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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

It's good to see the broad but anecdotal sentiment backed up by data.

The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?), and it's fascinating to watch some companies chew their own limbs off (metaphorically speaking) to appease investors-at-large.

Here I speculate, but the pattern seems to be that board members are involved with multiple organizations, and are stakeholders in even more - and those with ties to commercial real estate (and all the funds heavily invested into it) will do whatever it takes to push for higher office occupancy. At the same time, they're doing this (arguably) to a disadvantage to the companies they're supposed to steward - forcing best talent out, paying a premium for half-empty office space, and generally eroding morale by this display of duplicity.

At the same time, I love seeing the quiet resistance by the rank-and-file and even some middle management. The new reality is here, and there's no going back. The % of days WFH has flatlined, and I imagine over time it will begin to slowly but steadily trend back up.

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In broad strokes, it's just old vs new, and an age thing. I'll pick '40' as the mid-point:

Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing.

Young = under 40s - have grown up with the internet, github, working/studying remotely and so on.

I've worked in companies where the CEO and senior management are all 50 something, and in a couple of companies where they're all approaching 40. Can you guess which company used PCs and which one used Macbooks?

Going back further, I can remember working on Sun boxes, because management was reluctant to use that 'new fangled NT3.51 or even NT4.0'.

The point being, as the workforce demographic changes, so will the opinions and approaches. And the cycle will repeat.

I'm not sure it's that simple. I've been effectively remote for a long time and have zero interest in going into an office for the most part. (Though I'd do it more if it were easy, I'm a 2 hour commute to the only office it makes any sense for me to go into.)

Anecdotally, I hear it's more younger employees who like going into an office for the social interaction.

My observations agree with your anecdote, but in my experience it was the youngest employees who go into the office for social interaction. Meaning, fresh grads to ~26 year olds. They openly admitted they didn’t want to sit in their 600 sqft apartments all day and that they didn’t have anyone to talk to otherwise.

This sounds more like a way deeper loneliness and community problem than a workplace problem.

That's the same thing I thought: it was the younger people who yearned for the office. Junior employees tended to do worse with WFH, especially those who were onboarding, whereas more senior folks were more comfortable working without much supervision. Younger people also don't tend to have larger homes, with dedicated, quiet office space. Younger employees pinned more of their social life on workmates than older employees who might already have established families and community ties.

Anecdotally, I know that on my team, the younger teammates were the most eager about returning to the office. I'm nearly 50 and wouldn't go back in if you held a gun to my head.

At least currently there's probably a bell curve going on in terms of what age groups want to work in office vs remote. I've also seen younger employees want to be in the office, they enjoy the social side of it, and early in your career its easier to learn and progress if you're colocated and able to ask questions of people easily. The old-school managers are also attached to being in offices, at least partly just because that's how they learned to work so it's easier for them then adapting. You've then got people in their late 30s and early 40s who are all in on remote work, a lot of us have kids, or we moved out of the urban centres, have a network of friends outside of work, so really aren't that bothered about being in the office.

What's going to be interesting is seeing what happens as the current generation of senior management age out and retire. Do companies start to lean more towards remote work? And if so what happens about the younger workers coming into industry at that point, presumably they're still going to prefer being colocated for the same reasons, and that will need balancing with the older folk's preferences.

The thing is, I'm over 40, and I love working from home - and I'm not alone. However I feel that we are very spoiled by having had the opportunity to form our relationships and networks during the in-office era, and that this feels very unfair to the up-and-coming junior generation.

Maybe you are right and they are just fine having not experienced the in-office environment.

I'm 38, remote, and can't imagine working in-office ever again. Our small-ish team (~25) works very effectively remotely.

But I suspect you're right. I learned a huge number of skills being in high velocity office environments, shadowing/observing others, etc. Starting out remote must be much harder.

I'm over 40, but only spent about a year of my career in an office. I haven't seen an office since 2001. I don't feel I missed much in the subsequent years. I still stay in touch with people I worked with remotely. I never spoke to anyone in said office again. Your stated opportunity seems rather romanticized from my perspective. Relationships can form anywhere.

You don't have to go too far back in time to when work from home was also the norm (when everyone stayed at home on the farm). The office age was the aberration.

