Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore

Big Tech is forcing people to put butts in seats; smaller companies that can't afford to pay that much are embracing remote work as a competitive advantage in the labor market.

At least that's what I'd expect, and it fits with how a lot of my friends are working. OTOH I have seen a lot of companies advertising for in-office or close-to-office (keeping their RTO powder dry) despite obviously having no chance of competing on compensation.

I want to blame that on the recent mass layoffs, hirer's market and all that, but I'm not sure -- maybe they're filtering out employees with high self-regard on purpose?

If I were hiring I'd probably look for "insists on remote" as a positive signal at least for devs. Values things other than cash, willing to have work output measured, can take late-night meetings sometimes, won't be poached by FAANG -- what's not to like for a manager?

The company just announced a 3 days per week RTO policy for those assigned to an office, but employees are free to go remote if that's what they prefer. The main thing you give up by going remote is an assigned desk in the office -- if you live nearby you can still drop in to an office whenever you like.

That's the problem, IMO. Tech companies, down to the smallest start-ups, love to cargo-cult the big guys. If Google, Apple, and Twitter do something, pretty much the whole industry will follow suit without needing much more justification than "Well, Google does it and they're amazingly successful. Therefore, we should do it."

So, I'm very disappointed at how many of the big tech companies are forcing people back into the office.

That said, I'm also not convinced remote is amazing. I do wish they would move to more performance oriented metrics on who they are allowing to work from where. This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring. If you just want people in the office, surely you have a reason for that.

This is especially true for a company that famously lauds OKRs. If they work as well as we've been assured that they do over the years, make that your push. Don't focus on "percent in the office X days a week."

Hopefully, there will be companies that are in one camp or the other as well. That seems to be the only way to create a workplace that is beneficial to everyone.

Google demanding RTO, for instance, doesn't impact me because I have negative interest in ever working for Google. However, I still retain hope that the sorts of companies I am interested in working for will have a working environment that suits me.

We collaborate through reviews on PRs, virtual documents, links, search queries, and yes, conversations. But this has all happened in virtual settings for a long long time, and almost can’t work any other way.

As a result, we never needed to have specific days "in office" or "you can do what you want"; as long as you could attend the meeting, you could be wherever you needed to be. I found just as much value on days in the office as days elsewhere, but the biggest value was that every day it was my choice.

Then the pandemic hit and we lost the office, and naturally I discovered the downsides of being permanently remote.

Today's "compromise" of forced "in-office" and "do what you want" schedule doesn't strike me as inducing the best collaboration based on what individual teams and groups need.

Perhaps having a goal of "optimizing productivity" is the problem.

If employeers were allowed to drive this to its ultimate conclusion they would adopt forced servitude as the maximum productivity setup (which, they historically, and even today in many places, have adopted).

You have two wrong assumptions here - one is that all the good employees want remote. That's not true. Good people also like offices with some flexibility to work remotely whenever they choose. Second assumption is that companies big and small won't make exceptions for their superstars. That's not true neither. A lot of companies are forcing their policies on their cogs while bending over backwards for their superstars.

Well, if the actual intent is to be left with a smaller number of more obedient people who'd bend over for the company and do things without asking questions, putting a bogus reason out is an effective way to accomplish the goal.

Another poster here said recently: the unspoken truth in the industry is that good employees will still be allowed to work from home.

Companies do have to pay for their office space. My employer did not review our lease during the pandemic. Recently, we got out of the other lease in the region and consolidated both offices into one smaller office for people who want to work in an office. We're saving a ton of money.

If you can run a company on the go or at home, certainly I am capable of shipping quality code at home.

Personally, I favor WFH for scores of reasons. That said, I am aware of the pluses (and the minuses that often cannot be clearly delineated) of having people together in locations. A fair amount of the benefits are subtle, and fairly unquantifiable. These factors balance off against often similarly subtle drawbacks. Most of this comes out of human psychology and social traits / elements of social cohesion.

To provide at least a little specificity, some examples that spring to mind:

On the plus side, you have little bits of useful information, quick answers / responses, knowing who knows something like 'where to find X', ... even being able to SEE how people look day-to-day - that colleagues seem healthy and well, and to ask them in person how they are... lots of little cues, small semi-random interactions of these types.

