you hate people - horrible if you love interacting with new folks.
1. You need a physical space to work from.
2. Your entire team is at the office as well and you can collaborate with them face to face.
I imagine 1 is not a concern for most people who have adapted to the situation over the last two years. And 2 requires that most of your team is local and agrees to come in as well, which I can't see being too likely.
For me personally going back to the office and still sitting in video calls all day with a geographically distributed team makes zero sense. It is a lot more comfortable to do it from home.
It's worse since we have an open office, so to do a video call you need to book one of the conference rooms that are in high demand, even the smallest rooms were perpetually booked even prior to the pandemic.
At least when working from home, I can do a video call any time without having to find a room. And I think people have forgotten about commutes and lunch. Now meetings are booked anytime from 8am-6pm and assume people will be available anytime from home. But since some people commute earlier and some people commute later to miss traffic, if everyone's back in the office, the only safe window to book a meeting is 10am-12pm and 1pm-4pm
I doubt most people have completely adapted to this. Speaking for myself, I only have one spare room that is a dedicated office (and it's also our guest room), and my spouse and I have to switch off when we need it for work. Most people don't have a spare unused room or two for remote work.
Although I have no issues motivating myself to get work done on my own (of course I have off days when I struggle - in the office it actually seems easier to get away with that without feeling guilty), one thing I always found hard was work life balance. You see it's 5pm but you are knee deep fixing a bug, so you power on with it, and before you know it, it's 6:30pm. In an office when you see everyone else leave you know it's time for you to as well - the bug can wait, no big deal.
I think what doesn't help is that I've never had a dedicated office room at home, I've had a cramped office corner of my bedroom, but it's not quite the same. I'm guessing Google's employees in SF, NYC and London are also in a similar position, so I don't really see there being much push back.
If someone moved from NYC to some remote part of PA they can apply to work remotely, and if Google says no, there are plenty of other companies who will take them. At the same time, there will be plenty of people who want to live in NYC and work for Google. There may be a higher turnover this year, but long term I don't see it being an issue.
People suddenly forgot they could look things up on their computers, stopped using established business vocabulary, and even small things like speaking one at a time were lost on them.
During the meeting, someone decided to doodle on the paper board in the meeting room (vs. using the usual C4 format we have been using on Miro boards), creating confusion regarding what "this" and "that" block represents. There were no meeting minutes, and none of the conceptual decisions from the meeting ended up on the wiki...
Of course, many of these can be resolved with better discipline, but it really feels like the medium invites chaos. That same team works very effectively in virtual meetings, with the ability to supplement the discussion with well-thought messages via Slack or Wiki comments. Meeting recordings and audio transcripts help for better meeting notes and recording the meeting conclusions and outputs in a way that's transparent and searchable.
Also ... gifies, how can anyone stand a 1h meeting without emojis and gifies is beyond me :).
Another factor to consider in the rush back to the office: gas prices may dramatically spike depending on the situation in the Ukraine. It will likely be a significant driver of inflation (and stagflation) and may keep folks from willingly commuting at pre pandemic levels.
Google (and Apple, and Facebook, and no doubt many others) have spent literally billions of dollars on real estate right before the pandemic. If people don’t fill those buildings, they’re going to look foolish.
That’s it.
It reminds me of when corporate says they need special employee shuttles instead of lowering costs by a shared shuttle. “We encourage collaborative conversations on the shuttles.” I’ve ridden them. No one speaks. It’s also not due to secrecy, otherwise they wouldn’t want employees to work on public transit.
For example, remote GOOG employees in Atlanta take a 10-20% salary cut compared to the Bay Area salaries. But the net takehome is still higher (on average) than the takehome for the in-office Bay Area engineers. And the overall compensation is better than >80% of existing Atlanta metro SWE compensation.
That's part of the reason why there has been such a huge influx of people to metros like Atlanta, Charlotte, Detroit, etc.
I'm all in favor of a GOOD office to come to, but until then I'm spending no more time on the property than required. Our white-collar culture and urban areas are too dysfunctional for hybrid and remote options to not be normalized. (In the US) If we're going to be "right-to-work", then give us the right to be remote.
I had a thrilling but ultimately abortive courtship with Google last fall, and at the time, the messaging on this subject was remarkably consistent: the plan was to go to a part-time model where people would go into the office 3 days a week, and they were hoping to be executing on that plan by the 2nd quarter of 2022.
So to see now that they are going to having people in the office 3 days a week in the 2nd quarter of 2022 is certainly no surprise to me. I would guess that that also means it's no surprise to any current Googlers who've been paying attention? And also that this says nothing about Google's own level of success with fully remote work, because, at least as far as I'm aware, leadership never seriously considered it as anything other than a temporary business continuity measure in order to get through the pandemic, anyway.
- 100% remote.
- 100% office.
- Some rigid hybrid scheme of n days per week in the office every week where n = 3 +/-1.
Why not "mainly remote but be in the office when it makes sense to be in the office"? This is how my team has been operating since last July - remote first but every 1-2 months we'll do a week onsite somewhere. Now we're getting pressure to start being in the office a few days per week every week starting later this month (and since we're dispersed that means going to the office to be on video calls all day).
