I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
- watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral, so team members that have valuable input may not even know the conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can search for the conversation years from now.
- the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on noise-canceling headphones and tune out ALL conversations, which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office conversations.
- Commutes suck
What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to filter out all non-work related discussions?
Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat any time it has some especially high confidence that it's generated a good answer to a new question.
On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI generated post before the person who posed the question uses the AI answer.
I can't agree with you more regarding the commute. It really does suck.
Going back to the office 2 or 3 out of 5 days is still better than 5 out of 5, but the amount healthy personal things that I get to "miss" don't sell it for me. I probably prefer an entire week offsite with my team once a quarter where the commute is literally a 5 minute walk from my hotel room to whatever conference / workspace we've reserved. Bonus points if the offsite is in a place that has wellness facilities so I can still spend that extra "hour" on health.
Trying to do focused work in an open floorplan environment always felt pretty silly to me, but I never really minded being in the office, but thinking about it now...a leisurely morning walk to the park to sit in the sun with coffee before work is a hell of a lot nicer than any commute I ever had.
Unless the employer is forcing you to live in a particular place, your tolerance for commute vs. rent (and other lifestyle impacts of location) is saying that, not your employer. I’ve rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the office.
[0] There obviously are some, and even some where the distance is much farther, but they are exceptional.
For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?
It's entirely possible that I will be directed to return to the office. At that point, I will politely but firmly decline, because I was hired as a full remote employee. And then I will find a new remote job, probably in less then a month, and probably making more money, even in this market.
You presumably wouldn't, because you have a set of preferences due because of various (from your description, non-rent) lifestyle impacts of location.
Which is, if you read my upthread post, rather than lobbing insults without doing so, exactly what I was talking about.
Now, in your case rather than overriding concern for commute time (which is evidently the case for lots of other people), neither those preference nor your commute time preference arr negotiable, so you would just resign if your employer decided to make your job an onsite job. Other people wpuld choose to commute. Other people, who dislike the commute and don’t have the other factors you have holding you in place, might move closer to the office.
In any case, the employer isn’t dictating commute time, but work site. Your preferences will determine commute time if you work (or, for that matter, will determime if you continue working at all.)
If you're commuting at typical times (getting to the office somewhere between 8-9am), there aren't a whole ton of places that are 1/2 hour commute away from, say, the googleplex. The east bay can be cheaper, but anything across the Dumbarton is out because the bridge can easily take 45 minutes during commute hours on any given day.
The places that are a reliable 30 minute drive on the peninsula are pretty much NW San Jose (SJC), parts of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Mountain View itself, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. With commute traffic, Milpitas is too far east, Redwood City is too far west, and even Cupertino is too far south.
"Impossible to live" is of course up to definition, but if you have kids and don't yet have FU money, you might be looking really long and hard at those houses in the east bay and wondering whether the commute is really that bad (it really, really is).
I'd be open to commuting again, but only if I'm paid for the extra time. If that makes employers pick someone else, that's fine (yes, I get I am in a privileged position to be able to afford to be that picky).
Fixing the statewide housing shortage, or replacing the suburbs with something dense and walkable enough to allow good public transport, is not.
If you think we can do the latter, please do so! I'd be happy to return to the office after it's been done.
This is why you document key conversations (though obviously this requires more discipline than searching for the information after the fact).
Another counter is that search often sucks (caveat: my opinion here is perhaps coloured by the fun and games sometimes had trying to find anything in Outlook or Teams, YMMV if you have different tools).
> the office is full of distractions
You should encounter my home!
> Commutes suck
Agreed. I have the luxury of living very close to the office which helps my preference for working here.
My main reason for preferring to be mainly in the office (I do work from home occasionally, more so temporarily ATM as I have a terminally ill pet to spoil until the time soon when the bad outweighs the good in terms of QoL) is that I don't have a room to designate a work room (well, I do, but I'd rather designate it for my hobby work & such) and I find switching on/off as needed is more difficult when work and home life don't have a good solid door between them.
