- the first two were conducted while we were in the thick of the pandemic and loathe to be near anyone outside of our pod. WFH made sense then, and I’m sure people were more comfortable knowing they wouldn’t get Covid WFH
- the third was in 2023 when the world opened up, but studied call center operators. Yes, I can see how they would be more productive at home. However, imho any position that requires collaboration and many interactions between staff is more productive in the office and this study doesn’t address that.
So it seems that there are numerous studies that show WFH is beneficial to productivity, that are done before pandemic.
> because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented
Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that.
It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.
> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.
Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).
> It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.
This is wishful thinking. Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project, which is the most important part, and in many cases senior engineers are on the critical path. But hey, if you're able to be productive at scale with remote work, guess you'll have a large pool of talent to draw from, so I'm hoping to see many successful companies replace FAANG.
> Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).
Yes, this is what YOU want. It's not for the benefit of the company, no matter how remote people try to frame it. But hey, if that's my only choice, then we should hire top talent in Bangalore or Warsaw instead of remote mid talent from high cost areas.
Precisely. I don't want to work for you, you don't want me to work for you, so it's a win-win: I'll keep doing good work for a company that appreciates what I can do and is happy to give me the flexibility that I need to do it well. You keep hiring people who don't mind being interrupted by a boss who values their physical presence over all else. Everyone's happy!
This sounds like a project management failure. One of the cardinal rules of the remote programs I run is: Never let the critical path be blocked by one person having to physically do some synchronous task. If Task X requires Person Y to approve it by Date Z, then you obtain that approval asynchronously, waaaaay before Date Z, where you would otherwise become blocked.
> In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project
I mean, I think that's what you're getting at here, so design your business processes just like you'd design a multi-threaded program: such that there are no locks and mutexes.
2. You can't always parallelize work, and even if you can, that doesn't mean it will be faster/more efficient
Having to constantly put out fires is always a sign of larger issues, especially in an engineering context.
When an employee's in a meeting and not at their desk, what do you do?
If they're not at desk, I'll wait there.
The point isn't that the project will fail if I don't get my solution right now. The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail.
That's a figment of your imagination.
Some would say that's an issue with the tools, but the tools aren't ever going to get better if the WFH people don't acknowledge the deficiency of the current system.
Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers.
I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.
If you treat your coworkers with anything approximating the dismissive, demanding, and entitled comments you've been leaving here you are making yourself a lot of enemies at work, and if you're not the boss you won't get away with that forever.
> I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product.
If this is how you actually perceive your relationship to these people then they will notice.
I'm a lower level TL, and we just got an intern for the summer. They needed help figuring out how to set up SSH, and they came to me. Is my work more important? Yeah, but that doesn't matter. I don't want them spinning on this while waiting for me to grant them an audience. If I truly don't have time, that's my decision to deprioritize the work, or send it somewhere else. Same with the people above me.
But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.
> A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. - https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
What is going on in your organization?