- Decisions made in the office, remote employees input ignored
- Manager sees others in the office, remote employees ignored for promotions
- Remote employees given the green light to work remote, others who don't work remote resent the remote employee for having that privilege
- In-person workers dictate working schedules, remote person's preference for async is ignored, remote person has to work a set schedule based on arbitrary availability of in person workers
Not sure which schedule you are talking about you shouldn't all the employees be generally available between 9 am to 5 pm?
For me that's a resounding "fuck no". For what purpose? If you're a software engineer why would you have to be working when someone else is? Collaboration can and should happen async.
Unless you're working on some highly life-critical real-time piece of software that's invariably complex, I see no reason why software engineers need to be on the same schedules.
In fact, much of why remote and even in-person work is a vast hellscape is because of these old traditions that we think we have to continue living by. The 40 hour work week, full-time all the time, real-time collaboration, set schedules, etc. It's all bullshit. You can build a highly scalable and successful business without following any of these "rules".
Some employees work in the office from 9 to 5 while others can work from 8 to 4 in the same office. That is between you and your manager.
> You can build a highly scalable and successful business without following any of these "rules".
Which billion dollar company has done it without following these rules?
> Which billion dollar company has done it without following these rules?
Success to me isn’t about being a billion dollar company, but to answer the question, GitLab comes to mind.
Working from home and, working using flexible hours are two different things.
> GitLab comes to mind.
Which got acquired by a billion dollar company. Do you think Gitlab was not successful in remaining independent because the rules which you want are not scalable?
> was not successful in remaining independent
Huh? GitLab was not acquired to my knowledge.
My bad, I assumed you were talking about Github, my brain did not even register Gitlab. I guess my brain thinks gitlab is not successful :)
Depends on the space utilization. The company paying for real estate that "might" be used isn't very efficient. If they have a temporary work area system, it's different. Then they can down scale their real estate footprint and accommodate ad hoc visitors, by reservation, or the occasional "group meeting". But if they're dedicating space to someone who isn't there, it's a bit of a waste.
My last company called this "hoteling".
However as people leave the company or new people join, it is pretty difficult to ramp people up to be as effective as their replacements. I don’t work at Google so maybe everyone who works there is a genius, but I’ve noticed this at my work where it takes quite a long time for people to be 100% effective and it’s mostly because people have meetings and other obligations that make it challenging to bring ppl up to speed.
Why did I write this entire story? I think it's about people more than institutional knowledge. I know my friend is smart and driven, and no matter what you'll throw at him, he'll somehow find a way to adapt and improve. There's also an argument against stale institutional knowledge. Ultimately, I think being agile as a company is a greater advantage than institutional knowledge, so I'm biased.
People have had a taste of not having to spend time getting ready in the morning, can take their kids to school, and forget an hour commute. You would be hard pressed to find many banging on the door to go back to the office. I know of one person in my circle out of about 30 who want to go back. His reason is lack of boundaries with his family about when he's at work.
I personally would never go back to an office, it's not worth my finite time.
What I like about remote work:
1. No commute (4 hours a week saved!)
2. No idle chatter.
3. No shoulder tap interruptions.
4. Lunch, dinner, and snacks at fingertips
5. Midday exercise.
6. Flexible hours.
7. Better coffee.
I want to work, not warm a seat or flirt with my workwife
I'd be a much happier worker knowing I had multiple opportunities to visit distant family for more than a long weekend, travel internationally, do some adventures, etc, as long as I logged in and worked. Usually when I'm doing those things anyway I have downtime that I tend to spend on things that are, at least, work-adjacent.
Through the last two years I have realized that I am closer to the middle of the spectrum, and enjoy (and in a way need) the thoughtful company of my peers much more than I realized.
However I also enjoy immensely the ability to work from home when I need to focus without meeting and distraction.
And here is my realization (which really isn't very profound); most offices, even those who are "designed" to be nice for the workers, are awful places for focus work. They are however fantastic for the exploratory phase of work, where bouncing ideas happens and the boundaries and limitation of the work haven't been discovered yet.
My dream now is the ability to work 2-3 days remote and the rest in the office. Thankfully the old money financial institution I work for allows this.
What's really changed is that elections are coming up. Pretty obvious isn't it?
Every Googler I know who wanted to go full-time remote was allowed to do so.
Those who didn't choose to do that STILL don't have to be in the office every day; just a few days a week. Which I think is the right balance for most people.
The only people who should be unhappy here are the ones who wanted everyone in the office 5 days a week. It's a win for everyone else.
Later that same day I spoke to someone who's managing at [online payment processing company]. Shortly after bragging that he frequently spends only 2 hours a day actually working, he expressed that full-time remote work will never work out because you can't tell if someone is actually contributing. I refrained from pointing out that ICs actually have targets to meet and code to produce, and that you can put them on a PIP if they fail to meet expectations, while he's busy proving that management can apparently get by just phoning in to the occasional meeting.
edit: company names changed because it feels a little weird to call them out like that, I dunno
Regarding not being able to tell whether someone is contributing if they aren't in person - this manager is just plain dumb, as they aren't measuring the right criteria.
The objective is to maximize sales by getting more money from people who want to spend more money, while also getting some money from people who want to spend less money.
