also, just to make sure it's clear to anybody reading about remote vs non-remote. remote doesn't mean no meatspace meeting ever allowed. remote team members are not under chess king rules. we did meet IRL. for some jobs it was just 1 week in 10 months. (thanks COVID) but otherwise it can be a lot more. (1 week every quarter kind of makes sense, but so does anything that members are up to - especially if they live close to each other.)
From the abstract: Findings show that early career artists have the least social capital, established artists have the most, and late career artists begin to lose social capital unless they actively maintain it.
It is clear who is stopping them from working from home, but who is stopping you from going to the office?
This happened to me once. The team was in NYC, and I wasn’t so I was coming to the office uselessly. I do like coming into the office since it’s easier to turn onto and way from work with travel as a context switch but that aspect made it worthless for anything else.
Please take a deep breath and consider the extent to which your unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of people who don't share your opinion may harm, rather than help, your cause.
> People want to work in the office with other people. If they go and end up working alone because their team is remote, then there is no point.
The author would crave for others to be present to satisfy their whim of not only wanting to go to work, but also dragging others reluctantly there. It's worthy of a walkout
At the least, you have to reorganize teams so the office staff have other team members who are also in-office and not remote.
If you can’t do that then you are better served with going all remote in my opinion.
This is not a zero-sum game. It is possible for everyone to get what they want.
At overall software-industry level? Yes.
At individual company level? It is much better to have uniform policies for the entire org. Either be completely remote, or completely in-office, or if you want hybrid then mandate the days when everyone must be in office.
Why? There are ample examples than not where this is not applied. Significantly compensation
If all your organization processes are set up to work well for on-site, then the effectiveness of the remote people in your organization will hurt; if all your organization processes are set up for remote interactions, then the overheads of that don't make sense for the on-site people sitting next to each other; and if some units are fully on-site and some are fully remote, each with different style of working, then you might as well have two separate organizations with vendor/contractor relationship, that would be more efficient as their collaboration anyway have to be managed that way.
The frupidity used to be a huge sore spot, but being honest, is no longer a part of the culture.
Sure, there are no catered buffets or massage chairs, but the old inflexible rigid frupid systems are all gone. Engineers get top of the line M1 Macbooks, nice monitors and good chairs. The desks are all adjustable sit/stand, not doors. You can get and expense whatever software you need. And yeah you gotta fly coach but nobody is going to bite your head off for expensing some peanuts from the mini bar at your hotel.
Only to be then shipped a base M1 Macbook with 8 gigs of RAM anyway!
Mid 2022, my (brand new) manager received a rigorous scolding for holding a team event where the team (spread out across East Coast and West Coast) met in a single location (Seattle; where majority of the team was) for a couple days of team building (i.e., working in the same office, going out to lunch).
Frupidity may not be the correct word. Perhaps miserly is more appropriate.
One common remote work thought is “you get more heads down time”
I’ve found almost the opposite. You have to be way more regular about engagement with each person. I would do 20 min meetings with every team member, every week. Team lunches over zoom twice a week, daily standup (1 min per person, plus breakout rooms for further discussions), Friday afternoon optional game days, etc. I always just hung out on a video conference, all day; similar to when people game.
In an office I can walk around the block with you and chat. In a remote setting I have to schedule some time and keep you engaged. It’s a long distance relationship, takes more time, and effort… much harder to sustain
That said, I’d set aside budget and offer it anyone wants to organize. If they did it they got a free meal, they’d get to start at 2pm, and could purchase games/activities.
Except that the parent commenter is expecting others to be available to them without regards to other people's working patterns.
And it is harder. For example, it's way easier to see when a junior dev is lost when you can see pain in there face from across the office instead of hoping it shows in one of the check-in meetings.
in person you just drag a laptop over but remote you have a call, share a screen, carve out time. not necessarily more disruptive, but sure feels like more effort, and now involves multiple apps sucking up bandwidth and potentially logging everything you say.
Also physically schlepping a laptop around to show someone is way more work than a simple screen share....and in either scenario here you're needing to 'carve out time'.
The truth and my point was that as a remote manager you have a lot more input requirements. Basically; you need constant touch points with every person. These comments also point out the challenges in that, don’t want to over do it either.
(1) Leadership & management are actually two distinct roles that are often conflated
(2) how do you lead a team without talking to them?
Your comment is fair-ish, but I think misses the mark. You have to balance touch points and removing blockers, with attitudes like “I want heads down time to work”. In an office you can walk pass, see someone struggling and offer to help. In a remote setting you need regular check ins.
For what it’s worth here, I described maybe 2-4 hrs a week of meetings. How is that a burden? Lol that overhead of planning & engagement (5-10%) dramatically (like 1.25 - 2x) productively. It results in less waste and a more motivated / engaged team, if done properly
This is exactly what I love about remote work.
Being able to schedule activities ahead of time and avoid my flow being interrupted makes me so much more productive.
I and the people I work with also like to organise meetings back to back. We spend our mornings getting through all our meetings by 11am, and then we've got the whole day to get work done without any interruptions.
That is from the people's manager perspective. From the perspective of an IC, the lack of all that extraneous engagement means we have more time to write code.
I know people who are RTOing to be on video conferences all day. Not a fun way to live.
