The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds.
I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based on this criteria.
I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based on this criteria.
The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes. Maybe the core goal does see some innovation, but documenting that becomes much harder.
There are also detractions to the everyone together models. Anyone with kids _will_ bring the latest mutations of colds into work. They'll vector out of daycare and schools through the parents and infect everyone in the office. Frequent Fliers might also have a similar effect based on their sheer exposure. Allowing WFH isolates these fault domains and minimizes the spread.
I will say, if those are my two options, I'm going to choose getting sick for a few days a year over filling out thousands of words of tech specs that don't actually clarify anything for anyone (because all of the actual questions get answered over slack DMs anyway) every single time.
(Not saying all tech specs are bad, but they're certainly not a one size fits all process and if remote work means we need more of them then that means we're spending more time writing them then we need to be)
Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that crazy. My work place has "do what you want policy, but we want to encourage remote work and shrink our leased offices". My team at least has 4 people that come to the office regularly, and 2 that work remotely 100%.
The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. I'll always do what's more efficient and what reduces red tape. If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.
> Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. A conversation that just needs 3 people will now involve 12 because everyone needs to forward a meeting invite to everyone they think might even be remotely interested.
The "outright disrespectful" is just a people problem. outright disrespectful people will be outright disrespectful in both verbal and non-verbal communication.
We noticed this as well. Now we come in at least once a week. Is there any way that the same level of speed of collaboration can be achieved remotely? We use all sorts of tools but we've not been able to achieve that kind of productivity and it honestly irks me.
Couple this with a more instant communication form, ie voice chats, and there isn't much else to need when it comes to collaboration. With the added benefit of async communication, you can leave notes to each other on the board/build off things without having to actually be together at the same time.
I will note that if you have a tablet and compatible pen (with app support), it makes it all feel so intuitive. But some people get into the flow of clicking and dragging components with text it's not a big difference.
with a physical whiteboard, you get to do your own getto animation. Do you want to express the flow of data/requests in a service? easy, just draw them as you're expressing them. Do you want to express a node replacing a node, draw the arrows, use an eraser and you're done. You've essentially created the "animation" part in real life without any need to learn or know "animation" software which is too complicated.
in 2020 when we were all forced to work from home, I bought a really expensive Wacom tablet thinking that I can use that to replace a white board. The logistics of it all was just too complicated. telling everyone on the meeting "wait, shut up. let me grab my tablet. Let me connect my tablet. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? let me start drawing. Can you see my drawing? oh I'm drawing too fast and you can't see the arrow's direction? oh sorry I'm not used to drawing on a tablet. I'm pointing to "this". Can you see "this"? what do you see? no that's not what I was pointing at. I'm point at "this" not at "that". Let me disconnect and connect again."
might as well just cancel the project and look for another job.
The scene has got substantially better, to the point where your situation is actually quite overcomplicated. You don't screen share anymore, most of these apps support multiple people on it at the same time and have indicators for what they're focused on/adding to (their cursors). If you do want to use a tablet, and I do, I just connect to the app on my iPad to draw on, while still using my macbook to view the document as a whole/indicate what part I'm really focusing on/keep the voice chat going/etc. There's no lag or slowdown, and I only have a 100mb connection, it's not as if it's transferring an entire netflix movie to me.
COVID has substantially improved so much remote work, it's unfortunate a lot of that has been clouded due to experiences early on from the rushed forced implementations!
> What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?
I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.
And yes, sometimes it is important to let other people interrupt you. For example, if someone else needs their code reviewed, they should absolutely always interrupt me to get it reviewed. Unless I'm in an interview with a candidate or something similarly external, unblocking other engineers on my team is always a higher priority and return on investment than anything I could be working on alone.
So what am I supposed to work on when I'm waiting for my code to be reviewed? Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important? Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching. In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task). In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
But anyway, needing everyone into an office because you struggle isn't the fault of WFH
This isn't about "me struggling", it's about ways the entire team's productivity can be affected by choosing an asynchronous vs synchronous code review model. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/context-switchin...! has some more info on how certain types of context switches can be more damaging than others. I've been working remote for 3 years now with a synchronous code review system, and I wouldn't give it up for the world.
Reviewing code together is reasonable, but having to review it as soon as you say "done it" is an interruption.
Yes, absolutely, if that hour is going to be productive and collaborative in coming up with ways to make the code better (which every in-person code review I've been in has been)
> everything I can’t understand without asking you needs to get written down for the on-call eng next year
No, everything that you can't understand without asking me should be fixed by both of us so that it can be understood by everybody. Approving hard to understand code just because it's been "documented" hurts the entire codebase.
