Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
You don't talk to people aside from at the meetings?
I realise this depends on the company and the person, but to me these kinds of conversations are essential. I find all the interesting stuff actually happens in these incidental conversations!
I guess the real takeaway here is that to be an effective company you need to have an environment where your employees can work well, but different styles work better for different people so you end up having to compromise.
She hadnt actually made any formal announcement. She just liked informal chats with colleagues and assumed all important decisions she made would just spread to everyone through some kind of office osmosis.
She then got annoyed with me that I didn't have enough casual conversations with the team. She wasn't a good manager. But it remains the only time I've been reprimanded for focusing on getting my job done and not chatting enough!
If I get an idea during a meeting, I send it as an email afterwards
I also have a great remote setup at home. A room, with a fast desktop computer and all. Still changing the location few times a week clears my head somehow...
I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment?
Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, however, a lot of employers / teams still have not setup effective means for including and training the less experienced members of the team. I realise that much of this learning is of my own responsibility but I really, really miss spending time with my team and learning from those more experienced than I. I feel as though I have stagnated an awful lot over the last two years and there’s only so far self-learning can take you when software engineering is such a collaborative process.
I’ve had success doing very long screen sharing while someone works normally. Let them forget you are there, in some ways it’s a lighter ask than breathing over their shoulder. Take notes on things which don’t make sense and batch your questions for when they want to take a break from coding (maybe on the phone, they can clean dishes out whatever). If no teammate is willing to do that, you might be seeing cultural problems unrelated to remote - maybe explore other teams at the company.
Yes, three things:
- Learn to write detailed yet succinct prose, and practice this often.
- Learn to unblock yourself, so that asynchronous communication does not become a barrier. Be prepared to dig in at least 1-2 layers of abstraction below where you typically work and spend lots of time researching unfamiliar topics.
- Decide whether you want to be a generalist or a specialist. There is room for both in the industry. If you want to be a generalist, make sure you are getting n years of experience and not one year of experience n times.
These are largely the same actions to take to be a top class engineer in an office too though.
The failure mode of taking this advice is to constantly churn technologies and spend all your time learning superficialities about the new shiny.
An example of getting deeper if you're a Java programmer would be to really learn all the collections available (beyond ArrayList and HashMap) and when to use them. Wider would be to learn and improve on your SQL.
So in-short, yes, self-learning is required (always is, always will be), but if your senior can do some sort of guided self-learning, I'd like to think you would then gain the confidence and be more than capable of picking up the necessary skills, along with the sometimes-serendipity that comes from such paths to discovery.
(sadly, my CEO is does not share this remote work mindset, which is why if anybody is looking for a CTO, please DM me...!)
Bingo. I've been doing the same with new remote hires (especially jr). I try to block off a couple hours every other day that are 'open'. When they send their first few PRs, I'll call them and go over it which inevitable leads to lots of random questions about the code base.
Finally, I make it clear this time is open to them as long as it's needed.
My goal is to replicate the ability for someone to stop by my office. I think so far it's been ok.
I'm sure you are.
If you have time.
Thing is, at most companies, most employees are perpetually swamped. Or at least quite frequently.
I'm a new employee (3 months) at a company. The documentation is quite bad. In other words, it's quite standard compared to all other companies out there. There are some wikis, tutorials, confluence pages, etc, but the links tend to get reused, and in the end you have just a handful of true documentation sources, all being 10 or 15 or 20 years old. My team members are friendly and eager to help. They have all gone through the same pains as me. But they are super busy. Some times, I say "hi" on chat, and tell them I have a question, and sometimes they help me, but some times they tell me "can you write your problem in an email, and I'll take a look by tomorrow". And sometimes they tell me they are super-busy "this week".
In the end, I got the most help from another new joiner, who joined 2 weeks after me. He's helping me, I'm helping him. We really depend on each other. Because of him, I'm probably twice as far as where I'd be without him.
But here's the thing: our company has a 3-day-a-week policy. And his desk is just next to mine. Whenever we are physically next to each other, we interact a lot. But when we communicate on zoom, the interaction goes down maybe by a factor of 10.
