Seeing lots of people on teams very vocal about not wanting to work with remote people either and saying no to anyone that has the inkling of it.
Something the remote crowd might not realize is happening.
Something the remote crowd might not realize is happening.
Something the in-person crowd might want to consider is that a lot of interesting roles are going to involve lots of work with people who aren't in the room with you no matter whether you're in office or WFH. If you go in being highly vocal about no remote work, you may not be considered for roles that aren't fully remote but do involve a lot of videoconferencing.
And maybe that's OK with you, but do think about it.
I don't want to spend my life doing Zoom calls. A quick telephone audio call for 5 minutes along the lines of "hey, are you nearly at the store" - sure. A call to avoid literally flying 5000 miles or something - if we have to.
But in general, for actual communication I want to be in the room with someone, and I think that a combination of colocating people and spending an hour or whatever on travel for clients is normally worth it for that. Hybrid office environments are an absolute non starter for me for that reason.
Colocating functional teams together, and by extension the teams they need to work with, is a great idea but the math just doesn't work out for a company of more than a few hundred employees. At the minimum you are still traveling to other buildings on the same campus to have meetings.
None of us want to spend our life on Zoom. But I'll take a few hours a day of calls to get back 2 hours a day in traffic that I can spend having coffee with my wife and petting my dogs.
One has free form ideation and camaraderie the other is people sitting in silos in a chatroom
Even my last fully-classified job, where had to be in office because we could only work from a SCIF, we still had SCIFs in Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and PA and that worked fine. Maybe because we weren't Scrum and there were only 2-3 meetings a week everyone had to go to? Theoretically, software development should be a job that is possible to do in a mostly asynchronous, largely work alone manner. Linux, GNU, and other gigantic open source projects seem to have gotten along fine for decades without needing offices. Even when I was last in the Army working in the 1st CAV HQ at Fort Hood, we had brigade HQs in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, and South Korea and that worked fine. And, of course, when I was at Platoon/Company level, I was a tank commander. Obviously, during maneuvers, you can only communicate with the other tank crews via radio. We managed somehow.
Unless you're sitting within speaking range of every person you work with, you're surely sending them messages via some chat platform or e-mail anyway, aren't you?
That's more than a bit unfair. From what I've seen a lot of companies that were completely unprepared to switch to remote, handled it a lot better than they thought they could.
Consider the pre-pandemic prevalence of "phone booths" and one person conference rooms, so you can be in a meeting as the only local attendee. As far as the other location is considered, you are remote just with access to a bigger coffee maker.
True, but it's possible that a company had nearly 100% co-located teams prior to COVID.
>no different than working with someone in another office
Given the choice, they'd likely prefer someone local in this case as well.
Refusing to work with people because of their office situation is toxic behavior.
How would the PM who is in remission from cancer or the engineer with a disabled child supposed to feel when someone says that they prefer to not work with them because they need to stay home?
This is just a straight up lie, the speed of communication is literally 50% in real life by my reckoning. The huge vocal delay pauses, the having to focus more to get information out of low bandwidth sound, lack of body language (camera body language doesn't translate the same as in person). That's before we get to "ummmmmm.... errrr..." "Sorry can you repeat that" "oh sorry no you go first" "Oh can you mute your mic please I can hear myself" and videocall bandwidth only allowing 1 person to talk at once with a 2 second barrier either side of each thought from the sound delay and mute dance.
Literally video calls are so broken that you can't do creative discussions in them, if the tech was magnitudes better then maybe but these small delays and lack of presence make it a objectively different beast to working in the same space.
If this is not shared with the non-engineering staff, then we'll end up with (even more of) a two-stream staffing problem - non-engineers will be social at work hanging out together, engineers will be productive at work being ignored.
And the implied threat of "you're less employable if you want to work remotely" is utterly pointless when applied to engineers. We're employable based on productivity not sociability. Thus it has always been.
Also seeing enough whole companies buing fully into remote, and more and more remote teams happily working together.. and tbh there sure are jobs/people for which this doesn't work out - but then good that there is more for both sides?
For those it works it is not just a lot of saved time, the flexibility to hire anyone anywhere (a lot of people are not ready to move their whole life for a new work) but also just great for environmental impact, imo.
Not ironclad, a place could be implementing it decently, but they'd have to do some convincing. (Being remote pre-pandemic would help.)