Offering people less money because you think they will accept less money because they are not likely to get a higher offer due to where they live is more accurately described as arbitrage.
I agree that “price discrimination” isn’t quite right; it’s more of a metaphor. It works if you imagine that companies are selling money that is bought for the price of labor. In different markets, people will accept more or less money for the same labor, or equivalently spend less or more labor for the same money, which allows for price discrimination.
It's not a trend we're heading toward, but it's well established practice in the economy. People working in Asia or Eastern Europe, for USA companies, make less, and they do the same job.
Fact that it's going to be applied to people working remotely, not at the office, is just an implementation detail.
Just look at the commit logs.
Sheesh. I managed an SWE group for years. It was easy-peasy to unobtrusively keep an eye on things.
I reserve my greatest praise for those who delete code without visible regressions or increased complexity.
Thanks!
Personally, I agree with you. I work somewhat differently, but am highly effective.
I managed a team of very high-functioning C++ programmers, for one of the top imaging companies in the world, for 25 years. I kept employees for decades, and that’s no secret. I mention it frequently, here, and my entire career is an open book. I've been an active software engineer for over 35 years, and shipping software, that entire time.
There's a [vanishingly small, I know] chance that I used a couple more techniques than simply counting CIs.
I was a very good manager for 25 years.
I guess maybe I ended up doing OK. Read the testimonials on my LikedIn.
I’m pretty aware that CIs are simply one single data point.
Some of the days with the fewest commits, are the ones I did the most work.
Yeah no. I've had to do a lot of investigative, hacky "PoC" work with lots of debugging, design, coordinating work (whiteboarding, email threads, etc) for the last ~5 or so months. I'm a software engineer but if you looked at my actual commit logs for the last quarter or so, it'd seem like I haven't done much. Some people work differently and have different workload, I've been shifting to some more active work now (and I'm glad because I enjoy coding way more) and my commit log "landscape" will probably be very different in the next few months, but if you just looked at the last few months it'd look like I didn't work a single day.
I really hope people don't base productivity just on commit logs, seriously.
I disagree. Buyers of labor (or buyers of anything) will continue doing what they always have, offer the least amount of money that they think sellers of labor will accept.
“Cost of living adjustment” is just fluffy language to hide the underlying bet by the buyer of labor that the seller of labor residing in a particular area will not be able to find a buyer offering a higher price.
If full remote stays around or gets bigger then this is the end state. Everyone arguing against COL based pay seems to think they'd get to keep there high salary rather then everyone getting payed less.
At the start of my career, 16 years ago, I spent some time abroad in a small country with some very distant family. When the topic of my career came up in conversation I remember multiple people saying that software engineer simply didn't exist as a profession in that country because there were no software jobs available there.
No. Each region will have its own supply and demand that affect prices.
Employees are no different. If Google can find enough qualified people in Ohio for 80% of the salary, that’s the cost of an employee in Ohio. Just because it’s more in CA doesn’t change that.
But regardless, there are plenty of engineers in the mid-west willing (and happy!) to work for 50% of what a FAANG is paid in the Bay Area. So it's win-win, the employer gets a cheaper employee and the employee gets a better salary than before.
There are lots of areas that are having difficulty with gentrification and the associated difficulty of actually being able to hire people to work the service jobs in those areas.
A company that is paying significantly more than exacerbates the inequities in those areas. A big tech company having remote workers living like royalty in places as the cost of housing there goes beyond what the regular person who lives there makes can become a PR nightmare.
As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much.
That's not just either, even if people didn't complain about it. Sometimes it takes a bad thing happening to someone for them to realize injustice that existed before. I would hope anyone against location-based paycuts within the US is also now against international location-based paycuts.
If a company was paying SV wages to someone, that must be because their labor is worth > that amount to the company. Salaries within SV, not hitting a profitability cap, exist on a supply / demand curve. Companies are rational actors, so they have no reason to be paying their SV employees any more than is necessary.
The current pay dynamic for all companies (that I know of) is location-based pay. Either they only hire in one location (so are trivially location-based), or they pay US employees more than overseas employees. Maybe they, like Google, are moving to a more granular within-US system.
Now, for the leveling. What mechanism would force a company to pay non-SV / non-US employees the same as SV employees? Possibly a law, maybe a union at a specific company, or simply social pressure from employees of the company.
So the facts are: 1) the company can afford SV salaries, 2) that company pays less than SV salaries for workers outside SV, and 3) we assume a leveling event that changes that.
Now a company has (roughly) two actions when this happens: bring SV employees down, or everyone else up.
In the first scenario: you're an SV employee. You're being paid market rate for SV, and the company announces they're bringing your salary down. You'd quit, right? Other companies aren't doing this, and since your salary was market rate, you can simply hop over to another company in SV that's paying your old, higher salary. There's a coordination problem for the companies here: if they all made this change at once, nobody would move and the SV salary would reduce (at least in the short term). But that would be illegal (see the Apple/Google recruiter ban lawsuits). So instead, they would quickly attrite all their programmer talent to companies who haven't made this move, until they are solely employing non-SV programmers who are happy with whatever the below-SV-market-rate salary is. Which may be fine! Many companies locate outside SV and pay less in comp as a result. But the most successful American tech companies locate in SV (or similar CoL areas, like Seattle), so they must see something to hiring those programmers, even if they're more expensive.
