Remote startups will win the war for top talent
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For me, the primary one is that it's _way_ too easy for everyone to get deeply frustrated with each other. Social interactions and chit-chat lead to a better understanding of people and a more accurate mental model of what people actually mean when they say something.
Written text is the majority of remote communication. That's both good and bad. It's a much lower bandwidth form of communication than face-to-face in terms of being able to pick up intent and understand the context of someone's mood/etc in what they're saying. The same goes of communication over webcam. It's higher bandwidth than written text, but still lower than in-person.
When you're fully remote, you'll much more commonly misinterpret folks intent. You'll also more commonly have your intent misinterpreted.
At least in my experience, this tends to lead to a much higher rate of frustration and more frequent extreme misbehavior when everyone is remote.
I don't have an easy solution. Occasional in person meetings help a lot, but they're hard to do well, and easy to do poorly. Having 200 people in the same room for 2 days doesn't really help the situation, as there's zero time to get to know anyone.
I've found that even just turning my camera on in Zoom meetings makes a difference. Joining the standup call a little early, having "face to face" chitchat, builds up a small buffer of rapport that significantly improves empathy and perceived intent
Especially if you need to have a conversation where there might be some existing friction/tension/frustration, doing it over video instead of text or just audio will hugely increase the good-faith nature of the conversation
And of course, the occasional in-person hangout helps too, if you happen to be in the same city as your coworkers. What's important is that you each form an impression of the other as a human being, and not just as a faceless mechanism in the org that may be helping you or getting in your way at a given moment
I am in a hybrid situation now, so I try to take different team members out for coffee and give them some one on one face time when they are in the office on the same day me.
On my team we have a weekly 30-minute meeting for non-work-related updates. A chance to talk about whatever you did in the past week outside of work, or about anything else that currently interests you. It typically prompts a lot of follow-on conversations in Slack afterwards.
It might be nicer if this happened organically, and didn't require an explicitly scheduled meeting. But we consider it important enough that we carve out the time to make it clear that it's a team norm.
I still find it hard to build new connections over Zoom but I find that by putting effort into being present over Zoom that I connect much better and others are encouraged to have smalltalk with me before/after meetings.
I had the same experience in an office setting when working as an internal consultant at a big corporation. I'd often be helping teams on the other side of the globe on short-lived projects.
When you don't ever meet the people you're working with face to face, it's just easier to misinterpret what people say.
If those people could sit next to you, do you think your collaboration would be higher?
Remote work is not a panacea, there are tradeoffs. Investing more effort into building remote relationships is definitely worth working at home and not having to commute.
Excellent insight.
People get themselves into the dardnest trouble over a work Slack thread they just couldn’t drop.
It's the majority of office comms too...
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Isn't RTO pretty easy?
Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lots more that work remotely. The in office staff contribute more ideas, work, fixes, and functional software than the remote teams by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system. It's simply easier to hash out hard problems in person that it is on a remote team, and the context is key. You have all the little asides, ah ha's! and comments collected up that provide a better picture than any remote team can get unless they have their headsets on the whole time.
Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially.
What this has allowed us to do is beat out other development teams, both inside and outside the company. Hasn't gone unnoticed - we also get the most important projects and are paid the most. When it matters, the in-house people get the work.
YMMV, of course, this is just one place, but I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren't interested in their success as making their work life easier.
Also, bit of indication in “hard numbers out of project mgmt system” and “all the little asides, ahas…” coupled with “unless they have their headsets on the whole time” that your company may have optimized for local ideas and local capture.
Consider (a) ensuring project and idea capture tools are “remote first” oriented (tools that work remotely work just fine in office, inverse is not true), such as dropping whiteboards and using digital collaborative tools for whiteboarding even locally, e.g. …
- Excalidraw+
- Microsoft Whiteboard
- Samsung Flip2
- Microsoft Surface Hub
- https://www.remotion.com/
This was the single most important contributor to the culture change at firms I’ve helped go fully remote since the 90s. The nanosecond something elevates from chit chat into an action, everyone in the company needs to gate-keep: “Could you please share/ask/direct that in [the digital place]?”
The second most important was ensuring [the digital place] is frictionless, using social media habit apps as benchmarks, not, say, Jira.
In my experience, after initial chaos, then learning, then crossing a tipping point, productivity went through the roof, and following that, these firms absolutely spanked on-prem only firms at caliber of talent and pace of delivery of outcomes into client hands.
> I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren’t interested in their success
* There it is.
On the other hand, a lot of collocated teams, especially at larger companies, have bad enough environments that they're essentially remote workers as far as communication goes. I've visited plenty of teams in open-office environments where all the coders are packed in, hunched over wearing headphones all day, while random people blather loudly nearby about things unrelated to the coding, and key people for their project are scattered across the building. Or farther.
If I could have a properly collocated team with dedicated space and the correct layout for collaboration, I'd love that. But I'd still prefer all-remote over the average BigCo setup, where space is set up for the convenience of managers and office planners, not the actual work.
This is a brilliant term. I never heard it before this post. (Thank you!) My whole career is working next to traders and sales at global investment banks.
Everytime I hear someone say: "Sales & traders can all work from home / [low cost] country X,Y,Z", I cringe. They fundamentally do not understand "ambient information".
It was a tricolor LED connected to the pager network that came out circa 20 years ago. By default you could hook it up to the weather, stock prices, and the like. What I hooked it up to was early Continuous Integration servers, so that everybody could see if the build was broken. It made a huge difference for some teams, where the build went from usually broken to usually green. Sometimes because people changed on their own, sometimes because executives suddenly had a thing they could understand about the room full of people typing furiously.
And yes, totally agreed. The best work I've ever done was in close contact with the people I'm serving. It can make a huge difference.
However, if you are working on credit card payment settlement, you do not give a sh-t about sales team golf scores / "amazing" drinking stories. It is a bother / nuisance. But maybe sitting next to the account team makes good sense!
We've seen issues and topics that we decide "Let's work this one out when we're in the office." We schedule it, and what might take several video conferences and endless chats ... suddenly takes one meeting and the solution solves a bunch of other things.
I agree everyone should find their best way, but for us sometimes there's more of a free flow of information, everyone is engaged on that one issue more in person than when remote. When it comes to some topics it's just much faster and the result is more complete in person.
It does make it sorta an event when everyone is all in, exciting, and such.
It seems just as likely to me that the most dedicated, hard working employees are the ones willing to commute in to the office in the first place, and they would get more work done than others regardless of where they work.
It might just be their home isn't so nice. Ages before covid I worked at a company that had an office but was mostly remote.
There was a guy who was going to the office because his wife was unemployed and they lived next to his mother in law, so he wanted some calm.
I'd go because the heating at home sucked so on cold days it was better to be in the office :D
“Top talent” getting diluted by remote-ness may be not worth it. Hiring local to work in-person may be better if the less talented team can really communicate and get shit done.
I do think it's a false dichotomy though to compare "top talent diluted by remote-ness" with "less talented in-person team that can communicate well". I agree with that direct comparison, but it's not the only option. Remote can be done well. With proper investment in remote, a team can have "top talent that can communicate well" instead of picking one of two bad options.
On prem might get the bulk of the credit though - politics are ... evolving with remote workers.
But your experience doesn't match mine at all.
95% of cases where I see people complaining about remote work is because the company basically changed nothing about how they operate day to day when Covid started, they are a normal company trying to work remotely. Obviously that is going to fail miserably. Hybrid model is the worst of both worlds
I like remote because I don’t want to be all in on work. I don’t care enough about my company to even write up an expensive bug I noticed. I just let it waste my org’s money.