Correct, yes. Your current problem is at a state of being done, beyond any code review feedback you may receive. Expecting people to immediately cancel everything they're doing and review your code is not only absurd but also leads to poor quality code reviews. Because rather than actually think about the code and spend time on it, you want them to approve it as fast as possible so you are unblocked as soon as possible.
> Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching.
The reviewer has to context switch and juggle multiple tasks. They have to understand what your code does, why it does it and why it was necessary in the first place. They have to open the ticket, read what it's about, read any conversations and then figure out any potential concerns.
> In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task).
If you have one person review your code then I question that your code review process even matters. For extensive reworks, redesigns etc you are going to pull in more individuals and there is going to be more time taken.
> In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
They take far more time in my experience. I've had review turnaround be a few hours to a day in an async context for major reviews. They review the code, we hop on a call when convenient and go over the issues in 15m and we're done. If it's nothing major or understandable over text, then comments are good enough.
Otherwise, most other people are either available, or will tell you when they are not and you can easily say back "no worries, ping all of us when you're done" and everything moves 100% more efficiently.
If I need the 6 of us to be on anything I need to send a meeting invite for a specific time to eliminate that type of bullshit. Then deal with all the bullshit that entails
> You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway.
In this situation, you ping someone and are upset that they're focusing on work. You are angry that you didn't interrupt someone in the middle of deep focus to do what someone else might consider a pointless meeting.
The last statement proves my point. You don't actually seem to consider the employees time or work to be important, but rather that you need the six of them NOW, no matter what they're doing. You're exactly the problem you describe. What you describe as avoiding red tape to me sounds controlling and nightmarish.
Even in an office environment if people want to do quick talks, white board stuff etc I vastly prefer setting up quick meetings or something ahead of time so that I don't constantly get interrupted by some jackasses fighting for my attention when I got a problem to solve.
An organization should have the balls to say "fuck it, we're 100% remote work" then let employees figure out how that would work for everyone and hoe to organize their meetings and work schedule for everyone. Or they should equally have the same amount of balls to say "we're 100% work from office with the occasional exceptions like we did before and you should figure it out".
I've been wanting a commitment to one of the approaches from management for a long time. I'd also like some form of commitment from other companies when I'm applying for jobs. I have no interest in working in a "hybrid" team. You're either 100% remote or you're not. Just tell me which you are and let me pick.
What's funny is your solution "or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in" should be a meeting invite rather than a morning ambush.
That’s fine. I’ll catch you next morning or when you’re grabbing a soda or water or …
> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.
This is what's disrespectful. If you're incapable of synthesizing the problem effectively into written form, then honestly you're the problem here. It takes a given amount of your time, where you can think twice and edit the document and synthesize ideas well, objectively better then dumping your stream of thoughts on everyone. Then, others may spend much less, or more, time on it on their rhythm. This flexibility makes it more efficient and respectful of others.
The scheduling is a 100% solved problem. Google calendar/mail let's you pick a free slot in a matter of clicks. But do you need the schedule a meeting immediately all the time?
It all just sounds like bad management and incapacity of expressing ideas well in written form. The kind of job anybody with half a brain cell can do.
Luckily in-person communication doesn’t exclude that. Write to your heart content. Go nuts. Who cares. On the other hand, 100% remote communication excludes all other forms of communication
That's a big fat strawman. The same way I can gather some people from the office for a five-minute adhoc whiteboard session, I can start a quick group chat about a topic and turn it into a video conference if necessary. No scheduling or agenda required.
Written communication is inherently significantly more complicated. To "jot down" any idea you need to consider how that record will further be shared with others. If I were to write an .md file with a bunch of terms that only the 6 of us know what that's all about, then make a bunch of assumptions based on that. All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with.
In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Then add links to those who don't know. Then add links to the link to those who don't know. Then eventually schedule a meeting to discuss the proposal. then a meeting to discuss the results of discussing the discussion of the proposal.
Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this.
Also, you've moved the goalposts again. The GP suggested video. Not writing a book in Markdown.
Yes they don't work unless you have a company/team policy of "everyone must turn on their camera 100% of the time". You can say something in a meeting with 14 people, take a quick look and see 10 people nodding and 4 perplexed (or 4 people nodding and 10 perplexed). Can't do that with 14 static avatars.
As far as I know no company has such policy. When a team in my company tried to enforce it, their manager got a quick call from HR saying they can't do that.
I get your point, less work for you and job security, but don't be surprised if you're not met with sympathy or not taken seriously.
"Documenting" is not "documenting everything down to the T". You can have that attitude with verbal communication too.
Your problem is not remote work, your problem is that you seem to work in a toxic environment. And judging by the discussion style you employ here, it could also be that you're used to rely more on intimidation than arguments. That indeed doesn't work nearly as well in an e-mail.
