Why the Remote-Work Debate Stays So Heated | Hacker News Reader

Why the Remote-Work Debate Stays So Heated

theatlantic.com

25 pointspseudolus51 comments

It is heated because there are a lot of different parties and power dynamics.

You've got workers that want to work from home. You have workers that really don't want to work from home.

Then you've also got antiworkers that want to "work" from home. And antiworkers that want to "work" from the office and get facetime so they can still make career progress.

And then you've got facilities management people that need to justify office space. What happens if they don't? Do they still have jobs if a lot of offices get cancelled?

Then you've got sales types who need an office for occasional client meetings. And corporate politics makes that hard if they can't justify it by having the few local workers show up regularly.

I've probably left out many ulterior motives, because there are plenty. Any time there are plenty of unspoken motives, things get heated easily.

Imho it's not that complicated and it's mostly driven by CRE and desire to have strict control over the worker's time.

A huge part of why this debate is reductive mindsets like these where something that’s ridiculously complicated to the point where nearly every individual involved has their own unique situation, is reduced to “the people who want what I don’t want are just doing it for evil”.

'Even a broken clock...'

This puts it quite well.

And a company who has to support remote and non remote kinda have an issue since they now have to know how to work both ways.

Also managers that think "time spent with butt on a chair where I can see him" is a good metric for estimated productivity. But yeah you've got a ton of competing dynamics which make the problem hard.

> Then you've got sales types who need an office for occasional client meetings. And corporate politics makes that hard if they can't justify it by having the few local workers show up regularly.

I worked at Dropbox for a couple of years post-remote-work, and I think they got this bit right: They kept a substantial amount of office space, kept on-site cafes, and turned those office spaces into collaboration spaces. You aren't supposed to (officially, "allowed to") use them for solo work. But, team off-sites are now on-sites, so there's always a smattering of people in the office, and there's plenty of space for sales to have client meetings as necessary, too. And, despite the requirements not to, I know there are people who go in just for some coworking at times.

The large trade-offs are kind of obvious to me.

There obviously is an advantage to in-person collaboration. There obviously is an advantage to building relationships with co-workers. There obviously is an advantage to letting a junior hire shadow you in person.

There obviously is an advantage of being able to confirm that someone's ass is in a seat and that there's a padlock on the door that doesn't open until the end of shift and that you can make all employees put their iPhone in a box to guarantee that it won't distract them while they work and to ban headphones.

I think the question is: is it worth letting companies have that level of control over employees?

I'm reminded of the first software job I had out of uni where I started doing push-ups and sit-ups in a spare room of the building. I got a few other software guys to join me. We'd do 100 push-ups and then get back to work, fired up. You couldn't see into the room. People just know we went there a couple times a day for 10 minutes.

Well, someone decided that they didn't like us doing that and they told us to stop even though it was no more disruptive to anyone than going to grab a coffee from the break room.

At 21 years old I remember being incredibly resentful that I didn't even have that level of control over my life just because I was someone's employee. Even though I was just trying to stay awake and get fired back up to do some work.

And I chuckle about it now when I do a full body workout in my apartment while waiting for pointless Zoom meetings to conclude.

I’m so happy to work at a giant company that treats employees as adults who can self-optimize working arrangements, anywhere from never in the office to 5+ days a week.

I know that’s not the case everywhere and it seems bizarre. If you’re not hiring people who want to be productive, everything else is just deck chairs. And if you are hiring productive people, it’s insane to set global policies that limit their ability to optimize?

It all seems like arguing which breed of horse is better for the carriage.

You've missed the advantages of having quiet working environments where nobody interrupts you, has noisy conversations right behind you, or is otherwise doing distracting things near you.

That's a pretty big advantage too.

> There obviously is an advantage to in-person collaboration. There obviously is an advantage to building relationships with co-workers. There obviously is an advantage to letting a junior hire shadow you in person.

Is any of that “obvious”? It goes against everything I’ve seen in my career. The least productive people are those that “build relationships” in the office. The most productive are those who crank out code from home with little to no fuss. I’ve also seen juniors excel remotely because they have the space to research whatever they need and in a remote environment, often feel more comfortable reaching out to senior people for help than the would irl.

