A third place? I'm not sure I even have a second anymore
muezza.ca
muezza.ca
I don’t like this concerted effort to make me feel bad about these hypothetical junior employees losing out on “mentoring” and lost “spontaneous innovations” that happen supposedly in offices. If you like that keep me out of it. The world has moved on and if you want to commute 2 hours a day be my guest, but don’t make me do it.
Punch in/punch out mentality has its place, but if you don’t have one of those jobs, the mismatch will eventually become unbearable for one side or the other.
I think that’s where all this is leading; WFH roles will be smaller in scope, lower in salary (not CoL but lower responsibility), and much more focused on churning out work decided by the folks in the office who work as a team to grow the company.
Maybe you’ll be happy with that role. Most won’t.
Wrt your top comment, it’s probably worth acknowledging that work mentoring and water-cooler banter are two completely different work-social activities. People do need mentoring, even senior level hires, and without it, people are not going to succeed as often. How do you ensure mentoring is working with all-remote work? (I do think there are things you can do remotely, but as a senior developer, I have watched juniors struggling during the pandemic, and I don’t have the choice to stop hiring juniors.)
It has not been my experience that senior folks need mentoring, only culture and people ops guidance (as every org is different in that regard). Coaching (distinctly different than mentoring) can be done between peers remotely.
Observe, communicate, improve, repeat.
> we can’t train new devs
Yeah, I think it’s clear what’s going on here to folks who aren’t you.
I think the social aspect of a soul sucking 2 hour commute every day is more harmful to an individual than any positive aspect of being around peers at work.
When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Remotely, i ask "hey, i'm doing task #WXY-99 on project A, who can explain the stuff to me", and i have a two-hour mentorship on the project specifics. And sometimes more. I was taught a lot of stuff.
But the management is the best management i had in my life (Ie very hands-off, but with strict work procedure i had to learn the first day), and they discovered the way to make me twice as productive: 5 hours of meeting maximum every week (as i'm new, i have 3 hours on average). The rest should be work or one to one.
[edit]: And we do a lot of 1:1. Lot of reviews, pair programming, mentoring, discussing new feature, designing a DB... All that stuff that i used to do in "meetings" with 10 people are done on 1:1. Its faster, its a lot less performative, thus more productive and make the interaction more "real".
Damn that sounds great. Where I work we have the exact opposite; two people screen sharing and troubleshooting a problem only they are working on or understand, for 30 minutes at the end of morning standup...every day.
So many issues that affect a "team" - misunderstandings that would have been a chair roll away are elevated to the status of conflict. Code has been written, lines have been drawn.
And yet we pretend that it can all be dealt with by more "teamwork".
I only break out the agile ceremonies for junior engineers who need the guidance and I do it all over video conferencing.
But at the end of the day, our products get delivered, timelines met on or ahead of schedule, and typically on budget.
aww never mind. I know the answers
Unless you (ie you) are the product owner / guiding light / main decisin maker then any "keep developers developing" is false. But in the likely circumstance that you taking a "product goal" and running with it - then are you getting the recognition and then the linked monetary rewards and access to other resources?
or are you just doing a great job while others benefit?
I hope it's the former
I'm particularly precise about how I define my stories with granular acceptance criteria linked to UX designs for how it should work.
At the end of the day, I'm just a waiter for my devs to keep them going and prioritized. I don't reap rewards other than a paycheck and the satisfaction of a delivered product.
Post MVP, we'll define a roadmap of what the customer wants depending on budget and do 4 week sprints to deliver.
After working in a agile safe corporate environment for years, this was a breathe of fresh air. I see the agile tools as guidelines for picking and choosing depending on need. This wouldn't work in my old corporate job.
Hope this explains it.
> Was work socialization even that good?
Yes and no. I have friends I met from going into the office. But most were still "work" friends -- people I wouldn't have socialized with had it not been for working at the same company. But for me the inane inter cubicle chatter is gone, and I can focus on getting work done first.
And then small failures in highway system
It is but one fender bender can back up traffic for hours. We can argue about whether public transportation is good or not. We can argue for denser housing in urban centers and hope to win over the nimby's.
The solutions we're proposing now would have been good 40 years ago, maybe? Now you need a solution for 40 years of population growth for these urban metro areas, and that won't be cheap, and it won't be free of NIMBY politics.
The idea of having more of a "third place" sounds good, but I think it will be more realistic for me once my kids grow up. It's very tough to commit to something like an adult sports club, hobby group, etc. with little kids who demand a lot of hands-on attention, constantly get sick, and need early bedtimes or naps. Time is at such a premium, which is why working from home (or wherever else I want) is fantastic for me right now.
It doesn't really matter. It was OK for some, useless for others. People still don't have a choice. It's just a different lack of choice.
