Comment by huynhhacnguyen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huynhhacnguyen | Hacker News Reader

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That setup sounds realistic, and I think the general idea is for the company (and other employees) to give employees what they want and recognize how they want to work. If someone prefers working at the office, it would be terrible to force them to WFH. However, it would also be unreasonable to force other people who enjoy working remotely to come to the office with them.

Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup? And if they're still happy in that case, who are we to say they have to change the way they work? So let people realize that the decide for themselves instead of doing the reasoning and making decisions for them that they may not agree with.

Regarding social interaction, getting surrounded by other people at times is nice, since we're inherently social animals, but why would we utilize work to fill in that need? Getting isolated for an extended period of time would drive me insane, but getting surrounded by other people, who I may not be comfortable with, would also do the same to my mental health.

As for my case, I have found that people can disregard the practices we have developed in the WFH era since they can "communicate faster" now and that has been giving me lots of headaches lately. So when people say they are more efficient at the office, I automatically associate that with the tendency to ignore clear, coherent documents because people think they are "cumbersome".

> I think the general idea is for the company (and other employees) to give employees what they want and recognize how they want to work. If someone prefers working at the office, it would be terrible to force them to WFH.

> Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup?

Generally agreed, but caveats apply here: a lot of folks may prefer to work from home, but don't necessarily prefer the approach that leads to their greatest productivity. Also, most people don't properly account for intangibles, such as the creativity benefits of an environment where people spontaneously interact on a daily basis (it's famously the entire reason the Pixar studio building is designed as it is), or the mentorship of new people. Costs like this may be OK for a year, or three, but will eventually come back to bite you.

Finally, many people have reliably mis-aligned notions of what "productivity" is. For example, when a junior engineer disappears down a dark hole of code, it's usually a bad sign, even though they almost always think they're being very productive (I say this from deep personal experience, having fallen into this same trap many times over). The danger of this one is that even if you're evaluating by "outcome", nobody really knows if you're unproductive because you're drifting, or because you're distracted, or because of something else. And if you're far from the group, it's even harder to tell what might be wrong.

Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem. And oh yeah: haven't you heard that the manager of the Chaos team is talking about eliminating that use-case anyway? Spending too much time there would be toxic for your career!

I haven't found a way to replicate this with zoom.

The point about junior employees is reasonable. In such cases, we may have to find ways to really mentor them, not just to evaluate their performance, so listening and understanding their struggles would be of utmost importance. During a 6-month period when we had to adopt a full WFH mode, I've had to conduct a dozen sessions like that, and had some promising results so far, so progress while small are made. In time, even though they may not be able to improve on all their shortcomings, they start to realize when they need to reach out to other experienced members of the team or when to raise their concerns. Anyway, the point of working remotely is not to eliminate communication but to filter out the necessary from the distracting ones. That being said, a team consisting of mostly freshers will surely fall apart in either a WFH or an office setup.

Stop using zoom to recreate the office.

Juniors aren't going down a darkhole. They are asking on expert forums and trying out different things. It's part of becoming senior. They don't need someone to rescue them.

People interact on a daily basis remotely. It's form is different but it matches the medium.

> Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem.

This sounds like a lack of technical leadership. If the junior's boss is an engineer, and they do their job, then this won't happen. The story reminds me of my first job, which wasn't even remote, where my boss was a non-technical person and I was going down "dark paths" constantly because he couldn't recognize it as he lacked the expertise.

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