I’ve never worked at a company where the programmers were so “busy” they had no time for at least ok documentation and time to train.
It’s simple. You assign an onboarding mentor, and it it one of his deliverables that you get onboarded and proficient in say three to four months.
You'll get more exposure to people, more chances for one-off conversations, your boss will know what you look like and you'll be closer to the action - all important things early in your career.
Once you're an old hat at things, it doesn't matter nearly as much. You know who to reach out to, know how to navigate politics, know what the resources are.
My prediction is we'll see people slowly return unless their company strongly enacts 100% remote (or the role fits remote well - little to no team interaction).
Once a few ambitious people start finding out the project they really wanted to work on went to someone else who has been having lunch with the boss 3 days a week, they'll get in the office too or find another job.
In my experience, this is not correlated with remote or office work in any way. For the most part of my career, spent in the office, I have not received any form of mentorship, even though I would have liked it. Most people I've met don't have the "mentorship gene", so to speak. They don't really care enough to stop what they're doing and share this knowledge with you.
The company I'm currently with is an exception to the general rule I've seen in the industry. Specifically, they put a lot of effort into actively sharing knowledge (as in, you don't have to ask for it, it will be given to you even if you're too shy to say anything). And they're fully remote.
So, to put it another way - if a company doesn't put any effort into training while remote, I find it difficult to believe things are any different in an office. Maybe what you miss is those interactions that are inevitable when you're physically working next to others; maybe it was a way to get "training" by accident. But there's no reason why you can't do the same remotely. You could try pair programming, for example, or you could all be in a Discord channel and just work in the same virtual place.
The unpleasant truth is that mentoring someone is something that works far better in person, where they can learn from you both directly, through explicit tutoring, and indirectly, through experiencing the kind of person you are and how you navigate your environment.
I feel like this is one good reason why a hybrid working approach might end up being the sweet spot between all remote and all in person. A few days a week, a few days a month, or a few weeks a year in the office together to facilitate these kind of activities.
Bing remote, not having direct contacts with your team/department/etc. tends to be demotivating for a lot of recruits.
To your question, what do you want to learn? I can tell you that if you want to broaden out, just do projects in new languages/frameworks. If you want to learn technique, I would suggest you go find quality academic publications on the topics you want. The chances that your teammates are anywhere near as "good" as what you might observe in such books is honestly very low. Most engineers are mediocre, that is just a fact, so your team may not be imparting as much wisdom as you feel it is. I know mine didn't.
So moral of the story is to not be shy any take initiative to reach out. We have chats and emails and internal forums message boards, so use all of them. If you're nice, ppl will be nice to you and help out. I've noticed that most new hires are not comfortable with messaging people they don't know, but this needs to be overcome. Even couple years in I DM people knowing nothing but a keyword, and I get a lot of help, and I get to have a nice chat and bitch about the lack of documentation etc .
You are completely correct, orgs need to do a lot better but I don't have a lot of hope but you can totally take it upon yourself to be more forward. Also bring it up with your manager maybe they can find you a dedicated mentor
What's weird is I've found collaboration works shockingly well remotely. You can jump on a Slack huddle and share your screen or use VSCode LiveShare to pair on hard problem, or a document, and while there's more fiction in drawing, it turns out my whiteboard handwriting is terrible anyway.
The thing is, you have to do this deliberately. You need a culture of teaching or you're going to be bad at teaching, and since it's harder to read the room, your experienced folks and managers might not even realize you feel stuck.
I'd suggest you raise your concerns to the people around you. "I don't feel like I'm learning this way, can we do more pairing or can I join on some of the harder projects" is a fine place to start.
- on your side you need two life, if full-remote, two life means a local, physical social life and a remote social life, without both you'll miss a part of humanity that we need to advance well;
- a room, silent/isolated enough, dedicated just to WFH, enough to been able to talk out loud without earpieces etc, with a good conference speaker (just because a good speaker+a good cam that follow you is too expensive for most);
- on the company side remote work should be organized as remote work, not as "the same but in a virtual office", and that's really hard for most companies;
- time to be dedicated to "coffee machine talking" must be considered, it's needed to be an efficient team.
