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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution.

Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab's is a good start) to start grasping it.

But it will happen and the companies/startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc

And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).

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…what?

Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here.

As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).

> At this point remote work is nothing new[...]

I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares.

With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...this trend is hostile to human nature and relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales.

Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system

Agreed. People have all sorts of reasons to work remote, and it is not always because of walkability:

- proximity to family and community support

- quality of schools for kids

- some people want to live out in the boonies, with a hobby farm or a real homestead

- shared cultural or political values

- some folks want to be nomadic, couch surfing or living out of a souped up van or rv

- some folks want to be able to stay with extended family for longer

- some folks want to cowork locally

- I know one guy who lives in a low cost of living area and reinvest the arbitrage back into his local community while still living comfortably

In my family’s case, I have been regularly going to the local indoor play gym so that my toddler can wear himself out. It’s too hot to play outside.

Also, flexibility != remote

There are remote work places which installs invasive software to monitor “butt-in-seat”, and you don’t really get flex time.

You've been lucky and haven't experienced a regular company that is not remote ready. I'm sure most tech companies are in a much better position then the ones where the only communication software is Skype. It's a serious uphill to convert such a company to a remote one.

You have to work it even within tech companies.

I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a mode of work that more or less helped out the rest of the company.

These things were not free. The pioneer had to really put himself out there to implement the remote best practices. By the time I got there, most of that was in place.

I'd be grateful to read a little more detail about what those best practices are, if you have a chance?

I think I have only read a couple articles about it, but I don’t have them.

Just off the top of my head, unorganized:

- manage outcomes instead of time spent

- Explicit presence: as a remote worker, you have to be explicit and deliberate about making your presence known. Status emojis, socialization, and “thinking out loud” threads

- Use [async] tags in messages whenever you can to help manage urgency of reply. Same with statuses

- Daily standups become even more important in order to promote social bonding, including brief chit-chat right before everyone shows up. Video if you can. It is about the only time the team bonds together

- Use the zoom chat for backchannel, so that you can still get something out without interrupting the speaker

- Having said that: Slack history records everything. Do not use Zoom chat as meeting notes. Put that into Slack, and then into Confluence/Notion/OneNote.

- Shared documents to work out a plan over Zoom helps keeps things focused

- You will be exercise writing a lot more. Leverage that. Be more thoughtful about replies. You can always link to conversations in tickets and documents

- Make use of do not disturb and periods when not to recieve notifications

- Keep your calendar up to date. Make sure to block out maker time (focus time), lunch, async times, and when you are running errands. That way, people can quickly schedule a time with you if needed

- Slack huddles in open channels can simulate drop-in calls. If you like pairing, you can start a huddle with yourself and work there. Rename the huddle to make it clear that you are open to drop ins, add a summary in the huddle thread to make the work visible

- hybrid meetings suck. People in person have to make more of an effort to make people who are remote in known. Conference rooms should be setup to put zoom folks on the wall, and zoom folks should put their video up. (It works better as all in person or all zoom meeting)

- team, dept, and maybe company should periodically bring everyone together onsite to do the things you cannot do remote

Maybe I should write a small, well-organized ebook about this for sale. I’ve been looking for small side project

Most IT and engineering (and probably other "IP based") companies are "remote ready" for the right person. It's not some vast change or investment they have to make, really. You use the laptop they give you and connect from a different place, and continue to go about your job more or less the same way as does everybody who works with you, since most places are perfectly used to remote meetings and have been for decades. If they want you they'll make the accommodation. That goes for prominent companies that have been implementing strict back to office policies.

There's no "not ready", it entirely a choice by management.

Having the tech to allow a few employees to work remotely is one thing. Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely. You have to transform a lot of things like:

* On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company.

* Socialising - there needs to be a regular opportunity (not mandatory) to meet up in person, even if there's no office.

* Communication - this is a biggie. The company can't just install Teams/Slack/Skype everywhere and expect collaboration to continue as before. Instant messaging apps are terrible for building asynchronous communication habits, since they incentivise quickfire messages. The company needs to publish guidelines on how to give status updates and ask for support, and potentially make communication skills be part of employee evaluation (if not already).