Of course, these can also be minuses to some / to some degree. I.e., the interruptions that come with semi-random interactions, digressions in conversations (of overly substantial length) about current events &/ recreational activities etc., the "talking behind the backs of others" gossip, ...

It's a very mixed bag.

Now, as always, people are constantly changing too. Generations replace generations. And, those who have grown up with text messages and all sorts of other channels for keeping in touch, ... well, it's another factor in how useful / important "physical presence" may or may not be.

Ultimately, though, for me, WFH has been substantially more efficient and productive most of the time. I didn't even have a long commute or some of the other hassles of many, but, cutting out the commute, transitioning between environments time, random interactions and potential for distractions (ADHD being a factor), etc., has been beneficial to all parties. I agree with your points to a very large degree ... the objective advantages to (substantially) reduced "company office presence" are generally quite clear, and are mostly to be contrasted with more subtle human / social factors including the needs of some "managers" to feel like they are "in control" and are "the employers".

The "MBAs" may have won the "round" starting in the 70s and 80s of decimating unions, but, the environment has changed yet again - including in terms of demographics in as basic a way as sheer quantity of workers available (vs. roles to be filled).

I look forward to more power returning to labor, so-to-speak, even as someone who is involved in running several businesses and operations.

I think it's great if everyone can work where they prefer. I miss the days when I could see my colleagues in person in the office. But on days when I work from home, I can totally see why they prefer it.

I do think that newer employees can benefit from being in an office with experienced team members. However, if this is the new way of things, then I suppose they will need to adjust.

I think layoffs would be way better than trying to force out one group of people, but the people at the top don't care about what's good for the company - they care about themselves.

C'est la vie.

> in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces

was largely unsuccessful almost everywhere and the trend was for more open, more distracting spaces as time progressed. It was to the point that complaining about open offices & wishing we could complain about cubicles like our predecessors was a tired topic on HN.

The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. A private space in the office is under the CIO’s control. I’ll let you guess how often they think a private space is worth spending money on.

It depends on who you work for and where you live. At my last job I refused to go back into the office, because when I was in there the boss would come in regularly to discuss the latest political blog he'd been reading. He's the one in charge of managing the quiet time, and he was a major extrovert who was terrible at it.

Meanwhile at home, I have an 8x8 room that was once a closet and is now my office. It has a child lock on the outside to keep my kids out. I have a set of 37dB ear muffs that fit over my ear buds and block out basically all sound from outside. And I have control over my slack notifications and can ignore them until I'm ready.

I need more quiet time than non-tech management thinks I do, and this way I get to manage it myself instead of making do with whatever management allows me.

Well, the person that got interrupted by you probably lost quite a bit of productivity because of you.

Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it. In every office I've worked in in the past 20 years none of this really happened. It was 99.9% distraction. It's trivial to hop on a meeting with close collaborators or even non-close ones to bounce ideas off of. It's a mask argument for FOMO and the desire of those who simply prefer that environment for various non-collaborative reasons.

Being in the office mostly means you can afford to have less gems because you know you'll spend more time in person walking them along.

I favour some WFH/Hybrid setup, personally. And I view a lot* of this new office push as mediocre managers being unable to leverage their talent.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or do you just believe it to be true?

As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.

there isn't a single colleague in my department (~30 people) who preferred WFH where I feel they were more productive, or even on par. Quite the opposite, those who exclusively stayed at home when working completely lost touch, gave vague updates and excuses about what they're working on and what current problems are. When they returned to office (we've three mandatory days at the office now), it really showed how disconnected they were from all the process and changes that happened over the last two years. And I mostly don't have to care, I'm not responsible for these people, except for one instance my work doesn't even directly depend on them, but I can absolutely see why an employer wants to get everyone back into office. It's not worth keeping WFH up if for every one of those few who actually benefit from it, there are five others who you basically now need ten times the effort to make sure they di their hours and don't just bullshit you in endless video conferences with flaky connections and parrots going mad in the background and whatnot.