I can see those who actually give a shit being more likely to go into the office.
I don’t think your remote workers would be more productive in office. I wouldn’t be. I just stare dead between the eyes in the same meetings I just nap during when I am remote. Rather, highly productive and engaged people are just less likely to want remote.
Working remote requires a number of changes, and it may even require training that your company isn't providing, because as you clearly have guessed, in-person interaction is more natural.
But how this looks to me, is that your company is doing a great disservice to the remote workers by not provided them with the tools and comms to be fully productive. You are letting them sort it out for themselves when they may not know how to, which is... bad.
Claiming you're doing better because "monkey brains" is just silly. Many things take practice, including clear communication over video and text.
Most office workers work 2-3 hours a day max. The 8 hour workday is is a relic from factory work.
If I was to go back to the office, this is what my day would look like:
* Show up at the office at 10:30, just in time for the meeting
* Put in a couple hours of solid work, finishing whatever story I planned to complete today
* Go home at 1:30 to smoke weed and play videogames
That's what I do now, except I don't have to commute. What's going to change to make office work more appealing?
That might sound like a case for being remote, but for me, it's usually been much more effective in the office because that single hour of overlap was most of the day. Yes, some of it is wasted time, but I did and still do build great working and personal relationships with my peers in that "wasted" time that I still cherish.
Headphones on meant leave me alone in every shop I've been to. I also, personally, rarely have extended periods of just coding. The value I add is almost exclusively helping other people work through problems at this stage in my career. "Distractions" are "the job" for many of us.
Seems like this would drastically affect motivation and therefore output. Sounds your company may have a self fulfilling prophecy about remote work being less productive.
the kind of work those systems track is assembly line tasks. They can’t measure alone the strategic impact employees have on a company.
These are very specific numbers - how do you measure this?
This point often seems to get missed. If you're at a large company, you're often working with people on different floors, buildings, offices, countries. I want to be co-located with the people I work with often just isn't an option at larger companies even if many people come into an office.
- Terrible written documentation
- Major and minor decisions not reaching everyone affected, resulting in a lot of people not knowing what's going on
- Perception of decisions getting made in secret or without transparency
- Other non-verbal communication channels get neglected, e.g. the only way to get in touch with Director ABC is to physically accost him in the hall
- Remote workers are frequently forgotten or treated as second class citizens
- Favorable treatment for in-groups and cliques, based on extroversion rather than job performance
These all seem like objectively bad problems for a business, and I'd argue many of them stem directly from overreliance on face-to-face.
I don't think this is a black-and-white issue. Sometimes a "spontaneous hallway conversation" clarifies in 5 min what a 30 min Zoom call would otherwise do.
3 of my coworkers and I coordinated a few months back to go in on a single day together. I was reading over a doc a coworker wrote and had a question about a portion and found him grabbing coffee and coming back to his desk. I just went over and asked him the question, he clarified, then we both sat back at our desks and got back to work; I was unblocked. If we were remote, I'd DM him and then stop reviewing the doc until I got an answer. I often context switch out of work I need clarification on since I have no guarantee that the coworker is even ready to help. Having state (in a meeting, not at your desk, at your desk, chatting with a coworker, etc) on coworker availability is very useful for efficiently working.
> Perception of decisions getting made in secret or without transparency
I'd argue that this is worse remote. When remote, a lead and a manager get into a VC call and hash out the team roadmap without any input from the team. They can reason it's a lot easier on availability and less disruptive on the rest of the team to make the decision. While the lead and manager offer the plan to the team for comment, the team feels demotivated because they have to read and push back rather than sit at the table for comment. In office, the lead and manager can discuss things at desks and interested employees can overhear and interject. It's not perfect of course (favors those around for the conversation), but it's better than the Zoom world.
I think hybrid remote-first work is the best of both options but I think most companies going fully remote will not go hybrid because the cost savings of doing everything online is just so much higher. As you noted, offline-first companies will treat remote workers and second-class citizens.
But today even if I were in my local office, almost no one I work with would be in that office even if they weren't WFH anyway.
Then you couple that with the fact companies love one-size-fits-all solutions.
In the office people don't mind tapping their neighbor on the shoulder 10 times a day to ask how to find/do something. On Slack they feel self conscious about zooming/slacking with someone 10 times in 1 day with questions. It's more about being in your head and feeling like a nuisance online vs. in office, than office being better than remote
This also makes our office days pretty dead in terms of actual progress on projects. Our stronger engineers work much more efficiently at home
That depends on how you measure efficiency. On many teams, the strongest engineers maximize their impact by helping other people.
Do really large companies tend to forgo locating related teams closely together?
The video conference room environment is so unpleasant (always craning my neck; crappy video quality; speakers with poor balance that frequently hurt my ears; awful reflections on TVs; the perennial "hoverer" outside the meeting doors for the last 5-10 minutes of the meeting) that I'd just rather work at home if even one or two hours a week are online via video.
Yes I do. A lot of people seem to think that if everyone went into an office, they'd all be working with a co-located team sitting a stone's throw from each other. This may be true with startups. It's often not the case (with local small team exceptions) for larger companies--especially those which already had practices of being fairly flexible about location for a lot of hires.
I don't do creative work or programming, as I work in HelpDesk, so I don't see the reason for going back to my bunker. It seems most of my coworkers have the same beliefs because as my company started threatening with going back to the office previous to thos summer, people left, and many became pretty hostile.
In my case it takes a <10 minute walk to get to my office, I don't have to spend too much time nor money, but at home I have a cushy place, two large monitors, and over everything else, I hear birds and see nature while at work.
I have to take some mandated breaks (collective agreement). In my office it was dead time, I couldn't do anything interesting. At home I wake up and do some house chores.
When my journey ends, I just get up, pack some stuff and go to the beach or go meet friends. I have way more energy than when I worked at the office.
I'm clearly not "top talent" but having tried this, I can't just forget it.
Companies say there's a lot of intangible benefits while working at the office, and I say there is a lot of intangible benefits while working at home, at least for me. I didn't even know I was to have that much energy and do so much stuff instead of laying in the sofa because I was tired.
Hybrid models will always struggle and 1/3/1 is going to be probably the best you can do.
My company is fully remote, we embraced the GitLab model and are EXTREMELY collaborative. Every meeting has a note taker, we use Figma and Figjam for white boarding with incredible efficacy. We essentially have near the same level of documentation as a major enterprise with only 30 staff.
Socializing is encouraged via huddles in Slack and I can communicate with anyone in the company if I need to. Collaboration and new ideas disseminate differently online, but as a leader I have made it a goal to make sure we are not putting barriers up online, and actively encourage 'water cooler' talk.
Meanwhile we have had no problem sourcing candidates since we can pull from anywhere in the world, we have some incredible people all over the world that we would not have gotten otherwise.
Have you considered that your company is self-selecting for those who flourish in remote, but that those whose personalities differ are self-selecting for working in an office environment?
It's OK for there to not be a one size fits all solution.
During my somewhat passive job search, I've only been considering companies that have an office local to me (i.e. Central London). I've been working remotely since the start of the pandemic, and I simply don't like it. Sure, I don't miss having to commute or offices with bad noise pollution controls, but I miss everything else.
Most of all, I miss being in town at the end of the day and being able to pop to the pub with colleagues if one of us needs to vent, or go to a salsa party nearby. I basically don't go out anymore; yes, this is a me thing, but it's also always been a me thing. I've always found it easier to have a social life on weeknights rather than weekends because I struggle to overcome the inertia of being at home.