* Evaluation - remote work gives senior management a bad feeling because they don't feel like they know what's going on in the company. The root cause of this is that they're not actually evaluating employee output, but rather something else (e.g. how the employee contributes to meetings or responds to in-person questions). This kind of works in the office since those things correlate somewhat with employee quality. But remote work forces managers to think about how to objectively measure employee productivity solely on their work output... and some of them either resent the extra effort or just aren't imaginative enough.

None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.

To add to that about Slack — speaking is a distinct skill from writing, engaging in different part of the brain. The skills you use for speaking in person does not automatically translates to writing, let alone the various social nuances that comes with text based communication.

The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.

True. Anticipating context is one example of a skill that verbal communicators sometimes lack. For someone to understand your statement/question, it needs to be framed in the language they use everyday, and not to lack any crucial information.

In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.

I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"

> Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely.

It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).

> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.

Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.

> Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe

This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.

> all electronic onboarding anyway

That's not true, you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office. And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.

In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.

> This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.

Right. Far from the "few and far between" narrative here, isn't it?

> That's not true,

I'm talking about HR onboarding. Signatures, payroll, boilerplate regulatory compliance training etc.

> you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office.

Nope, not if HR is located elsewhere. It's phone, email, electronic meetings.

> And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.

"If you're in the office you'll be in the office".

All of this stuff is trivial to do online. I don't pretend it has exactly the same results, and one possibly valid concern is monitoring and hepling newer and less proven employees. It doesn't mean that just because there are certain pros and cons that the whole idea falls in a heap at the first hurdle though, so those kinds of anecdotes do not address what I wrote.

> In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.

None of this is rocket science, and all of the tools to do it trivially exist in any software suite any company uses even ones that aren't remote. Email, calendar, chat. Or a physical pen and notepad if you must. Checking in on people isn't some incredible and complicated new skill managers have to learn, that's what they do.

When most people use “on-boarding”, they don’t mean just the legal/HR/benefits paperwork, but rather the effective integration into the fabric of the company. The original post to which you replied even specified that as including “learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503709

And there's nothing that's particularly prohibitive about doing that remotely. You can't just call a bunch of dot points like "on boarding" refuting what I wrote. Sure it's what you might read in your CEO's email or whatever, but that doesn't make it true.

The point you seem to be making - that remote working is a cinch as long as all the managers already know what they need to do and how to do it - is both correct and missing the point.

Studies in the UK demonstrate that feeling isolated and making connections with colleagues in a remote environment is a major concern for younger employees: https://universumglobal.com/blog/the-leadership-gap-young-wo...

This is an organisational issue which isn't solved just by making tools like email and calendar available.

That's not the point I'm making and I have to say it's pretty outlandish if it seems that way to you.

The point I'm making is that it's not because an organization is "not ready" that remote work is not permitted. Implying there is some set of steps or purchases they need to make and then they are ready. It's because the people who can make the decision don't want to.

I thought that I repeatedly made it clear that I made no value judgement on the remote work and didn't claim that is a bad decision to make.

You've consistently asserted that most companies would find it easy to switch to remote work.

I absolutely disagree with this. At least I disagree that most companies can do so and be confident of maintaining productivity. I believe it requires a big shift in organisational and operational processes and attitudes within the company.

No I haven't, and "easy" is not a well defined term here. What I said is that it's not a matter of being ready or not, it's a matter of choosing to or not. And lots of companies can and actually did choose to do that at very short order when covid was causing shutdowns, so if you want to make extraordinary claims to the contrary then you'll need to bring a lot of evidence.

I'm not talking about IT or engineering. Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here? They clearly want it to be a remote company.

Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software. It's even worse there. Their remote culture is highly dysfunctional and she goes into the office 5 days a week even though she doesn't need to.

> I'm not talking about IT or engineering.

What are you talking about then?

> Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here?

I don't know what you're talking about. What result? What company? Can you give some more detail or did I miss a post?

I have many concrete examples right in front of me, which is the number of companies and government agencies that went to remote extremely rapidly during covid shutdowns.

> Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software.

Like I said, that's just a simple choice. Most probably by some self-important bureaucrat who wants to sabotage the remote work scheme. All they would have to do is use normal software like many other places permit, and that would be most of the battle.

Remote work and collaboration requires a very different skillset in order to be effective. So if a company clearly wants to do that (both leadership and staff trying to make things work), it is probably time to bring in a consultant — maybe someone with an anthropology or sociology background that can look at how everyone interacts together with the technology, and can suggest gradual changes there.

An example: in some companies, the receptionist knows who has entered and exited the building, and can sometimes become the defacto person that can help people find each other. Someone whose effectiveness depends upon this informal role of the receptionist will find that they can’t work like this anymore when the company goes remote.

They’re talking about the company culture not being ready for remote and it’s completely correct.

Most companies attempt to have office culture and working style while working remotely, which absolutely sucks.

There are not a lot of companies (And employees) who have figured out how to do remote well.

"Most engineering" is a broad brush, some engineering still uses tools other than software at least occasionally.

Lots does. I work for a company that among other things makes leading edge ASICs. The tools and probes and things required to test and handle wafers and the chips that come back from packaging can't be sent to peoples' houses. Some people have to work various manual steps in that process at times. It's surprisingly hands-on, especially in early stages of characterization and yield and performance tuning.

The vast, vast majority of person-hours required to go from drawing board to bits of silicon running in customer's computer can be done entirely without physical presence though.

I know mechanical and structural engineers and it's much the same for them.

> At this point remote work is nothing new

I disagree. As long as i still see traffic in cities, it means remote work is still a tiny minority

Somebody has to serve you at restaurant, stack shelves at store and about gazillion other jobs that are done physically at location, or they are not done at all. Such claims are so desperately out of touch with reality its a bit sad. There will always be traffic in the cities.

Or do you want police or ambulances or surgeons to also work remotely?

Your tone sounds like you're criticizing the parent comment but the content of your reply is pretty strongly supporting/backing up the parent comments assertion so I'm having a hard time figuring out if you're trying to disagree or agree lol

At what times is traffic peaking? What are people doing then?

It is relatively uncommon, but nothing new.

Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

> Most did so successfully.

There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut.

Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too?

Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?

Wife works for a retail bank. Front-line employees didn't go remote - they need to be in retail bank locations serving customers. Back-office employees were 98% in-office prior to COVID. In several weeks, the company pivoted to remote work, including procurement of laptops (most non-managers had desktops). During the 2.5-3 years of COVID-induced WFH, their engagement numbers and measured productivity went up.

I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces.

While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative.

All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.

My company went permanent full remote. We are much less productive, velocity per engineer is about half what it was. I'll freely admit it's because the company is poorly managed, but in my experience tons of companies have leadership that isn't able to quickly pivot in the way needed for WFH to be successful. It requires a lot of effort to get remote engineers to communicate well and at least here it basically just doesn't happen anymore.

I've done a lot of remote work over the decades. It starts out well, because you know your coworkers well. But, over time, those relationships fade, and people come and go at work. You lose the connection with them, and they with you.

It's hardly all roses.

>You lose the connection with them, and they with you.

I work in an organization with 10s of thousands of workers across the United States. I will never, in the best circumstances, see more than a handful of them in person, other than in-person team meetings, which have themselves become increasingly rare as the team is more geographically diverse than ever and travel budgets are slashed due to ready electronic collaboration tools. So ... what connection? I mean, I don't really care about having a personal connection with these folks anyway. I like them and enjoy having a positive professional relationship with them, but they're my coworkers and we have amazing tools to build those relationships. If some of them become friends, that's fine, but it's not anywhere close to a prerequisite for me to be successful and fulfilled at work.

My entire career I've worked successfully with people I never met who live on the other side of the planet. The whole discussion about the necessity of in-person collaboration over the last 3 years has struck me as one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I haven't had a conference call in 3 years. I cannot emphasize how revolutionary and positive that change is. I see my coworkers' faces more now than I ever did in the past thanks to Zoom and Teams. It's nothing short of miraculous how much better things are now.

