Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloppe | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to the office-vs-home discussion everybody is just plugging their own personal preference. Clearly there is a mix. Personally, I love going into my office: it's close to me and has amenities and coworkers I like very much, and I'm personally much more productive there than at home. I realize there are plenty of people who prefer and are more productive working from home. But clearly it's not nearly as superficial as a necktie. Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely. Maybe a happy balance for new hires is an extended in-office orientation followed by the option to go remote, although this also requires some senior employees to be in the office to help with orientation.

Ofc the benefits of this have to be weighed against real estate costs. Let's just stop pretending anybody knows exactly what the office situation will be in the coming years.

View on HN

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

How would you demonstrate this?

I’m with a funded SV startup that’s been remote-only since its founding, a few years before covid. We have staff in at least five countries, and in the US, in at least five states (just based on the people I can think of offhand.)

The company is the leader in its field, which involves significant real innovation, and has many major enterprise customers.

I’ve helped onboard many employees, and I’ve managed one of the key product teams.

When I hear people talk about all the disadvantages of remote work, I just internally roll my eyes. As you say, they’re plugging their own personal preference. But that seems to be exactly what you’re doing with the quote above.

I am just plugging my preference. Tried to emphasize "me personally". I'm sure many companies work much better without an office, though I think at a certain size it almost certainly becomes beneficial to have at least some office space. My main point was that neckties are not an apt comparison, and that we don't really know yet how valuable offices are under various circumstances.

Remote work definitely works for some companies and not for others. If football player X never lifts weights and player Y lifts weights a lot, and they have similar levels of performance, it does not follow that lifting weights is unnecessary for a successful football career. It just means that it's unnecessary for player X.

I was hired into a senior role (architect level) by a company that was compelled to go remote because of the pandemic. Remotely building working relationships at that level was hard AF since most people I had to work with already knew each other from the pre-pandemic days and were happy to have sidebar conversations to keep moving.

We parted ways about 9 months into the job when we both realised this wasn’t working.

My impression is that remote work for new employees needs a lot of explicit relationship and trust building that we get for free when we interact with people in an office.

This is about being "remote first". All discussions should happen in the shared chat or at the weekly group video call except if there's some specific reason not to (eg. disclosure of non-public corporate financials, personal 1-1s, or similar). It sounds like that company transferred some bad office habits to online.

This is the thing right here

Remote requires personal responsibility as well. From everybody

This sounds suspiciously like a “no true Scotsman” argument to me.

Remote first is a spectrum and dismissing lived experiences as “oh, you just haven’t experienced the right kind of remote first” helps no one.

What makes you think documenting everything exhaustively is a panacea? What if the quality of documentation sucks? Will your argument change to “you have to document everything to a certain level of quality otherwise you aren’t remote first enough”?

Please don’t feel I’m attacking you. I was a big remote first proponent before experiencing the difficulties of integrating with teams who didn’t know me except as a voice on a call.

After this, I’m more sympathetic to execs demanding RTO for culture reasons.

I joined a remote only company 5 months ago and saw people face to face for the first time earlier this week. It takes more conscious effort, sure. But that's also all. It will be a hard adjustment for companies whose staff is not used to remote work, but it's just a skill people will acquire.

I'm in a similar situation now, but the new company has been more than happy to have company days where we fly in from around the world and get to know each other and it works pretty well. Also, having zoom/teams/slack video channels permanently open works surprisingly well too (you don't have to have your camera on).

Companies that have gone fully remote, also quickly discover how much of their company knowledge is in one person's head, or whether it's well documented, which helps with the onboarding too.

Some companies have definitely moved to remote working better than others.

We saw immediate changes in productivity when people moved home 2 years before covid, less meetings, things got done and people where in generel more happy, but that might not be for everyone but onboarding wasnt made harder, what was harder is the comradery you get at the office, but that was also what swallowed alot of time in the first place i suspect..

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

Is it? I don't believe it is. At this point, people just plug right in - once you're used to remote work, it's a matter of learning which chat platform they use, getting access to email, and away you go. It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days, precisely due to needing to accommodate remote onboarding.

I'm now struggling to find the study I was thinking of when I said "demonstrably", but I can say anecdotally that our new hires ask fewer questions online than in person, despite my reminders that the worst thing you can do while onboarding is ask too few questions. Coworker relationships are more formal and compartmentalized online than in person and they can be more reluctant to ping people with questions out of fear of being considered annoying. This doesn't apply to everyone but it has a noticeable effect on the average new hire.