You can have spontaneous conversations in a number of ways, but anything that requires focus work suffers greatly because of the insistence in shoving people together without providing suitable spaces for isolated work--which is why I would, back in the 2000s, frequently grab the brick that passed as a laptop and find an empty meeting room to work in, and later (thanks to GPRS and 3G, not even Wi-Fi) "upgraded" to sitting in the cafeteria or a lounge for two hour stints every day just to get work done.

Yes, you need to coordinate with people. And yes, you need to manage them. But doing either by having them within earshot and "not knowing" what they are up to are truly the hallmarks of incompetent managers, or of a broken company culture. Set up office hours. Rotations. Anything but mandatory RTO at arbitrary days that will force people to spend 4h a day in a commute, be unable to pick up their kids from school, or aid elderly relatives (or friends).

I sincerely hope that I do not have to go back to an open-space office ever again, and that my trips to the office are driven by actual need rather than management insecurities.

Physical proximity (and being able to close a door) is a magnifier and multiplier in one way, and digital proximity (and disconnection) to be able to connect with someone is different.

How well the company works in terms of systems and processes that work well remotely prior to the pandemic is a starting point.

Being forced online/distributed at the pandemic doesn’t mean an organization is, or was any good at it.

Offices must provide what the home can’t to remain an alternative.

Offices (home or at work) should be helping me get more done with less effort compared to my home. Interruptions are an effect of culture, or lack of it. The fixed cost investment in better monitors, internet, seating and managing interruptions can go a long way to finding and keeping flow.

While day to day tasks may be ok working remote, problem solving is generally more effective in person when others are involved.

Onboarding of new team members goes much quicker with an in person component for the first few weeks before going hybrid or remote.

Remote work may be ok for one person departments but many are starting to experience burnout after Covid. What’s next in life and career and finding who and what tot all to with hands on or shadowing has its value. In person is also a retention strategy of orgs, fewer opportunities to wander without more effort.

Still organizations who lament about in person work are almost always guilty of falling prey to not reading the full study on open concept workspaces. And they’re free to demand in person work, they sign the checks and people can vote with their feet.

Orgs can do better, especially for knowledge work, by providing a door to close - this is an immense offset against working remotely. Full time open concept working is not a productivity multiplier in most cases.

I’ve worked remotely at a higher pace (more than 8 hr/day) for the better part of 2 decades, while having an office (with a door) nearly the entire time. In person always has its place. But I like flexibility in my life just as much.

In the US, offices might mean longer commutes and less time with family but it’s not necessarily like that everywhere.

It seems like some folks want to have their cake and eat it too. I have less than a 10 minute walk to my office, it won’t always be that way.

Currently we are designing our new office to have all the concierge type services the current demographic needs. Among the top of the list is full access to extremely fast internet (10-30Gbit) that is snappy not available at home.

Of course, it’s possible to solve problems remotely with some people more than others, which can be a function of how long you’ve worked together. I get to work with some of the same people for a long time, it offers unfair advantages like what is being described. Even in that case though, it’s faster in person than online. This is harder to talk about with some folks because they rarely have both feet in one job long enough (3-5y+) to go deep and wide on problems.

To the extent an organization is mature and not innovating too much, remote or hybrid work can be much more feasible. The better their systems and processes, especially companies who have distributed offices.

One reality is there are too many people who demand remote work and also have also taken unfair advantage of it more and more over time. They are then making it ok to offer their position off to the best value globally and not to just them. The role of telemetry of ones productivity or availability is a factor in this based on the tooling.

While interruption is enemy of productivity - instead of being being interrupted by people at work, other distractions await at home. Emails and slack can be far worse interruptions. Many people can’t resist doing certain activities at home that are far beyond.

Digital meetings that drone on for much longer online to overcommunicate can’t be more productive than being forced to stand up for 15 minutes to talk.

I'll take wfh, thanks.

The in office teams on the other hand seem to rely on synchronous work and so they block each other, and this seems to mean the group can only finish a small number of tasks per day, whereas our remote teams complete bigger work more frequently.

I also find a lot of our juniors or quieter folk are a lot more confident talking to people in the remote setting.