In return for giving up a pointless commute to use a different Internet connection and for spending less time pandering to bosses who want to promote buddies who look like them instead of competent leaders, I can spend more time with people and things I actually care about and more time doing work I love. Every single bit of this new arrangement is roses.

This is what is meant by the "big corps haven't cracked it".

More progressive corps embraced online socializing earlier, and honestly that's all I need. To be sure something is lost socially by not being in person, but the workplace is not social-drinks club, or if it is that's where your productivity went.

You still build connections with people you only meet online, older folk might have more trouble with that, which makes sense why they might struggle to manage if they heavily depend on "making friends" to do their job.

Training and onboarding can be issues, but barring a straight up lack of talent generally focused efforts are probably better than just assuming the new employee will "make connections" and learn via osmosis.

This. Keeping a connection takes some effort

And yes this might mean going to the office once in a while or to a company event etc

Not an unsurmountable problem but it's not negligible neither (as much as it is slowly growing)

It’s all roses. I see my coworkers in person once a year at the Christmas party. Other than that I’ve only every worked with them online since I started working here 2.5 years ago. It’s all roses.

Classic HN, any pitch for a shade of grey gets met with either "no it's white!", followed by "what? everyone knows it's always black!".

People are complex and different. If something is white for one person, and black for another, when you put them next to each other you get... black and white.

Reducing people's different experiences to a homogeneous grey mush is overly reductive.

I've been in my current project for over two years now, never met the team in person, but we have a good connection - chiefly because we insert some chit-chat into the meetings.

You have a source for any of that?

Speaking personally, everyone I’ve spoken to on the matter (myself included) have zero desire to return to a traditional office.

I guess I’m one who likes the office. Not every day. But frequently. And I think I could build a culture with in-office time that would out-compete a remote-only competitor, domestic only or offshore hybrid.

What part of this culture would make it more competitive than any remote-only equivalent? And how would you build it?

> What part of this culture would make it more competitive than any remote-only equivalent?

Hiring, the same way RO outfits can access unique talent, and information transfer, particularly to newer team members. Also, in industries where over-documentation is an unnecessary liability.

I'm a software engineer, and I think the fully remote-work culture can often be less personally fulfilling.

I enjoy going to an office, having a change of scenery, interacting with people (both close friends and casual acquaintances), brainstorming ideas with a small group around a whiteboard, getting lunch with colleagues, etc, etc...

Sure, the "writing code" part of the job is easier when there are fewer distractions. And a crowded open office can be an annoying source of distractions.

And I definitely enjoy having lunch more often with my family, or hanging out with the dogs, or sitting out on my deck under the trees while I read my morning email.

But working in an office was nice too, and I miss it.

Heh, you ask for a source and then just provide a personal anecdote?

How many people do you know? When WFH was mandated, I hated it. When the mandate was finally kicked, I loved going back to the office, and have spent almost every workday at the office, despite having the possibility to do 40% WFH if I wanted. No, I don't want that, thank you. Not a coder, working as admin. I like people, that is why I work in an office. And personal experience is definitely that working together with people who are currently at home usually slows down processes quite a bit. Besides, sometimes, WFH-people are just not reachable, because reasons... Daughter has sneezed the first time, or wife has decided she needs to go for her yoga class and coworker suddenly needs to care for a 4-year-old... And, god forbid, if you ever say anything when these blatantly shameless things happen, you are the bad guy.

> Not a coder, working as admin

The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.

"Besides, sometimes, WFH-people are just not reachable, because reasons... Daughter has sneezed the first time, or wife has decided she needs to go for her yoga class and coworker suddenly needs to care for a 4-year-old... And, god forbid, if you ever say anything when these blatantly shameless things happen, you are the bad guy."

This is obviously hyperbole for... living a life?

Are you referring to individual employees or the companies? Clearly many companies are mandating RTO despite remote/self-determined hybrid supported by a strong majority of employee sentiment (and often performance data)

A source for companies rolling out return-to-office plans? It's all over the news. Not sure what you're asking.