I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote. We'll just have to wait a few more years for more robust, large scale comparisons before we really understand how much an office is worth.

Absolutely. I personally found myself less likely to ping someone over Teams to ask them a small question versus leaning over to the next seat to ask. I was assigned a work-buddy when I was on-boarded, but I think I asked him a total of 3 questions. I believe that if I was on-boarded in-person, and had a few lunches with him, it would have been quite different. Also, the fact that the only time I talk to my co-workers is over Zoom makes it necessary from a human relations point of view to start many meetings with a bit of chit-chat, which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.

FWIW i am FAR less likely to interrupt the person sitting next to me and yank them out of their current flow into a different topic. I'd rather send them a chat message that they can answer out of bounds when it does not interrupt their flow.

>which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.

So in terms of time there is little difference? I find myself to spend much more time chitchatting in person - which is nice but also not the job.

> I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote.

Even if your interlocutor can, and even if the large scale studies run counter to your argument, that doesn't mean your experience is invalid.

Life isn't a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study. There is no control group consisting of you and your cohort to measure against.

The scientific method is, I argue, on the whole, the wrong instrument to bear in these scenarios, at least because measuring the metrics affects the study group and publishing the resulted affects the society in which the study occurred.

Absolutely agree. I just wanted to provide a counterpoint to the idea that it was just accepted and obvious that remote onboarding is worse - that doesn't mean it isn't, but I don't think we have to assume that it is.

I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences especially because I've been remote since 2011 so I have a clearly biased perspective.

Life feels a lot like a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study sometimes.

I don't have a counterpoint, I'm interested in other people's perspectives, honestly. I just thought it was a little absurd to gently move past the assumption that remote onboarding is obviously worse!

I can see ways it might be worse, obviously, and I've experienced good in-office onboarding. But I've also experienced absolutely crap in-office onboarding (a month of no working development environment!) - so I question whether that experience was because of the office/remote dynamic, or because companies that do a good job onboarding because they value it, regardless.

So it's interesting to hear stories and experiences from other people's perspective, both onboard-ee and onboard-er, since I'm just one dude with my own Unique Perspective™ and limited total experience based on that viewpoint.

Upvotes are not enough to express agreement here, don’t have much more to add other than it reflects my experience, too. Most people don’t know if they’re supposed to ask the most trivial questions so they implicitly default (wrongly) to not asking. This doesn’t happen in person because the most trivial issues are noticed without newbies asking. To replicate this fully remotely you need a purposefully designed process.

>It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days

It's just not. In the office you're sitting next to a person you can lean over to and ask a question. Yeah, it interrupts their workflow, but that's ok when they're supposed to be helping you onboard. Remotely you've got to send a message, wait for somebody to reply, schedule a zoom call, whatever. It's async communication and it's slower, which is OK when you're not blocked, but when you're onboarding and blocked you need to be unblocked quickly because you don't have the experience to know where else to go while you're waiting.

Increased difficulty doesn't mean impossible or unsuccessful. Personally, I think it greatly matters what sort of culture and tooling you have available at your companies. If you've always done remote onboarding, you have years or training and materials. Having started remotely at a company that was not really prepared to be remote (2021), it was quite difficult as often many questions were expected to be answered by someone sitting next to you. Seeing new coworkers start while being in-person has shown it to be a better experience than what I had.

If there's some thought put into the onboarding process, I believe remote can be effective however I would argue remote onboarding requires far more effort and planning for the same result.

I think onboarding is easier at remote-only companies because you can just search for relevant conversations, you don't have to puzzle out that the way to understand the wonky CI process is to go mountain biking because it's the drive home from the trail where they actually hash out the problems.

Good luck finding anything relevant in usual chat history older than a week.

Oh c'mon. Code is like the cosmic background. It's a picture of how the universe was back when it's author's we're only barely capable of making it work. They know better now, but it works, so they're off doing other things.

Therefore, if it's a year old and it smells bad:

- either it's still like that

- or somebody has since harvested its improvement into at least one standup update, which you can search for

At the very least, you're likely to be able to find who to ask.

The majority of offices are located in the biggest cities >1mil population. Every such city has huge size and insane traffic jams, where people are wasting a lot of their lives. Regardless of my preference to work from office (some days I do want to see my colleagues), the sad reality of commute is going to be a major factor in preferring remote work. I do not want to waste 15 full days every year at sitting in traffic jam, or standing in a bus packed with people. And neither do most of the people with such option. Having an office in <30 minutes commute or even walkable distance is a luxury really, and very few people have it.