People repeat this like a mantra when defending open floor plans (usually managers), but I very much doubt it. Most people seem to hate open floor plans. The subject seems to have gone by the wayside with the pandemic (then it was a question of finding a quiet place to work in a house shared with other people). I'm sure it varies by occupation, but the cost of distraction relative to whatever benefit you might gain from conversation is like investing money in the lottery. Yeah, you might win something, but you mostly won't and the cost will be enormous. I sense a bit of classic FOMO opportunism motivating such rationalizations.

Overall my team has improved with remote work. Before the pandemic it was a struggle to find developers, in large part because of our location (expensive New England college town) and the (unspoken but clear) requirement that people come to the office every day. Now my current team is comprised of developers from Toronto, Sweden, etc. We hit our targets and get work done.

I wouldn't trade it for anything and I hope the pay grade above me realizes the concrete importance of the people and the work over this abstract idea of "community".

This is an anti feature of offices.

Usually that brief interruption costs about an hours productivity for anyone doing stuff like programming, etc, due to the massively high cost of context switching.

It could have been an email/IM.

> training is AWFUL remote.

This implies that the training is lacking anyway, in most cases.

There's no data on this, at the very least you could mention that it's only your personal impression ?

IMO (and this is clearly a personal take) there are two competing effects: - higher bandwidth and easier to align face to face - more distractions, interruptions, more complicated to get things done

If you're in a business or position where you have no IP or nothing hard to do per say, you'll see the first one dominate. If you're somewhere with IP and competitive advantages through smarts then I'd say (personal again) the second effect can come to dominate.

Google pulling a "no remote" move means to me that their competitive advantage in terms of engineering and smarts is not a priority + using the fact that the market swung back towards employers vs. employees. But not general comment about "this take is obviously so much better", this is just intellectual lazyness I believe

Depending on who you are, massive massive benefit. In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.

training is AWFUL remote. Not even close

Definitely agree with this as a statement on how things currently ARE (in general), but they don't have to be that way. A lot of companies who struggle with this turn out to be just really bad at training in general. Previously, they got lucky; the people in need of education scrounged it by interrupting people or watching people or asking someone to metaphorically hold their hand. Companies were training by chance, rather than by design. Remote working demands a different way of training people, a different way of managing people and measuring output; a lot of companies are failing badly at this and falling back to failing less badly at it in the only way they know (i.e. everyone back to the office so we at don't suck quite so much at training and management and collaborating).

Working remote allows me to finish my thoughts, finish the task at hand or just take a breather when I need to. I think that’s the same for those who prefer remote work.

Async communication is far better for a team that needs to get through a never shrinking pile of work.

Remote work isn’t for everyone. It’s a preference, with zero impact on productivity or efficiency for those that prefer it.

I will admit one major downside. It’s easier to move one’s career forward, especially in management if you’re able to chat with higher level decision-makers as-hoc and in person. For those that thrive off of connections to climb the ladder, remote is a much harder climb.

Hard numbers from 20+ projects over 20+ years say the exact opposite. Hard core tech R&D projects, small and large.

When I compare the distributed all remote projects to those run in house, it is night and day difference.

Learning: presentations, pairing, questions via messages, asking for a quick call to clarify something. Also: document your shit.

Ideation: set up ideation sessions before tackling a ticket. At the end of a daily scrum, ask people x and y to stay and trade some ideas.

I lose 2 hours/day commuting + 1/2 hour de-stress from driving through shit traffic. I get far more work done on my WFH days than I do my in-office days. I'm an IC and don't need to do much mentoring, and when i do it's always easier to do it remotely with screen sharing than to try and sit two chairs into the same office. The only reason I come into the office is to have lunch with my co-workers. I do NOT see them the entire rest of the day.

Only thing I've ever gained this way were some bread-making tips (which admittedly were pretty good).

Our office has handily addressed this problem by making communities of expertise that anyone can join, occasional icebreaker events, and monthly showcases of what we're working on or investigating (this usually is just a few minutes of presentation by each team and is optional).

Make it easy for people to connect and they will do so. Meanwhile when I'm at the office, it's headphone-city and the open office format makes those random chats very distracting and frustrating.