I'm of a strong opinion not to form big friendships at work. I now started making friends outside of work at 37.

At work I'm looking out for myself.

Forming professional friendships is looking out for yourself. It helps you get you new jobs -- ones that you won't have access to otherwise -- or employees, if you are hiring.

I thought that older people with families and bigger houses prefer WFH, because it is more convenient and it makes more time for the family. while younger single people with smaller apartments prefer the office, because it’s less cramped and lonely.

Another example: I've noticed older folks (45-50+) repeatedly say "stop sending emails/texts/Slacks, pick up the phone and call them". Meanwhile, everyone under that age (and to be fair, a decent number even in that age group) considers an unexpected phone call to be rude and disruptive.

I am 50+. I call people often and encourage people to call me without the typical hours long build up per chat "Hi", "Hi", "How are you?", "Good", "I have a question", "OK", "Can I call you?", "Yes", "Now?", Yes" and so on. I think remote work loses a lot of agility if you communicate only through chat.

Seems like you (and/or your interlocutors) are using chat like it was a phone call and concluding a phone call is better to have phone calls.

I dislike phone calls, but handle them in two ways:

If a chat conversation isn't getting a point across after a couple of back and forths (five minutes is too long,) then it's time for a phone call. Discussions in chat are fine. Flat out lack of understanding is best fixed when they can hear and interrupt for clarification.

If I do need to call someone, I simply message them and ask if they're available for a call. There's no need for preamble.

That’s some boomer slack usage. If anyone sends a message with “hi” they get a stern bollocking by me immediately. Our company handbook specifically forbids doing this.

Can you say "Hi, I need XYZ"? Or are pleasantries forbidden?

That's usually not an issue. It's the empty "Hi." and then indefinite silence that's an issue.

You wouldn't send a letter with just the salutation, you'd include the message! Why treat a Slack message like it's a phone call instead of like a (short, rapidly delivered) letter?

Agreed, just wanted clarification!

The boomers actually get to the point quickly. The young guys are the ones that send ten messages before getting to the point.

This. All most of 20-30 that I interact with are. Hi, how are you doing today? And then pause. Boomers just go straight to the point.

I'm also huge proponent of https://nohello.net/en/ in the workplace and elsewhere.

You can call but I might be taking a dump or something. If you chat, I'll answer within a couple of minutes. Seems more efficient to me.

That feels like more of a problem with the communication than the medium of it? Or rather to say there is a mismatch between the communication method and the way it is being used.

On async channels it is recommended to get to the point quickly. Sure send pleasantries, but no need to wait until they are answered. You can immediately also get to your point. Instead of sending "hello" and then waiting you would be sending "Hello. I hope you are having a good day. It seems that the turbo encabulator is complaining a vapour lock in the secondary log file. Have you seen that before?"

The https://nohello.net/en/ site describes this communication style better.

I am a strong believer in "nohello" https://nohello.net/en/

If you use chat like it's a conversation then you'll have a bad time.

If you use it like it's business communication like short-form email it's better.

It's bizarre that the same people who will send an email that says "Hey, send me this information asap" will start a text chat with "hey how's it going"

People who say hello and then wait for a reply will wait a long, long time for a reply from me.

People starting chats with "Hi".....5 minute wait......"You there?" is an entirely separate problem not related to what we're discussing here.

Yesterday I had to tell a couple of people in our extended team meeting: "guys, stop arguing via email over several days with 10 more people in copy, pick up the phone and clarify the problem in 10 minutes". This is not a sign that I am over 40 (I am), but I know a bit better what are the most efficient ways to communicate in different circumstances.

The people in that argument were located on 2 different continents 7 hours apart, that would be a non-issue if they were in on the same floor in the same building. This is not an argument for working in the office, just to adjust to the environment.

That is a bit different though. That's not calling someone out of the blue. It's setting up an impromptu call after chat/email isn't doing the job, which I have done many times.

It varies from country to country, culture to culture. Here in Norway work from home was so normal that during COVID there really wasn't any qualitative change, just a quantitative one. Anyone in a salaried position is being paid for the work they do not where they do it. In the winter my boss would occasionally rent a cabin in the mountains and work there while I, mostly, went in to the office because it was quieter there than at home (three children).

