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Comment by PTOB | Hacker News Reader

Our CEO just announced, "You’ve probably heard that many businesses, including some of our competitors, are calling employees back to the office, significantly reducing or eliminating work-from-home options, and curtailing much of the flexibility they once allowed. Even the tech industry – among the first to send employees home in March 2020 – is calling staff back to the office. Some with perks, others with threats. Some of these companies are citing a loss of culture and others are seeing a drop in their profitability or revenue. It seems their solution to one, or all these problems, is to bring employees back under their roofs.

Meanwhile, our flexible options seem to be working, creating a differentiator in the market. It’s been a draw for new hires and a benefit that our employees have enthusiastically embraced. And, since 2020, we’ve had our three highest revenue years, and we remain on track to grow further this year..."

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>Meanwhile, our flexible options seem to be working, creating a differentiator in the market

It will be interesting to see how the return to office/remote work debate will be settled by the competitive market. If remote work is such a big draw for top talent (and increases productivity), companies that offer remote flexibility will outperform companies that don’t, since they will attract better employees who are also more productive. If, on the other hand, remote work leads to a decrease in productivity (as return to office proponents claim), it may be the case that the better talent wooed by companies offering remote positions will be offset by the drop in productivity from remote work.

It may also be the case that remote flexibility simply isn’t that big of a draw, and companies with remote options won’t attract significantly better talent than companies without them.

Commercial property market forces might be stronger...

Care to explain?

Coming to the office has to be significantly more productive than working from home for it to make sense after accounting for the astronomical costs of office space in major cities.

This smells like a sunk-cost fallacy. My counterargument would be that there has been a massive captive market for commercial real-estate that has now, thanks to high-bandwidth networking, been exposed as superfluous.

The pandemic ripped the bandage off our collective eyes. People are now seeing that it is not necessary to jam employees cheek-by-jowl in order to extract value from them.

> Coming to the office has to be significantly more productive than working from home for it to make sense after accounting for the astronomical costs of office space in major cities.

It doesn't "have to be", there's other explanations. For example, maybe working from the office is less productive than wfh, but no one has figured that out yet.

There is considerable wealth tied to continuing to herd us all into the cities. If economic activity was to become increasingly decentralised that wealth would be at considerable risk.

A lot of that wealth is held by very powerful and influential companies. It's not a massive leap to assume it's in their best interests to encourage a return to the office.

A few choice editorials espousing loss of culture and productivity and good old group think will start to kick in.

But either way the last in line to be considered will be you, your family or the environment.

I think that is the wrong way to think of it.

Remote work has a short-term advantage in that your workers will be more productive (according to the author) so you'll get more done, and also it is a nice perk to offer recruits.

That sounds like a no-brainer for startups who are thinking about an exit that is a few years away. They don't have to worry as much about attrition, hiring is more focused on senior eng (in my experience), and given the relatively lower cash comp they are trying to find cheap perks.

For the BigCos of the world though, it is different. They have an established business that is probably profitable and they need to cycle in junior engineers and train them to make up for retiring/leaving senior engineers. For them, mentoring is more important than IC productivity.

None of this is to say that the author is wrong, because they are arguing that you can have the best of both worlds by adopting a hybrid mentoring model that they are selling.

I think it an unsupported assertion that mentoring is not possible in remote environments. The mentoring process does work better when its intentional and remote may need a change in the process of mentoring vs in-office. But the can’t do it is an assertion convenient to the return to office chaff.

I cannot imagine how miserable it must be to be a junior being remotely mentored.

Why? Periodic meetups, discussion, pair programming, and a slack channel or other RT channel with an open invite to ping. What is missing?

And actually in well documented places with pointers to sandbox environments (which remote tends to force better docs for both), it's great to let the juniors play and ask questions on missing and poorly documented items - reproducibility and learning is improved.

And I've worked too many in-person places where mentoring is random, unplanned and ineffective because of it.

It's not the first time hear this view and I still don't understand it.

In my mind this would only make sense in a scenario where the junior is a motivated hard working person and the mentor, working from home, is someone who doesn't give a shit. But the root cause here isn't the wfh.

I know it’s just anecdotal but I really do think mentoring is usually better offline. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done well remotely. But there are way more hurdles in the way.

One of the perks being in the same space is that it is much easier to clear up misunderstandings. Things like body language, facial expressions really do play a huge part in our communication. Especially if people are from different cultures. Also, a lot of juniors are already nervous when they start so having people with friendly body language around helps.

Being in the same space and doing shared activities also helps people gel together. Looking back at my days as a junior and as buddies later, I just don’t think zoom meetings are equal to shared activities like morning coffees and occasional table tennis to blow off steam. I don’t think I would have gotten along with some people if it weren’t for shared experiences in the office.

All this being said, I really do love wfh though. So I often think about how we could get the best of both worlds.

Before giving my anecdotal response I want to say I’m well into the senior end of the spectrum. Maybe that disqualifies me but maybe it doesn’t.

Anyway, my previous company was about 100 people and purely remote. I had a brilliant manager who taught me a lot. We did pair sessions and worked through stuff together via Zoom or Google (really can’t remember what video chat we used). Remote was never a problem.

Now I work at a company of about 200k and I’m in the office most of the time. Every single one of my brain cells is atrophying. I haven’t learned anything in the 18 months I’ve been here.

Maybe the point of hiring you was not for you to learn, but for you to teach.

You don't have to imagine. The overwhelming feedback from schools and universities is that remote learning sucks. It would take a leap of faith to imagine workers are any different because they have an employment contract.