This preference means some very exciting companies are effectively off-limits to me, and that's hugely frustrating; but I also know what I need.
Funny, because before COVID, like 90% of the IT companies out there were using a "one-size fits all" solution (i.e., 100% office-based work).
Remote doesn't specify where you work, though. In my 20 years of working remotely, I've worked from home, from cars, hotels, cafes, offices, out in the middle of a field, you name it I've probably done it. 100% remote working conditions can mean working in an office environment every single day, if that's your preference. Remote is a euphemism for "work wherever you please".
The actual differentiation here is whether or not an employer dictates a working location. Are you, perhaps, suggesting that there is strong overlap between those who prefer working in offices (which does no preclude 100% remote) and having a controlling power dictate how they live?
No thanks. I get paid the same if it takes me 4 hours or 8 hours to complete my work. I'll take 4 hours and spend the rest of the day doing what I want.
That’s the nonsensical aspect of all this. Everyone mentioning that the office was a key community or some higher ideal to spend time on for meaning forget that you can have that socialization and significantly more intrinsically valuable meaning-making with (a) family, (b) friends outside of work, (c) community involvement. All of which don’t require commutes, work lunches, losing family time for something that doesn’t matter in the long run. Instead, let’s hang out and support the extroverts who somehow don’t know how to make friends outside of those they helped launch a product with? Totally nonsensical.
Edit: I’m at a negative downvote and dropping fast, so fwiw one day everyone gets families of some kind and also stops working, even if that’s not understood now. what connections are left over after work stops are what will power you, and most people understand that eventually.
As an introvert, I welcome the reversal. Deal with it.
Yes and no.
There's the people personalities that affect the end result, but sometimes the company is the one setting hurdles that make everything hard.
"There's no free interaction, like at the coffee machine." but don't offer spaces (or time) for people to relax online and/or connect.
"You don't have the immediate help of others that are around you." others that can distract you sometimes, and meanwhile you want to even deduct the bathroom break's time from remote workers.
"I need some socialization." do your time, then find another outlet of socialization.
Some companies are not embracing remote working. Some might have valid reasons (most of the staff is local and we want the ones that could remote to have heavy interaction) or non-valid ones (I'm the boss and I want to see everyone at the office). Of course, for these companies, remote will be hard. They are making it so.
I see older people in management who can't deal with remote and younger people who are eager to work from wherever.
We haven't tried hybrid but I don't really see the benefits of it. One big advantage of remote is being able to hire people in other locations. The only way I could see hybrid being useful would be to provide a work space for people who want to work away from home (i.e., for variety or because their house isn't conducive to it), and let those who prefer to work from home (i.e., parents with young kids who need a more flex schedule) do so without set office day requirements (or very few).
I had such a hard time focusing in the office that whenever I'd finally achieve momentum, somebody stopping by to chat was bittersweet--it might be another several hours before I manage to reacquire that state. Usually I'd just waste time until everybody went home and then do my actual job in an empty office. I grew to resent them a teensy bit because their social habits had me "working" 12 hour days.
Being remote, we use a slack app called donut (no affiliation, I just like it). It prompts me every week:
> You've been randomly paired with so-and-so, here are several times that you're both available
We pick one and have a 30 minute chat. Explicitly making time for social stuff really changes the equation. I'm working only 8 hrs a day for the first time since I started working a salaried job.
How do you handle taxes ?
For example in Europe a German company can't hire a French dev if the german company doesn't have a legal entity in France, it quickly gets out of control both in term of paperwork and cost. The dev can't be a freelancer because a freelancer with a full time, fixed hours, single customer is illegal in many places
Also let's say you have an American company with 200 german employees but no office on german soil, does that mean they don't pay any local tax because technically they don't operate their business in the country ?
I feel like a lot of loopholes which were seldom used will promptly be closed once they become widely used
When working from home you can decide to meet up, which does happen, but since it involves getting your calendars together, it hardly ever happens.
I know lots of people want to keep business and personal split in their lives, and I respect that. For me though; I decided that since I spend 40 hours a week working, I better do this with people I like and enjoy spending time with.
I enjoy remote, but cannot agree with your comment. Socializing simply doesn't occur in Slack, for me. Communication, as you put it, does - but not the genuine socialization that I've come to miss.
If you'd like to understand, just go back and reread what you wrote. You described a lot of novel, innovative practices that require people to learn new habits and examine why their mostly subconscious, lifelong social habits aren't working for them anymore. That's hard! Hard enough that I'd guess you're in the top 1% of remote workplaces as far as collaboration goes.
That you've managed to succeed at a small, all-remote place is impressive. But imagine trying to go back to your bigco and switch everybody over. That sounds extremely hard to me.
All the trustworthy people i know from work were people i socialized with in person, at the office, around coffe-breaks, post-work drinks, etc. I don't see something similar happening over Zoom meetings and my guess is that 95% of people are like me in that regards.
Now, this may not be a big deal over the short-term but I believe that an actual company culture need actual tangible human bonds over the long-term.
Now, I rather go see my friends in person than setup a Zoom meeting and be all virtually together. I rather go see my father and talk to him over WhatsApp. I rather go to Paris than watching a video of paris from my room. I no doubt doubt that socializing is much, much better in person.
- Chat workspaces like Slack requires very different etiquette
- Zoom and video meetings requries a different etiquette. You can't use body language to signal when you want to speak. On the other hand, the chat backchannel enables interactions you can't do with in-person meetings.
- Writing and speaking engages different areas of the brain. Someone who is good at speaking is not necessarily be as good as writing, and vice versa
- In-person work favors good speakers, and remote work favors good writers
- The intuitions for how much to communicate is different between in-person and on remote. If you are used to in-person work, remote work requires a communication style that will feel like overcommunication, but it is not.
- Socialization on remote, distributed teams are less spontaneous and requires more concious effort
- When there's an in-person gathering with some remote people, remote-people tend to get forgotten. Decisions and ideas favor the people in-person.
- When I joined my first distributed team (that's not as a solo contractor), the engineering manager made sure the team still got together periodically, because there are some things you can do in-person that is not so easy with remote. This can include going to conferences. It is far easier to get to know someone as a person (and not as their role) in-person than it is by remote
- Some line of work favors remote than in-person, and vice versa. Software engineering can favor remote ... but not as much for creatives (like game studios) or sales.
The company I work for now organically grew into a distributed company. It did not start out that way, and the fully remote guy who came in before me pioneered the practices, equipment, to make that happen. (E.g. company all hand meetings were remote Zoom even though most of the people worked in the same office). The engineering team embraced remote-first, starting with the remote, morning standup. Some of the sales team in the field would remote in from time to time. When the lockdown came, the sales team got hit the hardest. They made it work, pioneered things like social time, and ended up embracing it when they hired remote from all around the country. Remote became part of the company culture.
I can't help but think the reason companies like Apple want employees to return to office is so that managers can "be more on top of them" (aka track their producitivty).
It's interesting to see that at some companies, water cooler talk is encouraged. I used to work for a small mom + pop business where the owner saw every second we weren't working 8 hours a day as a wasted opportunity productivity wise for his wage dollar he was paying us.
That's an extreme example but, where does the answer typically all? How much water cooler talk is encouraged, allowed, monitored, tracked? It's not hard to spend a few hours a day shooting the sh*t on Slack (or get together and go to a 1-2 hour lunch with everybody in office who can't really concentrate/is looking to do anything to pass time)... I don't know if management would like that?