> still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices

You hit the nail on the head. Senior managers who are unwilling to learn to do their jobs slightly differently are a big part of the problem. Imagine forcing an entire work-force to commute so you can physically stop by someone's desk to interrupt them vs sending a message or scheduling a meeting. Senior managers want productive staff, but instead of listening to what they need to be productive, they set up roadblocks to satisfy their own lazy vanity.

They say they want a productive staff but actions speak louder than words.

I'm 37 and a factor that I haven't seen much discussed is that in-office is a vastly higher burden for my generation. Commutes are longer, more families have two working parents (and need to, to pay the bills).

In-office doesn't mean heading out the door at 8:30 and coming home at 5:30 but something more like leaving at 7:00am, dropping off kids at before-school daycare ($$$), driving back to the train station to make it in by 9 and then coming home at 6 after your 1-hour commute to the closest affordable suburb. An 11-hour day, and you are paying out the nose for childcare if you can even get it, and you'll spend all your PTO on kids doctor appointments and parent-teacher conferences and the like.

This almost exactly described my life as well (also 37, lived in a major metro). Not to mention the (surreptitiously unpaid) evening calls we'd have with other TZs after spending that 11-hour day, because take-home laptops.

Totally agree. I was that age "a few years" ago, and I'm not playing working-hours-one-up-manship, but I was leaving the house at 4.45am, and getting home 7.30-8pm (London).

That was probably the low point in my, and others, working life that coincides with the age for raising a young family. It sucks.

I think we really screwed up. We're using WFH to hide child care while saying it's more efficient. We should have just demanded better work hours but here we are.

In my case, no. WFH because I prefer it. I manage a team of 7. In our team there are people all across UK. Childcare would be easy for me but commute, oh no!

There's talk about less than 40 and more years old. I'm over 40 and prefer remote. In our space it's younger folks that prefer hanging out in the office.

WFH for me gives me more flexibility in the childcare options. It doesn't eliminate my need to have my family needs met. I can't just watch my toddler and not work.

However, I can be more flexible and drop my toddler off at daycare after my daily stand-up since he mostly is fine watching shows during that. Then I pick him up right before his nap time. This scenario is awesome, but albeit just temporary until my family resumes our previous arrangements that was interrupted by a surgery.

My responsibility hasn't changed and I'll fill in randomly throughout the week as needed but, now I just have extra flexibility that I would never have in an office. Even comparing it to a small city, living in the suburbs easily meant a 15-30 minute commute and wouldn't allow me to have the opportunities I have now.

No, I won't return to the office and I'm not sure anyone will actually convince me to do so. I'm mentoring interns and juniors developers without any concerns remotely.

The model needs four buckets:

20-30: Needs mentorship, can live closer to the office

30-40: Has young kids, moved to the burbs

40+ AND Management: Developed management approach pre-pandemic, pre-Slack

40+ but IC: Could go either way

This is still HUGELY simplified, and please do not take offense if you are e.g. 30-40 without wanting kids. But "young kids" is just a huge difference in terms of the morning schedule and flexibility needs, especially as most families near urban areas have both parents working.

>Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing.

Absent the Covid years, I'd probably agree more. A lot of managers, execs, and other senior people may not have liked commuting but it was just part of the job. But they're people too and many realized they could manage without going into an office all of the time. People do come in, especially for things like customer visits, but it's mostly a sometimes thing.

Besides the old/young divide, I think there's the geek/suit, or maker/manager divide.

As a geek, most of my time is spent working alone, even in ill-defined projects that require a lot of coordination and communication. Working from 'home' (more from wherever I want) is better. Also, although I agree that we lose something if we communicate remotely, I don't terribly care. When I communicate, information is more important than emotions. And they want me to work in an open floor office, ugh.

Suits spent most of their time in meetings. They also care much more about the emotions and human touch. They've spent years optimizing for firm handshakes, nice hair, good smiles and that weird clicking noise :).

Basically, suits want the office, geeks don't. Productivity doesn't have much to do with it :)

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

> The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?)

Oh, it's definitely not only about money, any more than the other "treat your employees well and you will provably make more money" things are.

It's about power, ego, and classism.

It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats.

It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office.