Generally speaking WFH works after a bit of "team experience", few in-person meetings to getting to know each others a bit, a bit of practice to adjust things etc, it means a slower "personal development" but thanks to more free time and home setup you can grow at your personal peace. Self-learning does not means learn alone, without help, means that you evolve alone following external stimulus, desires, needs, but you still have colleagues to talk to around for suggestions, idea exchanges, support etc.
If that's new for you it's "just" a matter of time to learn a new thing, "just" means not exactly automagic or easy but doable.
So nothing changes between last month and this month, except that managers get peace-of-mind knowing I’m calling in from somewhere on the premises, and I’m back living in a place where I can’t afford a house.
(I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions.)
I hope that I get to work on some actually hard problems at some point in my career. Sounds fun :)
If the justification is meant for the shareholders: why not admit they may be right, and lease a smaller office?
In my experience, this is the closest to just being together in an office without being in an office
People love (my company included) to say office promotes those low-stake spontaneous conversations that result in something positive. Because these spontaneous conversations don't happen remotely, the argument is that then that something positive wouldn't have happened either. That's a false argument though.
Besides, if a company has responsible employees they will think about work, about their tasks. These types of brainstorming and thinking would come up anyway. And if not exactly this specific brainstorm that came from a lunch-topic, another one.
At the end of the day, right now most arguments are emotional arguments to force people into the office. Those findings that something didn't make sense, would happen anyway if people just think about work and do their job, in the comfort of their home, in the Bahamas, or wherever they choose to work.
And don’t get it twisted. I’ve been in these types of meetings. Client meetings, project meetings, etc. It’s always been as an outsider, but they’re all the same. Small talk, people arrive, someone always has to have everyone introduce themselves, then there’s a quasi-presentation/conversation, and eventually everyone leaves. I can’t think of a less efficient means of communicating an idea than that.
But, I do exactly what you do - I prefer something well-written and it gives me time to think about it. As someone talking to a lot of people within the company, I sometimes get asked to go on a client call. I almost always say no. It's not my job to talk to clients (and that means being ready to look good for them) and saying whatever needs to be said in a call doesn't do much that an email can't do. While being there as an "expert" to the client is probably something that customer-facing people want, I have nothing to gain from it.
Useful meetings engage people : a fresh new idea to have everyone go research more, a way to gather the team to focus on tough questions, or to explain a point better than chat messages.
On one project we had dozens(!) of meetings involving 5-10 people to decide what to call an API endpoint that no human being will ever see again after the initial implementation. A nearly cried. I told them that they could literally mash the keyboard and use that, it's fine, just make a decision already. Nope. Got to run it past marketing. Branding (a separate team). Networks. BAU support. Domain hosting team. Architecture team. SecOps. Etc, etc...
The same org then had daily meetings involving 10+ people to decide how to purchase $500 worth of USB security fobs. At one point a project manager broke down in tears and pulled his credit card out out, and offered to just buy it himself if it would make the madness stop. There was a stunned silence, and then somebody raised the point that yes, fine, sure, but then how would warranty returns be handled if he becomes the "supplier"? With a straight face that same guy suggested another meeting to discuss the warranty return issue.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLU-Evdlt-A
He lived under communism, with its dozen+ levels of government bureaucracy, so you can imagine why he thought it was hilarious.
Once I had worked as a consultant for government departments, I suddenly "got" it, and now Yes Minister is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. The bit about hospitals is all too true.
For example, just recently, I had to fill out a stack of paperwork to provision a virtual server for hosting an archived, read-only web site for data that hasn't changed since 2017 and has three (3) users. Literally a stack. As in, a pile. About a hundred pages, or a short novel. That nobody will ever read, except if the time comes to blame me for a shortcoming that they themselves could not have avoided.
I had something similar happen to me when I was also at msft, I volunteered to go to Manila and Tokyo (since no one else wanted to go) and it was the same exact situation except to interface with same redmond team and barely any with the international office.