In the second scenario: the company brings up the salaries of non-SV employees. This has no effect on you as an SV employee, except perhaps making it easier to get a job in the area, since companies have less incentive to outsource.
Now here's a major caveat: companies often outsource easier work to lower-CoL areas, but I think this is a broken / honestly somewhat offensive practice. I think it's OK to pay, say, someone who's main skillset is banging out internal apps using low-code tools less than a senior full-stack engineer with deep performance / kernel tuning experience. People able to do the former are more common than the latter! But companies, falsely and offensively, assume the former = non-US, the latter = SV, and then assign their pay in that way. But why shouldn't someone in SV trying to break into programming be able to earn $40k doing the internal apps? And, conversely, why should a high-skilled engineer in, say, India be forced to move to the US to earn wages at American companies that are equal to their skill? (sans timezone issues, etc., if that's important for the role, which is a separate discussion).
If Google can pay an L4 280k in SV, they can afford to pay an L4 in Minnesota, or India, or anywhere the same amount. They wouldn't pay an L4 that much in SV if they weren't worth that much (and, realistically, they're worth much more).
Conversely, if Google wants to hire a contractor for cheap, that's fine! That job just shouldn't be tied to location either. Why shouldn't someone in the US be able to take that job, if they want it?
I'm in management now .. as an engineer, I most certainly used to work over 8 hours a day (probably 12 hours, counting all the time I spent studying to keep up). Now, in management, the hours have actually gone up .. I now have to worry about things my team is doing 24/7, have to deal with a ton of human, infra and organizational issues, being open to meetings at any hour of the day, in addition to staying technical (my direct code contributions have gone down but my engagement with codebase and overall non-code issues has skyrocketed). I am in a large company and do AI research (so work and what I enjoy are the same, and doing cutting edge research is pretty much as hard as it gets).
Point is .. when people boast how little work they do, it makes me wonder who is the poor slob who gets to do extra. We are software professionals, and professionals need to act by a certain creed and abide by an unspoken ethic. Maybe this is my immigrant roots showing .. as I grew up, my folks always taught me to make sure I'm worth the salt I'm paid. I certainly have had periods where I was in a funk (especially early on in my career) but when a job just didn't gel, I left and tried to find something more engaging.
I certainly don't feel I can coast for a few months. Who the heck are these companies that are so relaxed. Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers). It could be certain areas of a large company, and it could be for some short period where people can get away with coasting. I don't think this is really sustainable with how competitive today's software landscape is.
Maybe not. In the corporate world, 90% of work is work that was generated by other work. Some people are really good at not causing work for other people.
Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers).
They spend a lot of hours but they don't really accomplish that much. The thing about FAANGs is that above the $250k line, it's all politics. If you're any good at the game, you figure out that you'll always do better using political position to take credit for someone else's work than taking the chance of your own labor (how much can one person do?) being appreciated.
Always get a team if you can: it diversifies your apparent contribution to the company.
work-life balance should not come at the expense of some of the workers pulling more than their fair share of work.
I.E a junior that is just learning terraform vs. a staff that has used it 3 years?
It's common for office workers to have at least 3-4 meetings a day which basically destroys the day already. You'll have only tiny snippets of productive time left, which are then again interrupted by email and chat. It would actually be a challenge to come to 2 hours of productive time in such a day.
It used to be that only managers were stuck in meetings and email all day long but now the same applies to office workers that actually need to produce something. A meeting is not a product, your customers didn't order a meeting and you can't ship a meeting.
Anyway, thanks for picking up the slack. I'm back to playing flappy bird now.
It's either this, or they have some unrealistically narrow view of what constitutes work.
I've worked with engineers who were concerned they only "worked" 4 hours per day because they only counted time spent writing code in the code editor. Had to remind a lot of people that communication, meetings, and other job-related activities are also work.
But there are also a lot of people who do the 2 hour per day thing by shifting as much work as possible to other people. They might do bursts of intense work when they know other people are watching, but it's back to the minimum as soon as they're not being closely observed any more.
The other half of that equation is to change jobs frequently. It can take a year or longer for some managers or companies to catch on to employees who aren't really doing much work, at which point the person can easily move on to the next job and start the process again.
Should companies adjust compensation according to these variables too, or just city?
I disagree with your comments on this though...
I'd appreciate it if you would expand on what you feel is actual 'choice'
It's funny, because that logic means that location-based-pay becomes its own justification. The city I live in is normally a personal choice. But by paying based on location, the city I live in no longer becomes a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city.
But the moment that my company discriminates pay based on anything that has an associated cost, it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies that pay differential.
If part of my pay was tied to wearing an expensive suit, then my clothes would no longer be a personal choice, thus justifying the extra pay for the suit.
If part of my pay was tied to me driving a fancy car, then my car would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for the fancy car.
If part of my pay was tied to enrolling my kids in a particular school, then enrolling in that school would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for that, and so on...
You still have the personal choice to live in the city of your choice, either by not working for a particular company because they don't offer you the ability to work from your preferred city, or working for the wage they are willing to pay you to work from there.