Now, I have worked in remote-first teams, in an office-first team that during Covid was suddenly forced to become a remote-first team and in one of those oh-so-dreaded "mixed" teams. The latter has some challenges but nothing that cannot be worked out. And you will find assholes, that report their own account of events to the boss all the time, in the office as well.
What I never encountered was, that quickly getting a few colleagues together to exchange ideas about a problem would be some kind of challenge. You post to the group channel, quickly explain the problem and ask people to join a short call. Done.
There seem to be trust issues between you and your team. No wonder.
You just described why written communication is vastly better.
Suppose instead of just two people who are 100% remote, you have 8 people who are remote out of a team of 12 (the rest come into the office regularly). The 8 people who are remote find a problem, hash out the design in chat/video, write up a document and the 4 people in the office get to see a document that 8 out of 12 have signed off on. The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.
This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email? Remote workers have only one style of communication available (digital) whereas in-house have two styles (in-person & digital). There is no functional difference for the remote workers in communicating with all other workers but for the office workers there is.
Long before the pandemic, we were 100% in office but we had one 100% remote team member. We never had any problems because Robert understood that he was the only remote person. There was a distinct section of "Robert update" in the team weekly meetings just to recap what we all agreed on and to update Robert. Robert knew that and worked around it. We also knew that any decision we made didn't involve Robert and that we had to minimize impact on him whenever possible. If it wasn't possible, then we needed to update him as soon as possible. Luckily Robert never worked on core components with many fuzzy interfaces to other component. Both him and us agreed long ago that it wasn't feasible.
If we all decided the whole team is remote, we could work with that. If we all decided the whole team is in-office, we too can work with that. Having a split team inherently dictated split responsibilities.
I don't entirely agree, I think hybrid can work well. It's just that like your colleague Robert the remote workers need to realise that there is a trade-off. You might save on commute etc but the price you pay is that in-office staff might make more decisions etc without you especially if there is a critical mass of workers in-office.
People who prefer the office shouldn't force their preferences on those who prefer remote but remote workers shouldn't try and force the company to be structured around them. Life is all about trade-offs and so long as people go in with eyes wide open it can work well for everyone (in that more people get to work in ways more closely aligned with their preferences).
I've also known teams that basically had a rule that as long as anyone was remote you worked from a work perspective as if everyone were. But it sounds as if that wasn't acceptable in this case to the majority.
It is getting increasingly tiresome to have some people who prefer remote behaving as if the world revolves around them. It isn't enough that they get to work remote, they also need to have everyone and everything else change so that there own lifestyles choice doesn't lead to any downsides for them.
It's possible if all team members in the office went out for lunch and didn't see the messages and emails in time. The remote members wouldn't exclude them, but the in person team members wouldn't be able to provide their input in a timely manner.
That's the point. Remote workers normally don't exclude the ones who go to the office, and office workers should not exclude remote workers either. That's how inclusivity works in many other cases too - you don't rely on spoken communication if you have a deaf colleague, you don't send your blind colleague architecture diagram in PNG, you don't require attendance to after-work beers, because people have all the kind of circumstances that require them to be present for their families etc.
There is a small price of convenience for in-office workers, but the total result is better documentation of decision making, less influence from office politics, decisions being taken more rationally - and that is not even considering that you can employ people from different cities, countries and timezones.
You added this yourself. Documenting stuff is not pointless or "paperwork" (e.g. filling forms to get certain things done).
Working remotely async requires people to document their meetings, have documentation in place for newcommers to your project, etc. It's far from pointless.
The alternative is to have these mythical "watercooler chats" that people keep saying exist where 2-3 people gather together and exchange ideas and decide on things without letting other participate or know about until it's too late. I've never seen much of that while I worked in an office but if it exists, the company has way bigger issues.
Remote work forces companies to work as they should have already be doing things. Or in other words, it exposes dysfunctional orgs.
The map is not the territory.
Open floor full of people - all doing Teams calls...
With colleagues who could not come, because there was not enough desks at the office, for everyone to book...
This variety can be a big deal!
One aspect is I am completely free to maximize an opportunity. Work at customer site, work at home, work at office... whatever gets the task done at max value.
Having that experience over a sustained time has shown me a few things, and one of those is how communication channels and context work.
Let's take that water cooler convo.
People like those because they appear casual, spontaneous and the context is compartmentalized away from the usual, sort of a back or side channel.
I have the same conversations over Skype, for example, or via a phone call while traveling.
I believe this struggle will result in more people being more flexible in how they communicate and why and as they do, the strong pressure to be in an office all the time will be reduced in a large number of cases.
There is almost no difference between a Skype chat, text messages, phone call or water cooler, break room, smoke room chat.
People who try it will soon adapt and everyone involved will be better off.
I can't stand the creeping of "social" office life into my private life. Hey let's catch drinks after / see the match together / get to know each other. It brings way more negatives than positives into the work life. I spend less energies deflecting this kind of interactions in remote work, and I can concentrate on the actual work even more. It's okay to be detached.