Yikes. One would hope that the distance between our cubes is sufficiently punitive so as to discourage these excursions.

Please, do not disturb while cogitating.

>You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close.

I've joined company that wasn't remote-native and yet they were well prepared

They had training videos, documentation, presentations and introductory codebase walk - a lot of stuff

I've been really quickly productive.

So maybe training is as good as your effort put into that?

>You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

I can send message to someone over chat way faster than you can get to his office room / desk.

I can almost guarantee that this person doesn't want to be interrupted in their work at random by people "just walking over to ask a question".

I have never had trouble asking people questions. And I get asked them all the time. In fact, that the questions and answers are written and async is superior. When I was in the office, people would frequently take conversations to Slack (or say "could you Slack me what you just told me?")

Personally too, I find written communication to be superior. I will do quick video calls with people but that's rare (and usually to the taste of the other person).

We also have excellent training backboned by mentorship.

Isn't that the distraction people try to avoid? I don't think there is an expectation from anyone that people should walk over to someone's desk and ask questions. In fact, I believe it's the opposite of what's typically being welcomed – do your own research, dive deep into the problem, work with the problem from different angles, etc.

I do not believe that remote training is awful. When someone's trained remotely, they can always record a meeting and come back to that recording many times in the future. If something is unclear, just send a message. Nobody's recording screenshares in the office, so training/onboarding material from your co-workers gets easily lost. This leads to distractions, such as walking over to someone's desk and asking follow up questions.

I've been in the software industry (QA and dev) since 2000. Other than a short time with a startup, I have _never_ been on a team where everyone has been in the same state, never mind the same city.

For large company settings it’s a different story - if I have to have tons of meetings with a pool of various 100 people for many hours a week, some of them occasionally, yes it would be super helpful to have all those in person to establish connections quicker. However, even with RTO there is little chance those people would be in the same office, so you would be stuck on video calls anyways.

There is probably a sweet spot of medium sized companies where there is a lot of people but they are still in the same floor where in office would be effective. But for google scale - not so much.

The company: All the magic happens face to face.

Also the company: All your coworkers are in a different country on the other side of the world who are asleep when you're awake. Figure it out.

Here's what typically happened in every company I worked at. I ask a question, they tell me to look at the documentation. I look it up, do what I needed to do, and at some point, it all unravels because the documentation is horribly out of date, and there was something else that needed to be done from the beginning, which this other guy knows about.

Training is always awful, in person and remote. Nobody wants to help or give any info, even when you are asking questions specific to the company product. Things that can't be googled, or things that the team would be better off just telling rather than letting the new guy struggle for a week.

No I'm not bitter at all.....

That's a benefit to working from home. One of the worst things about office work is that it makes it easy for someone to come and interrupt your train of thought. It takes time to enter the flow, and almost no time to be shoved out of it, at which point you have to take time to get back into the flow.

A quick question can cost a half hour or so that way.

This is where IM or email shine. You can ignore it until you're in a place where answering it won't be so costly.

Its a "lazy" solution to require RTO for the sake of collaboration, training etc. as there are demonstrated examples (like GitLab, for instance, also see companies like Linear, Supabase etc that are full remote and still pushing out great work).

While I get sometimes in person meetings are great, they really start to lose their effectiveness past a certain point, and I think thats pretty clear with these remote first companies that are successful is they took the time to re-think process, re-think culture, and re-think the approach.

What I find with RTO companies is they want to plug their ears to the idea of real change, because its a real effort to get everyone to do things a bit differently. For example, look at the struggles everyone seems to have around maintaining useful documentation and async communication. One thing I realized is companies that took remote seriously gravitated away from everything being a Zoom call and started pushing in earnest centralized documentation and async communication. Long form responses became the norm. In depth Wiki's became the norm. Those are two examples I've seen in successful remote environments that I think, anecdotally, remain true across the board.

Companies that don't give this real thought are the ones that seem to also be going back to RTO. To me, RTO is an implicit acknowledgement that the culture of the company is unchangeable, and leadership is unable to consider different ways people work.

You can have all this in remote first cultures, that much is clear.