> it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city.
I don't think "justification" enters the consideration for extra pay for living in city X or less pay or no job for living in city Y. You are offered a set of terms of employment working from a given place. There is nothing stopping you from attempting to negotiate different terms. Maybe you can improve on those terms. Some people have enough leverage to work from anywhere they want without any pay decrease. Not me, but maybe you!
But anyway, if you follow the logic of the thread, it was: (A) location-based pay is justified because of location-based cost of living --> (B) then is car-based pay justified because of car-based cost of living? --> (C) no, cars are a personal choice --> (D) your car is as much a personal choice as your location; it's only not a personal choice to the extent that your employer pays you to choose in a particular way, so using that reasoning to justify location-based pay is begging the question --> (E) your reply, that location is a personal choice, which is a counter to the claim (C), not to my response (D).
As far as negotiation goes, you might be amazed the extent to which companies are willing to shoot themselves in the foot to stand by their non-negotiable policy. I've seen it. And the calculus is this: you might be so skilled that you're a bargain even at $1 million, but if they pay you that much, it increases the market value of other skilled workers in your area. And if the market discovers this information, that might cost the employer a lot, even though it has nothing to do with you. So they'll tell you you can have the $X you want, but only if you move to a city where other skilled workers are already being paid that much, even though they don't actually care what office you're at, or even if you work remote full-time anyway.
Cost of living doesn't justify location based pay. It happens to correlate, but if a company could offer you an less pay in a high COL area without you declining the offer, then they might. They could even move their entire operation to an area with 1/4 the labor rates, like the Philippines, but there are big reasons they don't.
> then is car-based pay justified
Car based pay doesn't exist AFAIK, so what's the point? Companies pay what they have to pay to hire/retain the employees they want. There are a myriad of factors affecting any labor market, including all sorts of day to day personal costs like housing and transportation, but those are distilled through the personal choice of the employee. The main input to what employers pay is what other employees pay - it's a feedback loop at an unstable local equilibrium.
That said, if a major company or three decided to move to globally uniform compensation (the same pay in Czechia as Chicago), well that would be an interesting experiment to watch, though I wouldn't want to work there.
One would never have been an acceptable candidate sans [skills] [suit] [car] [lifestyle]
Google's revenues, however, are not limited based on employee location and I sure as hell don't see why pay should be.
I'm still living in the Bay Area due to family but that's one of the reasons why we haven't looked seriously about moving. I felt like the WFH train was going to stop eventually.
Looking at the comments here, i forsee an Onion headline "Ex convicts want to go back to prison because they can't make friends in regular society or miss the "structure" set by Warden."
- My co-workers are friends. We hang out, we go out drinking after work. We do activities on the weekend together outside of work. Early stage start-ups often are like this, most of the time not by intentional design, but due to the hours and intimacy of working closely with peers.
- My co-workers are colleagues. We're professionals, but our interaction stops there. I don't particularly care to get to know my colleagues on a deeply personal level.
Your preference for working remotely seems very closely tied to which camp you more strongly identify with.
I wonder, then, if the last two years will improve these kinds of project practices in onsite teams. Or maybe "hope" is a better word.
Tribal knowledge, and knowledge transfer presentations and video recordings remains the only way to share knowledge.
For others, it's not.
That said, at this point I'd almost go as far as to say that city centre-based offices will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history. Who thought the idea that spending 2 hours a day travelling to and from a physical location (and having to pay for it!) to generate larger profits for shareholders was a legitimate or sensible use of human time and capital?
My health, both physical and mental are immeasurably higher as a remote worker. The biggest argument I hear is "But you don't get to socialise anymore!" but of course I do. I socialise with my colleagues both remotely and in-person and more importantly, I socialise with those I _want_ to socialise with. Members of my community, friends, family, people I choose. Not people who passed the same interview as me.
-xoogler
Now I just have a dog that I walk for a few hours every day instead haha.
Honestly in my experience the work environment itself is not great - google has cubicle pens with half height walls, it super frustrating to work when people are continually going back and forth around you.
(and if that sounds low, don't worry: I now make much more and work for a company that doesn't even have offices in my time zone)
https://www.seriouseats.com/lunch-at-google-insanely-awesome...
Forget snacks, the amount of money you save by not living there and not commuting could pay for an in house chef.
The only good thing is that I can have informal meetings with my colleagues, talk around the white board and so on... this is very valuable.
If I was getting paid the snack amount in cash then I'd probably be ok but as is free breakfast+lunch+snacks saves me on the order of $500/mo. And as someone who is pretty mediocre at cooking the quality of food is better as well.
But the open office is just fucking terrible for getting actual work done.
- I love my teammates and it is so unbelievably rewarding getting to see them in person and share a space with them. We're social primates and it's soothing at some deep primal level to get to be around my tribe.
- The food is excellent. Not having to cook and wash fucking dishes again is god-damned divine. After two years of eating almost every meal at home, I fantastize about burning my entire kitchen to the ground.
- Just getting out of the house and having a change of scenery is really nice. Being in an office with other people working helps me switch into "Google employee" mode.