I like going to the office, i know many people who prefer it.

> with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

> My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

Speaking as a senior manager at a smallish software company (300 people), absolutely, decision makers are in my experience smart and competent.

But what they don't do is necessarily make decisions based on data.

I don't believe for a second that most RTO debates are based on meaningful measurement. As with a lot of corporate decisions, I suspect it's a lot of HIPPOs, fingers in the air, and herding behavior.

When I joined my current employer the biggest drawback was that unlike my previous job they did not allow remote work. Managers were against it because they were paranoid about people slacking off.

The pandemic hit, we transitioned to remote work, I was happy. Everyone quickly adapted and learned how to efficiently work from home. About two years later, two things happened:

1. Surveys and postmortems showed that remote work lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity at our company.

2. Company leadership started talking about a mandated return to office.

People of course challenged this decision, pointing to the data, and no real explanation was given. Those who wanted to returned to office, but the mandated return was indefinitely postponed and eventually silently dropped as the manager primarily pushing for a return left the company.

> You are assuming that decision makers are dumb

That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect.

They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office.

They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distance.

They may not be dumb, but their idea of "normal" is not what covid hath wrought, and therefore a return to the office is a return to "normal", and thus a heaving sigh of relief can be had that we're now past that extended weirdness.

They may not be dumb, but they may not be able to understand that people are motivated differently from themselves and from each other. "I work better in the office, therefore y'all do too". (admittedly there's a bit of dumbness in that one, however that's far from saying it's unrealistic or rare).

> according to data they are seeing

Anecdotal warning: Outside of the "best of the best" kinda places, my experience is that most decision makers work on 'feel' and not data - whether data is available or not.

The "best of the best" places are also managed by feel and not data. There's even some kind of rationalization for that: at a sufficiently high management level, they have to make a decision every 30 seconds on average. That's mostly gut-driven by necessity...

Thing is, that normally works out, but large shifts like the "new normal" during the pandemic can take a while for the gut to pick up, and so the default is to get back to the known-good state...

KPIs adapt to circumstances but the thing about power is correct. I seen many power plays and the size of the "army" of the managers and how much they could assert control were important parts of them. If employees are dispersed they can't help the "generals" too much.

You are assuming that they see high attrition of their best talent as something bad. Sometimes they don't seem to care if the numbers in Excel look good.

> My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

I agree. They are seeing the data that their skills of busy-bodies bouncing between meetings and impromptu conversations at other employees desks don't translate well to remote work and they understand that their nice 3mil$ house in the valley will cost much less in couple of years if everyone embraces full remote, so they are doing their best to preserve the status quo.

Let's flip this around: do you (or decision makers) have any evidence that remote work is worse? Without that data, and barring ulterior motives (such as attrition without severance), reversing the status quo and enforcing return to office is, by definition, not a sound data-driven decision.

> My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

That's precisely the problem. The decision makers suffer from extreme confirmation bias and Dunning-Kruger effect. So what happens is they run surveys, polls etc which are loaded and indicate that employees would 'love' to return to the office. They mandate RTO and are then surprised when people leave en masse because the data they've collected is wrong.

They might be making the "best decision", but best decision for whom? Their own career, social standing and property investment portfolio? Or the best decision for the company and employee well-being and productivity?

Decision makers are politicians, their job is to take the most politically efficient decision according to data. Deciding if it was the best decision to take or not is the job of historians.

I don't think most did so successfully. A lot of companies did it without any sort of software or procedures to support remote working and never managed to implement it during the time. They still rely on Skype.

Tech companies are not representative.

When I started working remotely we had icq and a private irc server :)

Virtually the entire VFX industry has shifted to remote. Let that sync in.

The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now.

They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.

I'm curious (and not really familiar with modern VFX workflows).

Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.

I think it depends on what they're doing. If they're doing animation (which includes moving elements in live-action footage) and mostly checking the quality of motion, they might get away with proxy renders. But anyone doing critical color or compositing I would think need to do local renders on a calibrated system, and then commit the work to a remote render farm for consistency and accessibility by other team members.