Absolutely agree with productivity, partially agree with socializing. Socializing is still possible, but you lose out on things like impromptu conversations at the coffee maker and such. Also, if there's a big meeting, there can be one speaker at a time. In person, 60 people can be having 30 conversations in smaller groups. It's hard to pull off virtually.
The latter point is something the company I work for has been experimenting with lately (not development wise, just how we can emulate that within). Tandem offers an "overhear" option in their Tables feature, which is alright. More distracting for some reason than in real life though. Break out rooms are okay, but have more of a barrier than turning to your left.
Overall though, remote work rules and I don't think I'll ever go back.
For me, there is something about the physical presence of other people that slows me down (in a good way). With online interaction, I too find myself impatient, and eager to bring whatever I'm doing to a conclusion.
For example, around 20 years, I played a lot of go (the board game), both in-person and online. Online, I found myself playing impatiently and recklessly, especially if I was in the lead. Whereas in person it felt natural to take a long time, and I played better games and enjoyed myself much more in person.
If productivity and socializing works for you remotely, wonderful! Far be it from me to piss on your parade. But I for one found the obstacles to be quite serious.
This doesn't mean automatically that I wouldn't run a company completely remote. Just wanted to chime in why socializing might be difficult for some in a remote environment.
I've been remote for 14 years and I would never go back to the office. I have plenty of calls, direct messages and group messages for communicating with my colleagues, former colleagues, friends, family, etc. I'm happy that it is a good replacement for you, but I need some real face to face people time and I find it challenging to get enough of that when I'm remote.
That said, that's part of why productivity can be higher in remote jobs, so it's a compromise that needs to be metered appropriately to maintain mental health and good relationships.
Yep. Outsourcing work to other countries might be cheaper but from what I have seen there is no the same level of involvement of all parties. Much of the time both contractor and company are expendables. And yes, if you are lucky, you get to form a team and let them work for 6 months tops before client's dissolution.
Perhaps in US market startups are an attractive thing but most senior (over 30+ years) talent will prefer a solid company at least here in Europe. YMMYV
It. Just. Didn't. Work. It's far too different and people just didn't want to go to remote socializing events. Sure, there were pockets of people that played online games together or other niche activities, but these are not inclusive.
Speaking of people from all over the world, at scale timezone differences also become a huge problem. No, not everyone wants to attend work meetings or social events either after local work hours or extremely early in the morning.
Asking because in all settings I was in, when someone came online with their camera off, others soon followed suit. At least to me, there is a huge difference between a videoconference and a voice chat... Seeing other people makes remote meetings much more pleasant. Or is it just me?
What rules do those who work remotely have for video?
In a remote-first company, everything (tools, workflows, etc.) will be organized around that remoteness, which yields much better results (and doesn't make remote workers feel like second-class citizens).
What I don't like is how dismissive everyone is of anyone who disagrees with them on WFH. Everybody is different.
I don't feel like I particularly thrive in a remote environment, and you're right, I didn't really have to put thought into work social events(which I enjoyed), it was kind of an added perk. But I also recognize the benefits of it, and am certainly not complaining!
What about work hours. Do you guys just never meet? How do you handle having to meet someone from Zurich and someone from Tokyo on the same day? If the answer is async communication, doesn't that lead to a long turnaround in certain cases that need high levels of collaboration?
Collaboration was through the roof. Maybe it's how our previous virtual meetings were run, but it felt like items like planning, architecture discussions and reviewing strategy documents was 5x more productive in person than virtual.
At this point Slack should be running with full "voice to text capability... Even TikTok can transcribe audio. Too many things are just tedious and time consuming to do within modern companies. The pandemic gave so many a break to realize that for many roles, remote works better, yet productivity tools haven't innovated much to ease the transition.
Companies will save tons of money on real estate and office equipment alone on a move to remote work, and the ability to hire independent of physical location is a big benefit of normalizing remote work. My biggest concerns in the evolution of remote work are usually security and authenticity, which always prove to be quickly evolving threats.
What does 1/3/1 refer to?
I think you should elaborate on why the hybrid model is a struggle, I personally don't see it as one.
You’ve described an entirely different dynamic and that’s fine, but it’s not the dynamic I’m interested in having.
I already stare at a screen for programming I don’t want to stare at one for collaborating with people.
For me it isn’t around the effort or lack thereof put into remote.
It’s just not the same
Others require constant interaction with others in order to accomplish much of anything. They need a barrage of ideas and help coming at them constantly and in every direction. While modern remote tools can help with this, an in-person office seems more ideal for this kind of worker.
In the late 90s, I worked for a startup making disk utilities (PartitionMagic). I got married and my wife was doing a residency program in another state. I was able to negotiate a remote work arrangement with my company, even though dial-up connections at the time made things hard to collaborate.
They gave me a new project to design and implement (Drive Image - a disk backup program). I would fly back to the office every couple of months and show them the latest version that I had completed. I did this for almost 2 years and was very, very productive. It helped that I was the only one on the team for most of that time (they didn't assign someone to help me until sales of the product reached several million $).
I have no interest in doing one damn extra meeting to deal with org politics.
The A16Z model sounds about right to me: flex work with low real-estate burden, spend some of the savings on frequent, family friendly off sites.
I know this is controversial, just like, my opinion man.
I'm curious if there is a multiplier a company could pay you personally to convince you to endure the commuting stress and inflexibility of an in-person office?
I.e. would you go back to a commute for 1.2x, 1.5x, 2x, or 3x your current salary?
I hate commuting, I hate shitty office lunches and interruptions totally ruin my focus. The things that people like about the office (long lunches with coworkers, spontaneous events, fun conversations) are literally my bane.
But for the sake of argument imagine the least-bad in-person office you've worked at, and a company able to pay up to high six figures. Are you saying there's does not exist a salary in that range that would convince you to return?
The first $100k a year is huge. The second $100k a year is useful. By the time you're at 300k, 400k, the utility is very low unless you just really enjoy collecting sports cars.
I have a nice home. It is 25 years old, but I do a lot of work on it myself. I have a nice enough vehicle that is reliable. I can afford whatever books I want, to go hiking wherever, and whatever I want at the grocery store.
Why would I give up a work environment I like, with great food and no commute, where I can have it quiet as a mouse, just to make more money that wouldn't make a difference to my life?
All I can say is, good luck. Bar a heavy economic disaster ( its possible ), it looks the odds favor WFH crowd now.
> some employers muse they can lower those salaries
That seems reasonable given their much larger labor pool of remote workers. They'll probably couch it as paying a premium to attract and retain in-person workers but its the same end-result as lowering salaries for remote workers.
To me the bigger question is not how many developers will be working full remote vs hybrid vs in-person, but what the salary differences will end up being.
And that is assuming a ~20-30 minute commute I don't need to move/uproot my family.
My guess is that if the salary premium required for in-person workers ends up being ~2x or more, most companies will decide that going remote is feasible after all.
On the other hand, if the salary premium employees demand ends up only being, say ~1.3x, then many companies will just bite the bullet and pay it.
My experience so far has been that the average multiplier is smaller, closer to ~1.2x for many software engineers. I suspect many companies would be willing and able to pay 1.5x for in-person developers but I think you're right that significantly fewer would be willing or able to pay 2x or 3x.
Will wages in, say, Lagos or Buenos Aires rise to SF/NYC levels? Or will the reverse happen?
Economics says that it depends on the value of the labor, but cost of living matters too (or at least, has in the past within say, the USA).