Debates about WFH seem redundant at this point. There is not much value in endless anecdote-driven BTO vs WFH holywars. By now, it's obvious that WFH is good for some people and bad for others. Companies should do what that can to offer the desirable type of work to the employees who should have a choice. That's it. End of story. Back to work.
Was work socialization even that good?
Meaningless banter about TV shows and restaurants we like.
Me? I've made long-term friends, gone on vacations, successfully played matchmaker, etc. I enjoyed working with the person who was fluent in five or so Chinese dialects, the folks who engaged in meaningful political and philosophical discourse. I enjoyed the banter about shared hobbies. Hell, I enjoyed the opportunities to goof off (some say there are googly eyes on the inside of the refrigerator door to this day). Come to think of it, while I didn't enjoy working for this one guy, 1:1s involved getting out of the office and just going for a walk which was great.
I definitely do not need the semi fulfilling work environment which is a poor replacement for these much more meaningful connections. Honestly if you do long for work, I suggest trying to find peer groups instead. You can be more honest and you wouldn’t lose friends to a layoff, etc.
Fair, but -- anecdotally, I'm an introvert with fairly limited social needs. In-office socialisation meets those needs quite well, especially as I'm married and have socialisation at home sorted. I also suffer from an anxiety disorder, and the _necessary_ nature of interaction in the office works out great for me -- because "find[ing] peer groups" is quite a big ask, between the anxiety and the social energy expended in doing so.
I worked at a fully-remote company in 2021 and 2022, and it was great, but I'm under no illusions that my experience would be replicated elsewhere. I was on a team with strong social elements, and I had weekly 1:1s with teammates which generally took the form of general chit-chat rather than work-related discussion. Now, I'm back in the office at a new place, enjoying the limited -- but built-in -- social interaction, and not really feeling the need for anything else. I don't like the commute, but oh well.
Obviously, this is all specific to me -- but insisting that your own preferences are universal is wrong-headed.
So many of my hobbies are related to computers or the internet. I moved away from the place I grew up, and all of that has combined to make it hard to meet anyone at all to make new friends with in the real world. I'm married now and have 2 young kids, with even less ability to easily leave the house on my own. I can too easily see a future where I'm 60 with basically no real connection outside of my immediate family, something that I worry about for everyone if we don't figure out some better ways to be social in the real world again.
I'm not sure what the point of this reply is, this topic just struck a chord with me.
Personally I suspect that no one has answers and what we are left with is trying to talk about how we feel and see how others feel - a social activity that I've found US culture to be particularly bad at. People want bold, holistic theses about what "should" be - not uncertain vulnerable discussions about where we are. I hope, for all our sakes, that we can find a healthier way to talk about and envision new kinds of community.
Edit: fixed some spelling errors.
I’ve noticed this at work. Somewhere during the pandemic the attitude has creeped in that because we aren’t in the office, there should be no down time ever. Meetings have to be quick and to the point, no chitchat, no social meetings either. What a waste of time. Work work focus!
But on my team we deliberately make time for down time. We often wrap meetings early then just sort of hang. Or we spend the first 10min of standup shooting the shit. We’re one of the few teams that still shows up for “friday hang time” every week. And we have a ridiculous amount of meetings, mostly ad-hoc, for a 4 person team.
People wonder why we’re the most effective team and how we get so much done. I think that’s why. We feel like a team, not just a bunch of people working together.
Even though we'd lose that 15 minutes of productivity every day, our team is actually coherent while other teams are a mess. We get stuff done, we work together effectively, and we actually enjoy working together. It makes all the difference.
At my previous job I was a manager so I talked to other people _a lot_ at work, what with all the meetings, 1:1's, etc. When I started my new job as an IC I realized that I didn't interact with my coworkers nearly as much.
So I scheduled a monthly 30 minute 1:1 with each of my teammates that specifically has no agenda and is there to talk about whatever. Sometimes we talk about tech stuff or work stuff, and sometimes we just talk about random things like travel plans or events we've been to, etc.
Obviously, this is a lot less social interaction than I would have if we were all in the same office, but I do think it's helpful to remind all of us that the person on the webcam is another human, and I enjoy these 1:1's.
Just make sure the person on the other end does too, and isn't doing it out of some sense of obligation to show up to meetings they were invited to. Watch out for signs of them being uncomfortable, like trying to always bring the conversation back to work stuff.
Some people don't want to talk about their personal life with co-workers, they just feel obligated to fill the time with it.
I also try not to pry into their personal life too much if they're not volunteering that information. Like I said, sometimes we just talk about things we've been working on or general tech chat.
Seems like a small thing, but if I see it coming up in the schedule then I don't want to do it.
But now I have a family, so I spend time with them, and with other people that have kids our age that live nearby and go to the same school, or go to the same art studio nearby. I no longer need social interaction from work to fill my life.
But here is the real problem -- a lot of the people who can "fix" this are like me -- they already have their built in social networks and don't need these other places.
