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Comment by trhoad | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I'd be where I am today if it wasn't for sitting physically next to people and watching what they do, picking up on non-verbal cues etc. I love working from home, but I also have the mentality that we all need to "pay it forward" sometimes, so I tend to spend a couple of days a week in an office with (typically) more junior engineers who may not even have space for a desk in their flat share. The "I'm alright, Jack" WFH crew really get on my nerves - it's a disappointingly selfish mentality.

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We train new devs at our office using screen share and open audio channels. Which is to say there’s ways to do it. It’s a bit disingenuous to brand WFH as self centered and not helpful to new devs.

IMO that's not a good replacement (and I'm definitely in search of one!):

- You lose all asynchronous aspects to work.

- Screensharing is basically one screen at a time and usually "zoomed in", not representing your actual screen. You can't sit side by side and compare laptops. You lose a lot of those subtleties about how you physically do the work.

- Open audio is, I wager, very atypical. For me, it's almost a faux pas.

- This can add up to a lot of lost time for senior devs, so it's going to be avoided. Meaning you'll need to push uphill to make it happen.

It works for my team is all I can say :( and our new devs would leave if we switched to working in an office.

Precisely. People are mimics. Without offices no one knows what to do and how to be successful.

I don't believe all the people who say they are super productive at home because being productive is being a good team member. And remote people aren't good team members. They are absent and aloof and the barrier to interacting with them is higher.

People hate the commute. That's fine. I wish everyone would stop lying that WFH is a pareto improvement. It's not.

Since you're post is light on facts, here's some from my company:

In 2020, we had a record year in both revenue and earnings. That's the bottom line. I won't mention all the KPIs that our IT staff hit since KPIs are all bullshit, but we exceed the previous year by a significant margin. During this year, my team grew by 20%, and hasn't had any turnover.

In 2021, we had yet another record year in both revenue and earnings. Specifically, earnings were up almost 15%, and we're a financial services business, so we didn't get a boom from commodities etc. As with the previous year, we exceed the goals for our KPIs by a substantial margin.

So now in 2022, we're hybrid, though most of my team prefers to work from home. And we're still doing exceedingly well as far as we can be measured, both as a team and a company.

So that's hard data. The company, despite being 100% remote in 2020/2021, has never been more profitable. Ever.

Maybe your team is full of losers who are absent, aloof, and difficult to interact with. Or perhaps it's something else...

Oh those are facts. I thought it was just anecdata.

I started my career at a fully remote job and it was really difficult for quite some time.

Today I see working from home as a tool with a spectrum of useful applications but I really haven’t found a replacement tool to being next to people in the same space.

Although, I am optimistic about these more casual video chat tools that enable spontaneous conversations. However, I haven’t used one in a serious capacity yet.

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