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Collaborative work done remotely is a skill that can be learned and improved. And yes, maybe some forms of collaborative work are inherently more difficult to do remotely.

But you are ignoring the massive impacts of commuting, being stuck in crappy office buildings and forced to live in an overwhelmingly expensive and chaotic city have on performance. Having spent 17 years as a remote product manager, my anecdata is that eliminating those factors from my life led to dramatically higher performance, and more importantly, a work/life balance that didn't have me quietly resenting my state of employment for the required in-person depredations.

It's important to note the difference between...

...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience...

VS

...a 20+ year veteran with 3 kids and a house in the suburbs with a 2.5hrs of commuting per day and a job that consists entirely of conference calls, emails, and presentations.

Not everyone fits in these two groups, but they are illustrative.

The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.

The second group has usually already baked in their system of organization and discipline and can more easily maintain productivity at home.

Another dimension is how much socialization an employee needs to do their job. Someone in HR might need considerably more face time than a programmer.

> ...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience...

> The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.

The young single employee will probably not afford to live in a big city and have a short commute.

Cities are PACKED with young single people. They (and the poor) are the only ones who didn't move out during the pandemic.

Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers. Trial-and-error is the least desirable way to work. Async and remote is about thinking and writing down before blurting out. To me the latter is more professional way to work, and for the same reason it's more somber.

Couldn't agree more. I recently started at a full remote company, after working at very in-person-centric companies before. I'm astonished at home much genuine discussion takes place on slack and over email. It's so nice to have a physical, searchable record of where various engineers stand on these issues! And it's nice to be able to take my time and read through an argument, instead of making the argument orally and forgetting half of the points by the time we decide on a direction.

If your company stubbornly insists on synchronous video calls for every decision, of course you'll hate remote work. But if your company embraces the async nature of remote work, I think it's possible to be much more productive.

>Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers

And remote-WFH meetings that aren't 1:1, are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep with their mics muted, until their name gets called and you see them suddenly snap back to reality because they were watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast.

I know I'm guilty of that and if you say you aren't, you're lying, like saying you don't masturbate.

> And remote-WFH meetings are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep, watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast.

This is a company policy problem. Remote or in-person is not going to solve that. If your employees are not being engaged in meetings, stop having them.

I'm heavily in favor of remote-WFH who prefers async communication, but this is a multi faceted problem. What do you do when the employees who actually need to be engaged in the problem use WFH to slack off and not prepare for meetings?

This might touch a nerve, but some tech workers are grown up man-children with little to no discipline (I'm sure everyone here knows some) since they got through life by having adults (parents, guardians, teachers, bosses, coaches, mentors) keep them accountable for their work/progress, and once the move form the office to home happened, they stopped doing much work and treated it as a vacation, since they didn't like their job much anyway and they were just there for the paycheck, and as their boss/colleagues couldn't see them slack off the whole day it felt like they weren't accountable to anyone anymore.

I've already seen several people let go due to this.

> slack off and not prepare

Maybe take advantage of the benefits of remote: Have 2 meetings instead of one, with one being a 'pre-meeting' to make sure everyone is prepared, with a few hours between them. Keep them short. Nobody is going to complain that you re holding up the conference room.

>Have 2 meetings instead of one, with one being a 'pre-meeting' to make sure everyone is prepared

So we solve the zoom-meeting fatigue problem by introducing even more meetings and disruptive context switching where the bosses/leads need to take time out of their already busy schedule to act as baby-sitters and check up on their "babies" because some people lack self discipline and can't self organize when someone isn't constantly watching over their shoulder?

Sounds like micromanagement hell, count me out. I don't know any tech company where this is the norm and wouldn't want to be in one, not as a worker, nor as a boss.

Everywhere I worked you were trusted to be accountable for your work and if a higher-up had to keep checking in on you regularly, you were on your way out.

Generally when you're having meetings about meetings, you're crossing the line into a meeting-dominated culture. History and common sense tell us that meetings may be where some decisions are made, but they are not where actual IC work gets done.

> What do you do when the employees who actually need to be engaged in the problem use WFH to slack off and not prepare for meetings?

The same thing you do with workers who use working from an office to slack off and not prepare for meetings?

100% once you get good at async collab, it’s such a better experience.

Offices are dominated by politics and rarely arrive at the right answer. The right answer is almost always found in deep quiet contemplation

You are not alone in believing creative work and collaboration are much more difficult in a remote environment. But yesterday I watched the movie "A dangerous method" about Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Well, at the time, collaboration was via paper mail. And my feeling is that they were more creative than we are. I'm not suggesting to go paper mail, but I couldn't help but observe this fact.

That’s an interesting hypothesis. I could see how paper mail, by virtue of forcing you to put extreme effort into clarity and thoroughness, could spark some novel thinking. On the other hand, as much as I think I work with great people, I doubt they’re all great in the level of those three!

Unfortunately I think remote work is the worst of both worlds by comparison.

