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Comment by librish | Hacker News Reader

I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. There are some studies but they use estimations and proxies, carrying the same flaws as doing performance reviews based on lines of code.

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.

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> 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.

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.

To extend this, more useable time with family.

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.

> and therefore early evening bedtimes

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.

This is of course true.

OTOH, WFH people living alone can go many days without any human interaction.

There is no arrangement that is "best" for everyone.

As a counterpoint people with young children seem to spend at least some time each week during work hours taking care of their kids while their partner (whose on maternity leave) is doing something else. Also the constant background noise of kids crying or some kids show playing it pretty annoying.

> 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.

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.

It's all purely anecdotal. I started a new job just when the pandemic hit. It was perfect timing, the lockdown went into effect between my last interview and my first day of work. Like everyone else, the company was not prepared for it. The only advantage they had was that they had a couple of long term contractors from another country.

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.

You know what, I agree. My last place of work we went remote at the start of the pandemic, but I'd already had two years of getting to know my colleagues and our relationships carried on as usual when we started remote working.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

Agreed. I don’t if it’s for everyone, but i love it. No commute, healthier food, access to a bed for a quick nap, and a nice office. 10/10 would do again.

Quick naps are hugely underrated. 20 minutes of sleep in the afternoon and afterwards I could do my job while juggling knives (figuratively).

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.

As someone who recognizes what's best for me may not be best for others, I will comfortably acknowledge some companies should do full RTO while others remain hybrid. If you do a four-square of RTO-or-Hybrid/Remote vs Success-or-Unsuccessful you likely won't reach some magical, simplistic conclusion like "(co)locating results in a (more/less) success". The real world is more varied than that. Enough companies will employ either strategy for workers to have their pick. But we shouldn't take a moral or capitalist ground for suggesting one style is superior. As technologists, we have to be remain sensible enough to recognize the multivariate nature of success.

As soon as they give me a 12sqm private office with a view, I’ll be happy to go back to the office.

As a opposite view:

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

> Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example.

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.

>I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example.

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.

> Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside

Wouldn’t that snow be just as annoying to deal with for getting to work?

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.

> 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.

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've seen people playing video games during work hours for example.

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.

I think the overall theme here shouldn't be "I'm sure we will lose ppl and that's fine".

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.

Most if not all your points are moot if optional WfH is implemented. Which is what all the proponents of WfH want. I don't think anyone want's to force people to work from home. Just give us the options.

>> I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example

I've seen people playing ping pong during work hours in the office. They even have tournaments sometimes.

The horror.

> I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.

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.

You can probably still go back to the office even if your colleagues work from home. And if not, there are probably coworking spaces, or similar. Why must there be a one-size-fits-all situation?

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.

Surely you mean that the flat is for sleeping not living. They're too small for living, because all the living is done at the restaurants, bars, parks, theatres, offices and so on.

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 made that deal then switched jobs and had an hour commute from my townhome.

WfH means not needing to buy for commute. Buy for lifestyle. Still want to live urban? Get a co-working space.

You can always move away from that dense city. With booming property prices you should even profit in case you own the apartment, just sell it.

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.

Yeah i joked with my team the next step will be asynchronous teams where teams could be spread over US and EU etc.

I love my solo lunchbreak walk just to empty my head or just think instead of having to talk or interact with team members.

Next step?

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.

My team is mostly in office, but we do have people in 2 other time zones. Communication happens mostly in slack (even for people in the office - because it would be too loud otherwise - open plan office, gggrr), but also to include people not in the office. I think having remote people in various time zones is fine, as long as we can "get together" once in a while. We do virtual board game night (well, afternoon for most of us) once a week, and of course, do sprint reviews and planning together.

Well that's been going on for a long time now, most big companies have multiple time zone teams.

I agree that working from home is great, and this is really not important, but I have to ask:

> 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?

As someone who has had both cats and dogs and currently has an otherwise well mannered dog who bites when his claws are touched, yes, that is a necessity with some animals.

> 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.

As a young person without children, I much prefer the office - I intentionally live close enough to the office that my commute is a 20 minute walk or a <10 minute bike ride, so my commute is actually pleasant, and not having the forcing function of a commute to get me outside is actually worse for my mental health.

I can still work from home when I have errands to run or medical appointments, but I much prefer being in the office.