My wife works from home in a related industry, and she is quite frequently transmitting work files (up to 100s of GiB) over our residential connection. We have multi-gigabit symmetric FTTH though.

Source: Worked at a ~2k employee multinational when covid hit, it got bought by a bigger corp and got turned into an ~11k employee company later on.

Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones.

COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option.

People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was.

Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events.

Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties.

I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.

>And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).

This is somewhat wishful thinking: most companies cannot have employees that live outside their country. These workers instead need to become consultants, and contract to the client companies. Employing someone overseas is not easy at all, and most companies just aren't set up to do it. There is a new industry of companies that specialize in "employing" digital nomads, and then contracting their services to their employers back in the other country, but of course this adds extra cost to the client. For US-based remote jobs, they usually plainly say "US residents only" to avoid these hassles.

>Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).

Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications.

When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting French truck drivers the EU pushed through new regulations that required the drivers and the trucks (!!) to visit their home country at least every 2 months.[0]

>The most controversial measure is an obligation for trucks to return to their country of establishment at least every eight weeks

I think political entities will fight a lot with dirty tricks like this to keep the tax revenue and employment in their jurisdiction.

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logisti...

Similar thing is happening here in Philippines. The government basically gave tax breaks to companies who will utilize their office spaces in city centers. To no one's surprise, most of the local companies are now forcing return-to-office. The government justification is: people spend more when they regularly go the the office thus, stimulating the economy.

There's a lot of unconfirmed scuttlebutt that companies in major American metro areas have similar motivations...

I can say with the utmost confidence that spending more time and money downtown is the last thing that my 3 hour round trip commute motivates me to do

I doubt it motivates you to travel home for lunch!

It sounds like you'd be very unlikely to enter downtown for any other reason. Also, may I suggest you move your home or employment? 3 hours is a lot of commuting and that is bad for you.

There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms (and anything in between). I am here in Thailand as an expat, with my own business, working remotely for European clients. I am taxed at the Thai rate, and have a work permit, because there is no large Thai talent pool competing for the same business and opportunities I am. So far I am not seeing any dirty tricks, there are other countries competing for this exact type of expat too. "Dirty tricks" would drive them away to other countries.

> There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms

Bulgaria (and Romania, per linked article) were on the receiving end of said dirty tricks. The problem is Western EU trucking companies did not want the much cheaper to operate Eastern EU truckers eating their lunch. The "dirty tricks" did not come from Bulgaria/Romania in this case.

Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins.

It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown in boats, stay in detention centres, leave the EU to keep the Poles out of the job market etc. exist primarily to protect local working markets. IMHO a people doing the same job in SF and Bangalore must be compensated the same but the fact that they aren't is exactly why it's much better to live in USA. That's also why you have H-2B visa quota.

I'm still puzzled about this, don't you think that this could have the same effect on your industry as the manufacturing moving to China? Especially for coders, don't you think that people in poor countries can code just fine? Technology is not only making the distance a non issue - recent developments are also removing the language barriers.

The money that even the junior US tech workers are making is at life changing level for most of the world. This will be tapped.

Time zones still matter though. I have been in same-time-zone remote teams and different-time-zone ones. The dynamic is very different.

Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones.

As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to affect why that doesn't work.

We've all been there:

  Them: Hello, <name>

  8-16 hours pass

  Me: Hello, did you need something?

  8-16 hours pass

  Them: How are you?

  8- 16 hours pass

.....

https://www.nohello.com

Exactly. When you do async comms and have a question, skip the chit chat and just send the question and an appropriate infodump.

As a matter of fact, even when you chit chat do it in self contained units. You don't know how much time passes till your co workers read your joke in #general.

Right, the time zone differences are a hard one. In some places people work in the hours of the client when doing remote work but it's still hard and taxing.

> Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins.

Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison.

Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway.

I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.

I agree, it wasn't a mainstream success so far but there are teams who cracked it. There are some companies who are proudly WFH-only and global.

The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results.

I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.

In my opinion, it’s more about the local culture.

People in different countries/continents work differently, have different expectations around how much initiative non-managers should take, etc.