That said, I think it should be everyone's individual choice, if one was to ask me. I have no issue with people wanting to work an office everyday, but forcing everyone to work in an office every day is the problem

You get a little socialization going, you give people the freedom to choose, you still save money in total AND because the "hybrid" isnt randomly distributed, you might actually get all those "useful" communications happening.

Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy? And on the flip side, if companies want productive employees over the age of 28, and deliberately don’t want to be remote, maybe they should start providing offices instead of desk clusters…

Don't get me wrong, I love working from home as well and never want to go back to the office full time, but home is full of distractions. Everything from cooking lunch, to deciding to quickly throw on a load of laundry to talking with daughter about her day when she comes home from school are all distractions I don't have att the office.

Commuting is not equal. Short vs Long commutes, commuting where you have to drive, commuting where you physically exert yourself, commuting where you meander through a park or market on the way to the office and leisurely have breakfast on the way... these are all commutes but they might not all be experienced by everyone the same. Some people hate driving to work, other people have a sports car and love it, and some people might not mind sitting in rush hour traffic with some good music and a bong in their lap.

Personally I love a 15-25 minute bike ride to work. Nothing like it to wake up, clear your mind and get energized for the work day, and the ride home can be a furious workout to destress, or slow and blissful. But that is me.

A) Not all commutes are bad B) Cities should probably be designed to make commuting better (but that may require less cars and more public transportation and better urban planning) C) Some commutes can be good. D) Long term consequences of decreased activity and social interaction may not be apparent yet.

Organizations are in decline when they begin to think of meetings as the work instead of the meeting output.

when i'm at the office i can... go to the lounge and hear people working?

Managing a team, remotely or otherwise, is not "easily done". If you find it easy you're either strongly underestimating your abilities or not doing your job right.

Doesn’t this partly imply you wouldn’t have good data to compare performance of remote vs local?

I’m both excited and hesitant as Remote work should let me work when I’m productive more (ie evenings) with exercise and chores in the afternoon “deadzones”, etc. That and not spending energy masking in an office environment.

However there classic adhd problems to contend with like keeping schedule, etc. I also find I need people to stimulate me. I’ve been thinking of a coworker spot in addition to my home office.

I definitely don't need to be onsite everyday to keep up-to-date with a manager. One call a week is already a luxury, some interactions via chat (where I can report some progress and stuff).

Mostly it's managers who want to see their team everyday and talk to them, I guess because it makes them feel like they are managing?

The value in your comment is on bringing one aspect that makes the situation more "grey", but you lose it all by then depicting the situation as "managers are useless and devs don't need them", which is very black-and-white.

I'm not a manager and I'm not a dev (I work with data and often ended up coding my own system that sometimes ended up in production against my will), but I have observed a lot of devs who were saying "I'm doing fine on my own", and they were convinced it's the case, and ... they were not doing fine.

Some red flags are devs that complains that "the requirements are not clear" or "the company seems to not care about my effort". Sometimes it is true, but I've observed a lot of the time the same people also saying "just give me some requirements that I can follow step by step instead of explaining the bigger picture, I don't care of what this other team do, I'm busy" or "I redirect all the company-wide meeting invites directly to the bin folder" or "when I go into details of the code, the manager don't get it because it's too hard, but when the manager explains their needs and why it makes sense, I don't get it because I'm wayyyy too smart" or "when I go into details of the code, the manager don't get it because it's too hard, but when someone talks to me about something else than code, they have to learn to adapt to their audience and be happy that I pretend to listen to their boring work tasks".

They are truly thinking the problem is the others and incapable to even imagine their mentality is the problem.

For me this is the first time I've ever felt far more productive working remotely since I can trust other team members are doing a good job, and when there are blockers or things to discuss it's easy for us to jump on a call and work it out.

I'm not saying there are no drawbacks, but I think for this particular project the pros far outweigh any cons of remote working.

I was very much in the hybrid camp a year ago, but now I think it really depends more on the team and the project you're working on. Some projects I've worked on before I can't even imagine working on from home since they've required a lot of collaboration with non-technical teams. But for projects where the technical work needed is well scoped and where you have strong developers, you might as well just let them work however they please.