I also don't have kids and I don't necessarily prefer the office... but from over a decade now of experience working in remote and hybrid jobs, I've found that there is no substitute for shoving everyone in a room and telling them to figure out the problems with processes. Tons of things just never get resolved when working remotely because it's hard to communicate actual pain points to others because they'll only talk to you via instant messages or in brief video/voice chats. And it's hard to convey how much time people are losing to issues in projects. The issues don't pop up on a day to day basis, but they do pop up in long-tail projects and even in continuing development projects. And the worst is figuring out requirements remotely. When you're in person, you can pester people without their ability to filter you out until they get you the requirements. Remotely, well, they can simply just ignore you (and often do in my experience).

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.

I very much agree and I’m looking for another job because my company is forcing me back for 3/5 days because of this. I’m not going back to that.

Onsite/online split is the worse, unless you work with just a laptop and nothing else then you'd have to have duplicate setups at work/home and at least I'm always leaving things eithere here or there and then missing them.

>My QoL is insanely improved.

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!"

People realized it. It was companies that were resisting it. I remember looking for remote work pre-pandemic and it was WAY harder, now it's more a default.

I'm in Uruguay, South America, so the pandemic has been an incredible boon to me. I even got a remote team management position !

People noticed it, but companies also knew what defense learned: long-term planning efficiency plummets when working remotely. And that goes for whether you're just two different in-office design centers working together, or if the entire team is remote. I'm sure companies are starting to see the decrease in quality and efficiency of project planning and management starting to show now which is why they're looking to return to offices.

I was going to reply to the parent comment but found yours and just wanted to say 100x this! Thank you for capturing it so simply and concisely.

An interesting note on this is the main reason any urban areas are overpriced is because of max desired commute to a high paying job. If more remote options become available for this, we will likely see a decline in pricing for real estate in those areas as well as a decline in gentrification ect.

The only thing that is (kinda) better IRL is impromptu debug sessions, or that initial couple of days when you are bootstrapping a new project, so it's nice to sit with person(s) who are working on this.

Even those are easily matched in quality with zoom/slack and draw on screen features.

> 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.

Just so you know, this is not legal. I hate it.

> Just so you know, this is not legal.

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.

All great for you ... but hey lets think of the little people like the shareholders of google... 257 billion in profit in 2021 (share price closed 2800), from 89 billion in 2019 (share price closed 1350).

Hey look it works for them too, everyone is a winner!

What part of these profits comes from work actually done remotely during the pandemic ? What you are proving is that the Google model of hiring extremely talented devs, paying them handsomely, and asking them to spend days in their campus allowed them to create a company that takes in billion of profits even during a pandemic.

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.

> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.

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".

Luckily, there will be plenty of remote firms to scoop up all the engineers Google is about to hemorrhage.

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! ;-)

But Google let most people who asked to go remote, go remote. And said several times that if you haven’t asked to go remote yet, they’ll give you a 30 day notifications before you need to go back

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.

There is already a huge google engineer hemorrhage. A number of principal engineers and other folks I thought would be google lifers moved to snowflake. I don't expect this to affect Google's ability to continue to grow at 15-20%, though. There will be armies of younger people who still want to jumpstart their career there.

This makes perfect sense, some people will be suited to some days on-site, and some off-site, but there will be others like myself where the commute is now a deal breaker.

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.

Upvote you and more!

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.

Of course they'll lose some people but an office is enough of a competitive advantage to justify it.

Every single thread I see on this has this exact same comment. It's like a bot wrote it. Is it that hard to imagine that an onboarding experience remotely can actually be done well, or that you could actually make friends with people existing solely on zoom? I think people are making that assumption, just because it feels right or maybe because their own org is just throwing juniors by the wayside and hoping covid will end rather than thinking about how to train people electronically from the ground up.

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.

Is it that hard to imagine that an onboarding experience remotely can actually be done well, or that you could actually make friends with people existing solely on zoom?

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.

It's mostly a realisation most organisations are illogical, bloated, developer unfriendly and/or too undocumented.

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.

What if people don't want this tech pseudo-utopia? I understand where you're coming from and definitely agree that commuting is a problem but... we're already on the verge of a population crisis in developed nations, loneliness and alienation are at all time highs. I really really don't think that remote work is the utopia you imagine it to be. It's going to lead to more people who never leave their home or apartment, and maybe go days without interacting with people face to face.

>that you could actually make friends with people existing solely on zoom?

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.

Has anyone had a great onboarding experience remotely? How did it go?

There's a 95% chance that this is a disguised RIF.

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.

You can just fire people. If I had a report that was not meeting expectations I sure as hell wouldn't make "deny their remote work application, hope they are dissatisfied with the office, and wait for them to quit" be my plan.

This is quite sensible comment. I am sure not much liked here.

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.

What is an RIF?

