Paul Graham on Remote Work
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Do you commute to an office every day, sit at a desk in a 4 person shared cubicle, have monthly "performance reviews" by someone unqualified to manage your subject area, have to deal with 3 children's weekly scheduled school-caused sickness, own an old car and only 1 so it is out of service when it needs repair?
I worked from home for years ... scratch that, I "lived at work" while at home for years. If you believe that getting your work done on time only during 9-5 then you've never had to deal with after-hours emails demanding results by the next morning.
Take a job that requires a 1-hour "10 minute standup" every morning at 8:30am so it "doesn't impact the work day". Take a job that needs at least a week to complete with no external progress (e.g. programming) and listen to the constant requirement for "progress updates". Note how there is a built-in assumption that because you're home you're slacking.
Fight through heavy snow or rain, struggle to find a parking space, find out there is no coffee in the break room, that only 1 of 3 toilets are working, that the internet connection is down, and your other 3 cube-mates are all loudly sick of something "going around in the office".
Sure. Go ahead. Assume the worst of your employees. Like children, make sure you can see them at all times.
Yes, some of us tried hard to make it work but like always there was a minority that probably did not and now we all have to pay for it.
At this point, the best we can hope for is a hybrid work schedule. It's not what we want or wish for but, if we are lucky, it's what we can get.
Or middle management forces this on everyone so they can keep pretending they're useful, while most of middle management is absolutely useless. Most managers are there to ask something one person and forward the answer to another person, or gather multiple ones to sum them up in a single sentence. That's literally the job. People who have actual business influence sit at 'the top', people who have technical influence sit near 'the bottom', most people in between are just... there. I know, I worked with middle management heavily in my last corporate gig, those people usually barely even know what we do, they are incapable of making any decision without 'running it through upper management', most of them are not even trained properly to resolve interpersonal issues or work with people in general. Going to the office just so you can sit in your cubicle or on a random desk in the open space and spend whole day on calls with other people is just... pointless.
> It's not what we want or wish for but, if we are lucky, it's what we can get.
This sentence reads like corporate management is your overlord and you're happy if they let you do something. Working in IT you're privileged enough to be able to actually choose who you work for, thinking you're 'lucky' because you can work 2 days from home, is kind of... sad really.
I have yet to hear any company even robustly define productivity for tech workers.
I kid you not.
Maybe your managers are lazy or incompetent?
Also, who doesn't bring their own coffee from home vs. drinking the three-day-old moldy diarrhea at the office?
I hope this serves as an example of why tethering your understanding of working needs to your extremely limited experience - as it is for all of us - makes your argument a bunch of weak anecdotes that add little to the debate.
Talking of limited experience - you think that the tech industry can disappear overnight and life will just "continue unabated"? Yikes.
"We can always go back to the stone ages", sure, sure we can.
Working remotely for the smaller companies and startups was much faster faced and productive. Part of it is due to company size and not remote vs. non-remote. We met regularly (once a month or so) to set direction, we executed at 2x - 3x the speed than at a larger company.
The FAANG company never embraced remote work fully. 2 years after I started remote, HR still messes up counting local holidays. Newly hired remote workers were promised they could travel for 2 weeks per year to meet face to face with their team. In my experience, it did not happen. Travel was severely restricted and new team members were not allowed to travel.
Now, leaders are complaining that remote worker productivity is lower than hybrid workers because of face to face interactions after they sabotaged remote workers and failed to deliver on the exact promises that would have solved this problem.
This sly behavior is unacceptable.
It is about power and control.
Remote workers can have a life, can see their children and friends, and may even have energy to go chasing other job offers. HR and CxO hate all of that with a passion that would outshine a thousand suns.
Like the title of an oft shared post on this site says: "You Can't Tell People Anything."
Show them instead. Just create successful remote companies and stop wasting your time arguing with these people. Or if you just sold your remote-first company, start a remote-first only vc fund and do well.
A random SEO-driven post says PagerDuty, Dropbox, Unquork, Coinbase, Superhuman, Twitch, Gitlab etc. are remote companies. Is this even true?
If it is, then pg should try to argue against this self-evident reality. If he has the intellectual honesty to do so that is.
The past few years has been so saturated with "Never expect a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it"-type low quality pontificating that it's become unbearable nauseating.
I am sure there are plenty of others
I work at a company who his hybrid and has remote. Every remote engineer is damn near impossible to work with, a forget anything happening on Mondays or Fridays.
“Oh sorry, the contractor is here” “Sorry, the lawn guy” “I will be afk, doing this thing I totally would never leave work to do, but it is so important now because I am at home”.
People simply can’t separate home life with work life, and the job becomes a hobby.
Several companies I worked for used a very similar set of processes as when they were working in the office, paired with a set of wrong expectations with the employees.
Moving away from this and understanding how to work at best took several months, and entirely flipped around the team's ability to perform, to the point that being remote was even more productive both on a subjective and objective scale (e.g. lead/cycle time).