My lease was expiring, I didn't feel like renewing, I was home searching (wish I just bought something instead, this was 2015, so imagine the prices) and well I spent over 18 months living abroad with more than quarterly tickets home and I was not even mid 20's.
I loved it, but I 100% get it. If I had a family and truly deep network of friends and long term connections there, I would've probably said no, but I wanted to travel. Only downside was, it was Japan in Winter when I arrived. :)
This is even worse at corporate campuses like the Googleplex. It might be a mile walk to go meet someone in person, while that 1 person video conference room is just footsteps away. Sad, but what can you do. (That said, I've been in meetings where I realized the other half of the group was next door, and said "wait, I'll just come over". Sometimes it's just unfortunate incremental iteration on the list of conference rooms and not actually a good reason.)
The only “bad” case I know of is my cousin who moved to Finland from Australia: her teen struggled because high school was impossible to follow. The younger kid didn’t care as much, and otherwise they all had a great time.
I feel like I know plenty of families who have done this.
I have to be able to talk to everyone so my schedule is crazy (but is a schedule, so I’m not up at 2 AM every morning, and do get enough sleep). But I’m the only one.
I have to wonder how long this kind of thing will last in these types of org structures before there's a collective realization that coordinating groups always has a challenging element to it, even in person in a single office location.
With distributed groups, even more "overhead," which Zoom / video calls, I think, have been proven over the last 2+ years to ameliorate to some extent.
These kinds of stories come across as almost validating the critique I've seen going around on various discussion forums - that critique would be that the return to office push when the job doesn't inherently require it is more an artifact of an organizational failure to adapt and/or an attempt to put expensive office spaces to some kind of readily visible use, rather than rational or productive management planning.
But it sucks.
There aren't enough meeting rooms for all the meetings. When I do get a meeting room, I have to wait for the last meeting to wrap up. Or I find out that the camera doesn't work. Or the lighting is off. And it's harder to tell who's talking. And messages in the meeting are truncated on the meeting room screen, so there's kinda a private side channel where only remote workers can participate effectively.
Our office is open plan, so I can hear people on other teams talking and I can't focus as well.
Sometimes the badge readers break and aren't fixed until the next day.
Sometimes there are evacuations.
The mail room is only open 11am-1pm, so if I have lots of meetings I have to wait another 24 hours to get my important parcel.
If they want me to come into the office, they really should make it more productive than working from home.
I still think it's a matter of control that the office is preferred. There's absolutely no reason why software problems can't be solved remotely, especially when half of the industry is outsourced to China or India.
I think the delusion most people tell themselves about in person being better for spontaneous conversations, and better productivity comes down to just wanting human interaction. Which is totally normal. But all of the talk about how being in person is better is just a cope. Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
So you're saying that people who are just more productive and happier working from the office do not exist? I sure feel like I exist..
If your location is causing you to be less productive, then change your location. Go to a coffee shop, or a co-working space. Go to the park. Go anywhere you want.
Which is the office where my coworkers are. It makes working a lot more fun for me.
Anyone who makes a statement like this is naive ay best. Some people thrive on environments with other people around. Some people don't have a home space conducive to working (either lack of space or having other people living with them). Some people work _much_ better in areas of places where they have supervision; that doesn't mean they need to be babysat just that having someone around keepz them in line and performing well.
> Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
For you (and for me). But that doesn't mean it's better for everyone, and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else ("well Fred needs to be in the office and if it doesn't work for Fred it doesn't work for everyone")
I don’t really see how any of this has to do with remote work. Remote doesn’t necessarily mean working from home. It could mean working from a coffee shop, a co-working space, a boat, a beach, a park, a mountain, etc. If someone craves being around people they can solve that pretty easily in a remote environment (granted it’s been more difficult these past two years, ill give you that).
> and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else
Given the proper setup, and support from management, there isn’t an instance where remote work isn’t better. Whatever Fred is missing about an office environment is reproducible in a remote environment. It just takes looking at remote work holistically.