I also hate the phone (OK, there are video options, but I find they help little and anyway the proponents of them usually have their cameras off so a phone is what we effectively have) as it combines the bad points of in-person communication with the bad points of written comms.
Having said that, while I'm definitely an office worker by choice, rather than a home worker, some do genuinely both work better remote and get a better life out of it, so we need some flexibility (with the caveat that I do wish people who want the remote work flexibility show me some flexibility in return and consider answering messages/mails by message/mail instead of trying to arrange a call which they know is by far not my preferred option!).
That isn't my answer at all, if you read my entire post.
People on both sides need to stop with the "you are 100% with us or your arguement is 100% incorrect" attitude.
> at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
Which I'm fine with. But they way many want to manage that communication does not work well for all, hence I suggested people have done flexibility on that along with the flexibility they want/need in other matters.
It'd never happen in a random chat service, people don't start water cooler stuff on public channels, they either use more limited team chats or private messages.
1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers.
2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH as they can work independently and the type of work they have does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For people that are close to senior it is split between those that do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter prefers WFH
3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in office on the same day. Most people at this level are either doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person. This area also tends to more likely have families and there is a split between those that feel coming to work provides them good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with family.
I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes into the office or not.
I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day.
Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am doing and between helping Bob with his other shit.
Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling technology you still cannot focus properly.
Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the office that grew the most, by far not.
This is a disaster in the making.
People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
I wouldn't know how we would get empirical evidence but collaboration in the office is definitely valuable...I think the debate now is: is it worth all the downsides of commuting and colocating around high COL areas
It is also valuable to be at home in a quiet environment.
https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/#:~:text=Amaz...
(if you don't have a Chromium-based browser, scroll to the heading "How the WBR Accomplishes This").
I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to shake.
I started going in to the office with a few of my team members 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things they don't want to.
But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices were closed and I have learned so much and made some really important professional connections simply by turning up to the office and meeting people there.
It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on video calls for some reason.
WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a part of the organization before WFH.
I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to change anything.
Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt work.
As a manager, and someone who values creativity and productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from people not being physically together, exactly as you described.
To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
Company B can allocate all the savings from office space and infrastructure towards increased employee compensation (or whatever else they choose to spend on).
Will the cost of office space prove valuable for the benefit of the in-person bonus performance?
I think that a "Company C" that kept all their office space and still allowed employees to exclusively WFH would be making a mistake.
But, I do have at least twice more energy and productivity if I work from home, and choose when to eat, go for a walk (and have good ideas at that time usually), when to sleep, no commuting, no worries like dresscode etc..
So for small companies, I believe distance working can be very interesting
I'd be willing to say that companies that work in ways that require more physical presence and _have it_ will outperform companies that require more physical presence and _don't have it._
But the companies that adapt to remote work and aren't trying to just do everything the same way they did before should be able to continue to compete at a high level. They have before, there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to be able to.
I'd love to see data if you have it. Many studies show the opposite.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
I understand that companies have expensive real estate handsomely equipped with the finest of cubes, and that it comforts the old guard to see an army of business-casual-attired employees staring at screens, but it seems extremely unlikely that this costly and anachronistic model is going to outperform virtual competitors.
But on the flip side, here's some things from my experience that I would count as productive:
- saw someone looking angry at their computer for several days. Asked them what was going on. After a chat realized his project was never going to work so we canceled it. It would have taken weeks/months for us to realize this if I didn't see him physically boiling at the desk.
- need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.
- crown jewel: ran into a dude I used to work with, now in a different department. Turns out he's working on something similar to me. That started a bunch of conversations, ended up combining efforts and building platform. Now running essentially 3 businesses based on 1 tech investment. Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bump into him in the elevator.
Rando feels entitled to interrupt 2 Co workers whenever instead of working around their schedule.
Sounds like a few things need fixing here.
I read your list as a list of ways in which the organisation has come to depend on inherently time and space limited proximity to paper over cracks in a way that is limiting because it will mean addressing opportunities and problems won't scale.
How is this positive for the two people you interrupt and keep from working? If this chat takes weeks due to WFH that just means that they cannot be interrupted.
This scenario is exactly why I'm much less productive in the office. It's a net negative.