I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work.

There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc). You may simply have a preference for being around people and using the methodologies you listed here, which is fine enough, but remote doesn’t fundamentally block any of the outcomes you mentioned.

Why cant you use standups to give updates and then take it offline if anyone is struggling?

You seem to be having some kind of Messiah complex where people always need you for help. If you leave the company tomorrow, the company will do just fine without you.

I eventually had to leave because I turned into a human Confluence replacement and architect on top of my existing work and still was one of the worst paid people (with little to do about that, management hates "mercenaries"). So I'm very happy I no longer feel compelled to do this working remote anymore, except when people abuse our platform.

I saw it happening in a 'remote' setup a few years back, except, it wasn't as intentional as it was in co-located work environments. It was more a natural consequence of people being remote. Issues/delays that might have been more naturally noticed in f2f settings lingered for months before surfacing. And... the more I dug, the more I was noticing this. More teams separated and working independently with few 'info hoarders' acting as informal intermediaries. There wasn't actual info hoarding with a political motivation behind it, but it happened all the same. Some aspects of working in that team were far better than '9-5 @ office' of 20 years ago, others were worse.

I'm not a "remote work at all costs" person, but also not a "return to shared office at all costs". Flexibility/choices I think are the optimal setup. Not everyone has a great home to work from. Many people work better with routine and physical space between 'home' and 'work'. We do, indeed, often get new info/ideas from the proverbial water cooler chats. There's no one 'best' way for people to get work done, and not one 'best way' for people to work together. My 'best' working style even changes depending on the skills and personalities of the other folks I'm working with.

From a CS angle, we know async is more efficient than synchronous code, but requires very careful implementation. Same for people. It works for OSS volunteers, it can certainly work for full-time employees.

But if you need consistent support (juniors) or you need to influence/help others (seniors, managers), then it's such a huge hindrance to getting traction.

Your job at the office is to sit and listen to conversations like KGB?

Seriously, it sounds like you dont know how to structue work, nor manage people.

Organizing and growing teams is a challenge no matter what the environment, especially for a group that trends introvert. It is hard, whether in office, hybrid, remote, or mixed.

It is hard enough that it seems to me that people pick a side and then stop thinking about how to make the other options work - because why would you? If you picked iOS, why would you waste your precious time thinking about how you'd do it on Android?

But if you're not thinking about how to solve the problems you perceive in remote work, it's not useful to announce your problems with it as if that is any kind of conclusive argument. You haven't solved the problem, but that doesn't mean the problem can't be solved.

Another problem is that many companies are doing hybrid, and that means 40% of the time spent remote. Do the juniors just not get help on those days? Do they just "talk themselves into trouble" without the talking? If we can answer these questions for the two remote days, we can answer them for five remote days.

>I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.

Great. You're one of these talky people. Lucky you! We're not all like that. Let's see if we can be friends rather than competitors/enemies.

We did this forever! If you were ever on-call or had to remote in from home, you were hybrid. WFH has always been supported by employers - as long as it was free.

Another issue is the author's conscious and unconscious hidden biases and agendas. If a research is ordered by a video chat software company, you bet the result will be different than if it's paid for by a coworking space provider.

Similarly, you'll have a different result if it's done by a SF company who needs to justify their expenses vs. by a remote team headed by a manager from the woods in Wyoming.

By the third citation, you lose the source of the study, only have the clickbait outcomes like "86% productivity drop by onsite work", so I'm in the camp of "do whatever feels right for your team".

Everyone is arguing about the age-old questions around productivity and how to measure it, in software development. Google's tracked metrics fell (probably after a time of instability or increase) and so the organization is reacting.

And when working remotely, what I see is that even good coders disappear "in the zone" for far too long... endlessly optimizing some unimportant part of code that doesn't ultimately matter, sometimes creating even worse code that was there at the first place.

And then you feel bad that you say "hey but this new version is horrible" when you know the guy worked on it for a week.

Okay it's doable remote, but it's harder. That's why I say "it's more effective to be not remote".

As a worker, I get it, I hate commute too and I hate not being with my family. But, when the company fails because the competition is just faster and can build things better faster, you won't get a job anymore. So, yeah, I am not for full remote.