- I don't dig open plan offices at all. The one we're in now is a big empty white fluorescent lit box. It has a lot of windows with an excellent view which is great. But otherwise, it feels like sitting in the middle of an empty grocery store and I find it very hard to focus. More often than not, I grab a laptop and hide away in one of the lounge areas to get actual work done, which feels sort of paradoxical. (I'm probably an outlier in that I prefer to work on a couch with a laptop on my lap instead of at a desk with a big monitor.)
So it seems to me that the only reason companies like Google would mandate the return to offices is because they see a greater cost in having employees work from home. Are they afraid of the cost of lost happenstance collaboration being so high and not trusting in technology (some of which Google built) to bridge that gap, or are they worried that their employees are slacking off?
Personally, slacking off when working from home would not be unimaginable, but more often than not, I may work longer hours from home as I won't have the commute burden or feeling that it's time to finally leave the office, so it's actually easier to get carried away. Admittedly that has other mental health implications, but not ones I would imagine most companies considering the cost of.
Don't be so quick to assume others will follow Google. Google has not been a leader in anything during COVID.
I think the days of companies following Google ended long ago. Hell, Google mostly follows Meta's lead these days.
Surely I'm not the only one? Guys don't talk about this.
Surely no one really cares.
that said, I never have had as much deep focus as when I'm working from home, in particular in the evenings. really important discoveries are made there too. so I think having both is optimal. and above all, having a flexible job is something I've come to expect for work-life harmony.
It's super natural to just ping someone in chat and if it's the case, you can share the screen and if anyone else is interested they're already there and can just throw an eye. If the discussion is annoying you, you can just mute and focus, but most of the times if it's a longer discussion, we make a split conversation and rejoin main after we do the back and forth.
Really natural way of doing things and I can work from anywhere with people from anywhere, as long as we can get some overlap with the daily calendar group chat, which is very easy to do given its immovable nature.
life since 2016 has been one shit show after another in America and going back to work as if nothing happened just seems stupid.
Obviously, companies have to compete with other companies from all over the world for tech talent, but the ratio of tech money to tech talent is much higher in certain parts of the U.S. than pretty much anywhere else in the world. As a result, if that money gets to shop for talent around the entire world then the 'price' for that talent seems like it will go down. But maybe there is something I am missing.
And maybe all the people who want to go full time remote are ok with that, but depending on how big the pay cut is, maybe not. Presumably, if companies now see less benefit in having in-office engineers, then everyone including in-office workers will get pay cuts due to the globalized market for talent. So perhaps, selfishly, we should want companies to put a high value on being in person, but I guess we will have to wait and see.
Just remember there are just as many, if not more, mental detriments to working in-person.
Time and cost of commuting unpaid Cost of work wardrobe Requirement to wake earlier to make it in on time for people who aren't morning types
If they want to make a mandatory mix of remote and non-remote work, it should be like oil rigs, where you go to the office to work and live on campus for two consecutive months out of the year, and then you go home for the rest of the year.
Requiring that you be chained to a single metro area for the entire duration of your employment is objectively inferior to a situation where you can live wherever in the world you want (except I guess for countries that have sanctions) and you can even just get rid of your home and spend each week working out of a different city and just have to give 2 months of your life to the company.
People fantasize about this, but I don't really understand the need for so much stimulation, and lack of appreciation for continuity, simplicity, familiarity, and "putting roots down".
Then again, I suppose you might want these things, but your roots are in Ohio, and you simultaneously want to work for a Bay Area company.
If you want familiarity, “roots” and simplicity, knock yourself out. I don’t want that, and I want you to accept that I don’t want that, nor will I accept it for your convenience.
Cool, thanks for making that explicit.
> nor will I accept it for your convenience
A little aggressive but OK. Remoters are on the defense, after all. But please realize... I'm just a person on an internet forum.
I’ve been remote for a decade. I will never work in an office again, but if you want to that is fine. I’m not the one asking you to stay remote or leave your “stable” subdivision. Instead, you seem to believe that I should want what you want because you’re happy with it. No.
> I don't really understand the need
you said:
> you seem to believe that I should want what you want
There's a disconnect there where you're reading a lot into what I said.
Granted, my comment was terse.
Here's more detail of what I was thinking when I wrote that:
"""
People (myself included) fantasize about living all over the place.
But, since I (a person in my late 20s) have learned more about myself, I've started to appreciate simplicity, continuity, and roots (which I had to work really hard to create, after a very complex personal history that I won't get into here).
Because I have experienced this personal shift and really valued it, I've started to think that the desire to live in many different places is mostly mimetic, and that if I pursued this, I would not be able to have the things that I have achieved in the last 5 years.
Therefore I don't understand why this notion is so widespread or how it got into my head (but it's probably through mimesis of the novel).
"""
By all means, you do you. I'm jealous that you have found something that is really working out for you, and my comments are coming from a place of curiousity and the need to work out what I desire. I'm sorry to have failed to come across in any other way.
I considered interviewing for Meta recently. Then I realized that these are the people who have access to my conversations with my girlfriend when I was 15 years old, and a complete chronological geotagged history of my exact whereabouts for the last 10 years.
No thanks.
> As of June 15, Facebook is opening up remote work to all levels across the company. Anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work.