I think this essay https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... shows evidence that says the answer is "yes", that we'll see a weird fracturing of labor markets.
What I think you can probably safely say is that, within the US say, you'll probably have some degree of normalization of salaries over time. You'll probably still have outliers with the biggest/best-paying tech companies, some areas of finance, particularly well-funded startups, etc. But, as was already the case before, a lot of companies simply won't even try to match the top-tier salary bands. And mostly they'll be fine because hiring practices are simply random enough that no one really skims the cream with their processes.
I know that it was big surprise for FB and other big tier 1 companies when they started to hire remotely was that it was not actually easier to hire remotely than hiring in NYC/SF. The remote pool ended up being pretty small.
EDIT: But let me specify - the original premise to this was that there are already two comparable candidates in SF and somewhere else in the world.
I've worked with overseas devs who I'm pretty sure were smarter than me (PhDs, ability to go deep on tons of technologies) yet didn't have the skills needed to quickly turn around a request from a business person and build the right feature.
I think salaries will level out to a certain amount inside the US and other countries - but it's going to be a long time before highly competitive companies wouldn't be shooting themselves in the foot by eliminating themselves from consideration by coastal devs, experience-wise - but cross-country language and communication barriers (especially when timezones are involved) will remain very high.
Companies have already been trying to do that sort of outsourcing for 20 years, and yet US salaries have only gone up in that time frame. Solving "working remotely in the US in a few timezones" is a very different problem than solving the persistent, unsolved-for-decades "hiring programmers in a different country" problem.
I think this will normalize over time, but it will normalize to no one getting good mentorship as all the senior folks work remotely.
For the discussion, let's assume that the whole world of IT candidates is now your pool of potential employees. India alone seems to produce around a million computer science graduates a year. Europe, probably in the same ballpark. Rest of Asia? Who knows. Same for Central and South America. That's each and every year, new candidates that are added to the pool (minus those removed).
Even the absolute outliers would result in a sizeable number.
You are right, not all of these might have the required knowledge (if looking for experience hire), or some other number of factors.
But it would probably be easier to just start poaching top talent from top companies around the world.
I've personally worked with engineers at "hot SF startup" and also engineers from Croatia. Both were folks I'd consider of equivalent skill. #anecdata
> I know that it was big surprise for FB and other big tier 1 companies when they started to hire remotely was that it was not actually easier to hire remotely than hiring in NYC/SF.
Do you have any articles or references for this? I'd love to learn more about this.
All of the big tier 1 companies have serious strings attached for remote work. I've interviewed at several in the last year or two, and they all advertised remote work but also had weird requirements like "must be within 150 miles of an office" and "for certain positions" and "based on seniority."
Perhaps the reason they are struggling to hire remote employees is linked to the fact that they have poor remote culture AND dubious support for remote employees in the future.
I think at this point, the meaning of competent is the top 1% of engineers
If you pay a top programmer in the Philippines, say $45k/year, that's 10x more than the average dev. salary in Philippines. It would be like offering $1M in salary to someone in the US. You could pick and choose between the best.
You're not gonna get any better candidates if you up that salary to SF-level salaries, like $250k/year. The law of diminishing returns will kick in after a certain level. Comparing wages in city A in country X and city B in country Y is like comparing apples and oranges.
Also third world country savings pretty much limit your retirement options to third world countries. You aren't going to retire in the South of France on a third world salary.
But then again, purchasing a home in SF or NYC is very expensive.
The better headline would be "Remote Startups will win the war for top talent among employees who prefer to work remotely"
Not quite so sexy. Sure some; probably even most software devs prefer remote/hybrid work, but there are still plenty of incredibly talented people out there who prefer being in the office every day.
However, it seems like most programmers here are just javascript pushers. So dinking with a front-end button click handler for hours on end is something that doesn't really require collaboration.
This, I work from home when the weather is bad, otherwise it's a 10 minute bike ride, which is actually quite enjoyable when the weather is good and a nice way to compartmentalise the day (+ using my legs isn't a bad thing either)
The ergonomics of an office workplace can't compare to the extent I can customize my at-home office and kitchen supplies to suite my exact needs.
People had a taste of life WFH during the pandemic. Overwhelmingly they loved working from home even though there were a minority who wanted a return to the office.
The hybrid model or remote work will be the only real possibilities going forward. Top talent does matter and is the edge that companies like Apple and Google use to stay competitive. They need that talent more that talent needs them. Plain and simple.
I don't really think these are reasons to work remotely, at this point. Until we eradicate disease, we have and will continue to operate in a world with small but not-insignificant risk of disease transmission.
> Almost criminal
This is hyperbole and degrades your point.
> Companies should be required to apply and get approval...
Are you sure your perspective isn't too biased towards professionals working in tech and business service industries? Your proposal is logically consistent with lowering emissions and changing the culture of the way we work, but it rests on a few assumptions that have not yet been demonstrated, namely the effectiveness of remote work. I worry you're underestimating the impact (stifling) that this will have on the flexibility and growth of businesses across many industries.
I also see this as a major loss of individual freedom. You can argue that this loss of freedom is worth the cost, but I don't think you can say that this criticism is invalid.
But, if you are not an entry level employee, your objective is to find work. That means socializing with people in the company to understand where the opportunities lie, collecting subtle clues, show your human side to gain trust. A zoom thumbnail on a scheduled call cannot do any of these.
One last thing. I have not found anything as effective for problem solving as having X people in the same room staring at a whiteboard and scratching their heads at the same time.
If you can't communicate, changing where people are located won't help.
Please don't lock me into a room to stare at you while you slowly gather your thoughts. My time is important. Gather your thoughts and then present them. Don't make me babysit you.
Or to put it better, if work is obvious, someone has already done the work for you
The poll I saw overwhelmingly had "in person team" as the competitor that is most dangerous.
Talent isn't just about hiring the right people, but getting the most out of them. With 100% remote you're also selecting for people that want to be more comfortable or unsupervised. It could be a good or bad.
For a big company, if you are wel organized, I think the remote team can be way more productive. But it should be made up of mainly seniors.
- Who believes most work friends are actual friends that by and large want to be there as well?
- Who builds and maintains friends at work for 90% career management, and the other 10% are cool people you enjoy working with and then you stay in touch with 1-2 of them once you leave a job?
- Who views the work socialization as actual socialization versus career management requirements?
My experience with a relatively successful path in tech is that most friends at work aren’t actual friends, that 90/10 split is true, and that work socialization is for career management.
It feels like the remote work debate is partially about if work fiends are actual friends and it’s worth bringing everyone in-office to support that truism, and then if remote work enables the same level of career management abilities IMO it does and it’s easier to do so. For instance, Leading in slack is a lot easier than leading vs the ex-athlete with a MBA in meetings who projects confidence.
The issue with work socialization is career advancement involved, which means money, which means basic security for you and your family is on the line.
I can be open and myself with my friends playing board games. Part of openness is testing out ideas and risking conflict. If I say something wrong, the worst that happens is I get a new group of friends to play Catan with. If that happens at work, my mortgage and family is on the line.
Similarly I feel like choosing to not socialize in a normal way at work because someone might get you fired, while not as unlikely as getting shot, is still incredibly unlikely and not worth considering. This does assume a base level of social competence of course.
It’s a low likelihood but high impact event to be shot by your board game buddy.
It’s a med or high likelihood and high impact event that your career will suffer bc of a misstep in a social sphere at work, or imo more accurately it’s a medium/high likelihood and high impact reward that by navigating work socialization correctly and as anything but a normal social interaction, you’ll do well.