To me, it is absolutely obvious. I have worked with lots of people in tech; mainly non-programmers (eg: lab managers, system engineers, cloud architects, etc). And, from my experience, many of those people prefer to talk face-to-face about detailed and difficult problems. Grabbing a marker and heading to a white-board to hammer out a tough problem is far better than a Zoom call with the drawing app. Can you do the same thing on a Zoom call? Sure, you can. But I think the results are much better in a face-to-face discussion.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the amount of code you write bears little on productivity. Planning, strategy and understanding the work that needs to be done is way more important.

I didn’t say anything about the amount of code. I’m talking about people who produce value without fuss and hand holding.

I think like a lot of heated discussions, you have a group of people, the workers, being taken advantage of and a group of people, their employers, who hold all the power in their relationship and just want to lord over them; studies [0, 1] prove that allowing workers to work from home will keep productivity the same. There are also benefits specifically for the worker, but why would the employer care about this?

0 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/02/04/3-new-...

1 - https://hbr.org/2020/11/our-work-from-anywhere-future

I switched jobs and two weeks later started the corona lockdown. I was able to get up to speed, form meaningful connections to team members, and do some of my best work for two years.

My productivity tanked completely ever since we were forced back to the office. It almost burned me out.

And, to play devils advocate, how about the other way around? How about employers who really want employees to succeed but employees who don't want to put in the effort? Or, how about employees who believe what reddit tells them: they are being mistreated/abused because they can't have it their way?

Based on my own personal experience, good companies want to be accommodating because they understand people truly are the most important resource. They strive for a good balance of company-vs-employee desires. Who knows, maybe I am just lucky; maybe my past 30yrs working for big-tech is an anomaly?

> employers who really want employees to succeed

Doesn't exist.

Maybe in your world, but certainly not mine.

How about employers who really want employees to succeed but employees who don't want to put in the effort?

Like the studies show, people are as productive at home as at the office. Going to the office doesn't change effort. You're also implying that one can't improve while working from home, which isn't true.

Or, how about employees who believe what reddit tells them: they are being mistreated/abused because they can't have it their way?

I don't know what you're talking about specifically, but at a minimum, considering wages for workers are stagnant for decades while executive pay is (way) up, it's easy to see how workers are being exploited by default.

If the employee truly doesn't want to put in the effort, then no amount of the employer "wanting them to succeed" (Whatever that means) will make them successful. In office or not.

> In another, she quotes an expert saying that “environmental enrichment”—seeing new people, observing new things on a commute—is good for our brain’s plasticity.

The likelihood of observing new things (except maybe new traffic jams or train delays) on your daily commute is pretty low, I would say - and (how convenient!) increases if you only do the commute, say, once per week. And, of course, will only happen if you don't spend all of it with your eyes glued to your phone...

Yeah, if someone is going to say your commute is beneficial for this reason, going to a different cafe/lunch spot near your house every day is going to be even more beneficial.

She probably means advertisements. Nothing really changes on a commute.

That argument really feels like a bizarre stretch. Also, I work fully remote. I take breaks by cycling around and bet that between that and a mindless commute it is way better for my brain’s plasticity. Also, I can sleep longer which is even better.

https://archive.is/CpcAf

Nice!

In my experience, people who chose larger living space over shorter commutes are very resentful about resuming their commute.

Meanwhile, those who live in shoeboxes need the external space to stay sane.

Don't underestimate the selfish reasons on either side.

I didn't realise "not wanting to travel for over an hour each day, unpaid" and "not wanting to go back to the confinement of a tiny home" were forms of selfishness. If only there were some sort of middle ground, eh?

Between urban and sub-urban?

My point is choosing either on-site or WFH means someone has gotten a bad deal. Personally I think the environmental argument trumps most others.

Why are you treating this as either/or? Why are you pitting worker against worker? The article clearly mentions hybrid work. Relatively few, if any firms have enforced mandatory remote work on people who don't want it. This is about employers ignoring the benefits of remote work while trying to grab that little bit of autonomy granted to their employees.

Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. Coming into an office just to be on zoom calls.

This seems to be part of the problem: people want to make choices for themselves, based on their own circumstances, and managers want more one-size-fits-all solutions. I've adopted a hybrid schedule at work, but my commute is easy and short, I like my coworkers, and I have the luxury of my own office. If it were an open-plan space, I'd feel a lot less inclined to be there.

