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