Hacker News Reader

Comment by backtobasix | Hacker News Reader

You make a compelling argument for RTO.

I've been in tech since 1990. My first job at IBM, my entire product team of ~100 people was on one floor of one building. We knocked out projects at an insane rate.

Today, trying to lead teams over zoom, across multiple time zones, means it takes weeks to solve problems that took a few hours over a whiteboard.

If I was a CEO I would mandate RTO, but I would also make sure to colocate my teams, otherwise there's very little point to RTO when you're just calling into a Teams meeting.

Of course, the downside no one is talking about: camaraderie is real. If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it, but a very large part of team success is how they work together, and in-person collab is priceless.

View on HN

I’m 50 and started working in 1996. I started working remotely in consulting in mid 2020. I’ve led multiple medium to large consulting projects over the past 4.5 years where the entire team and the customer are in different locations.

There are all sorts of remote white boarding tools and even something as simple as two people working on a shared LucidChart.

I too hit the 50. For the last 8 years I been 100% remote and seen the office ONE time only and that was just to hug a buddy happy retirement. Later on I found out his wages were cut and he found a new job. I quickly joined him with a competitor.

The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry. They like flexing their will against others. That’s why having leverage and a huge f*ck you fund is necessary. Especially when it’s going to take a year to un frack this IT job economy. A quick fix would be removal of all IT h1b. The that would get Americans back to work. We all know they use it to keep wages down.

> The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry.

It depends. I have no issue with companies that RTO'd after lockdowns ended. Some teams and orgs work better in person, others can work fine remotely.

But promising new hires that they can work remotely only to renege on that promise a few years later when the job market tightens is a despicable bait-and-switch.

Exactly this. If you worked in the office, then went remote after Covid and the company made no promises about being permanently remote, I have no issues with that.

In my case, Amazon Retail reached out to me in mid 2020 about an SDE position. They made it clear I would have to relocate eventually. There was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life and move to Seattle for Amazon already knowing there reputation.

They then suggested I apply for a role in Professional Services that was “field be design” and that would be permanently remote. That department was exempted from the first round of RTO requirements while I was still there.

As of this year, even those positions are required to be in an office even though it’s more than likely no one on a project will be in the same office and the clients will definitely be remote. It means you are either at a customer site or on a call with a client from the office. I got Amazoned in late 2023. The RTO mandate from them just came into affect this year.

The equivalent positions at GCP are also hybrid. They reached out to me. But when they said that, I said no thanks

I’d love to learn about more tools you use to collaborate productively in a virtual arrangement.

Nothing really special that we use now. They are all SaaS tools we login to via SSO. GSuite, Notion, and LucidChart are all great for collaboration. Of course Slack and Zoom.

Especially if anyone has tips for getting Zoom-like annotation support in Teams!

Yeah, if you are using Teams, I assume you are working for a “Big Enterprise” company. I work for a company that was born working remotely. We use GSuite which has great support for annotations.

Honestly, an actual telephone would go a long way. It was how the 90's ran.

There are ZERO online collab tools that even come close to the speed of a whiteboard.

Fumbling with a mouse to write a word or draw a straight line is 10x slower than pen. Sorry, I think you're either used to working slow, or strait up bs'ing.

Well, I have done consulting working for AWS. Just because you haven’t learned how to adapt doesn’t mean the rest of the world hasn’t adapted.

> Just because you haven’t learned how to adapt doesn’t mean the rest of the world hasn’t adapted.

The truth is a little more complicated.

We've definitely found some tasks where CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) performs better than colocated work, particularly for well-structured tasks that involve any sort of automation, documentation, or governance.

But collaboration tools still aren't a satisfactory replacement for many kinds in-person work. Studies routinely find colocated teams have higher creativity, efficiency, team cohesion, and job satisfaction. Whether that's worth the higher costs (office space and salaries) depends on the domain, but there are certainly companies that would be better off being in-person.