I'm not sure there is good evidence that tech was that productive the past couple of years by any work they were doing. Rather, they were the only game left in town.

> Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote.

This sentence amuses me a bit. Does that also mean that American Democracy has only been proven to work for up to 245 years? :-)

I think so. Systems like remote work, American Democracy are not simple enough to have a scientific proof to provide guarantees. So many factors that might not otherwise have affected the outcomes could affect an outcome in future. So the only fair statements are that remote work has been proven to work for 2 years and american democracy for 200ish years :-) This is quite fascinating

Depending on your perspective, it may have been working for considerably less time than that

I mean.. yes? Except not even that, really, because the actual modern structure of American democracy is really closer to 100-150 years old (ie. somewhere between the country being broken in half and the 17th amendment introducing elected senators). But in the grand scheme of "humans having governments" it's pretty short either way, honestly pretty proportional to 2 years vs. "humans having megacorporations".

Well yes. But in that sense, the Democracy has gone through a full lifecycle of elections, candidates starting, candidates retiring etc etc such that all processes for doing it are tested. So you can have confidence that it can handle a lot of things. But not necessarily ALL possible things so it may well be that something comes along and kills it. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 100000 years. But for now, it seems pretty stable.

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.

The typical tenure for many developers is 2-3 years. 2 years is a long time for a software company.

That really depends on the software company. There are plenty of places where two years as about two releases of the product.

> I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term.

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 joined a new org earlier this year, fully remote, and my last gig was only a week in person before the pandemic started. I have also onboarded half a dozen juniors in the last few months, again all remote. Your comment is completely out of touch.

My company is fully remote, and whilst I'd agree that it's certainly doable to onboard people remotely (we've absolutely done this successfully), I would also say it really depends on the types of people and I suspect possibly the roles as well.

>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.

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.

  > It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person.

Clearly you have no idea how much churn is common in SV. At google after a 2-year tenure your "percent" (what percent of SWE is newer than you) reaches 50%. What personal relationships do all those who were hired remote and never saw the inside of the office have?

That is just insane churn. There has to be so much wasted work when so much project knowledge is dropped.

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.

This is made somewhat misleading by insane growth. Even if there is no churn your percent is still surprisingly high because of new hires that are coming from new headcount.

> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack..

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.

That's great, but I don't want to work with you, because something you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress.

Local vs. global optimization …

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.

Unless it's effecting your performance review or whatever, who cares, honestly? The obsession with efficiency and Taylorism is what's wrong with the current state of affairs in business.

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.

So distracting people who work on something that blocks you is "making progress"? That's rich.

> I have no way of making progress

This is how you make "progress", by disturbing people who are working?

It's probably for the best that we work different places :-)

Well, I don't want to work with you. Let's segregate by company policy and let the market sort out the winners.

>That's great, but I don't want to work with you, because something you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress.

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.

If the situation is that urgent, the whole team better be involved because y'all didn't plan that out correctly.

>you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress

Me more important then you right?

If you're in a position of some power that's maybe what you'd prefer. I'm on the bottom rung and being able to walk up to someone's desk so they can't ignore me would be extremely helpful. Been WFH for a while and it is not uncommon for people to ignore requests, never reply to messages etc.

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'm on the bottom rung and being able to walk up to someone's desk so they can't ignore me would be extremely helpful. Been WFH for a while and it is not uncommon for people to ignore requests, never reply to messages etc.

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.

Your last sentence sparked some reflection for me. I would absolutely teleport somewhere for a team meeting rather than play Zoom Brady Bunch.

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.

>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.

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.

I get the need to have uninterrupted time, but if others are depending on you to get their job done, it's kinda dickish to complain about people being "allowed to disturb you".

When people don't havr access to you they quickly realize that never actually depended on you to get the job done.

People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons.

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.

> People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons.

This.. this is exactly what Google did - everyone had the option to go fully remote.

Huh? From the article it seems that this was something you had to request and get approval for (with 15% denied).

Somewhere else I remember reading this would also cut your salary by 10%.

Software developers are not completely subservient slaves. But some of them are certainly obnoxious prima donnas and like throwing tantrums about their oh so terrible working conditions.

Comparing highly paid office work with slavery is incredibly insulting.

> so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave

Are we still talking about Google?

What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment

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.

> What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility

Neither of which have an appreciable business use in the near to mid term & are therefore totally irrelevant to an employer.

it seem that "completely subservient slave" caused some controversy. it wasn't my intention to demean real slavery, like the factory workers sub-contracted by google and apple.

perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)

"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"

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.

>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.

wut?

2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody within 1min.