If you are set up for remote learning it's fine. Royal Holloway has been running a remote MSc in Info Sec for nearly 20 years. The tutors said we were more motivated, and ironically, more social than the on-campus students.

If you are forced to suddenly teach everyone remotely due to a global pandemic, it probably won't work as well...

As somebody who got trained, finished an internship with an offer and promoted as a software engineer during the pandemic it worked great for me.

My company didn’t do anything differently to help people starting out as sdes and it still worked.

Of course every person us different so some will find the in person easier but I think most could make it work remotely. Especially if a company invests in helping to make it work.

Learning in person is more effective than remote for most people. Schools tried this during 2020-2021. It sucked.

Schools are one-sided and 1 teacher teaches to a class of 20. The teacher talks, the others listen. Mentoring is usually 1 on 2, or one to 2/3, the mentor alters the session based on what happens and listen to your feedback. Also, the mentor is open to feedback to improve their mentoring session.

And you can ask for a break if you are tired or need more time.

My opinion is that the two are not really comparable

Can one really separate the effects of mass covid with no vaccines, sick and dying parents & siblings, short planning, economic stresses, underfunded tech transition budgets in schools from remote learning?

I'm curious how much mentoring junior engineers actually need?

Maybe it's because I'm a self-taught self-starter, but I've worked from home for all except one year of my 17 year career, and I've managed to be successful despite never receiving any "mentoring". I've had co-workers, of course, and co-workers help each other when necessary, but we were basically equals.

Random question. Are you an only child? Firstborn?

Firstborn.

Should I put that on my résumé? ;-)

Jung's theory of birth order is about as scientific as the rest of his crackpot beliefs, and psychoanalysis in general.

Jung isn't the only one who has theorized about birth order making a difference in development.

One of the major advantages of mentoring for us "self taught" type is to get a second opinion and weed out bad habits.

I can successfully write functional code, but having a colleague from a different background helped me enormously with how I worked and what I did.

Also for a lot of companies hiring the "average" worker, who typically don't write code in their spare time on weekends, graduates need a lot more help to get up to speed.

> I can successfully write functional code, but having a colleague from a different background helped me enormously with how I worked and what I did.

Is that mentoring or just standard collaboration with colleagues? Code review certainly isn't mentoring per se.

> Also for a lot of companies hiring the "average" worker, who typically don't write code in their spare time on weekends, graduates need a lot more help to get up to speed.

Well, BigCos are forcing a return to the office, and they supposedly hire "the best", not the average.

>Is that mentoring or just standard collaboration with colleagues

A combination of collaboration and informal discussion/mentoring. Code review absolutely isn't mentoring. It's the discussions around how to approach things, and other tips and tricks.

>Well, BigCos are forcing a return to the office, and they supposedly hire "the best", not the average.

The average worker is still better than 50% of the workforce. Big companies may get "better than average", but by definition the best only end up at a very small set of companies.

> It's the discussions around how to approach things, and other tips and tricks.

Senior developers do this with each other all the time.

> by definition the best only end up at a very small set of companies.

I was talking about a very small set of companies.

Remote work is the future* with smart contract activated payouts based on task completion, initially via oracles, but eventually fully on chain, as economic activity grows there, and task workers can complete their contracts to successful payout by being that oracle, in terms of what they see, but everything they do will be on chain.

*some would have

I suspect there might not be a clear answer simply from remote vs. in-office. It might depend on what type of company you are, how large of a company, etc. And I tend to think that some types of teams benefit more from being in office than others, such as those with more time in meetings vs. engineers spending most of their time on individual work requiring deep focus.

My guess is: it doesn't really matter for established companies, because the market isn't actually that competitive. It matters for startups, with the advantage going to in-person (office or apartment) work. Tomorrow's startups become the established companies of the next decade, so eventually the pendulum will swing back toward office work, with lots of executives convinced it brings higher productivity. It's really because of path dependence, though, and not because of any intrinsic merits.

The dirty secret of capitalism is that companies become successful based on what customers do, not what owners or executives or employees do. A product or service basically just has to work, just enough that the transaction still happens. The amount of money the company makes depends on how many customers it has and how much it charges each one, not on how good its product is, so long as the product is "good enough". When the company is young and scrambling to take the market, then maybe effort and efficiency matters, so that you can go from "not good enough" to "good enough" faster than anyone else. But once you're already way past "good enough", you can fire 75% of the company and you'll still continue collecting money until the market changes enough that your product is no longer "good enough".

This signals they are not personally invested in commercial real estate or friends with people who are. Good for them.

unless you’re invested in that particular building, your business is a drop in the bucket and not going to move the needle

It won’t move the needle, no. But neither does your vote. On the other hand, “get out the vote” campaigns are still a thing. It’s not a perfect analogy, but if business owners band together and all push people back to the office, it’s not unreasonable for them to hope it at least props up office space asset values.

Sure but if you're a business that either purchased tens of millions of dollars of commercial real estate for your office, or are on the hook for a multi year, multi million dollar lease that doesn't look great on the balance sheet or to investors to have useless assets.

And there's not much you can do to even that out when the price of commercial real estate is dropping significantly.

I'm definitely not saying it's right, IMO it's a sunk cost and businesses need to plan for the future accordingly (even if it means unloading those assets at a loss).

The occupancy of the building does not appear on the balance sheet. Can’t imagine people really care.

That's a heck of an advertisement for your company and CEO.

Can you say who they are? Even if they're not currently hiring, it's something worth remembering.

Sadly, I cannot. I can say that we're an mid-tier (size-wise) engineering consultancy working across the US. My team specializes in the design of "hyper-scale" data centers. Very intensive Building Information Modeling workflows and such.

The moment revenue tanks they will panic and change their tune

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