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As a manager, it's not the day-to-day that concerns me the most.

It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.

Edit - I can't really quantify the above, so maybe it's not really a thing. But, personally, I miss those conversations and worry that new/young employees aren't able to have them.

> It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.

I've worked in the tech for more than 2 decades, in different countries. I've worked for startups, for FAANG, and for companies of different sizes in between. I've built successful projects and saw my share of failures.

I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game yesterday?" sort.

This "water-cooler effect" myth that is repeated often as if it was fact, and that completely puzzles me.

Those important conversation you mentioned, for me, always happened online even when I was in the office, normally through slack discussions (or email threads in the old days).

Certain teams thrive off of word-of-mouth data flowing across. I've experienced both type of work environments.

Usually, people may casually walk over to the area where the office gossip happens to get some info. It doesn't have to be a magical hallway or a water cooler.

The water cooler experience extends beyond the actual conversations occurring to encompass a general camaraderie that gets built being in proximity to others. Schools had the same effect happen in over lock down - students weren't sitting next to other students and overhearing projects they were on, general grievances with school work, or miscellaneous "the game last night" stuff. Without that sense of community, you can really feel alone and things like imposter syndrome have a chance to creep it.

Obviously, I'm in the camp that thinks the water cooler myth exists. It can extend to just learning colleague Z has 2 kids. Things that can happen online, but also might not since small talk and casual conversations might not occur as often. It can happen more naturally during periods of "waiting" - like waiting for a class/meeting to start vs everyone logging into Zoom at exactly the start of the meeting.

This isn’t what was being argued. What was being argued is product development decisions being greatly enhanced from water cooler talk.

I've seen it. But, it never seemed to make any difference to what I was actually given leeway to implement on the job.

It's like sideprojects and github repos during a job search - everyone says they are important, everyone thinks they are important, but at the end of the day, very few decision makers are willing to put in the time and risk of involving them in the process of their work.

> I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game yesterday?" sort

Does not match my experience at all. Depending on how you approach the water cooler you will get :

- People going to the water cooler to get water. And go back to their desk asap to stay focused (which is fine)

- People who go there and wanna have some chit chat about whatever interests them. Sometimes that means the game and sometimes not.

But yeah; but if you go in asking "what did you do this week end"; I have some colleagues who will happily jump in to say "I tried playing with Haskell, but those monads thing are are to fully grasp".

Never ever in my life, have I described my week end on slack. If I am going to be sitting in front of a screen and worsen my carpal tunnel syndrome; it's going to be for work related stuff.

I'm sure there was a time where people "never shared their weekend through text" either. I remember those types "I only use a phone for calling." Most of them are long gone now.

I have seen it on more than one place. Interestingly, all those places are research-focused universities. (And no, mere research institutes don't seem to enable it.)

In retrospect, it is quite obvious why that happens. Just for a start, if your place is such that a high-level executive announcing a layoff would lead people to believe in him, instead of reacting like "what is he talking about? is he crazy?", then you have no chance of ever getting productive water cooler conversations.

Just because you haven't observed doesn't mean it's a myth.

Inevitably when you go out with co-workers or industry colleagues at a conference, you will end up talking about work. That is the one thing you for sure have in common (while someone may not even like sports), and it's an easy topic to fall back to.

But FWIW, I also think the small talk and getting-to-know your colleagues is valuable. Some of my deepest and longest-term friendships have come from former co-workers, former classmates, etc. While it's possible to cultivate a friendship via remote work, it's a lot harder.

Coworkers often share birthdays, weddings, random trips, and enriching experiences together that are not very easy at all to replicate over fully remote work.

I've noticed that as my career has gotten more remote, it's harder to even count on making new adult friendships into my 30s. I'm like a stranger in my own town, unless I really intentionally take the time to join clubs/groups outside of work. That's not a bad idea on its own, but it does take intentional effort and some degree of consistency that just sort of came automatically with working in an office. And some young people with less overall confidence / social experience may not even know how to go about that.

I think all of that def takes a mental toll. We're social creatures, even the introverts among us.

I have had some great friendships form at work. But I've also had really difficult situations. I've seen friends form and then become bitter enemies, transitioning from workplace disagreements to personal disputes.

The fact is we aren't in the army. This isn't band of brothers. Some people don't want to know anything more than how you're helping them finish some task for their job. There are going to be varying levels of motivation, care, etc.