The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time. They’re specifying their preference for in-person communication even though it may affect individual productivity.

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.

Same. I can't speak for personal productivity, because I think i'm waaay less productive, but I don't like remote at all. The hard part these days is finding interesting potential employers who aren't trying to lure me in with the remote hook, because it doesn't appeal to me. I was happy with the old norm of on-site, but with the ability to WFH on one-off days if something came up, like expecting a big delivery or something. I didn't like open plan offices, but I liked being in the office.

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.

>> The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time. I think you just hit the nail on the head right there.

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.

Same. I've never had a problem. I typically talk to my team numerous times per day via Zoom, Slack, Phone, etc.

I think the poster has an issue with their company that they are projected onto the industry.

>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.

OP said they prefer to resolve in person rather than Slack/Zoom/etc. They weren't projecting, just expressing a different preference for what they find productive.

> 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

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

> Now with WfH: Let me correct it for you:

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...

> 1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2

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.

> (yay, no more finger smudge marks)

OMG, I've been remote so long I had forgotten about this that literally drove me nuts.

I read these and wonder what folks think about all the distributed teams in companies. Is the view that they are just generally less effective?

> 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.

It really depends how you measure productivity. Does it make the team close their JIRA tickets faster and pump out more lines of code? Probably. But I wouldn't be surprised if it also resulted in more defects, worse designs, more tech debt, and more failed projects.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop someone from writing code.

Yes, I _personally_ believe distributed teams are less effective.

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.

Curious what makes you think distributed teams are less effective? I've personally been much more effective with my output working remotely than I ever was with the noise and distractions of the office. I've seen excellent productivity from my colleagues as well in remote settings, too.

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.

As I indicated, there has been a lot of published research on this specific topic as applied to software engineering teams. I would suggest you start with _Peopleware_ by DeMarco & Lister as a survey.

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.

I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works. To what degree it fits/supports peoples’ subjective state of mind is up for argument, but most professions got by just as they did prior to the pandemic. Heck, I’m a trial attorney and I never thought remote work would be feasible. After doing multiple 3+ day trials entirely by WebEx I never want to go back to a courtroom. I can skip security, use multiple monitors, seldom drive, cook my own lunches, pet my dogs on breaks… everything for my job is easier remotely. It’s a dream come true.

> I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works.

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.

> 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 :)

> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.

Most big tech companies are public. Record earnings and stock prices throughout the pandemic prove more than just not crashing and burning.

A) I think there's a lot of confounders here (like the global pandemic and such) that make it to difficult to infer anything from correlations

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

Many people end up doing remote work in person anyways at sufficiently large companies where in order to get things done they have to get on video call or phone.

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.

Record earnings aren't entirely fake news (people are spending more time online post-pandemic, and that's not going to roll back even if things go fully "back to normal" [1]) but the stock appreciation has a lot to do with the fake-news-ification of the dollar. The CPI has always undercounted inflation, but now the divergence is worsening. Real inflation's probably 11-12% right now.

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.

----

[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.

Record earnings and stock prices are not necessarily due to remote work. They could be despite it.

I hate to be the "correlation is not necessarily causation" guy, but come on!

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.

Hard to draw that conclusion when everyone was forced to go remote… they weren’t competing with non-remote companies.

I don't understand how you could think the rise in stock price is related to anything specific people at Google did vs massive spending increases by companies in google ads since it was one of the only ways to advertise with the lock-downs.

Two years is a short sample for "all society". We've all been in emergency mode. Let's see how it shakes out for a generation.

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.

There may be a confounding factor or two there.

Have you ever walked between buildings to catch a meeting? I remember this from my Google days and I hated it. Ironically at some point they were cool with video calling in from another building!!

Why did you hate it? An excuse to take a walk in Bay Area weather in the middle of the day doesn't seem that bad to me.

I hated it because it took 5-10 minutes. I’d rather use that time working, or meditating, or doing anything else of my choice than having to walk. It’s also pretty messed up when it rains, or is cold, or I have a disability or a foot in a cast. Etc etc.

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

Haha, or video calling from the same building but between floors because rooms are not big enough!

my favorite excuse to stay at my desk and work

It sucks in the Norcal office but if you're in any of the other offices the max distance is not too bad.

laughs in New York City at getting lost in stairwells of the original 111 8th Ave building or Chelsea market building, and soon (not) going between Chelsea and Hudson Square.

Yes, if I'm not colocated with my team then most of the advantages go away.

> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.

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.

> 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

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.

It doesn't matter how many engineers there are as long as the teams are colocated. Yes you will need to have zoom meetings with other teams but interaction within the team can be almost fully in person.