Work is where people from different classes, backgrounds and walks of life come together to work on common projects. Socialization at work cannot be replaced by family activities or hobbies which are always parochial.
People talk a lot about cultural issues and bubbles these days and in my opinion the withering away of a workplace social life has been one of the biggest drivers. Remote work accelerates that dynamic of pushing people into private, increasingly narrow groups.
It took a long time to adapt- about 3 years before I feel like I really adapted, but I feel better about my social life now at any point before the transition.
On work relationships- for me, one of the biggest learnings was that every interaction when you are remote is intentional. If you are going to get to know your coworkers, you have to make time for it. I have 1-1s with peers just to talk on a fairly regular basis, and for meetings of appropriate size (5 or less people) I find it perfectly acceptable to spend the first 5 minutes or more chitchatting. I’ve also worked on “scaling” these interactions by organizing presentations on peoples hobbies, which has been really fun and improved everyone’s feeling of belonging.
As a result of this I have a number of people I consider dear friends who I have never met in person.
I do think organizations need to encourage in person get together a on a semi-annual or more basis. In my consulting days those get togethers created an enormous amount of bonding and trust in a very short time that increased communication for years afterwards.
I actually found it harder to find a social life in my new city than I did to maintain or develop work relationships. I’d previously used my college network or social sports teams to find out of work friend groups and the new city didn’t have either of those. In addition, I was a new father and we quickly had another child, which quickly limits your availability.
What eventually worked for me was a combination of finding a true 3rd space (for me, a teach your kids to ski club), moving to a neighborhood with lots of similarly aged families, and meeting other parents through my kids school.
So I really get the OPs feeling- that the 2nd space has collapsed, and that its tough build the 3rd, but with time, intention and repetition I really think it’s possible to have it all.
Look at the things you want or need to do day-to-day, and create contexts around those where social fabric can form
Instead of working from home, work from the same coffee shop a couple times a week. Make small talk with the people behind the counter and the other regulars, learn names
Have remote coworkers who live in the same city as you? Suggest a regular trivia night at a bar. Or host a weekly D&D or board-games night at your apartment
Create parties, cook people dinner, suggest day-trips to do fun things
Reach out, organize, offer to host, make small talk with new people even if it's not especially interesting right off the bat. But get curious, ask about the details, pull on threads, and you'll get past the boilerplate pretty fast
If you're literally starting from zero it can be hard - maybe you just have to seek out meetups or whatever as a starting point - but you have the ability to create change. A social fabric is a thing you cultivate, not something that just happens to you like the weather. Took me many years to learn that, but it's true
I don't mean to make it sound easy- for some of us, keeping a healthy social life is as hard as keeping a healthy diet or exercise routine is for others. But you do have agency over it
I'm never taking a job which is primarily remote again. I want my free time back. I want to spend the after work period relaxing at home instead of scrutinizing meetup.com for events and PMing my whole contact list frequently to work out when people are free to do things.
I sympathize, I know it can be hard, but I think it's possible for most people to do
This isn't workable at all in my experience. Most coffee shops are far too loud to have a call in; depending on your work, you might not always have calls only at neatly scheduled times.
Post-pandemic, many indoor dining spots have basically become fulfillment centers for UberEats and DoorDash and that includes coffee shops. Employees serve the drive-thru line and delivery pickup guys first, and are constantly working.
I don't have many work calls, to be fair, but when I do I can usually just migrate outside and be okay
Climbing out of it means finding room around the edges, small things you do have the capacity to chip away at, and making yourself more and more room that you can then use to make more and more progress. The same goes for social stuff and for increasing your capacity in general
A resilient society traditionally built in many layers of connection with different groupings.
As we lose those cohesive forces and opportunities, is what’s replacing them just ‘different’ or fundamentally more fragile?
The loss of contact slowly grew into a disconnect from the office over the years. I try to put in a day at the office every week now, to build up some rapport again.
Wouldn't want to face living alone. That this is the new normal state really scares me. Rent a flat and be done, right? I don't have time to mind a nice house alone. But with others, it's fun!
One thing I'd like to share was I met a fellow remote SWE in Australia by chance and I remember talking about the lack of second/third-place for people working remote. He shared his personal experience with this which I found interesting and very niche. He worked part-time as a barista/help at a cafe that he frequented whilst working since he just brought a long his laptop. He worked 4 days a week and was usually always there throughout the week in different times. I think this is a good model that could be applied for anyone dealing with the lack of second/third-place. Ofcourse context always applies
More companies are mandating return-to-office so hopefully this person will be able to find a company culture that matches their desire for social interaction at work. Switching jobs because the culture has changed is hard, but it will be well worth the hopefully positive uplift in mental well being for them.
The inverse is also true where if companies are mandating RTO then those who prefer WFH-heavier arrangements should also considering changing jobs; likely those that already have second places of their own.