Not just documentation -- all communication needs to be more explicit and deliberate. Organic "water cooler chats" can happen but in different ways.
Task-based mixed as in "those activities require coming to the office" doesn't create a lot of problems, but you will discover that workers will demand some incentive to engage on those activities.
The one that is the worst of both worlds is just the "we require your presence 3 times a week", but that is just the failure mode the article talks about presenting itself on a different way.
Meanwhile, employees who strive in in-person collaboration suffer in their development.
In terms of the collaboration, you are implying that I need to be in the office in order for you to be able to progress as a human. I’d once again wonder why you see this as a problem created by the WFH employee and not the in-office employee who needs personal emotional support from others in order to get the job done.
All above issues could be alleviated with some meeting etiquette, but that was challenging on its own. In our case the vast majority of teams didn't have remote members, so there wasn't much willingness to introduce company wide rules.
The simple solution was to introduce a single rule. If one person is remote, everyone must be remote (join from their own laptop).
Not OP but we are forced to dial into the meetings separately even if many of us are in the office and could use a whiteboard in a conference room. Remote colleagues can join the conference room remotely and at least those in office can get to have a conversation of a higher fidelity. But our company bans it for "fairness" - as in everyone must suffer Zoom equally.
I usually point at the way F1 teams do their meetings where everyone wears a headset, even if a bunch are in the same room: https://tinyurl.com/2uenm69f
But often if you suggest this to traditionally office based people they feel daft doing it and plough ahead with a mic/speaker in the middle of the room and the remote guys become second class citizens, not being able to hear half the room.
The only thing they do not handle well is multiple simultaneous conversations and people talking over each other, but those shouldn’t be happening anyway.
* The headphones must block outside sound sufficiently, so you only hear the people in the same room through the call and not directly.
* Your headset must not pick up when other people in the same room are speaking.
But even then, it has serious drawbacks compared to an in-person meeting:
* Latency. With anything over a 50 ms roundtrip (including hardware), people inadvertently start speaking over each other, and typical latencies are much much higher than that. It becomes more difficult to break into a discussion, trying to make a small interjection often disrupts the flow of conversation.
* Lack of non-verbal communication. Webcams remedy this to some extent (though many are negative to using webcams in their home for other reasons).
It can be argued that this is a small price to pay for the ability to WFH, but it's disingenuous to say that pushback against "everyone on headset" is just due to people feeling "daft" doing it.
It's just the reason I've been given. It would have been disingenuous for me to say latency or non-verbal communication was a factor because no one's given me either as a reason. Possibly because I'm talking about what are already hybrid environments trying to improve, as opposed to assuming an office environment is the default position - so neither of those were differentiating factors because they were already present.
there’s really no excuse not to have a decent conference phone in meeting rooms. i’ve seen them in use since 2000 at least, and personally purchased one that wasn’t even $1k.
we had meetings and calls with remote people long before covid.
Most recent one I've used was a Meeting Owl 3 which I think was in that $1k ballpark. It has quite a novel way of picking up on the 360 camera who it thinks is talking which works pretty well, but the audio just isn't anywhere near as good as everyone having their own mic attached. I'm not sure anything could be.
That's because F1 cars are LOUD and without noise cancelling and headsets you may miss someone's comment.
I’ve worked remote for a very long time including cycles in and out of it.
Some remote work principles come and go and others remain mandatory but are often ignored.
Primarily, people are not as good communicators as they imagine themselves to be and don’t dedicate a great deal of effort to improving constantly. This is in person, online and remote.
Underdeveloped communication skills play themselves out through attempting to over communicate for hybrid work but the core competency is not where it needs to be. One test is if someone can’t explain a slide deck using only a voice call, do they know the material at all?
Doing hybrid/distributed work well requires a clean slate in terms of space design both at office and home, and technology that elevates communication to the point where it’s invisible. Since that’s rare, working with what’s in place at a company and will take work if both parties to be willing to do it.
Employees also have to realize a pandemic created many of the nascent remote/hybrid practices and there is a lot of room for improvement.
Since most places will never invest or obsess enough over both deputizing and empowering their folks to have an unstoppable environment both at home and work, most are doomed to fail at it.
Generally, startups work at a quicker pace from the very start at one table, until enough is in place to start leaving the building and bring back insights. Some ideas will not need this as a must but also not be their full potential.
Startups are more than features and software development ceremony. In many cases it’s establishing a new way tech will work for and care for users.
Edit: grammar and clarity.
What issues do you see with it?
The startup I work for has an office, for those who want to use it, but there's no obligation, and many of us work remote full-time. This seems to be working out well for us, so I'm curious what obstacles you foresee.