This was almost never my experience.

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.

Sure, as long as $impossible is true, it works well. You can have a front end Javascript team all stuck in Portland, but that falls apart for any advanced skill set. Try convincing the worlds 20 leading experts in X to live in one city.

My experience of returning to the office a few times already? The same old thing.

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...

Note: just an typical enterprise dev take, not in the Bay Area/part of the FAAMNG environment

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.

Our office is 100% hoteling now no fixed seats. No personal stuff unless you want to carry it in everyday you go in. Been a few months since I went in.

That's one of the issues with the idea of flexibility/choice/etc. If most people have different preferences, your's are not necessarily really an option.

At work, it's hybrid, (remote up to 3 days/weeks) and each teams (we are 15 in my team) must vote on a common on-prem day and I get to keep my private office full of legos!

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.

"Productivity trough" god that sounds like absolute hell.

I would make the claim:

"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.

> I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.

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.

If companies are truly serious about inclusion and diversity, then embracing remote is a must! In just a few weeks of the initial pandemic lockdowns, I was really taken aback by how meeting dynamics changed - people less comfortable speaking up in crowded rooms or taking on challenging discussion suddenly found their voice. They were speaking up on video conferencing, in the meeting chats, raising hands and sending emoji reactions.

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.

I have found working remotely 98% of the time during covid has MASSIVELY improved my output.

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)

Yeah well, i don't want to be interrupted by a guy who thinks he can just come over tap me on the shoulder and I have to give him the attention he wants because he's too self-absorbed to understand other people might have a different way of working and have to accommodate to that guy's needs before their own.

"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.

Except you're also affecting the individual productivity of others.

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?

I had a collegue who would literary tap me on the shoulder. It was a loud open office so I had noise cancelling headphones.

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.

A useful tactic in this situation is to not reward the colleague for interrupting you like that.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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"?

I know from my perspective preferring all remote all the time, I often feel like I have to advocate and sell remote work at every opportunity, not because I feel that it is best for everyone but because I feel it is not the default, and that the group that is more in favor of it is the executive and management cast which have more influence over these decisions. So I oversell remote work sometimes because I feel that it is constantly at risk of being taken away from me if I don't advocate for it to the best of my ability. In contrast those that want back in office seem like the deck is stacked in their favor.

For me, I'm just not comfortable sitting in an office. It's cold, the air is dry, the windows are tinted a horrible deep blue and don't let in any natural light. Everybody else is fine with these conditions, but I'm not. There is just no way to have the exact same conditions fit everyone, which is one of the problems with offices - everyone stuck together in the same room with little to no power over their surroundings.

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.

The only people really comfortable in offices are the ones who are in it for the politics. Ditto everything you have said here including the taking a break. I learnt to code in bedroom 20yrs ago, and now im an architect at a global company working fully remote. our company has fully committed with Work Life Balance and now that means fully flexible - if u want to be an office, be in it, if u want to WFH, WFH. We are remote first, so there is always a video call for any meeting.

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'm in a similar situation: the pandemic destroyed my ability to be comfortable in the office.

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.

Some people also don't consider their day job to be their life mission and don't care if an issue is resolved in 5 minutes or 30 minutes if it means saving 1 hour of commute and spending more time with their family / hobbies / life in general.

This productivity fetishisation is so weird

I think such an office environment leads to lower productivity. I too present no evidence for this claim.

Personally I think I’m right! We should do it my way.

It leads to me wanting to kill myself more often and needing to invest more time in therapy, commutes, and recovery. And over half the engineers I've spoken with, who drop their facade, feel the same.

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.

Some people feel exactly the opposite and are happier working in an office than remotely - even if they believe remote work is more productive!

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.

How does not being around other people make you your "most authentic" self? We are only human through others. Every word you've ever spoken, every thought you've ever had, is codified in a language that was created over hundreds of thousands of years by people attempting to communicate. Are you anything without that language? It is a description of how you think.

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.

There are no firm answers. Consider health effects.

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.

There's absolutely nothing stopping those people from choosing to go on daily walks.

But you're wrong.....

I get paired programming is cool, but honestly you can do it perfectly on zoom thanks to screen sharing with multiple participants. Its easier to have their screen on your screen right next to your screen thats on their screen than to huddle together clumsily with two laptops. Sometimes I'll have "office hours" on zoom, where I will just sit in my zoom room and work on my stuff and if people want to hop in and 'tap me on the shoulder' so to speak they can do it, or I could go and hop to someone elses or send a message and see if they are free.