Personally I feel the pandemic has set us back quite a bit. We had companies haphazardly forcing remote work without any sort of strategy at all. This obviously is going to cause some people to think it doesn’t work. The problem isn’t remote work, it’s that your company just sucks very badly at doing it.
It was really, really, really nice.
I've been a diehard work-from-home guy for ages. Why spend perhaps 10+ hours per week commuting? It's a productivity and environmental nightmare.
But... sometimes?
Yeah. It's nice to be in the room with other smart people, solving hard problems. I didn't realize I missed it until I experienced it again. For the first time in years.
I think it also helps team cohesion. We're human beings, not robots. I think my ideal schedule would be "3 days at home, 2 in the office" per week or maybe "one week in the office, two weeks at home."
edit: I'm baffled by the polarized and inflammatory replies to this post. I was just relating a personal experience. I don't have opinions on how others should work. You want to be 100% fully remote forever? Cool. I don't think you're wrong. I'll continue to be remote a majority of the time, myself.
Do you still spend (or, would you like to spend) any time with your teammates? Like several times per year? Or 100% remote?
I’ve noticed this as a very American thing to say on the lines of “I’m super excited to be here” :-)
I understand that people fake "happiness" and "respect" all the time. Yes. It's true. But... you seem to be suggesting that I am faking it here? Why?
My coworkers aren't reading this. They don't know my HN handle. I have never mentioned my employer on HN. What incentive would I have to be false here?
If I am misunderstanding you, please explain.
I commented as a light disagreement with:
- need to use the word “smart people” or even such a need itself
- also possibility of this being a trite - more of an unconscious habit without maybe meaning anything specific about it (again, not faking it) [1]
And more importantly it was joke kind of a retort which I think I should have been clear about. Wasn’t a personal attack in any way.
Edit: [1] e.g. like the zero day old guy saying in his intro, “I’m super excited to join you all super smart people. It’s gonna be fun”.
And as for WFH - god, I just want to go back to office - fully or hybrid!!
On the other hand, making broad proclamations about nationalities based on anecdotes has another name.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The_Lake_Wobegon_...
I'm absolutely dumbfounded at the replies here. I make an offhand remark about my current team being a pleasure to work with, and I have multiple replies suggesting that there is something fishy afoot?
"The Lake Wobegon effect, a natural human tendency
to overestimate one's capabilities"
I've never ever had such absolutely bizarre replies on HN. I can't remember the last time I had such bizarre replies anywhere.
The tell is the callout that this is an "American thing" -- which, well, it is. America has a culture, and especially SF has a culture, that's pretty distinct from elsewhere. Talking up the raw intellect of one's coworkers is a very SF thing, and a very-non-European thing (not to say the person you're responding to is from the EU, I'm sure there's other similar places).
How it reads to an American: "this commenter is psyched to go to work with their colleagues, whose contributions and company they enjoy"
How it (could conceivably) read to someone from a culture very different from SF's: "this commenter is bragging about the IQ of their coworkers relative to everyone else's, which is either uncouth or sycophantic."
Commenting on it is of course ridiculous. Happy your team is good :)
It's hard to wrap my mind around somebody thinking a stranger is "bragging" or "uncouth" or "sycophantic" because they think their team is smart and fun to work with.
But, I understand that it's a thing.
As for smart, aren't most/all engineers "smart?" I hardly thought that calling a group of engineers "smart" would be controversial.
So here comes along this guy that loves going back to the office. Fuck that guy! He must be faking it, he's lying to himself. It's that fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work. It's because of these kind of people that I'm forced to go back! :)
I'm European and I know the fake US thing, but I didn't read that in your post.
I think there was also a misunderstanding. I'm not returning to the office. It was just a one week visit. I am back to working remote. I live 500mi/800km from my office. I will not move there.
fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work
But as a European looking at US culture, there is definitely a difference between this "positive thinking" attitude. I guess that's what the first response to your post was referring to.
I have no opinion on your subjective assessment of your current or prior teams. I'm not sure what about my response merits being called bizarre. If I inadvertently touched a nerve, please understand that it was not my intention.