It's about avoiding ever having to question the assumption that the only reason regular plebeians ever actually do work is because they have the boss breathing down their necks every 5 seconds (and, of course, the ever-present threat of being fired and left destitute), because if people did start questioning it, they might realize it also disproves the assumptions underlying the most common objections to things like UBI. Which would shatter the upper class's power over the lower classes for good.

This is not to say that it's not about money, of course. The commercial real estate angle is a real one, for sure. But an awful lot of the assumptions that lead to calling for RTO have much less to do with money, and much more to do with maintaining a neofeudal power dynamic between bosses and workers.

I agree - it's much more nuanced than my initial take. I guess I oversimplify it, in the spirit of "money is power", but you're right, we could say "money is proxy for power" and acknowledge all the other power plays that are as old as humanity.

> It's about power, ego, and classism. It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats. It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office.

I take it you're not a manager. Reducing people to "power", ego, corner offices... that's all very simplistic and (sorry that this offends) naive.

I've been fortunate to work in places where management is involved, technical, and impactful. It sets direction, identifies bad plans and wastes of time where work should be cut, identifies places where work can be combined, it resolves (and asks) difficult queries, and it works to grow the individual team members and make the workplace a good environment.

The cartoonish Clueless Idiot Manager Villain has just not been my experience. Sure, I've seen bad managers, but also bad individual-contributors.

Great point on potentially overlapping board membership. More broadly, there's also a theory that growing common ownership by index funds and others with significant commercial real estate exposure is driving this pressure.

also why the housing bubble won't burst -- too many stakes invested across the entire market

If interests were making themselves rich on real estate and other supporting industries by wasting productivity on commuting, office lunches, etc, it makes me think the current [impact on commercial real and affected industries] may just be the "bezzle" coming due.

Now that the cards are laid out flat, in retrospect it's easier for everyone to see and discover that the productivity and value may have been stolen. I'd love to see some investigation into showing the potential connections more concretely.

This is on point, but I think it can also be simpler.

Many execs and upper management would have read or watched the movie about MacDonalds and how they make loads of cash through owning the property and renting it back. Board member or not, they try to use it to boost earnings.

> > The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money

It's the opposite actually. WFH is more efficient, but efficiency is not the reason why we work.

Every self respecting man needs friends and enemies. The more watered down a man's life is, the less intense the friendships and rivalries are going to be.

WFH is just the last step in a long process watering everything down, where the commoditification of every experience is making us dull and full of apathy.

The problem is that a disease like that becomes endemic in society, so people's beliefs become weaker and weaker, but not having strong beliefs closely correlates with people having next to no belief in themselves, which again closely correlates with WFH preference because people think they don't have what it takes to thrive in an office environment because they are scared of the strong sentiments of friendship, rivarly, love and revenge on the workplace and in life in general.

I don't know what you're on about. WFH saves me so much time and energy that I can commit a lot more to things that are way more interesting and fulfilling than work. Now I can hang out with people I care about, focus on my Jiu Jitsu and guitar playing and spend more time chipping away at my massive queue of unread books.

Work is just something I have to do so I can feed and house my kids.

Spoken like a true type A personality. Lots of people don't need their ego fed constantly at the expense of others and are happy just being creative and thoughtful.

I’d really love to hear you describe more of this WFH desert devoid of fulfilment, and the living water of communal work. It’s kinda fascinating.

JumpinJack_Chad more like, saying it how it is.

Not just investors and commercial holdings, but many states & localities have offered big tax breaks to businesses to get or keep them in town -- Texas (Austin, esp.) come to mind. Idea being that a lot of big developments translated to a lot of workers, who bought houses, commuted, purchases gas+coffee+lunches, etc.

With those workers leaving the city loses revenue, on top of downtown areas dying off, which exacerbates the tax base problem further.

Anecdotally, my org mandated 3 days back but has pretty slide, across the entire org, back to 2 days. The genie is out of the bottle and there is widespread, if quiet, resistance from everyone, to include senior managers.

> The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?)

Many people genuinely believe that collaboration is qualitatively better and easier in person. Regardless of where you stand, you can't deny that there are pros and cons:

* The bandwidth of typing on Slack is slower than talking in person. Also, one winds up spending a lot of time on Slack correcting small misunderstandings that are easier clarified quickly in conversation. And two people typing full-paragraphs back and forth often at the same time, can be clunky.