> I've noticed that as my career has gotten more remote, it's harder to even count on making new adult friendships into my 30s. I'm like a stranger in my own town, unless I really intentionally take the time to join clubs/groups outside of work.

I think you should explore finding friends outside of work. I've seen many go down the "friends only at work path." Then they retired, switched jobs, and moved on, and that friendship faded just as quickly. It's amazing how many people will be your friend when forced to be with you (e.g. gotta go to work) but given the choice they aren't choosing you.

Yep. For me work is work and friends are independent of that. In 30+ years I have never had a friendship at work that exended to doing stuff outside of work. There were people at work who I was friendly/sociable with, of course, but at 5:00 we went all went home to our separate lives.

The key for me is spontaneously reaching out to coworkers who you like. Invite them to parties, or to disc golfing, or a brewery, or whatever fun activity you do that needs additional friends. I find that if a coworker comes with me to these activities regularly when we work together, that the activity and the friendship can continue after we no longer work together. You need to develop the out-of-work relationship early and acknowledge that you like each other's company even when you aren't forced to be together. YMMV

Totally opposite of my experience. I do an annual ski trip with some of my old coworkers from 5+ years ago (from a company not many of us work at any longer). I have been invited to weddings from coworkers I worked with 10+ years ago. I am still great friends with dozens of people I went to community college and university with. But since going remote it is far more difficult to make the same connections.

I'm still friends with old roommates from school too. That's different in my mind anyway -- I lived with these people, saw them naked in the shower, etc. It was a level of personal contact that was much closer than anything that has ever happened (or I would want to happen) with someone at work.

YMMV though, if you make friends at work that's cool, just never seemed natural or obligatory to me.

Wow, that sounds like a bummer -- I can't imagine spending a significant portion of my life working on something and never establishing any meaningful relationships with the people that I worked with.

Not everyone feels the same way and that's the point. Some people want deep relationships. Others want to get their job done and go home to their family. Others are so stressed out with this office culture worship draining them with a 2 hour commute that they'll go home depressed with no friends.

But statistically Americans have had a significant downward trend in the number of friends over the last decade (yes, before COVID). The office culture was always there. It definitely isn't helping.

I think there's a lot of lonely people out there today that don't realize the disservice they are doing themselves by being intentional shut-ins.

Again - yeah sure, there are communication benefits to general proximity.

But the idea that this literally happens "at the water cooler" (or from bumping into each other in the hallway) to a significant degree -- such that it's worth dragging people into their cars for a 90 commute each way, on top of the obvious productivity-killing effects of the vast majority of office spaces, these days, just to benefit from these wonderful and sublime interactions -- is just nonsense.

Or like another commenter put it: one of these things people hear and like to repeat, without checking whether it has any grounding in reality.

Nevermind the number of businesses that don't give a shit about your creative, new ideas you had at the water cooler, they know exactly what they want and they're not interested in what the grunts have to say about squat.

>While it's possible to cultivate a friendship via remote work, it's a lot harder.

One of the problems that I feel is only going to get worse, is how remote work is entirely on record. To make real connections you have to be able to talk somewhat freely. With Microsoft going full steam ahead with AI built in to teams for auditing and summarizing, you just wont be able to talk and build friendships like you can irl for fear of being flagged for inappropriate speech.

I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned.

Oh I've seen it, but I'd say it's very rare - I sometimes do pick up useful snippets of information (so-and-so is working on X) while grabbing from the refrigerator, etc.

Like, 5 percent of the time. The rest of the time it's at best definitely tangential -- and sometimes outright nonsense (people talking at you for the sake of having someone to talk at) that grinds my gears and objectively disrupts my flow.

Well, I've worked in tech for half a decade, and I experienced plenty of it in my first job. It benefited me tremendously to be able to get context from other engineers and even people outside of engineering.

And I had none of it in my second job before covid. It's not a guarantee. But it's weird to me that people are going their whole careers without seeing it... maybe I was really lucky at my first job.

Some people flourish anywhere, some do so at home, some need closer supervision to do their best. I don't think anyone needs watercooler idle chat to get them to do the best they can.

All of which can be done online. If you can talk to your friends via facebook messenger or whatsapp to stay in the loop so can you with your colleagues via teams or slack.

Bah. That is what hackernews/the internet is for. I learn more about new tools and stuff that other companies are using from seeing other companies/employees talk about that online than I do talking to co workers. Most of the time co workers are not talking about new cool tech, we are talking about life/bullshit because we are not robots.