In my experience I find pair programming with collaborative tools like VSCode's "Liveshare" [], paired with audio-only call (Slack huddle, Google meet, what have you), far superior than in person pair programming.

[] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/

I executed an entire project which was pretty much non-stop pair programming over Zoom and Teamviewer. Was the most productive I've ever been on that particular system, and trying to physically be in the same room would've only been a negative.

> you can do it perfectly on zoom

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.

No. I honestly experience relief, because I don't have to care about how my face looks like while being on meeting. I can sit comfortably. I walk around the room. Sometimes I do few push ups or squats. I make myself a coffee.

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.

It's better on zoom because no neck strain trying to look at someone else's screen. And you get your own keyboard.

> 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.

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.

I found some colleagues and subordinates are actually way easier to help with screen sharing than over the shoulder sharing or pairing.

The situation is much more symmetric.

And I'm one of those managers who kept extra mouthwash and altoids at my desk too...

At all the companies I've been at it's be kosher to ignore IMs for several hours if you're working on something.

I certainly like being able to roll out of bed and put on a coffee 10 minutes before starting work, but if I'm being honest with myself, the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.

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.

> the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.

I find the idea that all your regular human interaction comes from people you work with infinitely more dreadful.

People spend over 1/3 of their day working. It's the only regular social interaction a lot of people get outside of their household. They get a lot more irregular social interaction from other things, but nothing quite as regular.

> I certainly like being able to roll out of bed and put on a coffee 10 minutes before starting work

I did this, but now its just slipped into actually just checking slack at 10am then going back to sleep till 11:30.

>idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.

Have you considered bars?

I've personally found with all the time I'm saving commuting I'm able to spend a lot more time with my friends.

  We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.

Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary. What you're describing sounds like a low performance interrupt driven nightmare.

>> Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary.

There's probably more than one variable that went into that phenomenon...

This has been the reality for many of us for many years already.

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.

> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.

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.

My company is going hybrid in the spring (2 days in office, 3 days WFH), which I think is a good approach. There is definitely something to be gained from face to face time with co-workers. There is also something to be said of the improved productivity of working at home and not dealing with a long commute or random distractions.

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)

Do you literally want to be tapped on the shoulder? Because this seems to be an extremely common figure of speech, but literally, I would not enjoy that.

Right?

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.

I mean people normally wave in your line of sight then actually touch you but yes.... It's a super quick way to resolve an issue and get everyone back on track. Especially as I've gotten more and more senior over my career and a lot of your work output is making sure the rest of the team can function effectively.

Only when I was really junior did heads down code all day happen.

I just don't understand why it's physical rather than verbal. You have to talk to solve the problem anyways right? Isn't that the point of being colocated?

Yes if me helping on several different tasks is more beneficial than isolating and working on one.

And I prefer never going into a loud open office again where I am constantly interrupted. I traveled to my departments headquarters for an internal conference and I stayed two days after. The first half day I went into the office before the meeting, I could get nothing done because of all of the noise.

The second day I just worked from the hotel.

Switching cost from constant interruptions is a real phenomenon.

> "I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity"

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.

>>> 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.

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

Last I checked just about every major tech company has been doing just fine this past year. A lot of us won't be returning if required.

For me the mixed model works best, some days at the office, some at home.

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 thing that I find bothersome is wanting to force others to comply with our individual preferences. And it's all sides of everything these days.

That "individual preference" has a massive effect on the team just one remote person is a massive drain on efficiency. You can't frame it as "individual" when work is an inherently collaborative process.

Implying companies that embrace remote work are less collaborative?

Remote and in-office are both pretty inherently social decisions.

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.

I'll be frank. I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers. They need to make friends outside of work if they need socialization time. I may socialize with people from work, but will do it on my own terms. The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency, it's just the polite way of saying they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.

This obvious libertarian slant is drawing a really really really long bow. Silicon Valley big tech employees are furthest away from being “forced” to do anything. There are people at Google who are tasked with making calls relating to worker productivity, and evidently this is one of those calls. Where does this ideology end? What if they tell you what language or tooling to use? If you don’t like your employer telling you what to do, employment probably isn’t for you?

Having worked in large buildings in fortune 500 companies, I love the ability to be able to find a bathroom stall that is unoccupied without having to walk around for 40 minutes.

In my experience productivity is up and people get their work done. What I do see is a lot of extrovert getting depressed because they no longer have access to the smorgasbord of interactions at the office. Certain managers also seem worried by this move to remote, since it has become harder for them to "play the game" of office politics.

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.

>, since it has become harder for them to "play the game" of office politics

I suspect this is the real reason for a push to return to the office.