* On the other hand, Slack leaves a good paper trail and you can easily reference what you discussed. And it's low-effort and doesn't immediately interrupt the other person.

* But no good alternative to whiteboards, etc.

Also, as much as everyone hates it, management does have to deal with low performers -- a nd cases you can't really tell if that person is actually working through tough eng problems all day that take a long time, or are they just watching youtube videos all day. So as ugly as it is, "butts in seats" is a sort of proxy for at least eliminating that variable. I know this is controversial ("Boo, only a bad manager cares about how much time someone is putting in!"), but I offer that viewpoint as an alternative to "clearly about money."

Have you checked this to be true by looking at the involvements of board members?

Cost reductions from facilities are nothing unusual.

Yes at some point I've cross-referenced the board members of where I work to see where else they sit. It's obviously much harder to track their investments (unless it's insider buys/sells) but if they used to be C-suite or sit on the board of some company that's majority owned by a REIT, it's hard not to draw conclusions.

It's definitely a rabbit hole that goes deep and one runs the risk of ending up with a spiderweb of red threads on their wall :)

I love how it has to be some massive conspiracy, not the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work. A lot of these orgs are coasting and the impact won't be known for a while.

If that's a "well-known fact" then could I trouble you for some sources to that end?

Just talk to a few? I know plenty of junior developers who've told me that their professional life suffered during remote work over covid.

I know plenty who said the reverse. Uh oh!

Why is it surprising that different people could have different reactions to WFH? Some people liked it. Other people hated it.

The original claim that’s being supported is:

> the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work

Not “some people were less productive, others were more productive,” which is obviously the actual truth.

So professional work during a worldwide pandemic with all the hardship that entailed suffered...from working remotely? I don't buy that.

you mean the pandemic that completely upended the entire global economy and society?

the one that made entire industries basically vanish? the one that no one was prepared for?

like, I been 100% remote since 2015 for orgs that were already equipped for that, and life went on just fine when COVID hit. Jr. Devs at orgs that weren't equipped for remote definitely suffered, in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas.

> in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas.

Doesn't this just prove the point, though? You seem to be saying it takes additional resources and time to make WFH work as effectively as normal, in-office work. Many workplaces are resource-constrained and may not be able to implement those practices.

How do those resources compare to the cost of maintaining offices, the costs to workers of commutes and being more or less forced into expensive and crowded urban centers, and the environmental cost of the commute and the property maintenance?

Let's be real. The reason we all love WFH is because we can slack off. It's so easy to game the system and make it look like we're working when we're not.

The three big reasons for me are: 1. No more commute. 2. No need to move for a new job. 3. Way more real estate options. No longer needing to live inside a major metropolitan area near my job means I can save hundreds of thousands on a house, or pay much cheaper rent. It's a no-brainer.

Stop projecting your personal failings onto the rest of us. My productivity has never been greater - and I started this career journey in the 80's.

Add in the new AI tools and productivity is getting another bump.

I guess you're just getting left behind.

We won't miss you.

If you’re justifying this to yourself because you think everyone else is slacking off at home, you might want to rethink. I am not slacking off—my productivity is at least as good at home as it was in the office, even on days when I’m not at the computer a full eight hours. Judging from what we get done, other people on my team are also not slacking off. But if someone were regularly slacking off, I’d be able to tell—and I’m not even a manager, just a principal who listens at standup. At least wait for a better job market if you insist on playing roulette with your career.

I don't think it's any easier, it's just less unpleasant because you don't have to pretend to be working as actively while slacking off.

And if this is true it just proof of the merits of WFH. If everyone is 'slacking off' and productivity is basically unchanged, it just shows what a waste of everyone's lives working in the office was.

Sorry to have to be the one to throw ice water on you here: most of your colleagues are in fact working hard and enjoy WFH because they enjoy spending time with their family and working from a comfortable work environment.

If we want to talk about conspiracies, let’s talk about management’s belief that everyone producing value is secretly trying to game the system

It's pretty easy to spot people who aren't working. We hired a guy and it was pretty obvious he was doing multiple jobs. We fired him in a week. Unfortunately my boss got cold feet and his replacement had to be in-office.