You think more people would be satisfied with coming into loud noisy open offices everyday with constant interruptions than being at home? There have also been plenty of studies about how long it takes people to get back on task after an interruption and studies about the deleterious affects of long commutes. Not to mention increase risk of car accidents (unfortunately every link I found was from a law office).

And let’s not forget about disease spreading (even before COVID), increase cost of childcare, and how RTO affects mostly women more than men because they are more often than not the primary caretakers of children and aging parents.

It’s not just about children who are too young to be in school. It’s about children too young to stay at home when they are sick. Speaking of which, there is the entire knock on effect of parents sending kids to school sick because they have to go into the office and can’t get last minute childcare.

But most day to day work doesn’t require “creativity”. At most it requires bouts of collaboration and maybe creativity and then everyone goes in their corner and does their own work and can collaborate remotely - pull requests, online screen sharing, shared documents you can edit, “virtual war rooms”, etc.

The first time I worked at a company where the rest of my team was in another city, I had no problem driving 200 miles each way once a quarter (and get reimbursed at the IRS mileage rate) once a quarter. Later as I got into consulting, we could all hop on a plane and meet at a central office somewhere or with a client.

Your last paragraph seems to reinforce my point that "collaboration tools still aren't a satisfactory replacement for many kinds in-person work" given that you and your coworkers spent significant time and money to have occasional in-person meetings.

Perhaps I should be more nuanced since few tech roles these days are entirely remote or entirely in-person -- many remote workers occasionally meet up in person and many in-person office workers occasionally work from home.

The rest of your post makes the case that there are downsides to working in an office. I agree, there are! (Though as a parent with young children who recently worked from home for a week to keep an eye on sick kids I'm amused by the implication that an office is noisier or has more interruptions than being at home.)

To be clear: Remote collaboration is perfectly satisfactory (or better!) for many tasks. And even those tasks where it is suboptimal it may still be a net positive because of the higher costs associated with in-person work, including but not limited to the ones you list.

However, it is worth honestly acknowledging that there are also benefits to working in person. It's up to each company to balance those costs and benefits, but my guess is that eventually some companies will be better off working (mostly) remotely, and others will continue to work (mostly) in-person.

Don’t get me wrong, I work in consulting now and have no problem flying out to a customer’s site occasionally.

But I think the reason virtual collaboration only doesn’t work is because you need to meet people, socialize outside of work with the business lunches and dinners etc. Just because you are a lot more forgiving of people and it’s a lot easier to assume positive intent once you have met them and broke bed with them.

Yeah you can do the virtual “war room”. But it’s easier for people to say “no” to other meetings and block their calendars for an entire day when they are all in an office on-site in the same conference rooms.

I guess my entire thesis is that constant “collaboration” in a large group of any form is overrated. You collaborate and brain storm over strategy and then it’s usually you working by yourself or with another person over tactics which can be done with screen shares, putting ugly boxes in diagramming tools to discuss architecture and then polishing it, shared docs etc.

As far as working environments, the beauty of remote work is that you can buy some place bigger/cheaper/further out that’s optimized for your family situation.

My first home that I had built had a “bonus room” upstairs - the only thing on the second level - that was separated from the rest of the house. But I admittedly I never had to deal with small kids. My (step)sons were 9 and 14 when we moved in together.

> But I think the reason virtual collaboration only doesn’t work is because you need to meet people, socialize outside of work with the business lunches and dinners etc.

And I'm saying there's more to it than that. A couple decades ago I worked on a collaborative mapping/whiteboarding/sketching for Cisco Telepresence rooms for military users. We managed to get pretty close to the bandwidth of in-person meetings: eye contact was slightly off and turn-taking still required more verbal structuring, but overall we were hitting our targets. After that I worked on digital collaboration tools for finance professionals and we found use cases where virtual collaboration was superior, cases where it was clearly deficient, and most fell into a fuzzy middle ground of "it depends". I haven't worked in CSCW for several years now, but still follow the research, and my understanding is that there are still tasks where remote work suffers, and not just for socialization.