Both result in high impact/high likelihood results for my family.
So why take the risk/lose out on the reward just so I can have work friends who are truly friends?
Fwiw, there is legit academic research on the work social dynamic being about anything except normal friendships. The Organization Man is one example of academic research, the other is https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... which is a bit more pop-psychology that still rings true vs experiences.
Work culture tries to fill the same dynamic, but the profit motive, MBA culture and general sociopathy of the workplace (maybe you’d call me one?) make it a loose imitation at best.
So I play the game at work, and I actively build and value true bonds in my community and family where nobody cares about OKRs or RSUs.
Ultimately, I think I've decided I probably prefer a hybrid approach. Like T/Th in office. But that only works if everyone is on board - that is, what's the point of me going in on Tuesday if I'm the only one there?
That said, I live in the middle of nowhere in a non-tech city, so that's just a pipe dream anyways for now...
- Young workers typically want to socialize with other young workers
- Older workers prefer to be alone, with family, etc. Have funds for larger homes and at-home amenities
- Nearly everyone hates commutes
- Cities are expensive and small, but exciting. Rural is large, open, inexpensive, but can be socially boring
- Office REITs want a return to the office because that's how they make their income
- Cities want a return to the office to support their tax base and economies
- Offices and cities are a huge tax on companies
- Some managers like to manage in person
- Extroverted roles may tend to prefer in person
- Physical work (hardware), whiteboarding, etc. are harder to do remotely. (Or impossible. You can't passage cell cultures remotely.)
- Much of the time spent in the office is wasted / distracting
- Remote work allows greater flexibility of running errands, doing chores, multi-tasking, childcare, ...
- Workers will tend to choose remote work over onsite work if the pay is the same
- It's expensive to live and work in California, not so much in middle America
- The pool of talent stretches far beyond America. Fungible remote workers means you can pay $50k for someone in another country to do the job of a $300k+ FAANG worker.
From a purely economic perspective, it seems like remote work will win out. But that entails drastic and cascading changes to everything. Labor will move beyond expensive American borders and become much cheaper for companies to hire and replace.
Why does remote change this equation? If American real estate and salaries are expensive, businesses could always just open an office in a cheaper country, somewhere in Eastern Europe, India, or Asia, etc.
I'm a little confused how the bullet points you provided lead to the outcome in your final paragraph. Could you clarify?
There may be time zone, educational, language, regional/cultural, tax/ITAR/regulatory, or other differences between workers located in different countries, but ultimately these differences probably do not amount to much.
If that's the case, then these differences do not support a six figure salary differential based on location or nationality. The switch to remote work in the US places US workers into the same pool as the worldwide talent market. If the only interface between workers is text and occasional video chat, then a command of ESL English is pretty much the only barrier to entry for having workers communicate with one another.
At least it gave a decent indicator (for companies) on what worked, what didn't, and how adapt for the future.
Colocated employees clearly cost more in the form of office space. They can also command higher salaries than similarly-skilled remote workers because they constitute a significantly smaller labor pool.
Despite the counter-arguments in the article I do find it plausible colocated employees (ed: or maybe organizations) may be, on average, more productive.
But because there are so many confounding variables I think it'll take many years of evidence before we can empirically answer the question of whether the increase in productivity generally exceeds the costs of being in-person.
(For the record my guess is that it will be dependent on the industry and role. I think winner-take-all markets and roles like R&D and startup founders may be worth the added in-person tax, and everyone else will eventually be remote.)
Remote introduces barriers. It is theoretically possible that remote can move 100x faster & have better net productivity than in person, however that is far from the truth today.
Another big thing is the psychological effect of being a chair warmer. Sitting in an office environment, and being "seen" gives the impressing of working. Imagine seeing someone in their chair before and after you leave each day. It gives the impression that they are "working hard". With remote only there is no chair warming, you have to show results.
- No commute
- No 1 hour lunch (walking, buying, eating, cleaning up)
- Not in an open-desk office where I'm constantly interrupted
- Meetings are much more focused and I can hop between meetings quickly
- Easy to do chores if necessary during the day and then work extra hours at night to make up
- Office politics much reduced, output is easier to measure by necessity and people's output is much more clear
Additionally I was forced to double-down on socialization outside of the office, reinforcing relationships that exist no matter what company I work for, further reducing my aversion to jumping ship.
In summation, WFH forever, I'm never going back
- Lost my amazing bike commute. It's infinitely harder to motivate myself to bike for 30 mins in the morning and afternoon now, so I don't do it.
- No lunch reset. I still take an extended lunch because I need it to break up my day, but now it's just me depressingly eating by myself.
- Not in an open-desk office where I get to interact with people regularly. Being by myself all the time makes focusing pretty much impossible.
- Meetings seem mostly the same to me, except that people are way less engaged.
- Really easy to do non-work stuff instead of working, so I often find myself doing that instead.
- Output remains impossible to measure. Building relationships is now extra difficult, so the people who have them have an even bigger leg up.
And finally, reduced my connection to my peers and my org which drastically reduces my engagement and job satisfaction.
I'm trying to get back to the office ASAP, and basically coming to terms with the fact that I'm probably going to need to switch industries because of this.
The question is, do the two tradeoff as a net positive or a net negative for the company and how does that tradeoff work in more collaborative roles?
Having a history on your slack you can just search and remember the solution given.
For myself it's also easy to remind someone of the similar problem and adapt from the slack history, like similar commands and steps to solve an issue.
If more than one person asks about the same problem you can just copy and paste to a wiki and pin on the channel.
It's definitely better if everyone is on the Toyota model mentality instead of the ancient Ford model.
Then with the spare time I can actually do a lot with my remote teammates that is more social. Online games are a thing. Sharing photos of your last hike trail is another, discovering similar tastes and food recipes is also awesome.
I get that remote is not for everyone, specially people wired for social touching, but I felt extremely handcuffed in a open office space, doing my actual work by getting into the office 1 to 2 hours before everyone else.
I found that I'm more willing to socialize now because of better planning, decent schedules, and doing small talks after completing the hardest parts of the sprint, and respecting everyone's schedules by proper use of async comms.
Remote is not "anti collaborative". It only requires a different mindset.
For nearly every business, good enough is definitely good enough.
So the question to me is for average to slightly above average employees, will remote companies "win"?
If you're an average company in California you can hire good enough, remote talent 2-3 times cheaper remotely than if you had to hire locally. Just compare avg developer salaries in US vs Europe. "Slightly above average" developers in Europe can do the same job twice as cheap.
If people are focused on Research and Development in a large commercial project, it will often catch the ire of people responsible for risk mitigation.
Those times I save I directly deliver in value working remote. I can work more hours and I can be more efficient since I'm not tired. not to mention the ridiculous tax and rent costs due to property prices that do not reflect local wages adding to the stress.
yeah, NO THANK YOU. I get local recruiters hitting me up and not only is the salary here ridiculously low, they are either hybrid or require showing up at the office. Vancouver recruiters are a special breed: they won't list salary ranges, and get angry when you ask for it, require 2~3x the work experience for the same position elsewhere, and 40~50% haircut when we have the highest living cost in the region. There's a reason why most of its workforce in tech do not speak English at the office, they rather have new immigrants who can put up with this toxicity, and the management exploits them. Modern day colonialism.
But I want to work at what I'm doing, for the startup that I'm contracting for, in the space that I'm doing work in. And that's not here (they're not "anywhere" really) and all the local (southern Ontario, west of Toronto) companies suck, underpay, and are generally mismanaged.