After COVID we switched to almost 100% work from home. Office became mandatory 3 days a week but only on paper. In practice workers applied "passive aggressive" method, just didn't show up. And management didn't do squat since most of them were also working from home.
But I did have bad apples as colleagues. One guy in my team would be idle for long swathes of time although it would appear "green" on Teams - first sign someone's an asshole: they put a mouse move program but don't reply for hours. At least be honest and let your status be idle when you're not at your desk - we're all humans and I get that. Anyhow problem wasn't as much that he wasn't at his desk, when sometime I did manage to contact him in dire need of some crosscheck on the project we had to deliver, guy exceeded himself in being a passive aggressive jerk: he'd reply one or two questions then just disappear again IN MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE. For hours on end. Like I'm talking with him, ask him something, replies so I know he's there, immediately I ask him something else and he's gone. Sometimes until next day.
At some point I blew a gasket on him, called him on Teams when he was accidentally available and unloaded dicks and Christs and Gods and what else involves swearing in my native language. He was much more responsive for about two days then reverted to default behavior.
I thought of reporting him to my manager but I knew it would be useless. I tried naming things before in daily scrum with the management and upper management and didn't go well, reckoned what I need to do to keep my job. Eventually the company tanked and fired everyone (me included), so at least there's some divine justice. I found a new job in less than a week nevertheless, being around since the 1970s these guys might be more sensible than my previous employer.
I guess the moral of the story is: when bottom layer workers are dishonest, management pulls the strings and gets them in line. But what do you do when management itself is corrupted to the core? ... which I think is by far the rule rather than the exception. Who is policing "the police"?
Maybe his job was not to be on standby for your service 8 hours a day. Maybe he also had a job to do? Why would he be obliged to reply to your messages immediately?
The whole point of Slack / Teams communication is that it can be async, meaning you can ask people something and they will get back to you when it is convenient for THEM, not for YOU. If urgent, just call.
Yeah, he had a second job, that's what he had. In parallel to running a brick and store business (set up a bar and organized events).
I sincerely doubt everything you were asking this guy was very important, so perhaps you need to learn how to handle more of your own issues and ask more people for help other than that one guy. It is not that guy's job to do your job; it is your job to do your job.
Clearly there are benefits, especially for people with families,or a long commute. Hiring is also made easier.
I don't think a blanket return to work is what's needed, a more targeted appropriate one might be though, identify who's presence is required and pay them commensurately to be in the office. Working from home gets you less but you get the flexibility.
>I don't think a blanket return to work is what's needed, a more targeted appropriate one might be though, identify who's presence is required and pay them commensurately to be in the office. Working from home gets you less but you get the flexibility.
And how exactly do you do this? What if the person who's presence is required in the office depends on people who don't need to be in the office? What now? And how is it fair to everyone that some people can WFH but others can't?
The same is the case at my current company, and the new juniors have had zero troubles with learning. Why? Because all of that can be done remotely.
You only need to learn by watching if you are engaging in the physical world, and software itself is not physical at all, so there is never a reason to do anything in "real life" unless your software happens to be operating a robot or other physical device of some kind. There are endless wonderful cheap or free tools to enable everything that was previously in the physical world to be done remotely now, and if a company and it's employees can't use them right then it is a mix of organizational and personal failings.
And if you give companies exactly what they want, then they'll eventually want talented people to work for them for free.
So the two groups meet in the middle usually - depending on how competitive the job market it.
It wouldn’t be hard to simply put your money where your mouth is and pay differently for in person if it’s so much better and fire people remote if they don’t produce. If they do, there’s something else going on, but it’s not employee welfare or productivity in most cases.
Now they have at risk the millionaire rents they charge their employees.
The worst part is that the decentralisation of talent puts their monopoly at risk.
Software developers can work from home most of the time and meet in person for meaningful interactions (i.e. not just work in office instead of at home) periodically and when needed.
Remote work is a cultural thing more than anything. You can't turn remote and still take hours to answer a simple yes/no Slack message. You can't push everyone into remoting without emphasing the need of keeping written documents and meeting notes accessible to the team. You can't turn remote and just use Slack like an extended mail inbox you check three times a day. Remote will not work if don't have a documented onboarding.
Remote needs people to embrace this change and embrace other collaboration tools, such as Discord, Teams, Zoom, VSCode Live Share etc. Remote needs a commitment from everyone involved, it's not just sitting at your couch and doing everything like you did back in the office. And needs a different management mindset too, managers need to push people into doing remote right too, or the whole team gets penalised.
Until people figure it out we will keep having examples of "wow remote works great for X company" and "remote was a disaster for Y". I've been in productive and unproductive remote workplaces. I hated remote before until I saw it done properly.
And yes, remote won't work for everyone. And that's fine. If you hate Slack and Discord, that's not a problem, offices exist for a reason. Just don't try to measure the whole world with your ruler.