Every company is different, many only need high-bandwidth collaboration in large groups once a quarter, while someone in a research/design/startup might spend a couple hours a day in small collaborative meetings. Every company is different.

And again, I acknowledge the many advantages of remote work for both employees and companies. Related to your point about remote workers being able to buy bigger houses in a lower cost of living area, my company has now been forced to pay at least 10-20% higher salaries for in-person hires compared to a similar caliber of remote hires, not to mention the costs of office space. Therefore, if you're not getting at least ~30% higher productivity out of being in person then it's probably a net loss, and there are many companies that are being irrational or deceitful about their RTO mandates. But I've also found remote work proponents overly dismissive of the downsides which makes it significantly harder for them to convince their companies and managers even in cases where remote work truly is a net benefit.

And this has been my pushback against RTO, ironically enough. Team camaraderie is important, yes, but so is independence and comfort. I found that a single week or two a year, with my global team sharing a conference room, three square meals a day, and even non-work activities like volunteering or offroading, built a stronger working relationship than simply cohabiting a space together five days a week or working entirely remotely.

We knocked out big room planning and upwards of eighteen months of work scheduling in that brief week. We executed successfully on everything we planned for that entire year.

Teams absolutely need to meet in-person at regular intervals to remain effective, but they don’t need to be full-RTO. By making such meetups focused and organized, they become important events we want to sink our time and energy into. We relish the next opportunity to meet one another and build better stuff as a result.

You're a work colleague, and nothing more. I certainly have no interest in engaging with work colleagues outside of work. I have a life.

And occasional face to face team meetings are part of that work at many companies. If you don't want to participate you're probably better off finding a company that doesn't have such an expectation.

But what if you also like the people you work with?

Or, to flip that around a bit, what if you hire people who are both competent and interesting/pleasant to be around?

Yeah. Latterly, some of the economic headwinds in tech led to a lack of in-person meetings even after the worst of COVID was over. I pretty much just gave up even knowing who most of the people on my extended team were because I just wasn't invested in it.

It's very easy to have rose colored glasses when remembering the 90s.

I'm not trying to discount your entire point, but rather, argue that what was true in that economic climate might not be the same today.

Do I believe people were enthusiastic, collaborative, and highly productive when it seemed nothing could go wrong and the economy was booming? Absolutely. It's a lot harder to pull everyone together and knock out projects at an "insane" rate when the backdrop is the post-2007, post-covid climate. Stock market aside, there's something off about the purchasing power of the dollar and most young people feel it deeply. It's demotivating to say the least.

I think that's why you're seeing such a strong resistance to RTO. If massive wealth growth isn't an option like it was in the 90s, then give me comfort.

<< It's very easy to have rose colored glasses when remembering the 90s.

Nostalgia is a possibility, but I was watching an old reality TV show and let me tell you. Even that fake, scripted stuff was simply of different quality. It was hopeful, even inspired at times. Yes, maybe it was partly reflection of the times it was created ( easy access to money, jobs, cheap food and so on ), but I do not think we can just blame tinted glasses for remembering 90s fondly.

Depends where you were and what you were doing. The company I was at in the late 80s and almost all of the 90s was mostly not doing great off and on. Had some fun projects but I was definitely done when I left at the end of the decade. On the other hand, I was able to buy a house mid-decade and had some great extended vacations. 9-5 in the office pretty much every day except for some business trips wasn't great but I didn't have that bad a commute.

Nothing wrong with the dollar, things are cheap, food is cheap, even after the last couple of years inflation. What's broken is housing. People in the 90s had fewer toys but much more affordable housing.

I agree. I had my first house built in a new subdivision - 2800 square feet 4/2 - for $170K in south metro Atlanta in 2002. I was only making $60K at the time.