I’m not saying one is worse than the other. What I’m saying is that trying to mix these levels and hoping to exploit cheap labor to offshore doesn’t work well in my experience and what’s saved on paper is paid tenfold in customer attrition, employee turnover, high severity outages, that kind of thing.

For example, having had experience with Indian sweatshops, the people working there were paid a pitance compared to us, had to use their own equipment, no paid sick days, forced to commute several hours to work and back… imagine how interested they were in the work, being treated like subhumans by their employer. And whenever we’d talk about technical problems, they’d always say yes even if it turned out they had no clue what needed to be done or how to do it. I believe it was a factor of the tyrannical management there, but also a cultural thing. Same with asking for feedback, we had a culture (country, not corporate) where it’s common to ask for and receive honest feedback. The offshored staff could never wrap their heads around it. Or being asked to do something unclear/stupid: onshore would bring it up/challenge it/ask for clarifications, offshore would just go ahead and do… something, anything. Then we’d have to spend time redoing it and rethinking it losing weeks of work. But it was cheap, look how much were saving!!

I hope this doesn’t come as racist. I do t mean that the Indian offshores were worse people than onshore employees! What I mean is that there was a huge values gap between the two, very different ways of working, different expectations, different power dynamics and that they absolutely didn’t mesh together well at all.

We were appalled at the conditions offshore had to work under. One of the workers had cancer and couldn’t really afford the treatment because apparently health insurance isn’t really a thing in India and had to come work sick because they couldn’t afford the treatment otherwise… it was a disgrace and we tried to pressure management to face the human cost of their penny pinching.

It’s not impossible to have offshore and onshore working together and save money but I’ve never seen it done well so I’m very doubtful it can work.

And I think that’s our moat: we work differently, have different values, and different levels of initiative that local comapnies benefit from more than the marginal amount saved on exploiting offshore labor (in the context of sweatshops)

Completely agree on the culture, it's not that people in one place are inferior to the other - it's just that that's the way how work is done in their country and they keep doing it as long as they are in that environment. When the same people physically move to another country, they end up absorbing the local culture and adopt and behave like the rest of the team.

That said, with all the communications in place today I think the culture is becoming global with newer generations having less and less difference between countries.

Read Wealth of Nations for an explanation of why this might not be the disaster for the wealthy countries as most mercantlists think it will.

Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.

Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.

With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.

Somewhat, but I suspect that it’s not as bad as it may seem.

The pandemic made it clear that there are naturally forming windows of better collaboration around longitudinal time zones. Outside of +/- 2 time zones becomes fairly difficult on a regular basis. West coast to East coast is difficult.

For Americans, there may be some interesting competition coming out Mexico and perhaps a few of the more advanced countries of South America like Brazil and Argentina.

For Europeans I would expect the same from Africa, from countries like South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, etc.

But once you are outside of +/- 2 time zones you either need one side to shift schedules or have zone local orgs.

At that point it’s less about remote work and more about outsourcing. We already know what outsourcing looks like, and it’s very different from remote work.

Bottom line, I do expect to see increased competition for remote jobs, but for the good roles that matter the competition is not truly global.

A mitigating factor is that a lot of engineers are from low cost areas, and yearn to return. India, China, exurbs from across the US.

> Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand)

Why do the people living in those cities feel so strongly that this isn't the case[1]? How does the city administration deal with skyrocketing rents?

[1] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-...

Skyrocketing rent demonstrates the strong demand for such environments. Prices would fall if there were more competitive cities.

Or low supply.

The solution is a local inflation:

You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight.

This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.

> Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain

Unfortunately, they will have a lot to lose by not being cheap anymore. At least for the locals. See Lisbon or Boise, for example.

The combination of a bigger remote talent pool and enhanced productivity with AI tools is going to make it pretty rough for mediocre programmers in the medium term, I think.

What do you mean by “crack” remote? It’s been “cracked” and has been pretty run of the mill for years now. You have a point about big companies with overhead being slow to turn but there are already very well established ways for remote companies to work.

The change is already done. The radical change would be changing back.

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