And I'm not moving and giving up the life that I have I have so I can be where the interesting work is. I've done that once already in my 20s -- left my parents and siblings to go to the only place in Canada where the tech industry was really a thing (at the time) -- and I won't be made to do it again.
Canadian tech companies have been profiting from underpaying their engineering staff (relative to the US market) for a couple decades. Now they will suffer because they have to compete with remote. Recession might change this, but for now I intend on taking advantage of this.
So, remote it is. It's not perfect. But I'm not going to drive almost 2 hours a day to get underpaid by some mediocre local company run by mediocre management and mediocre investors. There's a larger world out there, accessible to me for the first time ever.
I’ll keep doing until it last and will see how the world looks in 24months.
I miss being in an office and having a connection to the people I work with, but I also refuse to compromise my salary, time, ergonomic home office, and flexibility to get this connection.
I'm rural just right outside Hamilton. The local market in Oakville/Burlington is sad. And right now it's not worth the commute into Toronto (used to live there).
I was getting excellent comp at Google Waterloo, but the drive was killing my body, and my soul was dead.
I was quite spoiled to experience what would become the norm after a pandemic.
I wrote a blog on my experiences of being "remote first". Funny enough, it includes this author's tweet that went a bit viral.
I found asking for help as a junior is definitely harder when you don't have people around (walking up to someone's desk vs slack message with ~20-60 minute delay then zoom call): and I often found myself blocked on tasks.
I found learning is generally harder remotely for me as well: the sheer amount of information + resources + help you get from serendipitous conversations with other engineers should not be understated. It's the same reason people got so angry over paying so much for remote university: it is objectively a worse learning experience.
I think this is just my personal stance: but I think in my perfect world I work in office for the first 5-10 years of my career to optimize for learning + relationship building, and then once I get more senior (or have kids) I transition into either hybrid or fully remote.
This was your first job so you may lack data points, but if you ended up not getting helped/being supported as a new, out of school, engineer in a remote setting, I strongly doubt that it would have been any better in an office.
I've been a manager/director working with distributed teams for the past 6 or 7 years, I've onboarding dozens of folks for whom it was their first or second job and they all had a really good experience.
Which of those two employee types do you think will have have better work output? I'm have a pretty good idea, but am not totally sure.
I basically did a comp-sci degree on the train to and from work, contributed to opensource software, caught up on work, read books , talked to colleagues, napped etc. It was actually pretty productive alone time for me. Forced quiet time for 3 hours a day. I was young and I had a 1.5 train trip each way to work.
I built my career further and could afford to live closer to my office, but it was still a 30 minute cycle each way, that was still beautiful, my more recent office job, it was a 10 minute ride in a beautiful city.
I work remote now, while I think my personal life is for sure better, I'm not sure we're functioning as well as a group.
The spending time with the family bit, sounds good, but I'm honestly still working insane hours remotely. Had to sacrifice a lot of personal time of late to my work. I'm probably working harder and longer hours know than almost anytime I remember. It's 6am meetings, 9pm meetings. That never used to happen for me.
But collectively I do not yet know. I find it plausible that the average in-person organization may turn out to be more productive than the average remote organization.
Either way I'm excited to find out!
The other half, arguably more impactful, is the process. Geographic distribution mandates certain work practices to remain productive, and those can be highly rewarding and enjoyable to work with. Especially compared to something like agile/scrum.
They'll catch up eventually, but at least in the meanwhile I'm getting paid to help with this.
In the hardware world, access to excellent equipment (and colleagues) can be a huge draw for top talent.
If you work on optical clocks, odds are good that JILA/NIST and the Boulder ecosystem will be at or near the top of your list for places to work. You just can't do that kind of work without the right resources.
Onboarding was especially hard, and trying to get the attention of my coworkers was where I spent most of my idle time. Something that would have taken 3 minutes onsite now meant first scheduling a meeting and waiting until I had their dedicated time.
Things like slack didn't work for more complex issues. I remember being in a technical disagreement/conversation/argument for about 1.5 hrs on slack, and I drew a picture and uploaded it and everything got resolved almost instantly. We didn't go to a meeting because it started as a simple slack conversation and it snowballed into a bigger disagreement so we never thought "okay let's have a meeting". Once it was resolved we went about our way but having slack as the primary way of communicating is exhausting and very slow.
I quit and joined a brick-and-mortar company and am happy again.
To me, an office sounds like something a tech company should only obtain after a strong and established revenue stream.
In the post dotcom bust startups were exceedingly rare, and what's happening right now is much larger than the dotcom burst.
The startup boom exists because money was so cheap you had to spend it. Then consumer spending started to ramp up again and money was flowing both ways. Worrying about profits was viewed as silly since that would get in the way of maximizing growth under the assumption that you could one day flip a switch and generate profit.
With inflation rising consumers have much less to spend (and are already starting to rapidly take on more debt), this alone would hurt tech companies (you see this in cancelation rates rising with streaming services and a drop in e-commerce spending), but the end of cheap money will have disastrous consequences for the startup ecosytem.
The number of IPOs is declining rapidly. Investors saw this coming when the pandemic hit and started to get everything together so the could cash out their chips before the casino closed.
Massive layoffs are coming in tech as unprofitable companies will be forced to demonstrate that they can in fact make money (if they really can) and even profitable companies start to see their income drop (since their income is primarily other tech companies or consumers who will be increasingly tightening their wallets).
What's coming is going to make the dotcom bust seem mild.
There is no way the dotcom crash is repeated because today IT is integrated inside every aspect of every business. It will be just another regular recession.
The biggest threat to programming jobs in the US is outsourcing (and, in the longer term - automation), not an imaginary apocalyptic event.
- Ten years from now, would I be glad that I had spent ~70% of my time at home?
As you can see from all these comments, whether working at the office is good or bad, depends hugely on context. E.g. what type of commute are we talking about? 15 minutes walking to the office or spending 4 hours everyday standing still on the freeway? There simply is no single answer for this.
Working remote certainly has its upside in that it allows one to have more control of the day. Bad storm projected for next morngin? I guess I’ll just work from home. Not having to walk out the door means more predictability. But coming back to the original question, this sort of control might come at the cost of losing some color in your everyday life in the long run. And thats what freaks me out the most: am I purposefully grayscaling my life for the sake of convenience and control?
I’d rather not.
Some people like to work remote and some like to work in office.
One thing that doesn't work well (usually), is hybrid where a team is a mix of remote and in office.
In the end, I could see some companies or groups in companies going full remote, and some being fully on site, and individual devs migrate to wherever they are happy.
One benefit of covid is it created a giant social experiment where we got a chance to taste what full remote work companies would be like, and now it is no longer something theoretical. As someone who went full remote way before covid, this is great as now their is more opportunity to stay fully remote where I am most happy.
The corporate world is full of examples of predators that hide in the multitude of in-person interactions to annoy, threaten, or harass. Remote makes that harder, and makes it much easier to document harassment.
My problem with the code-slingers who want to be totally remote -- don't you need to have periodic collaborative discussions with your peers? Do you really find those discussions are as good over a computer screen as they were in a room? Over a screen, most people are multi-tasking -- having multiple conversations, doing their laundry, whatever. That's a poor imitation of true collaboration, in my opinion. What am I not considering?
+ Hire for the culture
+ Commit to awesome, persistent written communication
+ Meritocracy in which trust can be earned by the work itself
+ Periodic in-person get togethers (not always to 'do work')
Of course, that's a broad generalization and yes, there are different preferences up and down, but I've seen that play out.