I even had my second house built in 2016 in north metro Atlanta in the “good school system” - 3100 square feet 5 bed /3.5 bath for $335K and only put around $12K down. I sold it last year for $670K after moving to a condo in Florida that cost $340K. I could never move to the state tax free Florida with not many local tech jobs if it weren’t for remote work

Except I also work with my local divisions, and the teams that work on the same floor near the same cubes are vastly more productive.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I'm here to burst the echo chamber bubble that "RTO is evil greed". There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you.

Some people just want to sit in a cube in code forever and ever. Awesome, that's great. But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.

For the last 4.5 years, my job has been half supporting sales as the tech person working with them and the client and half leading a team once the sale closes. The teams and the customer are located all across the US. So I am definitely not one of the people who just wants to “code forever”. I’ll hop on a plane for a business trip in a heartbeat and have no problem with schmoozing, business dinners, etc

I also have had experience delivering successful and unsuccessful projects. If I did a retrospective of each, none had anything to do with whether the team was collocated. While I’ve only done consulting remotely, I have been a team lead at a product company in office prior to 2020.

I started working remotely and in consulting at the height of Covid in June 2020. It’s just that too many people haven’t learned how to evolve and work in a remote first culture.

Before the gate keeping starts, I’m 50 and have been in the industry almost 30 years and I started in consulting when a job in the cloud consulting department at AWS (full time direct hire) fell into my lap and now I’m a “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company.

For the record I totally agree. There are absolutely merits to in office work.

There is merit to WFO, but there is also merit to WFH. The problem is it is not being honestly discussed in terms of its merits. And we know this, because when WFH crowd actually notes verifiable metrics, management trots out unverifiable, unquantifiable serendipitous conversations at the watercooler.

<< There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you.

It is not my job to make my manager's job easier. It is management's job to make our job easier; not harder. The priorities are backwards, because management also happens to hold a lot of power over rank and file. Quite frankly, the management is simply too lazy to manage WFH well.

<< But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.

I only have anecdotes, but I am not sure you are right. Can you elaborate on the examples in your head?

I think lack of in-person collab is the biggest drawback to remote work, but only because a lot of people still haven't adapted to or accepted the tools available.

> If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it

In my experience, the younger people tend to adapt faster and more readily use the tools. It's easier to form a good working relationship with them as a result.

Cannot agree more. Human interaction in person is far superior to virtual. Younger developers have never experienced this so they don’t appreciate the lack of it. However, I notice their delayed and glacial pace of growth. All of this is due to lack of discrete interaction which is where the real learning, team development and software development processes can thrive.

Never a full-time developer but I had a ton of in-person interacting in the early years of my career--even though I've had significant remote (admittedly mixed in with a good bit of traveling for a long time). Maybe it's a lack of imagination but I can't imagine how working more or less full-time out of my apartment for my early career years would have worked.

Yes, you can see the development plateaus earlier in recent decades. Teams that I've managed that are collocated are more nimble and ramp faster because in-person feedback loops all day long. I'm doing a bad job communicating this, and it is disappointing to see so much "well, i'm special and can learn on my own" which is something I've encountered so many times over the years (hint, it is a very small %age). The self-sabotaging isolation is astonishing. But as I said before, forcing people to commute far distances in cities with gawd-awful public transport is both on the OEM and on the car-centric USA. But I digress... All I know is: teams that are in the same building are 2-3x more effective than teams that are fragmented across the globe.

Agreed, I saw the same in literal cubicle farms at Intel.

When there is Bad Communication, whether due to zoom or timezones or whatever, it's like every interaction is a cache miss, for both parties.

When it's good people can basically wink and grunt at each other and it's enough to convey the meaning.

It seems entirely reasonable some teams will work well remotely, others in person. It maybe be context dependent, and it may be that some people prefer different structures for different projects in different places over time.

There is no perfect pasta sauce, only perfect pasta sauces.

Collaboration in person is a force multiplier. The problem is corporations and CEOs are the ones getting all the benefit from that. The average employee is no better off in RTO, so why would you expect them to want that?

For the record, I prefer being in office so I'm not arguing from my perspective. I'm merely trying to take the position of someone who advocates for remote work. It's not hard to understand why they might.