I really liked in-office work until I had to switch to telecommuting because of a major life event.

I really think it's poor logic to think one is better than the other: There are tangible advantages to both; and both work better or worse depending on the needs of the job and the kind of team that the company builds.

When I worked at Intel, they had to cut back on telecommuting because people were really abusing it. Yahoo did the same. On the other hand, telecommuting and hybrid worked very well for me for almost a decade. My wife and I would find being a two-career couple, with children, much more difficult if I had to be in the office five days a week.

I will point something out: If you need to telecommute to be productive; that indicates poor management within your company. Management should help create an in-office space and time to focus; if they can't do that in office, they aren't managing. One approach is "only take meetings by appointment." Another approach is team-wide dedicated focus time.

Karpathy left Tesla because of the back-to-the-office policy. Now he is working for Microsoft.

Don't be Tesla.

Actually, he is now back at OpenAI.

Did he explicitly state that as the reason? I thought he said he didn’t want to be in an executive role.

Only tangentially related, but when you have (a) a company that might want to lay off a percentage of workers and (b) don't want the negative press of said layoffs, then a return-to-the-office policy is an effective tool in the corporate toolbelt.

For any firm large enough that layoffs would bring negative press, so did the thinly veiled "return to work" scheme. I don't think it was so effective.

Because everyone has an opinion and whatever it is, there's always a counter argument to itYou can post about it and lots of people can relate, and if people relate to it they're more likely to comment.

So many people make it out to be remote v office and hybrid is the devil. I'm adamant that people want the flexibility to work how they see fit for the job at hand. Unfortunately, this doesn't typically align with all the other people in their division/team. Some will want to socialise in the office while others have commitments at home, some will want the focus they can only get in the office, while others want the focus they can only get at home. So you have a stalemate (or a planning problem).

I think Nick's right, in 10 years time it'll be a lot less controversial, there will be companies who are mainly remote, some who are main onsite and others that are both.

...and the groups of people who own office buildings who must be starting to sweat.

It's heated because it's local.

People will scream online because they don't want to have to actually talk to the people in their company making the decisions, because they know by the time that happens it's already been decided.

Can you elaborate? What is 'it's' that's already happened?

The decision of whether people will WFH or WFO

Exactly. By the time the decision/discussion is made known to the workers, it has already been decided at the executive level, and there's really no turning it around.

I'm thinking about how to effectively onboard new people into an organization, any good text about that subject? Personally I haven't experienced it myself, since I'm working at the same place as before the pandemic.

The onboarding question is a good one, I am curious about it. I remember GitLab had a public manual for this but I am curious how well it worked.

Remote for many years. Gitlab has some good materials for remote, async organization. Some suggestions:

    * formal onboarding guide checked in with the code. New people should be fixing errors and pushing patches to it as they go. The guide should cover all the logins and services, dev process, how to build and run the product, etc.
    * frequent 1:1 from boss and tech leads the first month
    * online social event to meet the team, bs, maybe play a game
    * automation in ci to build and test product for anyone to hit the button
    * maintain curated culture for faqs, problems, shared scripty bits. wiki, private SO, shared repos, etc
    * maintain SOP documents for common operations like making a release

Amongst other good answers, what's working well for my team in our new all-remote all-the-time era is deliberately assigning a different buddy from the team each day to the new starter, and making it clear that on this day it is a big part of the buddy's job to ensure that the new starter can achieve everything they should for that day on the day-by-day new starter checklist.

There is a timecode assigned for this, so the buddy isn't making time around other things; that day, this is a main part of their job.

On the first day, the principal task is a full clone and build of the principal software the new starter is working on. The second day is going through a full process of ticket assignment, working it, completing it (ticket carefully selected to be possible in a day and to exercise full process, so buddy has to introduce them to testers etc). And so on. Each day, a new face, a new buddy, and pretty soon they've met everyone on the team and had useful interaction completing real tasks.

Article is paywalled

archive.ph can fix that

None of us had a say in the choices about office life before us.

It’s been labeled in the past an intentional effort to sell cars, gas, and take people out of their communities as social control over time and agency.

I think given all the ways the people of the recent past have been shown wrong, we do not owe doing as they expect by default. It’s not as if they’re capable of putting up much fight at this point.

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