You’re right. I’ll retake the humour class (skipped that during my UG) and try again later. Failed miserably here it seems. But thanks :)
My work has moved the office to a general hoteling model where the dozen people that need the office every day are always welcome to use it. It’s mostly a ghost town but everyone is happy with how this worked out.
The most common use case is a team coming into the office to see each other for the first time in two years or the first time ever depending on when they started.
We have a rule that all calls are done over Zoom or Meet, so we will have the eventual insane looking situation of the majority of the participants in the same conference room speaking into a laptop.
The company owns several Owl cameras which did a good job pre-pandemic of bridging the gap of seeing who is speaking in a conference room. I’m not sure if all laptops open is a good policy for remotes like myself but I’m sure we’ll figure that out in a few months time.
2. There are companies/work environments/jobs/teams where coworkers are mostly nice, smart and a pleasure to work with. There are also companies/work environments/jobs/teams that suck and filled with political, disgruntled and unhappy employees.
So, the only thing that is universally true is YMMV.
Would I take a job that required me to be in the office every day? Almost definitely not. Would I sacrifice a bit of pay if it meant working for a company local enough that I could go to the office 1-2 days a week? Probably.
That would really be the sweet spot for me. I like working from home a lot, but being a fully remote team wears on you. I've considered taking a part time bartending job just to satisfy the desire to have in-person coworkers a bit of time a week.
I'd really want to see your reasoning...
Surely you're not so surprised to get these responses :)
I had the temerity to suggest there are benefits to face-to-face collaboration, and that meeting with colleagues was a valid reason for asking them to be on site in the office -- and I got raked over the coals as a butts-in-seats management lackey.
https://ez.substack.com/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destr...
The problem is that choices aren't independent. While they're not using this language, you can see that other people are thinking of you as a "scab" for having crossed the "picket line" of returning to the office, and that admitting there is any benefit to being in the office at all will result in their life being made worse. That's why it's so heated.
I wouldn't mind being in the office. I do mind commuting, and I definitely would mind getting COVID as my wife is in the vulnerable category.
This week I was supposed to go, not see my kids in the morning, waste 2 hours in the train, expose myself to Covid, just to sit alone in an office and discuss through Teams because the rest of the team was not even there. What the actual f**. I just couldn't go.
I wrote about this and my feeling is still the same: https://medium.com/management-matters/going-back-to-work-no-...
“My morning routine is well-oiled. I drink a big glass of water, do some exercise, hit the shower, meditate for a few minutes, read a few pages, take some notes, and write a few more paragraphs of my next book.“
What is it for you now? Morning routines are a dream of the past for me.
Whoever says overall productivity increases, is probably talking about very disciplined individuals.
If I had a dollar for every person I've seen randomly browsing Facebook or similar at the office, I wouldn't need to work anymore.
Now I understand that not all people are the same towards work and motivation, and I particularly sympathize with the spouse thing. So I think the broader issue here is management attempting to impose a single One True Way for everybody, which doesn't seem to exist.
I also think that the spouse thing may be somewhat a question of habit. As in, after a while, the spouse may end up appreciating that your being at home doesn't mean you're free to do whatever. But you're still able to go start laundry when taking a five-minute break, which is still extremely valuable and couldn't be done from the office.
Roll in at 9:30 and complain about traffic. Spend until 10 easy getting settled in for the day: making coffee, slowly sifting email, recollecting the weekend with others, bathroom break, etc. Now its the first meeting, totally irrelevant to anything you do so you zone out. Suddenly its lunch time. Another hour goes by. It's 1pm now. Check email. Another meeting. Check instagram. 3:30pm. Let me fire off that one email. Wow look, 4:35pm, better leave now to beat traffic.
I've seen people make respectable careers out of this.
It’s much easier to schmooze in the office than at home but it’s possible at home if you have good relationships with your colleagues, so when you’re not in meetings, slacking or doing slack huddles to talk about your weekend are good for morale and so good for productivity.
Granted this can completely be abused but I think it’s an important distinction.