Agreed.

I don't doubt that most engineers are hugely unproductive, but I'd wager it has less to do with where they physically are and more to do with the fact that most companies have carefully, almost clinically undercut their employees' faith and independence. Do you know how long it's been since I even saw a single job listing that was searching for an exceptionally strong candidate?

After downsizing trends, many teams are now fullstack and do not collab anyway. Each feature is worked by single dev for the most part.

This is a far bigger problem than wfh ever was. Everyone has their own thing to do and there is no incentive to work as a team. I saw it in several companies.

I remember better times, working in teams that actually worked like teams, together on solving the same problems, all day. I don't think it had anything to do with being in the same room. The trend towards "everyone has their own jira ticket to work on and the only thing anyone cares about is how fast they can complete that one thing, so working together with others is just a waste of time" started years before the pandemic. It will not be solved by going back to the office.

You guys were super efficient because you had whiteboards? You don't think people develop relationships with people they work with closely remotely? Time for bed grandpa.

Funny. Whiteboarding, for me has always been the fastest way to discuss complex ideas. I've never been able to replicate this speed with remote people (and I've tried several tools).

We used an open source collaborative text tool earlier, the name of which eludes me, but during COVID, I think we generally realized that shared Google Workspace docs actually worked pretty well for a lot of things we used to use big whiteboards for. For certain things, aspects of being able to have a hallway conversation easily were absent. But really we adapted pretty well IMO.

Same. I’m 100% remote in a very technical field, and the thing I miss the most is to work out a problem with my colleagues at a whiteboard.

I have tried every tool that gets recommended to me as a substitute for in person whiteboarding, and nothing comes close to the tactility of IRL ones. I've always found the online versions become a one person show rather than actually collaborative and handing pens back and forth.

Question. When you say you've tried them, do you mean with an actual graphics tablet + pen? I have not seen any company that actually provides such work-related tooling.

Companies thinking this is unnecessary because you can just use the mouse and it's "good enough", is like companies thinking keyboards are unnecessary for writing software because you can just use the mouse + an on-screen keyboard and it's "good enough".

Whenever I have to use a physical whiteboard for brainstorming, I loathe not having access to the flexibility of Krita (when just showing my screen) or Excalidraw. Ctrl+Z; moving stuff around; rotating; re-scaling; being able to hide the full layer and work on a new one (or move to a different part of the infinite canvas), instead of permanently deleting the whiteboard (and, in some cases, awkwardly taking a photo of it before deleting it and then awkwardly sharing that in Slack)...

I do like physical whiteboards though; having one on my fridge has been a nice low-friction way for my family to share reminders without the hassle of having shared calendar software ("waiting for package on Friday" or "cat vet on October" kind of thing, stuff that gets mentioned during conversations but it's still nice to remember in the short-term future).

And I'm a sucker for physical notebooks too, don't get me wrong (I love MUJI loose-leaf notebooks).

But using physical whiteboard for work brainstorming? To me they feel like not having access to the proper tools.

Just me and I'll probably take it down when I do a forced kitchen remodel, but I have a physical whiteboard in the kitchen as well. Less useful now that I do less travel. Probably some sort of project notebook works at least as well for one person.

My company provided an iPad + pencil, and my group has another one in the office. It’s better than nothing, but it’s nowhere near as effective as doing the Raj and Sheldon “stare at the board” act.

It’s true that on a physical board you can copy/paste/undo as easily as with an iPad, but unless the purpose is to create a tidy set of handwritten notes, you don’t actually need that functionality.

You can do that remotely. This is such an odd point.

I agree with your assessment - “okay boomer” - and I’m 50 and started my career programming on mainframes. I went full remote in 2020 and have no trouble leading projects remotely. Occasionally I’ll do a business trip during the initial kickoff or handover.

Half of my job is sales adjacent and the other half is leading implementations. If I can adjust to working remotely anyone can

Reply on news.ycombinator.com