Funny, I have bittersweet feelings about WFH because it was so much easier for me to slack off in office. All I needed was a butt in chair for 8 hours a day.

WFH I'm expected to track my productive time and ensure it adds up to 8 hours. Maybe some people can get away with fudging their records but I think there's a pretty widespread understanding that coworkers who regularly have lengthy periods where they're neither responding to DMs nor producing output aren't actually working for the full workday.

In office, if I spent an hour to go for a walk and to a coffee-shop during my 8 hour workday, it was understood that I was probably doing some backround processing while stretching my legs.

WFH if I disappear for an hour, it's assumed I'm not working (and I'm certainly not tracking that as productive work time)

Not any more than when I was in the office. Let's be real here - it's a rare individual who can do deep and productive knowledge work for 8 hours straight. All work from home means is that now when I take a break it's to do something productive, like a load of laundry, or really relaxing, like taking a walk, instead of trying to surreptitiously browse the internet for a bit.

Sometimes I have an epiphany loading the dishwasher. That should count as billable time, no?

>The reason we all love WFH is because we can slack off.

Don't insult me like that.

I won't pretend I don't know people who only work 4 hours a week, but stop acting like you know me.

I love work from home because I can get actual quiet. Not music downing out distractions. Quiet.

If you want to insinuate that I don't work, or perpetuate a culture that assumes I will not work as hard because there's no hall monitor, then get bent.

studies have repeatedly shown that office workers -- and most workers in general -- are productive for about 6 hours a day. and that's on the high end.

there are a lot of do-nothing, go-nowhere meetings that fill the gap and make it appear like things are happening.

WFH just shows that the emperor has no clothes and that a lot of time is spent doing BS tasks. there is still a ton of BS, but I can be chopping veggies and prepping a crockpot meal while on pointless 30+ people calls.

I've personally never worked harder or had better results since working for all-remote companies.

I took two hour lunches, with alcohol. I would wander into random university lectures instead of meetings. Do not underestimate my ability to fuck off from work no matter the location.

~$120B in enterprise value of remote first or full remote companies indicates this isn’t accurate. Remote may pose development and pipeline challenges, but they’re clearly surmountable.

The comment you replied to didn't suggest any conspiracy. They merely suggested that board members on the boards of multiple organisations sometimes will do things that favour one of the companies but is detrimental to the others.

As for your "well known fact", I'm not convinced it's either well-known, nor necessarily a fact (I can buy it happens some places, but would question whether it's an inherent limitations or an issue with management in organisations who don't know how to handle remote work)

It's more than three years since most people started working from home. Can you estimate when you expect these impacts to start showing up?

Seriously. GDP and productivity are super high right now.

And wages? ...just slightly higher :|

that's been happening since the 1970s :/

Speaking for myself, I’m getting the hang of training people remotely. It takes more structure, and it took a year to learn how, but it’s totally doable.

Can you share what worked and what didn't when it comes to training people remotely?

Checklists are the big one. We've got a big spreadsheet of general areas that people should know, each with a lecture attached, but those are for self-study; I go over each one in detail with each new hire in a series of sessions typically lasting ~3 months, at 2-3 sessions per week.

Separately, I hold what amounts to office hours 3 times per week, where anyone who feels like it can show up to ask questions—but new hires are encouraged to do so until absolutely certain they don't need to, and also to keep track of questions between sessions.

There's more, but this is the part that's easy to explain.

What didn't work... crucially, waiting for newbies to ask questions doesn't work; they won't. You need to actively go looking, and also bring up areas they might not even know they ought to ask about.

Thanks for the answer. I see the theme is you have to be proactive instead of passively dump info hope for the best. It makes total sense.

It's more than three years since most people started working from home.

a lot more than three years. remote work goes back decades before covid.

GitHub, Shopify, and Stripe all started as remote companies.

the really annoying thing is not the legions of people who believe it all started in 2020. the really annoying thing is that there's a ton of excellent literature on how to do it, and when it suddenly became mainstream in 2020, the newcomers ignored all that literature.

Shopify only went remote in March 2020, after being strongly anti-remote for a long time. You're right that they have leaned into 100% remote since the pandemic, however.