That's a very simplistic view of productivity. The kind of work most people here are doing cannot be measured in hours. I can be in an office for 10 hours, bash my keyboard, blabber away in meetings and not produce anything useful. Conversely, I could spend the whole day sitting in the garden and come up with an idea to solve a problem that has been plaguing the company for months.
If people are working an hour a day and still getting their job done then great. If they aren't getting anything done but it's not being noticed then that means they never had a job to do anyway. Being remote doesn't change anything.
I feel almost all dev work I do today is bashing my keyboard doing boilerplate garbage and transforming one thing to another and dealing with accidental complexity of the modern 'best practices'.
My work probably can be measured in hours. Good for you if you have something difficult enough to think about, but I am not sure most people have the luxury to work on interesting things.
I finally addressed this by blocking out the hours of 3-5 on my schedule for “personal time” and then working after that. It meant I could push personal chores and errands into that window no matter when requested.
Actually my schedule is so cross time zone that it wouldn’t matter so much but locking in the time helps manage it (I also have time blocked out for truly personal things like reading HN).
it is, but some people who prefer the remote world do so because they don't need nor want to socialize with their coworkers.
[1] I "work" from the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida office. My manager is in Tampla, Florida, and my two other team members are in Reston, Virginia and Seattle, Washington [2]. There's a push from upper management to get people back in the office in May, but there's no way I'm going in. No point to it.
[2] Due to our company being bought out by a larger company, and the rest of my team basically retiring at the end of 2020.
This an area where companies will see problems with reopening offices - the people who aren't there (eg remote hires who work hundreds of miles away, people who choose not to return, people who still need to isolate, etc) will feel far less included, will see that their prospects at the company are worse, and ultimately are much more likely to leave because the social aspect of Slack will die off. Maintaining inclusion in a partially remote company is incredibly hard.
in my experience, you need to be all the way into one camp (remote) or the other (on-site) to reap the full benefits, otherwise you are just getting the downsides of both.
any best practices that others have found for dealing with a distributed, hybrid team? (assuming you don’t have the authority to make everyone onsite/remote)
Now that our HQ has fully opened up and local employees are being asked to come back, how do you deal with the dynamic of up to 50% of your team not being in the same building? What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around.
We are in a place where we get very few of the advantages of in-person collaboration while having to bear all the drawbacks.
Genuinely curious because I’ve yet to encounter this myself - but why would you need a meeting for something like this? Can you not just ask your colleague via slack, teams, etc? Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it? That way there’s no burden of having a meeting just to discuss something?
Sorry if that comes off rude. I’m just genuinely curious what you’d need to meet about.
This is easily provable too. Have a 30 minute call with someone, and then have a 30 minute Slack chat with them. It becomes very clear that Slack doesn't work as well for that sort of comms.
Slack is brilliant for asynchronous stuff, or very short chats, but it doesn't work for longer things.
In what instance is talking about something better (I guess we’d have to define better but just assume better = retention) than reading about something? If I’m reading about it I can always read it again. In a meeting I’m going to forget 90% of it the moment I walk out the door (or end the zoom meeting).
That dynamic is much reduced in a synchronous meeting because everyone’s at the same meeting.
One of my frustrations with working remotely is things that used to be a two-way discussion on a whiteboard or a live demo become a one-way broadcast of something prepared in advance.
There are 'virtual whiteboards', certainly, but none of them are any good.
Like the other commenter, I just like having a place to get work done that isn’t my home. The plus side of an empty office is that I can take Zoom calls at my desk. It does get rather irritating to have to find an empty call room or conference room when others show up.
I would prefer NOT to go into office, but I don’t think it’s totally pointless. Beyond what I mentioned above, it’s great for 1:1’s. Go for a walk with someone, or have a coffee.
My ideal would be to go in when I want, which would probably net out to 1-2x per month.
For me, the act of leaving the office at the end of the day is an effective "off switch" that I don't have while my work station and my gaming station is the same chair in the same room. And the office is an effective procrastination temptation blocker that I don't have when I'm at home and surrounded by all my toys, dirty dishes in the sink, and dirty cloths in the hamper.