Practically speaking it's not so different than how it is currently though (except maybe lower CoL areas in the same country), it's very difficult to have FTE's in foreign countries, I am in a position to feel this very much right now- either you have to do very complex accounting, become a multi-national or they have to be hired as contractors.
There's still many barriers to it being off-shored, and the kinds of companies that would do that aggressively are looking to replace you anyway.
Have you looked into other services such as "remote.com" to handle international accounting/legal?
I am curious but from the employee's perspective.
They make it a lot easier honestly, walking you through the various hoops, but you are still a contractor which means you must handle your own employee benefits (healthcare etc), social contributions, submit your own taxes (in countries where this is not commonly on the employee this is annoying) and ensure that you are set up as some form of business entity yourself.
In my case that would mean either setting up a one man company or being a “sole trader” under Swedish law.
for PnL purposes as an employer, you would be considered a contractor.
How many people were all excited about a "random" guy in a small town in Sicily creating a key-value database a few weeks back?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35871462
That's globalization, folks.
If you think middle managers stand to lose due to remote work, you have no clue why middle managers exist in the first place. Remote work increases the importance of that role, in fact.
> Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely
Have you actually done meaningful software development? For a specific example - designing a complex system is definitely hard to do remotely. Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard and you will get a much better outcome. I have been managing remote teams for >3 years now and have flown in my teams from all over the world to a single location on multiple occasions. Every single time, the feedback was that whiteboard sessions were awesome and helped move the project forward significantly.
Have you actually done meaningful software development? I'm sorry for the tone, it's just that you're presenting a completely unqualified argument based on your own personal experience and then claiming OP hasn't done software development.
I do hobby projects that delve into some complex low level techniques (because my day job is kind of boring tech and this scratches that itch for me). I've stumbled across a global community, meaning none of us have ever met face to face, and have had the best collaboration I've ever had with any other developers. It's especially better than the collaboration I get with my coworkers, who are all just doing their job with varying levels of enthusiasm (which is as it should be, it's just a job after all).
The idea that you need a whiteboard and to see somebody's face to effectively collaborate is an antiquated ideology in the present day. We have: Zoom, Discord, Github, Figma, Slack, Teams, etc etc. These all allow effective collaboration with other people without ever needing to see their face.
> Every single time, the feedback was that whiteboard sessions were awesome and helped move the project forward significantly.
Great. And you can just as easily screen share over Zoom and draw on a tablet. There is no magical ability that a whiteboard and in person meetings have over meeting virtually.
And all this to say, in person sessions can be great and collaborative too! But your conjecture:
> For a specific example - designing a complex system is definitely hard to do remotely. Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard and you will get a much better outcome.
Is not a tautology.
Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard, and you may get a better outcome. The world we live in does not operate in absolutes, and the more I learn the more I realize that being dogmatic about any approaches or opinions is usually dumb. There's always an exception to the rule, and, in fact, there's usually several exceptions to "the rule".
Nope - not "just as easily".
> The world we live in does not operate in absolutes, and the more I learn the more I realize that being dogmatic about any approaches or opinions is usually dumb.
I agree with this take. Speaking of dogma and absolutes, I wonder what's your take on GP's comment: "Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely".
Now with that perspective of pragmatism, I believe job of C-suite is to strike a balance between what's good for everyone on average. There would be some who are actually productive with fully-WFH and those who want fully-RTO. Which is why we are seeing a return to a hybrid approach. WFH a few days and RTO for a few days. The key is to mandate RTO days uniform across the org to ensure that benefits of RTO are actually realized.
There is a sweet spot for "amount of process" that makes individuals and teams the most productive. Note, I didn't necessarily say happiest, and the productivity may not be sustainable indefinitely but we all know there is a certain sweet spot. Too much process kills productivity. "Can I just please leave this fucking meeting and start writing code?". No process also sucks. "Oh shit, you built that API? I thought I was supposed to be building that"
But just the right amount unblocks everyone and lets teams build stuff efficiently.
The trouble is "the right amount" is different by person, by team, and by project. So the most important thing of any process is to have it be constantly re-evaluated and adjusted as the team and work evolves. But I think we've all been there on a team when things just glide and try to recreate that for the rest of our careers.
I think the same is true for remote work vs in-office work. Sure, on the right task working from home is positively ethereal compared to an office filled with interruptions. But on a long enough timeline, and especially if you are part of the creative process of engineering (ie not just "converting requirements into code" but helping define the requirements, and contributing to the full product, which good companies incentivize their engineers to do), then you do want to be in person with your teammates for at least part of the time. Juniors need access to Seniors to ask questions sitting next to each other or even pair programming. And there is nothing quite like iterating on a design with a peer at a whiteboard compared to a remote session.
Balanced effectively by good teams, a mixture of in-person and remote work is probably the most efficient answer for most teams.
The problem is:
1/ It doesn't happen automatically, much like refining a process, figuring out this balance is going to require much tuning and adaptation. And a top-down company-wide mandate for the same process is the opposite of empowering that for teams bottoms-up.
2/ It has meaningful consequences for people's lives - things like where they reside, and how they commute. Whatever improvements come with a hybrid work environment are probably lost by the candidates you lose who refuse to move, and the sacrifices people have to make in the rest of their lives.