IMO collaborating via paper isn't about the actual medium of communication, it's time and freedom. When every reply takes at least a few days to arrive to you you've got enormous space for experimentation, even if only in your own head. Meanwhile in remote work world we're plugged into video conference meetings multiple times a day. There isn't a lot of mental space.

Just refuse the meetings you don't/can't attend.

The meetings overloads are totally unrelated to the fact employees are working on site or remotely. It happens in both models.

> Just refuse the meetings you don't/can't attend.

Very easy to say, very difficult for a great many people to do.

You are comparing synchronous and asynchronous work, not in-person and remote. There's no reason remote work needs to involve multiple meetings a day, just like there's nothing preventing your boss from requiring multiple meetings a day when working in person.

In fact, remote work is usually more asynchronous than in-person when it's a core part of how a company works. Remote-first companies might have people working in 3 timezones with 8 hours between each of them (I've been in this situation), so meetings are a pain in the ass for everyone and everything that can possibly be done via email or other tools, is.

I wonder how people feel about making other aspects of their lives remote. Attending remote conferences? How about remote vacations? Remote schooling for their kids?

Being able to watch conference talks on a livestream without traveling to them has been one of the best parts of the pandemic for me

There have been a number of conferences I've missed this year because they returned to in person. Sorry, I'm in it for a few talks, I'm not uprooting my week to fly to Portland and hunt for accommodations. A big slap in the face when they don't even offer recorded sessions online. Like, if the conference is about sharing knowledge with the world, don't you want to let the world access that knowledge?

A slap in the face?

Do you want them to put out free content that took a lot of money to co-ordinate and produce or do you want them to spend a lot of money setting up a paywall for access that very few people will buy?

academic conferences are not like that

All these conferences have corporate sponsors and paid-for sessions by their employees as sales and recruiting tools. The content should be freely accessible, your ticket buys you renting out the conference space and food.

I bet for most of these conferences, those costs are rounding errors in the grand scheme. When Microsoft has Microsoft build, the cost of the space and food is nothing compared to the return they are going to get from companies who turn around a pour money into azure because of what they demonstrated at the conference. Same with other companies.

The cases where this probably isn't true are going to be the conferences like Debconf or BSDConf. Mind you, these conferences have been hosting all their sessions on youtube for years.

This part has been great. Unfortunately "networking" at remote conferences has been terrible. Most of my conferences are predominantly about networking, so overall it's been a net negative.

I agree about that. I think a nice balance would be localized meetups to watch the conference or an after hours event where you can discuss the content of the talks over a pint or hitting a few golf balls or something.

Online conferences have been a complete bust for me. They're on par with IRC or forums, background noise with bursts of activity.

I loved going to conferences because the setting seems to often attract people that exactly are not the always-on-always-busy people, and you can go from tech talk to chitchatting back to tech talk. Also it was always a good excuse to visit another city and maybe add a day of sightseeing, or just break the habits the of every day work.

I miss in-person conferences and I don't see myself participating in a lot of online ones. You have all the problems of bad cameras, bad microphones, bad remote conferencing software. Totally willing to accept these in order to save 30-90 minutes of commuting every day, and you can get yourself suited in your team... but not willing to accept that for twice a year events that used to be awesome and fun.

Guess I have to clarify that I'm 95% happily WFH since March 2020 and I see no problems, given the right team and circumstances. I'm not one of these super extroverted people, but I do love conferences.

I'm not sure what you mean to achieve by this comment. Do you want to imply that working remotely is the same as "remote vacations", and so people are hypocrits for only wanting one of these but not the other?

But if you are serious about your question, please look at the context of each of these: Vacations are often defined by being in a different place. Working, however, is defined through achieving some result - for IT work, there is no necessary, physical "location" attribute. And if they have different relationships to a physical location, it isn't fair to compare them as if they did.

What’s your point?

Neuromatch is a conference and "summer" online school that was created due to the pandemic. It is spectacular, with thousands of lectures and hours of teaching online. It has now become an organization

> https://neuromatch.io/

For most of what Apple does, I'd expect that the ratio of in-person time to remote time needed is pretty low.

I wonder if an approach like that used by some TV series might work? They have a writer's retreat for each season, where all the people that were going to be writing episodes, the showrunners, and I think the directors would get together for several days and pitch episode ideas to the group. They work out what episodes they were going to do, outlines of the general plot, and which writers and directors would do each episode.

For a tech company maybe have a quarterly retreat that lasts a week or two. Hold it at some good vacation destination (changing each time), and for the well off tech companies maybe even pay for the employee's family to come too. Leave some gaps in the meeting schedules so that the employee will have some time to do vacation-like things with their family while at the retreat.

> In my experience, doing collaborative creative work is dramatically more difficult in a remote environment

Work on improving your ability to do collaborative work remotely? It is the future

I’m doing my best! I’m in a very hybrid environment right now. But even people with a lot of experience find it hard. The O’Reiley book “Discussing Design” (strong recommend, it’s a good book) is about design critique, and it spends some time on how doing critique in hybrid/remote environments is hard. Sometimes things are just… more difficult, and it’s not trivially solvable.