For work that truly is location-based, it's obvious. I once read that a garbage truck driver in NYC earns as much as 100K. I don't know if that number is true, but it kind of makes sense. It's strictly location based and the driver has to live somewhat close to the inner city.
Google was/is location-based, where being in an ultra high cost environment normally is a downside, so it must have unique upsides to counter this. I guess that would be the local talent pool and ecosystem.
Whilst this factor will not be removed, for sure it will be weakened. In any given team, on any given day, there will be remote workers. The other 2 days of the week. Those with a permanent exception. Those with an extension. Things are going to get more flexible and complex which means your team by definition is hybrid. In practice, a hybrid team is quite similar to a fully remote team if you do it well. You should involve the remote workers in anything of any importance.
If your team is hybrid/virtual by definition, the idea to pay based on location of the individual comes into play. The talented 200K engineer that moved to South Dakota to work fully remotely now is a 100K engineer.
I guess 100K is the talent value, when location is stripped. But location hasn't been stripped yet. There's Europe, India, other places...so ultimately what remains may be 50K. Yes, I'm making up these numbers but you get my point.
Those saying that it's bullshit to pay people based on location and think that this means that they can just keep that 200K and work from a different location are in for a rude awakening. It means you compete on talent only. If you're so top notch that purely on talent you continue to earn that pay, good for you. But be aware that you're in competition for that salary with the entire world now, and that world has armies of people hungry and willing to do anything.
And if you think that downward spiral is unfair...no it isn't. This is how it works in the working class in the west and in every class everywhere else. What you consider low pay in developing countries has been the step up for those developing countries. Whilst the west is largely stagnant, they've been building up a better quality of life. As it should be.
What's interesting to me is, that many of the upsides of home office (which are also the downsides of going onsite) seem to be pretty much inherent and unavoidable.
Companies doing home office can hire from a larger pool, have less expenses for offices and onsite services, no commuting allowances, etc.
Employees working in home office have no commute, less car costs, more food options, are freed of open-plan office distractions, etc.
At the same time, most of the downsides of home office (and thus the upsides of onsite work) do mostly concern communication and organization and should be solvable.
Online Meetings suck, because all video/voice chats are crap.
You can't get in touch as quickly as tapping someone on the shoulder - because messengers are crap.
And so on, and so forth. So basically, all our tools for online-collaboration are not able to adequately replace in-person communication. Something is obviously getting lost.
It's kinda interesting, that Google does not seem interested in figuring out what the problem is, and improving upon their tools. It would seem to me that making Google's online collaboration tools better to overcome those problems and provide a remote work experience that doesn't suffer from all those drawbacks, would be a great business opportunity.
Instead they are basically throwing in the towel and admitting that they are unable to make it work well, right?
The days of being able to live on a mountain or in the woods while drawing an SV (or finance for NYC) salary were numbered for the vast majority.
What's problematic is that rents have already spiked and that's before the Big Return.
We are tiny, and while actively hiring, no intention of getting an office again. Too much to do to waste on management, commute, etc.
That was really the point of my post. Some companies are happy to switch to 3-days in the office, and we should respect them as much as the ones that go full remote.
Most people are not digitally native, and as in my original comment, management layers are especially social. So I'd expect deep work orgs to be more remote-friendly: small technical startups like ours are happy fully remote, and it's an advantage. In contrast, most sales/marketing/large orgs are less remote-friendly: 1+ days in office, bad promotion paths for fully remote, ... . Not inherent and always exceptions, but just about what's typical, natural, & easy.
Not like Google is doing anything innovative and needs rocket scientists.
It seems like the best of both worlds to me. Most days we have maybe 8-12 people in the office, so there's generally enough people to get collaborative office conversations, but not so not so many people that it's constantly noisy. And if the weather is bad, or I wake up late, or I just don't feel like going in, I work from home and I don't have to worry about it.
We're a relatively small team, though, so I don't know how well it scales.
And frankly, given what people I know say about working at google, I don't think they could pay enough to put up with their organisational issues.
We should address it by making the lives of blue collar workers better (higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, high density housing), not by making the lives of white collar workers worse.
The people who would have to make the sacrifice are the capital holders and high tax payers - they certainly don't want to do this (in aggregate of course - even if some individuals would choose such a sacrifice).
Isnt that the govt's problem to tackle not a private corp?
In Big Tech, there are innumerable hard blockers that exist for reasons that almost all parties would think are stupid. Forward progress typically requires consensus or permission from potentially dozens of teams. In many cases the company doesn't view rocking the boat on a profitable product to be beneficial.
To at least some extent, when you are in the office there is at least some push for folks to find a way forward - while remote there is a strong trend towards the "tune out" option.
It just reminds of those articles from the 99s when companies hired people to be in the office right before the dot com bust.
My close friend works remotely at a Finnish company (he is Fin himself), and every Friday at 14:00 they finish working, and have beer drinking session and casual chit-chat over teleconference. Every week. He likes the experience overall.
Of course, not everybody wants nor can drink, but it is some idea to get each other better.
Maybe Google employees are behaving less like "Googlers" at home when priorities shift to family and life. Behavioral changes are harder to enforce remotely when you cannot model cult member's personality by pointing out "ungoogley bahavior" multiple times a day and shaming them in other ways.