I’m not some antisocial person either. I would enjoy traveling to the office and be sad to leave the little camaraderie party. But nothing was getting done and all that busy bee hustle was a smokescreen.
Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs, or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
Happens to me plenty of times, with multiple people (like I'll have a scheduled meeting with the PM and we'll do the meeting, then chat about some things, then it'll drift into bitching/venting about stuff at work, etc).
I probably have had way more of those over Zoom than not, because there's no chance anyone can overhear us (assuming we're both not in the office).
I think I tend to give off that vibe, though. Like you can share that stuff with me, and I'll understand and reciprocate and won't tell anyone because I'm obviously not playing office politics, not sucking up to anyone, I'm just there to do my job and help get others unstuck when possible.
I suspect this is the real reason. The internet is full of people boasting about having 2, 3, 4, 7 senior jobs pulling in millions in TC doing nothing but interviewing for next sucker employers. If WFH ends, it’ll be because of them.
I'll be that guy, so:
People who were the most vocal about going back to the office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building, just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the time.
I'd say the water cooler discussions were more about things not work related than work related, or about office politics.
I don't think I've ever had a "productive" water cooler talk without going in with that in mind already (i.e. I would've scheduled a meeting or walked to the desk anyway.)
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area...
People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries and timezones than my own.
Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and good use of tools.
At least in my experience this hasn’t really held me back, even in predominantly office based companies. I definitely miss a bit of gossip, but I saw a steady stream of promotions over the years, ending up in fairly senior management, and I had good relationships with everyone I worked with.
I’m now in a different job which has a very remote focused culture - there is an office, but apart from one guy most of the technical team don’t really use it as much more than a hub for meeting up now and again.
In my world, my team and I are in adjacent shared offices (not cubes), and we all walk or bike to the office. It works wonderfully.
This is a downside, not a benefit. I don't want to hear about your compilation error when I'm heads down on my own work.
With few exceptions, juniors are in the default mindset that they're bothering people when they have problems. My job is to socialize them out of that. I accomplish that by bringing them into the office, because the alternatives very rarely work.
Now, I’ll submit there are people who are not considerate at all. And to be honest, a lot of people have become way worse since the pandemic. It’s almost like they’ve forgotten basic human decency. And those people can be far more disruptive in person than they can be remote. But there are ways to resolve those issues (basically by telling them that you’re busy and not indulging them when they’re disturbing you, and very quickly they’ll get the hint).
Personal productivity does not necessarily map organizational productivity. You might be insanely productive by focusing heads down on your work all the time, but the organization as a whole may not grow as much.
Now, this may not apply to you and your organization at all, or may not even be generally true, but I did want to point it out because a lot of people here wonder why managers would ask them to come to office even though they believe they’re clearly more productive at home. There are non nefarious reasons leadership may be asking for this.
I never said I don't answer people asking for help. I said working remotely allows me to decide WHEN I answer people asking for help.
If someone cannot wait 30 minutes for me to finish whatever the hell I'm doing, and try to solve or at least understand their problem on their own in the meantime, they should be fired.
I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one.
Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at the Tender Greens across the street.
UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then I have to hunt it down.
If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break, they get fixed the next morning.
If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and evenings as they need.
If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of their butt-in-the-seat office time.
Here is one data point:
https://steveblank.com/2023/02/14/startups-that-have-employe...
I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact people worked longer because they did not have to endure the commute:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/work-from-home-prod...
It probably also depends on the job function, software developers are likely more productive when they can work uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you have young kids at home or a small apartment without a dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your residence.
Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote working than others, and those companies will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work. Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce participation, specially for women or caregivers when the population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike this.
This has not been my experience.
In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer companies who offered it than there are now.
At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a company that will let you work from the office if you want.
What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared to late 2019.
So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees return to the office will lose some of those employees, and companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I still think it's a better situation than before.
Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere :)
I’m pretty sure my pudgy form can’t intimidate them even if I tried.
When random convos happen in slack I don't miss them if I step away for a 15min walk. I can even search them.
Isn't feeling good something worth producing?