I've always been an advocate of remote work before COVID and think it'll be a much larger part of tech. It's not without flaws though, as the tooling, processes and general attitudes need to evolve.
It's also hard to decouple COVID from it, too. Working remotely during a scary, global plague where schools are shut down, groceries are sold out, and family members are dying is different than working remotely during a relatively normal time.
> Fortune 500 company found that just 10 percent of all communications occurred between employees whose desks were more than 500 meters apart. This suggests that once companies span multiple floors, buildings, or campuses, they’ve already lost much of the collaborative value of being “in the office” together.
1. 500 meters is a huge distance. It's actually surprising the distance at which 10% of communications happens is that far, which undermines the point the author is making.
2. You aren't supposed to collaborate with the whole company. You are supposed to collaborate primarily with your team, and less frequently with adjacent stakeholders.
Earning a stable and boring fixed salary, some will opt to do the minimum to get by, there is little downside of that at least for a few years. The leadership team needs to stay creative nowadays instead of saying "back to office or you're fired", how to do that? refer to paragraph 1 above.
> Does anyone, outside of company management, believe that considering your coworkers your closest social relationships is a good thing?
Over the years, I have really underestimated the strength of friendships which were made at the office. And also, how much they meant to me as well.
The flexibility of remote work is awesome, but I don't think it is in its final form. There are definitely aspects missing which we haven't solved yet.
The problem? When workers say hybrid, they typically mean they want the flexibility to choose where they work from and when, all the time. (In a sign of how jarring this concept is to ingrained expectations, Gartner refers to this as “radical flexibility.”) On average, that will be three days a week from home, two from somewhere else.1. Relocating to an obscure town in Texas to work intensely with ambitious engineers on hard space exploration technology.
2. Building a truly breakthrough software system (eg metaverse/gaming/crypto) with ambitious engineers in a fully distributed company?
I find it hard to see how a company doing (1) would lose against a competitor doing (1) in a distributed fashion. I also find it hard to see how a company doing (2) would lose against a competitor doing (2) in an onprem fashion.
1. Relocating to (city) to work in person with ambitious engineers on X. 2. Living where you choose to work remotely with ambitious engineers on X.
When there is a choice, it seems workers generally greatly prefer 2. If your labor market is inelastic, you might be fine. If it's elastic, it seems like on-prem will definitely lose out to remote in terms of the labor pool.
I have intense anxiety and panic when working in skyscrapers. I get a feeling similar to fear of heights and I'm unable to function productively.
In addition I was able to mitigate some of my interviewing anxiety by drinking half a glass of wine during the remote interview.
I now get to work at a FAANG company where previously my mental health/anxiety would have barred me from even having a shot.
Drop some Metaverse (or VR by Google/MS/Apple) in the mix and the patterns of interaction on remote teams will come closer to local.
Add some of the Gitlab tricks into the methodologies used on local and people will need less time at the office.
Add some unavoidable adjustments in the price of real estate or commuting patterns and some remotes might accept a bit of office.
That might well be true for FAANG-sized companies. Those businesses will pay start to pay less if they start embracing remote working (although right now they seem to be pushing for people to return to the office). It is not true for the rest of the IT world though. When developers can get remote jobs they're free to work for the highest paying company rather than whatever local IT industry there is. That pushes wages up if you're in Bumsville Idaho. Not to six-figures-for-a-junior levels, sure, but far more than you could earn before.
Overall I strongly suspect remote work will lead to developers earning more over the whole industry even if peak Bay Area wages drop a lot. Sucks if you work in the Bay I guess, and it sucks even more if you're a Bay Area landlord, but for the rest of us it's going to be awesome.
So, maybe big city folks will see their wages stagnate, but for those of us out in "Kansas" it's a dream.
The entire reason that I'm in the DFW area is because I couldn't find meaningful work in the New Orleans area, where my family has been for over 300 years. The culture of Texas is just like the hue of the buildings in its cities: beige crap. The cultural equivalent of a generic strip mall. Yet here I am, because there wasn't any remote work at the time. Because of remote employment, the wages that are now available in the NOLA area are about far higher than they were a few years ago. So I really do not care if the people making 500K are eventually forced to accept 400K, because the people who were forced to accept 80K for a senior position are now getting 140K for the same type of work, and that number is accelerating upward. Compression is a great thing at the bottom.
There is a big pushback, and no suppprt from the unions for this return to the office. There will be a wave of resignations very soon.
Who's hiring? :)
Even so, some people are just extroverted in a certain way and need that in-person. And, senior leadership often want a footprint to see and sense the troops.
So, the question posed to workers is this:
Because I need to see people in-person for social fulfillment/for understanding the scope of my authority in a clear way/because this is the way things are always done… I want you to sacrifice your family, finances and time.
Now that family and finances are on the bargaining table, and remote companies that “do it right” can seemingly maintain all the necessary revenue generation, I think remote work will win out.
It’s ultimately asking for a subset of someone’s socialization needs to be met in return for sacrificing family. Good luck with that.
I imagine this is common across the industry.
I look at the people on my social media that I actively follow, and they are in three groups: friends from High School, friends from college, friends from work. None of those groups are growing. The first two for obvious reasons, but last one is the concern. I think back to the last time I worked in an office.
My path to the bathroom happened to go past a bunch of people I never worked with for my job, but I'm still friends with a lot of them a decade later. People who I would just start random conversations with on the way to and from the bathroom. And I'm still friends with a lot of my old coworkers who I last worked with a decade ago (the last time I worked in an office). In part because we hung out a lot outside of work, going to lunch, dinner, bars, shows, etc.
But after that? My rate of making new work friends went way down. The chances for socializing are very small. The closest friends I've made in the last few years are all parents from my kids' schools, because we have constant in person interactions.
My old work friendships are not only important to my psychological well being, but also in finding new work. When I need a new job I go to those friends first. I'm lucky that I already have that network, but people who are new to work life won't have that chance.
Which leads to the other problem I see -- the juniors of today are the seniors of tomorrow. But the juniors of today are losing out on a lot of chances for mentorship with remote work.
Remote work is great for mid to senior level people, who already have some experience and know what they are doing. But it's not great for junior employees. They need those random interactions, randomly overhearing shop talk, being in the hallway and getting pulled into a meeting "because you really should be learning this". All things that happened to me when I was a junior engineer, and helped me immensely.
We try to replicate that with remote work, but it's just not nearly as effective.
So either we'll have a tier of in person companies where all the junior employees will work with the few senior people who like being in the office, or we're going to have a big problem in a few years when there are a bunch of junior people who we can't promote because they didn't get the mentorship they need to move up.
We need to solve the mentorship problem and the (human) network building in a remote world.
Weirdly, the article title mentions startups but the article doesn’t.
Most startups aren’t pushing the boundaries of any technology. I’d argue most companies wouldn’t know what to do with real talent.
Nothing to see here.
It is pretty easy to start your own project, with some consulting on a side.
maybe linearly less productive if remote from day 1
clever marketing hack for the author's startup though
Other things I'm looking for in a job (apart from a convenient office location) - (1) high pay and (2) stability. Startups just can't offer these things, least of all remote startups.
Edit: if this doesn't sound great to you, look into robotics; a lot of startups are constantly looking for good engineers willing to work in person. Often times they settle for remote, so stress in any interviews that you're willing to be in person.
Maybe not in the crazy expensive cities with long commutes like LA and SF, but everywhere, yes.