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

I think it is only the case in companies where there is no proper onboarding process or it is an afterthought.

I was hired as a remote worker in a company in late 2021 and it was the most seamless onboarding process I ever had. I remember in a lot of companies having to chase people, trying to find them or waiting for them to get back from a meeting. Or the unpleasant experience of spending hours with a new hire and literally feeling his breath behind your neck while I would show him something and not being able to multitask at the same time on other things, especially those that had a private matter or were too confidential for that person at this stage. I am currently doing a lot of knowledge transfer for a new member of the team while I am moving to another one and I spend hours in video call with that guy. I am sharing one screen, while I can still do other tasks, reply to emails/instant messages in a separate screen. It is more walkie-talkie approach than a real videocall. But I can work on something and I don't have to tell him "look I have to do something urgent and confidential, let's discusss in a bit again" and then get dragged by millions things and not being able to get back to him.

> I think it is only the case in companies where there is no proper onboarding process or it is an afterthought.

I think this is what it comes down to. Most companies have nonexistent onboarding, so new hires can be unproductive for quite a while.

I also preferred working in office. My company had a really nice one.

But due to covid forcing remote work I was able to go from renting a basement, to buying a home (and renting out MY basement).

House cost me the same as a city apartment, but I only qualified for the mortgage due to the added rental suite income. So if I'd stayed, I'd be unable to buy and have to continue renting.

Compared to staying in town, since I made the move in 2020, the difference in my net worth is now more than the entirety of my untaxed salary over that time.

tldr: I prefer office work, but working remotely has been the equivalent of earning 2.5X my salary the whole time.

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

More difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible or shouldn't be done.

Do not confuse one's inability to do something with a general impossibility.

Now yes, it does take a different mindset and we probably need to try different strategies for 'breaking the ice' over remote

It really just boils down people wanting a quiet place to work, or not, and employers wilfully ignoring that.

It's documented ad-nauseum that developers (or any other job that requires concentration and reasoning) are far more productive in quiet surroundings.

I've worked in my own office, with a door, for a couple of years out of a 30 year career, and those two years were by far the most productive. Apart from the last 3 where WFH has been even better.

Open plan offices are awful for most, and commuting 90 minutes each way, standing for the full 90 minutes on a rush hour train into London is also a waste of time.

I'm sure it's the same in the US, but substitute car and traffic jams for trains.

The tl;dr here is, if there's so much office space available and going cheaply now, isn't about time employers add proper offices for those that want them, and entice a large number of developers back to the office?

This industry is rich, pays $$$, pays $$$ bonuses, employs smart people, will supply you with $3k, $4k, $5k laptops, desktops, $1-2k monitors, peripherals, free lunch, standing desks, send you on 1-2k conferences and travel, and so on and so on.

But not personal offices. WTF.

> But clearly it's not nearly as superficial as a necktie.

Not sure about that. Working without a necktie can feel like working naked. It takes some effort to change your feelings on that.

On the other hand, working with a necktie can feel like working with a noose around your neck. The first (non-intern) job I had out of college required a necktie as part of the dress code, and though I got "used to" it after a while, it was never comfortable in the >5 years I worked there, and I was extremely glad that when I got to the interview for the job I'm in now, one of the first things they said was (paraphrasing, this was over a decade ago) "well, we certainly won't expect you to wear a tie if you get this job!"

Which parts of onboarding do you feel like are pain points?

It's great how you're more productive at the office. Now picture this: instead of your office with people in it who live within an hour commute, your team now consists of candidates literally anywhere in the US. You had 20 qualified people interview for your job, and you got it as the best, most productive person to get it done? Now the company picks from a pool of candidates 200x the size. You are now the 180th best qualified candidate. The guy who beat you, who lives 3000 miles away, is the best. Now do that for literally everyone you see when you do a little spin in the lunchroom. And it's not about the resource pool averaging out the same, because all companies can pick from anywhere. The guy who beat you isn't superior to you - his skills and experience and personality just more perfectly align to your job. And yours will align better to a better job. Both of you are now happier and making more, while the company makes more by saving on rent.

Also, ghmm, that nice long shit I used to take while browsing reddit... Go ahead and send me a meeting invite for timeslot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com