Everyone else I suspect is going to adapt to this work. There are people who want to work in a office. People who don't. We will need to find ways to make both successful.
Data point: I work at Google and the amount of control they have exerted over my life is significantly less than any previous job I've had, including random minimum wage jobs in high school.
FAANG companies want high productivity at fairly intellectually challenging work. You get that by treating people like humans, not machines.
Also, tech workers probably have way more autonomy on their schedule than most other industries.
Btw, I am just responding to your comment that "FAANG companies own you life"; not making an argument for remote vs in-person. I personally think that a hybrid model is great, and strongly agree with the currently-top comment by librish[2].
[1] significant control, if not total control
Today I started work at 11 and ended work at 4 because I slept poorly last night. I'm a staff engineer at Google. This "total control" thing hasn't been my experience at all.
One of the few good things to come from this pandemic was showing how much work could be done remotely. I assumed we were going to continue in that direction, but I guess these major tech corps want to go back to the way things were.
4/04 - worker not found
Seriously, it's not going to be a good day for management.
If we've re-learned what delay and jitter to tolerate in this last 10 years thats good, but personally I don't like the de-coherence from asymmetric delay with my companions online, and my own in-head foldback PA
> and my own in-head foldback PA
What is this?
I think you're saying you don't like Zoom, and I'm with you on that.
It's not just zoom. All digital av processing ads delay. Some removes av sync. Decoherence of visual lip sync and sound interferes with any perceptual clues you get looking at people and beyond 50ms we start to detect it.
In head bone conducted audio along with your own ear hears things as you say them. So your own speech is instantaneous unless you incur some DSP delay somehow wearing headphones and it then collides with bone conducted sound. Now in any teleconference system you have a visual of apparently local people and an actual of 200+ms of delay, loss of sync, and a confusing outcome.
I do hate zoom. I hate all of it. I also know it's the way of the future.
then how does a military use radio to communicate between platoons and companies properly?
tactical radio does probably do some lightweight stuff which works in the RF field they have. If its through LEO, or any kind of centrex, its got delay.
I'm not MIL. ask a soldier what it's like.
Some teams might prefer being in office 5 days straight and then 25 days remote in their hometowns.
I don't feel I've been truly appreciated by management, really.
what happened to Google. now they are hiring almost anyone who applies and have stricter processes and serious meetings.
that ceo is destroying Google for good. he wants to blame other people for putting money in the wrong things.
But those magical hallway conversations...
If it's not your cup of tea and you'd rather work remote, you should be able to find work elsewhere and I recommend you do.
About 2 years too late but nothing needs essentiality than a good old economic depression.
People, keep in mind that 100% at home is both bad for your mental health and career, long term.
I think a compromise of a few days at the office and a few at home is both good for employees and employers.
We should all unite to make this happen.
When the team was still intact -- the people who were WFH were the same people who had been in the office together -- things were mostly fine.
Now there's been significant turnover and it feels like we're imploding. Management has no idea how to onboard people remotely; the team culture is completely gone. Communication is horrible. People who used to be dependable are now half-assing things. A 40 hr/wk job has become one where people are working 55, even 60, because the new people can't see us all physically leave the office after 8 hours to be able to trust that yes, really, it's just 40 hours. All of this is a huge personal tragedy for me; you can even see my profile where I've had a number of comments talking about how positive the working environment has been historically. It's all changing though.
It just feels like a disaster. Everything hummed along fine for the first several months, but as churn has happened something has been lost. We never spent time and effort looking at how to become a remote organization. We simply told everyone to WFH.
I've been reading about some of the downsides of fully remote work for over a decade, and I'm just seeing them in spades now. Even teams who were built to be remote from the ground up have (pre-pandemic) write-ups talking about the challenges of communication, team bonding, trust building, and so on.
What I see in my circles is a bunch of people who say how much they love not having to leave the home. What I don't see is a ton of people arguing that it makes their team better. Let me be clear I'm not discounting the value of being able to be at home; I know it's a huge benefit to many parents, for instance, and I know there are some who used to have a 2 hours commute. I'm just saying I haven't actually heard any arguments supporting the idea that it is a net improvement for the team -- and when the team becomes dysfunctional, people's mental well-being and happiness begin to suffer for other reasons.
These are all obviously just personal anecdotes. I would not be surprised, however, to see companies start walking this back slowly over the next few years, especially the non-tech companies. I think we will see increased inefficiencies show up as churn continues, as well as people with even moderate extroversion getting fed up of the isolation. Further, there is a strong tendency for people to want to work with other people "like them," and so I don't see local/regional companies being open to hiring nationwide for very long. Google hiring nationwide is one thing; Regional Health Insurance Corp, with business 100% focused within a half-state-sized region, is something completely different.
I could be completely wrong. I hope we can sort of collectively settle on some sort of moderate state, one where WFH days are liberal, but you don't have organizations of 1000+ people who never physically see each other. For instance, I feel somewhat stuck at my current position because the thought of trying to grow trust with an entire new team of people over calls and internet chat is horrifying to me.
I personally believe working from office brings more productivity than working from home.
It's the same at Google, you can apply to be fully remote.
I personally believe working from office brings out more productivity than working from home.