Design work needs a whiteboard but no electronic tools come close.

A laptop camera angled on the whiteboard or whatever scrap of paper the person has on hand? Thats what we've used and its fine for showing drawings in zoom meetings. Making people commute to watch someone draw on a whiteboard seems wasteful.

I have tried whiteboard over zoom. It’s a miserable failure. There isn’t a camera, lighting setup and compression algorithm on earth that will get it right. It just looks like a grainy, pixilated poorly lit mess. And you can’t hand the market to the other people.

And worse you have to schedule it in advance in 30 minute intervals. Bye bye spontaneous creativity. Bye bye innovation.

Programming remote is easy. But there is vastly more to delivering a product than writing code.

Have you tried the virtual whiteboard in conjunction with an iPad and Apple Pencil? Or whatever the Surface equivalent is?

10000 better than a real white board

Nothing beats a real whiteboard for interactive discussion and synergy, IMO.

Progress doesn't come from telling people to "get good". If remote collaboration can be comparable to in-person, we need to prove it.

We have proved it. See last few years.

Or decades, for anyone who has worked for a company with more than one major office.

The argument that you can be successful only by sharing physical space is disproven every day, and has been for a very, very long time.

Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team.

With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom.

I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity.

Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work.

The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.

> Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. > [...] > Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work.

How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades?

Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?

In my workplace, I think it proved the opposite. Sure, the sky didn't fall, but the quality of work certainly went down.

The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer. These were things that happened naturally between engineers in a bull pen or from people walking down the hall to ask a senior engineer interesting questions.

I think remote can work for experts, but if you have a lot of juniors, they simply fail to develop.

Wfh clearly removed some methods of learning.

In my experience it helped companies realize their onboarding sucked in the first place and was relying way too much on oral tradition. They were forced to act on it and implement processes that make them much better than before.

For example it was not uncommon before covid that you'd start in a new company and you either didn't even have a computer ready or were missing lots of accounts to even think about starting and do something. When I switched company a bit less than 1y ago, I received all my equipment one week in advance, got a 3h meeting with HR scheduled on my first day at 9am, a list of mandatory and mostly useful trainings to do that I had to complete in the first month. Those helped me a lot get through the eventual idle time you get when your coworkers cannot dedicate time for you in the first days. I was also assigned an onboarding buddy that I could annoy anytime to help me navigate through anything I didn't know.

Never saw that kind of efficient onboarding before Covid.

I think that is a fair point regarding IT/HR onboarding.

I was thinking more of technical onboarding like project history, context, SOPs, real workflows.

> The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer

I actually took advantage of the tools available to me and improved all of those in my current company.

There are onboarding Git repositories with both information about projects, as well as instructions for getting stuff up and running. IDE run configurations and scrips that prompt for input or give details on first run. CI/CD processes for deployments, monitoring tools that are integrated with the communication apps, useful scripts and utilities where needed.

Of course there's always the possibility for colleagues to just ask questions, but now I can also encourage them to look in the direction of general chat channels so someone else could also help them.

Somehow telling someone to wait for a few hours and getting back to them with some very basic automation wasn't chosen in the past often, even if in those particular cases more time was wasted on doing things manually or poking one's finger at the screen and explaining what to do, when that could have been a few lines of Markdown.

  > Work on improving your ability to do collaborative work remotely? It is the future

sounds like a business opportunity to me!

What about continuing to sketch out on paper or whiteboard and just pointing the webcam at it in the meeting? Works fine for us.

Then how do you hand the marker to someone else?

They start talking and their camera fills my screen.

> In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other).

Getting a graphics tablet has been a pretty good idea in my experience. You get all the benefits of working digitally like layers and non destructive operations (like moving stuff around), which would be a bit more cumbersome otherwise.

Oh course I'd still argue that it's a bit worse for taking really quick notes, though being able to easily save a file or two and put it in Slack or some Wiki for referencing that exact thing months later is pretty cool, without the intermediate step of having to digitize some pictures and do the same work twice.

I do also enjoy being able to share my screen in standup meetings and very quickly showing a few screenshots and graphs, in addition to aggregating them across years for later performance reviews.

In my experience a particular pain point is the latency that you speak of, as well as people not wanting to invest about 50€ in a reasonable mic and possibly a webcam as well.

It just shows when people don't care or don't know about these things, even interviews with government officials in the news for a while here looked like they're 240p or something.

We are talking about a TECHNOLOGY COMPANY that sells the best collaborative software, hardware and philosophy the world has ever seen, and employs thousands of people who all believe in that.

The fact this has not already been used as an example to champion technology to take it to new levels of collaborative effectiveness is an absolutely steaming red flag that Apple has begun "the descent".

As they pointed out in their open letter [0] the last time this was proposed, they don't need in person collaboration every day, or even every week. It's probably only useful about once a month if that.

[0] https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...

Don't be a sucker. Lots of second rate management wants to see butts in seats. That is all.