They prefer remote customers because they want this dysfunction.

It’s going to be hard to tell what’s related to the Covid shutdown and what’s related to remote working.

Gonna assume it’s a “who you know” and “right place, right time.” But I’ve been holding out in AngelsList for some time.

Google is, by far, the worst place I’ve ever worked with the most useless work and uninspiring management and coworkers. I haven’t learned a damn thing in my time there. FB had its problems but I was at least learning there.

Also I'm not interested in wasting my time studying competitive programming questions for those interviews.

But sure if you love grinding Leetcode and don't mind being chained to a desk, I'm sure Google is alright.

Even 1 day a week in the office is useless. It means you HAVE to live near the office or in the same state even. It's either remote or it's not.

And the days in office can be with your team.

I don't understand how allowing some remote work makes it 100% useless.

Video chat (for screensharing) with colleagues? Wonderfully effective. 64 people in the one Teams meeting? 100% seems to be "manager who can't bring himself to write a more then a 1 paragraph email and instead thinks too highly of his oratory skills".

Which has led me to my grand hypothesis that if you're calling a meeting just to give a fixed speech, write it out first and then decide why it's not an email...or decide just not to send it at all. If you think you need a meeting, then prepare the topics for discussion ahead of time and solicit an initial round of feedback.

Just decide that you meet e.g on monday, so you can plan everything

and spend rest of the week actually doing the work without disruptions

For me, if I could walk 5-10 minutes to an office (especially with people I actually worked with, which wouldn't be the case if I drove 30 minutes to the nearest office) I'd probably do so pretty regularly. For me, it's definitely mostly about the commute which would be 30+ minutes to the closest office and then I wouldn't know anyone there.

There are a lot of locations that really benefit me being close to them than being close to the office.

Also, 5 minutes from the office is not very far. If a lot of people work at the office, living spaces 5 minutes from the office will either end up really expensive or really small.

In my experience it seems like the people who make the decisions on returning to the office are those who can afford to live close to the office.

My home office is kitted out with an ultrawide monitor, a nice webcam lighting setup, a great mic with a nice low-profile arm that slides under the monitor, a powerful desktop tower, etc.

The downside to working in an office, even when there is dedicated hardware that stays there, is that the hardware is usually not gonna be as good as what I have at home, and that I will not be able to have my own office room to work from without distractions.

On the one hand, I makes sense to pause. On the other hand, making vibrant light urban spaces feels like something they could pull off & really build on. Become a destination company.

This is what they get for adopting a car-centric lifestyle.

>As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?

I live in Tokyo, and it's about 10 minutes to walk to my office, and it's extremely safe. No, I don't want to work from home much, except maybe the days when there's a typhoon or I'm just not feeling well.

Absolutely, yes. Don’t know how it’s in Google, but offices in our company don’t supply nice equipment like Herman Miller chairs with high quality desk and constant distractions from other people make any kind of deep state of work impossible.

Add on top of that having a house with a nice garden (if you’re one of those lucky people!) and the clear winner is obvious.

The beige and drab decor is okay, it’s the way the monitors are so cheap and outdated. And the way the mouse and keyboard are the cheapest possible. Giving people doing knowledge work on computers all day the cheapest possible interface just don’t make sense. It’s penny wise pound foolish.

And The office neighborhood is also very unfriendly for pedestrians and bikers. it’s clear planners believed there was zero chance of people actually walking anywhere.

I’d much prefer an office with decent equipment and a better setting. it’s a reason why I am considering switching jobs. To have a decent office to go to.

I'd still want the office to be nice. If it's some concrete monstrosity where I can't get them to buy a decent chair and I have to sit in an open plan… home still wins.

Yes, because I don't want to get covid.

I lived 5 mins from my office for ages - I specifically moved to the area to avoid a commute, save money on transport, etc.

Still preferred to work from home.

I said “had” because admittedly now I’m a corner case. My wife and I nomad around the US 7 months a year staying in mostly extended stay hotels and the other 5 months (October-March) we “snowbird” in our home in Florida that’s rented out when we aren’t there to cover the mortgage.