WFH is the worst case scenario of "taking work home with you", which really isn't the way I want to live my life.
It never had anything to do with collaboration.
Junk like HN serves well enough for endless procrastination in or out of the office. Having my toys near me has been no worse - if anything my personal projects have suffered because they largely got attention during the commute.
The rest of the time we talk in person and sync up after. We’ve found it quite enjoyable so all of us come in every day.
We’re in HFT so if an action would leave money on the table, we’d prefer the alternative that grabs the cash.
In this case, we started this office because part of the team was remote in SF and expressed an interest in being in one. It costs a lot per year so we didn’t make the decision lightly.
I guess it's more fun banning shit than it is building a world where we don't _need_ to drive _ANY_ car to an office. Or, a world where I can simply get on a trolley/etc to go where I need to.
My job is to build software to make the lives of the people building our product better. I'd prefer myself and my team to be there with them frequently, instead of considering ourselves to be part of some class of special people that have the luxury of working at home most of the time.
That said, I do appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home for house maintenance, deliveries, family stuff, etc.
Beyond all that, going into the office (or factory really) is energizing. Too much time at home and I get reminded of CGP Grey's "spaceship you" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck
there's a balance. I would consider being on site as a special case; do it when needed. This means the workplace needs to plan it out, and know ahead of time when it is going to happen.
So they like to save all the money by utilizing benefits of online resources. Never flying for mid level employees for any face to face meeting, get togethers etc. No tech conferences, no in-person training and so on. At the same time office is best way to collaborate with team distributed over 4 cities. Doing 5 webex sessions in a day apparently require office to do quality work.
Afaik many people who either see best intention or that management is listening their remote work demands are deluding themselves. Management are simply waiting to get great employee churn over so they can announce everyone get back to office if they want to keep their jobs.
Cheers to the facilities person that went around watering all the plants. Has to be awesome having a forty story skyrise to yourself.
(I think there is a security guard and a HVAC engineer that still go on site also - I believe the building has to still be cooled to control mold and keep the pumps and values involved from freezing up).
It would not surprise me if down the road we get some kind of leak or revelation saying that top management of many large corporations colluded to force everyone back into the office. Of course that's just speculation at this point, but it really does feel like there's no good reason to force people back other than justifying their office space expense and a reason for middle management to exist.
The pandemic has let the cat out of the bag in terms of working remotely and being productive. But some c-level executives are stuck in the past and want to return to it.
Yep my team is split between 2 sites and works with teams in various other sites. We may have some meeting rooms set up, but we will still be using video calls predominantly.
I've been in my current position for two years. During that time: I've had 4 managers. The team structure has changed majorly twice (lost about 1/3 of the team because they got reorg'd to a different team/project, then lost 1/2 to posting or leaving the company). We also had app ownership change majorly 3 times.
They're having such a hard time retaining and finding people that they're having to combine teams with 50% losses to make one whole team, start a new office in a new region in the hopes of using a new labor market, start up an offshore team for owning mature products (prod support), and they're finally investigating full/permenant remote jobs to see if they can get more people that way.
Top management considers all workers to be equally capable and replaceable. Management at the lower levels requires people to manage at their location (direct superior always at the same location). With full remote work there is no reason to employ people in locations with non-minimal wages. If there is no employees in a location there is no manager managing them either.
It is not managers belief to be able to more easily watch what their employees are doing in a real office. It is just a matter of securing their own job.
I think a lot of the forced-hybrid environments are a result of companies waiting for their commercial leases to die.
That said, I remember sitting on a lot of conference calls in the office pre-pandemmy, so... isn't video better?
I think a lot of the forced-hybrid environments are a result of companies waiting for their commercial leases to die.
And even if in some workplaces are rooms for phone and now Zoom calls, that too many people use now Zoom calls make them insufficient.
There is only one reason to have people in the office, that is so that you can observe them (and own their soul). If certain people have a need for face to face interaction, that is an exception not the rule.
Unless there's an office pizza party or a real scheduled brainstorming session, it's not worth physically being there.