I’ve onboarded around a couple of companies remotely and it can be done really well, if people put thought and a process into remote onboarding it works really well.

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.

Like most work related policies, I think this falls squarely under “it depends.”

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.

But is a job just an exchange of labor for payment? I view it as so much more. Even if we look at it from a job perspective, its also an opportunity to build personal connections between team members; "I owe you one" - goes a long way. Yes you can absolutely build these personal connections online, and it may be easier for introverted people, but I would say for most people a handshake or a smile passing down the hallway or a 'cool jacket', or someone fixing a bug and rushing to tell their co-workers, and other organic interactions are very hard to replicate online.

My friend, 95% of my coworkers have very little understanding what I do to the point where I could ghost for a week and there’d be probably 80% chance no one would be the wiser. Lots of jobs are like that. Deadline are generally floating, a project can take 30min or 30 days, and micromanaging doesn’t help much if at all. I keep track of what I’m doing on GitHub, make sure my backups are good, and do my thing. They don’t need me there and when I am in the office, very few people need to talk to me lol

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).

Many people have family and friends they'd much rather be around than the people they're forced to be around at work, even if those people are nice and their friends, so they don't need their job to substitute that socialization for them.

I totally get the idea, but when a company can easily fire you for no good reason it's hard to develop any real attachment to a job so that it is something beyond just an exchange of labor for payment.

So don't replicate it online. Having a different venue beyond a job is also an option.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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 want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person

What company did you work for in-person where any issue could be resolved quickly?

It's not about the tech-companies, it's about their employees: many of them simply don't want to come back to the office!

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.

I do wonder what the critical percentage of people refusing to return to the office is for companies to offer remote as standard? I quit my old job over a return to the office policy and fully intend to never return because I deeply despise commuting, open offices, the interruption-driven culture of in-person work, and urban existence in general. I realise I'm probably a bit of an extremist in this respect though, I'd love to see a breakdown of what employees attitudes are globally.

I don't think it needs to be a percentage. Every company has earmarked certain employees as "critical" to their day-to-day functioning. If these start leaving in droves, even if it's only a few, management might turn around pretty quickly.

Companies have been operating remotely and/or distributed for much longer than 2 years. Pretty much every company I worked for from 2010 onwards had at least half the team separate from the "sales office" that owned the relationship. Most often this was having dev teams in South America or Eastern Europe, but pretty frequently we just had multiple offices in the US working together. And frequently with clients that were in a third location. Slack, Zoom, JIRA. That's all you need.

> 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

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.

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?

All of your concerns die away in a hybrid enviroment.

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.

The past two years has not been real remote work. When you work remote for real you get together in the office every month or so and your relationships stay high bandwidth. The past two years has been forced separation. Forced virtual, and NOT remote work.

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.

Personally I'll never go back to the office except for the occasional meeting. The benefit I get to my health and well being from not commuting, is far too great. I also think that offices are just a power trip by the company leaders. They get off by walking through an office full of people. Its just another crappy part of being an employee, suffering through the command and control structure of business.

How can you say they're wrong when that is their experience. I certainly do think working remote has been better for me and for my teams. It is proven in the productivity and happiness of those that I work with.

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.

> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack

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.

I have worked at a couple of FAANG. When I wanted to get things done, I would hide in a meeting room, or I would work from home. The office is the most unproductive environment (at least for me). People will interrupt you all the time, for random things, chit chat, coffee and what not. Having head phones all the time did not make any difference.

I wish companies would understand this.

You're living in the past. The places where people tapped shoulders were the disruptive inefficient places I've worked at. Slack and Zoom have worked great remotely. The only thing I miss is in-room whiteboards, but I'm in the minority. Maybe you haven't worked for well-managed remote companies, and maybe Alphabet isn't one.

> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person

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.

In software Engineering there is no evidence that working from home is less productive. Personally it is quite the opposite with open offices still being the norm in most companies.

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.

It's not that common IME for there to actually be a real debate but rather simply some sort of power play/expression of desire for personal benefit.

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.

as a board member or shareholder I think I would ask the inverse question.

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.

>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.

Not everybody at Google is in one location to begin with.

Your last paragraph sounds a lot like "any problem I may have now or in the future by definition is always more important than whatever the other person is doing at that particular point in time." That may be unintentional, so it's just an observation.

>I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong.

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.

Well, you're certainly free to work the "old way"

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

Survival is enough. I think living is more important than working. Working exists so that you don't die. We should do the work necessary that everyone thrives, otherwise our choices should maximize living.