Open Google Calendar or Office 365, create a meeting once or twice a week for 30 minutes and call it "watercooler chat". Make sure staff know it's an open forum, and that anything can be discussed safely. People that want to show up will. People that don't wont. Modern problems require modern solutions.

Eh? We kind of make sure to discuss all those things on Teams too (or only, really, since 80% is still remote).

If this is true, this is a really simple problem to solve. Organize cross-team show and tells. Past couple organisations I worked for did this successfully.

I’ve been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are not self starters or need lots of help are not doing well.

That first group is able to (IMO) progress just as well as they would in-office because they know when to reach out for help, fix things on their own without help, etc.

The second group may or may not be better served by in-office work. In some cases there are language barriers that make things challenging and I expect more in-office communication would reduce these. But I think a much bigger help would be for these people to be able to watch more experienced employees work and operate (both in terms of learning specific tools/processes for doing things, and the soft skills like when those other workers reach out for help, how they do so). Both of these assume they want to do better though; I don’t think WFO would help truly disengaged juniors.

So basically, I completely agree with you and I think the distinction is important. FWIW, I think people who progress in their career and become valuable employees quickly tend to almost always fall in the first group anyway.

> Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive.

In your comment you say you haven't worked in-office much. So, genuine question, how do you know feedback doesn't benefit from being in-office?

I think this relevant because in my experience (1.5 years remote because of COVID), the benefits of being in the office often aren't apparent when you're out of the office. For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed. If I wasn't in the office I wouldn't even know I had missed these conversations.

>For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed

Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. Taken to the extreme, they even create a state of helplessness in others, where these individuals become a funnel for all others to ask questions and obtain knowledge from. This is without accounting for all the noise pollution it creates.

Opponents are very eager to pull out these 'what about the office talks?' arguments, but whether the benefits even outweigh the downsides isn't obvious at all.

Heck, most developer work cultures use Scrum, and they can't even work through a single item on their retrospectives. Surely a bit of skepticism is warranted.

>> For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed

> Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else.

That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more difficult, like someone humming at their desk.

It's sort of like someone who writes a bunch of useless unit tests. The solution isn't for the team to scrap unit testing, it's for that person to be coached to not do that.

One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of stuff that can happen organically in an office into intentional practices that require discipline, which means they're a lot easier to neglect.

>That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more difficult

Yet anecdotally, it has occurred in every open office so far. Managers were also eager to applaud this behavior rather than berate it, while at the same time looking at the actual work performed, scratching their heads why nothing was happening and then giving said individuals special treatment. I'm not alone in experiencing this, either.

>One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of stuff that can happen organically in an office into intentional practices that require discipline, which means they're a lot easier to neglect.

"That's not really a counterpoint, just coach them not to do that." If your argument against my point is 'well just teach people differently, also it doesn't happen that often at all (despite it being a common complaint on the internet)', you'll also have to argue why your point is special enough not to deserve the same response.

Companies relying on a lack of documentation and individuals using said documentation is a humongous risk even outside the remote debate, and that's most of the requirements for remote covered. Those 'organic intentional practices' don't seem so great when 80% of the seniors on the team leave without a paper trail and the remainder knows zilch.

> Yet anecdotally, it has occurred in every open office so far.

Open offices are terrible, by the way. They provide few benefits, and their main effect is to magnify the downsides of in-office work (at least for software development). They just happened to be trendy and enable lower real-estate costs.

> Managers were also eager to applaud this behavior rather than berate it, while at the same time looking at the actual work performed, scratching their heads why nothing was happening and then giving said individuals special treatment.... you'll also have to argue why your point is special enough not to deserve the same response.

Many managers are not great.

A busybody is undermining team productivity without adding value is a management problem focused on that individual. Remote work introduces more systemic communication and training problems.

> Those 'organic intentional practices' don't seem so great when 80% of the seniors on the team leave without a paper trail and the remainder knows zilch.

My experience is remote work isn't leading to any special emphasis on documentation. And in any case, any reasonable level of documentation isn't going to make up for all the experienced people leaving.

I worked in-office for about a year and a half. Then I switched fields and companies right before the pandemic hit, so I was effectively starting over again. I did not find being in-office vs remote to be particularly impactful on my ability to be effective, get feedback, and get up to speed. Obviously this is a very small sample size based solely on my personal experience.

>If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college.

I am not so sure on that. But I have seen similar throughout my years. More and more I am coming to the conclusion this is one of those "some people are wired a certain way, others are not". I have seen plenty of highly "educated" folks lacking terribly in skillsets. I have seen the same for those with no education.