There were remote employees before (especially in Production Engineering and much of Support), but R&D was almost all in person.

(Source: I miss the productivity of the Elgin Street office ...)

I'm talking about the period from 2006 to 2008 or so. source: that's when I met Tobi and a few other early people.

Nobody knows. What will catch up soon is any country in the USA time zones discovering they can do you job for 20% pay. People who think they will be able to work remotely while making top-city salary are delusional.

I disagree with GP. The impact on employees (junior or otherwise) and the hit to productivity exists, it's just a result of under investment in remote-first working practices. Anything between fully remote and fully in office / everyone in the office on the same days per week is going to be shown to be disaster.

I think the effects are going to start presenting now, but because it's a new phenomenon for most organizations, it won't be recognized for another year or so. The next 2-5 years are going to be littered with stories along the lines of 'progress ground to a halt and nobody could put their finger on why, so we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work and eventually realized it was a lack of any remote strategy'

Why do you seem to think that those two things are mutually exclusive?

The "well-known" fact you speak of is what my wife's boss uses to justify return to office. It's definitely not the massive investment in office furniture, office remodel, and meeting spaces that have been gussied up for impressions of success. No way it's that! /s

The fact that senior employees are leaving for remote work ensures junior people are all they have left! Junior people are, shockingly, not as productive as senior people... who would have thought?

I moved to a new role in my company a year and a half ago, and it's taken me this long to be confident enough to take responsibility for things that I'm not told explicitly to do. That's really the line between junior and senior in my opinion, both feeling like you have the power to make changes in addition to permission to do so. That transition is hard no matter if you are in the office or not (in the office, for my example) but it really can't happen if a junior is suddenly the senior tech because the real seniors all left.

Those investments in office furniture, remodels, etc. are already sunk costs though. Why would they be used to justify RTO? If anything, it's more expensive to have people come in and use (read: destroy) furniture and equipment.

This is a genuine question. The RTO push has befuddled me for awhile because the money that's already gone into the offices (like the leases) were decided on awhile ago and will be paid out regardless if people come in or not. Perks like free lunch and snacks also cost more when you force people to come in. So I don't really understand the financial aspect of it.

Maybe it's management needing people in office to justify their jobs for some reason? I don't know.

Edit: I'm staff-level for what it's worth. I've also noticed that this article doesn't actually reflect reality; nearly every job listing I saw this year said that the applicant will have to be in the office 1-5 days a week.

Those investments in office furniture, remodels, etc. are already sunk costs though. Why would they be used to justify RTO?

you answered your own question. sunk costs fallacy.

Industry-wide? I guess I'm naive for thinking that some companies must have some smart people in the room and point out the fallacy

I know a lot of people here think executives are idiots but I really have trouble believing that any CEO is sitting there thinking "Damn. If I don't get people back into the office, all these office chairs we spent good money on will go to waste."

Exactly. Same with "Damn. We have to drive away our best talent to fill occupancy in the office we already signed a lease on despite rent being a fixed cost that isn't impacted by occupancy." Like, it just doesn't make sense to me.

I do understand to the degree tax incentives get involved. But, whether having deluded themselves or not, I do believe most execs pushing RTO are doing so for reasons they think are sound for collaboration, cultural, or other rational reasons.

A conspiracy would involve people working together, conspiring, towards some secret goal. What GP stipulates works just as well if you assume everyone is working on their own in their own best interest.

Going by the principles of capitalism or game theory it would be more surprising if this wasn't true and board members overwhelmingly worked for the good of the company instead of their personal wealth

Well-known facts eh.

I didn’t know it wasn’t possible to mentor junior employees remotely. It’s impossible to assign a mentor, actively check-in on their progress, encourage collaboration, etc. over a computer.

I guess I’ll have to tell the junior I’m mentoring that we are doomed.

Annnnnnyways, I’ve been having a great time mentoring a junior engineer at my company. We regularly meet to discuss his work and I constantly stress “please bother me if you have questions.” I reach out once a day to ensure he’s good to go and he often reaches out a few times a day for questions. We assign him work that is challenging, but within his skill set and abilities.

In summary, anyone saying juniors will suffer either has no idea how to mentor remotely or are just lazy. Adapt or die.