It's like every study that "proves" that 4 day weeks are better. They never seem to extend any further than the initial honeymoon period before the novelty wears off

My company implemented 36hr weeks (done at noon Friday) about 6mo ago and it continues to be super popular/effective. It’s consistently the benefit we discuss/list as a favorite and our company is onboarding more users than ever (important for our growth).

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.

I am the complete opposite. My work productivity has went way up because I do not have people tapping me on the shoulder. I agree that working remotely isn't for everyone.

I think these generally framed studies don't prove anything, there are so many variables that may vary between projects and individuals; However they like to come up with some number and claim that it is the gospel truth.

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?

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.

Reminds me of feature flags. They seem sub optimal at a code level but highly beneficial at the System level. But why force people one way or the other ? Let them make their choices. Why not give optionality and then optimize. I don’t know much about SV traffic but in Bangalore people were routinely spending 4-5 hours in traffic everyday pre covid. I don’t see how this can be beneficial for anyone at an individual level and for the company as a whole.

Hasn't basically every bit of the industry seen massive growth and profits since the start of COVID?

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.

It's not proven but we'll get there.

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.

I suspect what the VCs say will have an impact too.

I can tell you that remote work sucks. Not for me, personally, because I like it, but: managing team remotely is very difficult. Over the course of 2 years I had at least two people who were clearly fraud - their work performance was abysmal, probably because they were working two jobs at once. It's hard do motivate, and to control people if you never even met them.

If they’ve got Google amenities I can see it but have you seen the side by side desks in open spaces sharing floors with salespeople that reflects most programmers work environments? Some places won’t even provide an ergonomic setup, and they have to compete against a setup developed at home over 2 years that works out much much better.

Yes and other things haven't been proven either...

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...

Yes! You are hinting at something fairly important which is, the whole != sum(parts). Most of these studies show individual productivity is higher when remote. That doesn't mean overall productivity is. Individual productivity only matters in the big picture, if everyone is 100% aligned and focused. Which, will never happen.

I was in the camp of remote is always better even after being aware of 'never say never' and 'no silver bullet'.

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.

Not crashing and burning has a lot to do with development momentum from before the pandemic. It will take all of 22 and ‘23 to be able to compare the output of pre pandemic versions of big tech. This is especially true for hardware companies and products that have annual release cadence.

>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.

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.

Most of the studies I've seen that evaluate productivity are based on surveys given directly to the employees. I imagine workers have a lot of bias when asked to evaluate their own productivity, especially when there are significant personal benefits from working at home.

When someone tapped my shoulder in the office, they often started to whine about their problem without providing any actionable information, wasted a lot of my time this way, then I tell them to send me an email with a description of the problem - that ends up actionable.

Completely disagree. We have proven that a lot of developers are both happier and more productive when working remotely.

The open office is the absolute worst possible environment for being productive. I could probably be more productive in the middle of a highway.

> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.

Google's stock looks the exact opposite of crash and burn, it doubled during these last 2 years of pandemic and remote work.

If you work at Google, even if everyone is "on-site", they're not at your site, and you still need to treat them as if they're remote. Once a company reaches a certain size, and has offices in multiple locations (and timezones, and potentially multiple countries), it's necessary to treat most people as if they're remote, because effectively, they are.

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.

I know that corporate meeting room A/V is often an issue, but Google has pretty much solved that in their own offices. Their internal deployment of Meet works very well.

Genuinely curious - why do you value "overall productivity" so much?

My teams are spread around the world and I’ve seen much better collaboration since Teams and the camera-on-culture became standard. I guess in-person is nice but it geo-restricts your network.

> 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.

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.

> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.

You stated your preferences. There are many (probably most in programming roles) who don't, so they'll go elsewhere.

> I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong.

It's better for me. That's the part that I care about.

Everyone on-site works. Everyone remotely also works to some extent.

What is really hard, is being a remote newcomer to an otherwise mostly on-site company.

I agree on a lot of the things you said but I wonder if they are worth the cost, not just at an individual level but even as a society

>>tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily

Bless your heart.

so you are the kind the interrupt people train of thought to get your stuff done and let them to work til late

But that would only apply to a small company where everyone is working on the same site.

Are you a manager? I swear it’s ONLY managers who say these things.

Spends 3 hours commuting so that someone can tap him on his back.

do you code for living?

"semi"

Remote is neither better nor worse. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt if it is timed wrong.

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.

There's a lot of comments and obviously I've not read all of them, but I find this comment nails it in every paragraph.

Nah, feels more like some /r/im14andthisisdeep sh*t.

> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site

Pretty obvious from the rest of your comment.

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