As an instructor as well, it skews similar with the students I have seen. Some just have a "fire" and work through issues, others will just give up at the first sign of issue (I am talking "I couldnt figure out key based auth, so i did nothing".

I have tried to get folks to take personal ownership in products and deliverables, to varying degrees of success. In the past I was ardently against "silos" of responsibility but ultimately this led to some taking no ownership stake in any products. So we have had to transition to "assigning" primary, secondary, tertiary responsibility to services/products. This helped a little bit but also led to some then just bringing in personal excuses.

Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that folks have varying capacity for load/projects and how much they are simultaneously work/support. As well as varying capacity to be able to work indepedantly vs need more guidance/check-ins on stuff. I try and cater to whats needed to get the most out of them and understand not everyone is a rockstar that can just take a challenge and come back with solutions. Even still, it can be tricky managing that withing intra-team dynamics.

The idea that you can make up for being remote by being proactive proves the counterpoint.

You seem to be a top performer— the kind of person that someone higher up but perhaps not directly related to you -would pull to the side and have you work on something more important, if you were in the office, because the office is where non-organizational-chart-directed-actions take place.

It can even be as simple/stupid as an idiot in a suit asking “are you good at computers” while in an elevator. You fix their idiotic excel problem that they could have googled, then you end up in charge of some thing they want to build.

I understand that this represents a bit of disfunction - but I believe this is reality.

For 3) the difference with in office work is that the manager can passively check in on how someone is doing. Just casually checking someone's posture from across an office you can tell if they're struggling or not.

Forcing a video call is a lot more formal and just doesn't have the same effect. People will attempt to present a cool demeanor.

Someone who's doing great and is fully self sufficient in office can probably crank out code form home just fine... its the cases where people are struggling or need to collaborate in an non-formal way that I think in office helps the most.

As a junior that also just started before COVID forced everyone into remote, my experience has been that team culture is the deciding factor. I've always been extremely vocal in communicating ideas, acquiring feedback and asking for help digitally, but my experience has been split for the two teams I've been yet.

The first team was just set up as the pandemic hit and thus had all collaboration happen online. This created structures that fit a remote-first approach and even worked after work got hybrid again. All important discussion happened online, we had ways to spontaneously get help and enough formats to get creative. And it worked, I never felt left out, all blockers for everyone got cleared as fast as you would expect and feedback cycles were good.

I can't say the same about my second team however. While it's officially hybrid, I'd say 70% are coming into the office every day, while the other 30% (me included) work basically exclusively remote. And it isn't working well, the office people just have their own bubble. They exchange ideas and communicate offline and it's hard to be part of that. I tried integrating digital tools, I tried talking about it, but it just doesn't work. I can plant seeds for new ideas, I can ask for feedback, but the second I communicate it to the office bubble, I'm not part of it anymore. This isn't intentional obviously, but when they talk about stuff at the coffee machine or during lunch, the idea will start developing by itself, while I have no way to take part in it. And who can blame them? If you have a good idea during lunch, why should they not talk about it? And who wants to provide an official protocol for the remote workers about lunch discussions? And then when I then try to talk about the idea a few days later, I always notice that it advanced without any possibility for me to participate. This sucks obviously, because it massively diminishes my influence to bring in and grow my ideas. And while I do get feedback when I ask for it directly, I have noticed that barely anyone actively informs you about the small 1% stuff that you can improve. Which doesn't sound bad, but if you miss an 1% improvement every week, even in a year it will amount to a big enough sum to matter.

And I think these 2 things do massively influence a career. You need to be the face of a bunch of good ideas if you want any kind of soft power. You do need the small informal feedback someone gives you when getting a coffee, if you want to be the top 10%. And in some hybrid organizations, you will miss out on that.

The office people here actually are actively politicking against the remote people whether they realize it or not. If you were their boss they would have no choice about keeping you in the loop on lunch conversations.

This sort of thing is definitely a problem with many "hybrid" situations.

> are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee

> don't even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn't work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)

> Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.

Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).

It is culture in about every form. Education isn't actively made to teach people to be independent. Work culture for the past X decades has been pushing people to be dependent on each other directly. Social culture has pushed people to be dependent on work to fulfill various needs beyond a paycheck.

And despite us catering towards the open office for multiple decades, we are still seeing it is barely on par with an ad-hoc WFH call while other things are going awry. Anyone with any kind of perspective can tell these comparisons aren't remotely fair.