Edit: I will add that my company flies all remote employees into the office once a year for the sole purpose of team building. We did our hackathon in person and focused on building those bonds that can help people work better together. It’s technically optional, but who wants to turn down a free mini-vacation?

The lessons from academia suggest that some students thrive in a remote environment, while others completely fall to pieces. It could be that teachers fear losing their jobs to technology if they are not a prominent fixture in an in-person classroom, thus making that up, but it is also quite plausible that different people are actually different.

Finding a student/junior who is able to do well in your business environment at a distance does not imply that it is scalable across all workers businesses need to hire.

Very few business environments are remote though. Almost every one is hybrid, practically all of them if you consider the ones that were in-person or hybrid before the pandemic. Looking at the comments in this thread, too many people seem to be arguing against a "mandatory remote work" strawman.

If you truly need an in-person job or employee, you can find one.

> people seem to be arguing against a "mandatory remote work" strawman.

Not at all. Even if there was such a thing as "mandatory remote work", that does not preclude going to an office. Remote work allows working from anywhere.

The premise is that, absent of job obligation, there is little reason for the seniors to show up at the same place as the juniors. If such obligation is placed on them then you have an RTO mandate.

> I didn’t know it wasn’t possible to mentor junior employees remotely.

Might be possible, but most can't do it from what I've seen.

So if you go full wfh your pool of people who can mentor shrinks by a large factor (4x is my bet).

IMO most people can't mentor effectively to begin with, its simply a little more obvious when its remote.

This is solved by having a structured mentorship program and guidelines, and really good onboarding.

Of course, this means businesses have to invest in this sort of thing, and of course, they don't, because they implicitly got it for free by having seniors covering for juniors for so many decades it obfuscated the problem

I (generally) haven't heard people saying it's impossible, but it absolutely adds friction.

It undeniably takes more effort for me to reach out via Slack than it does for me to swing by a cubicle. Maybe I have gotten lucky with my experience, but I plan on continuing to mentor new hires. It’s certainly possible that I’ll change my opinion as I get a larger sample pool, but I’m happy with the experience so far.

I used to kind of think this, but for me reaching out slack has turned into something I really appreciate. I can asynchronously ask someone to get in touch with me. they do when they are ready. i dont interrupt them. i can continue doing other things. there is no set meeting time, we can just have a little chat with zero effort, say goodbye and go back to work.

at the end of the day after doing this I do feel more tired, but I get plenty of self-scheduled productive little discussions.

I've mentored someone remotely and it seems to have gone pretty well. Doesn't hurt that they person is very good. And, yes, chat is invaluable.

I still feel you're losing something without in-person (including social) interaction. I know for me personally, I would say I have much weaker connections to many people I've never met in person. That said, there are a bunch of other factors involved with building new connections as well that aren't purely about being virtual.

Way back (talking multiple decades) on my first day at $JOB, my manager took me on a walk and introduced me to about 30 other engineers across multiple teams. A bit of smalltalk and bit of shop talk with each one. I still connect to 15 out of those individuals even today. I wish there was a way to replicate that for the remotes these days, because I felt that was pretty awesome.

There are, like remote happy hours, travel blocks, team get togethers etc.

These are solved / solvable issues. Socialization at work can be facilitated in a myriad of ways, even remotely. Games are popular way of doing it, virtual happy hours, team building activities etc.

There are. I admit to finding them annoying for the most part and I usually avoid.

Remote happy hours are hard because everyone is at the same audio volume /distance.

I wish I could emulate walking-over-there on zoom

you could use fluid rooms in Zoom, lets you go in and out to talk to someone

There needs to be a normalization of "peeling off" the main chat room

Annnnnnyways the leaders at top companies, included Zoom, seem to disagree. I guess you are smarter than them. :)

You only like it now because salaries haven't adjusted to the fact that the pool of candidates who can do you job goes up considerably if you are full-time remote. Long-term, wages will stagnate as opportunities in non-USA countries open up. There is no reason for your company to pay you a USA salary if you are full-time remote. And they won't, eventually.

The real estate thing seems like a conspiracy theory to me. Is there evidence that it's wide spread? A significant amount of the pro-office comments here are influenced by real estate? Seems unlikely.

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