When are remote workers going to start blaming themselves? Clearly, companies big and small are recalling their workers back to their office. Clearly, they have data showing that their productivity metrics have declined. Tech management are usually very data-driven compared to other industries. So if they're recalling workers, then they must see something.
The simplest explanation is that remote/hybrid culture is less productive on some metric - whether it's total company output or less creativity or whatever it is. So while an individual remote worker might perceive himself or herself as being more productive, they often do not think at the level of the total company output.
And no, management isn't going to come out and explicitly say that their WFH workers are lazier and less productive. That's just bad PR. But you can infer what management is seeing from their actions.
They'd never come out and say "We are recalling our workers because we have data showing they're less productive while working from home.".
Saying something like that would cause a lot of bad PR. Piss off your workers even more. The media, pro-WFH people, HN will pan the company for saying something like that. There's no winning for the company to take this risk. It's best to say something generic like "culture".
I am thankful that our company doesn't do that. We have data that proves wfh is at least the same and better in terms of productivity. Oh, and also, we listened to our employees when they wanted complete flexibility. It was not just HR exercise sending questionnaire out and then ignoring it saying something like 'we hear you but...'.
But clearly, the tech companies recalling workers disagree.
PS. I don't believe in 3rd party studies since they rely surveys and the subjectiveness of remote workers. Companies actually have access to employee data. Also, studies need to be multi-year because while people were likely enthusiastic and motivated 3 years ago, they might have checked out while WFH by now.
If leadership at big companies were actually 100% sold on remote work, then they would have given up their offices long ago.
Add to that the point that the few stated examples are usually available if staff come in even a modest amount of the time, ie they are an argument against full remote rather than an argument against majority remote.
In person is better for collaboration, for social interaction, and for a sense of a company on a mission. Some of the jobs I had were fantastic experiences and that was because of the people. And not just your direct team, but you also get to know lots of people outside your team. You learn from them, you have fun with them. It’s well known that many people meet their partner at work - or they used to anyway.
But remote is what people … especially developers … want. And remote is what makes sense, what’s the point of traveling 2 hours a day to sit at a desk and do what you would do at home?
On the other hand, some people do exploit remote working…. they work less, the slack off, or even have two jobs or freelance clients. This is well documented.
There’s no right answer.
Forcing everyone to move back into the office would probably be impossible for like 2/3rds of our team-members anyway and would probably require either letting those people go, or more likely, reorganize the teams and replacing them with local workers.
I can't stress how much economic damage it would cause, and how difficult it would be to hire and train people on the specialist skillsets we need.
why do we need slack and teams and online chat windows if "in person" and phones will work? let alone VR?
They are the last people I would trust on Earth for productivity advice.
Companies that were remote before COVID-19 anyway are not suddenly realizing that remote work doesn't work (because it does work), so they are staying remote. They had no offices and aren't getting any so there is no incentive to bring people into an office.
Companies that weren't remote before COVID-19 are usually locked into long term leases, and conveniently enough, these are the same companies extolling the "benefits" of in-office work and the "downsides" of remote work that (also very conveniently) only they have observed.
This all boils down to whether or not the company has a significant amount of skin in the game with regard to office space.
Paul Graham is being paid by Big Office Rental to day this!
You write as if this "elephant" is "it" for all time, for all remote workers. It's not, because there has been (and will continue to be) a cohort of remote workers from before Covid, who realise there is a cost/benefit here, and who do not commit fraud, they just work from home at the intensity they work and their employer is just fine with that
Sure, sending everyone home, and then wanting them to come back highlighted that people who aren't self selected up front to WFH include a cohort who cheat. So what? They probably cheat in other ways at their desk.
SOME remote work works worse and worse over time because SOME people realise they can scam their employers. But, what % it is, against overall work-life rebalancing, value for money, increased work time because of not spending time commuting, reduction in other costs (ok, dealing with sunk cost in the office is an issue) .. It's nothing like as elephant-in-the-room as you think it is.
No, one of the elephants in the room is that a fucktonne of Management KPI are built around offices, and the people who demand return to office want to return to achieving those KPI. And, a fucktonne of corporate future profit and tax offset is predicated on property retaining its value and those office blocks are dropping like stones in a deep pond: Thats why Google and Salesforce both unloaded huge property investments (rental or lease) recently.
Managers and CEOs and Boards want return to office because they have "REI-ified" beliefs around the nature of work and the value of office work, and they have set deliverables which will make them personally wealthy by achieving this.
Its not dissimmilar to the mass firings: there was no across the board need to shed 10% of staff. It was a KPI which benefited a cohort of managers and CEOs. Thats all (in my opinion)
Workers and Bosses are always in tension. The factory model was designed to increase production at the expense of craft work done in the home by weavers and spinners. Was the "product" better? For some things yes, but for others no: it was about profit extraction, Taylorism, and hourly rates.
I also think you vastly over estimate the number of people who are willing to commit fraud to make more money.