So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one? What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
People have been asking that since companies started phasing out WFH after the pandemic.
I left my last company when they made me go to the office when I worked for a dispersed team, I was the only one in this office and the rest of the team was dispersed across multiple timezones. Every team meeting was literally a zoom meeting, and conference rooms were scarce so everyone just did zoom calls at their desk.
When I was WFH I didn't mind getting up in time for a 7:30am meeting to meet with the overseas team before they went home for the day, but I wasn't willing to leave the house at 6:30 to get to the office in time for that meeting, and I wasn't going to join a 7:30am meeting at home, then head to work after already putting in an hour of work.
My boss agreed it made no sense, but there were no exceptions to the rule -- I left before it became mandatory 5 days a week in the office.
The CEO made a big deal of going to the office every day so everyone should do it, but it didn't escape notice that the company literally opened an office just for the finance and executive team that happened to be in the same wealthy suburb that he and most of the other top execs lived. That would have turned a 45 - 60 minute commute into a 10 minute commute for him.
During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off.
Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes.
Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.
Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize).
I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever.
This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.
Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.
Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.
You want to actually compete for fast iteration? We'll happily take you on over at ardour.org ...
Yes, there are some FLOSS projects which may take a long time to approve PRs. Even in our case, that happens sometimes when someone proposes something we're not convinced by but also cannot reject immediately.
Meanwhile, it's not unusual for comments in our discourse server to lead to direct changes in the main branch within hours.
So while FLOSS may contain examples against distributed teams, it also contains very strong, and very numerous examples that argue in favor of it.
Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).
But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.
"Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"
I suspect there’s more at play with this. Maybe they’re expecting attrition from this and that’s their actual goal. They never reveal their core intentions.
This is about the appearance of doing something, not actually doing something.
In office, managers get to look out over their little fiefdoms. It's a physical space, with physical people, and it's theirs. And their competitors (other managers) can see their domain, and understand where they stand in the pecking order. In WFH settings, the whole thing becomes far more abstract. The manager's desire for elevated position isn't met, and they become paranoid that their competition can't see their status.
Is it so hard for them to say, FU, office time now because I like it, or because we want to force attrition, or we bought all this RE and by god we are going to use it?
I mean, if they give the honest non vibe reasons, it would be the same, but at least honest.
Wall Street doesn't care as long as the stock goes up.
Customers don't care as long as they get the product.
And employees can't do anything other than vote with their feet.
So what's the downside of being honest?
You mean phone coffins?
Now the real issue is: what on earth is a fart pod?
Anyway, my (quite literally mine as in I'm the MD) tiddly company still clings to the notion that remote working is a good thing, in general. Pre-pandemic I was a sceptic and post-pandemic: I'm happy that a lot more remote working happens.
There do need to be additional controls but not of the intrusive, automated variety. I deliberately ring people up and encourage using the dog and bone and frown on email for immediate requirements.
It is a fact of modern corporate life that people will use email as it was intended: a reliable store and forward communication mechanism. A side effect is that what should be sorted out now can be ... legitimately ... punted off into tomorrow.
Any productivity increases come from the fact that some employees would rather quit than come back to the office. Which makes it seem like less people do the same amount of work. Until they get overworked and output plumments. But that will land outside of the measurement window.
The illusion of control? I mean we can pretend we don't know what this is about (well it's probably also about encouraging a reduction in force), but we do know right?
By far the people who bemoaned working from home the most were people whose job doesn't typically involve any actual "work". Not saying that there weren't exceptions, but the vast majority of working engineers I knew rejoiced in finally getting heads down time, while everyone whose job is primarily "performance for leadership" hated how difficult it was to perform visible theatrics on a camera.
Especially in large orgs "leadership" and "team success" are largely about optics. Being seen working in the office late is so much more important than getting any actual work done. It's only in small companies where actually shipping something has any value at all.
What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. Recognizing this I've completely avoided working for large orgs, and continue to enjoy remote work we're I can be valued for the results of what I build (well there's always a little theater) over office productivity performativity.
What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery.
Large grandiose parades and such.
Things have to stay stable long enough for a leadership class to emerge. In tech that is not possible. They are just leaves in the wind.
most are one, some are neither, and a small minority are both. i have works for more than 20 tech managers in 30+ years, have managed technologists (ops, app-dev, network, infra, etc.) multiple times, and have hired and fired tech managers. i can count the genuine tech leaders+managers i've met on one hand. fewer around than ever nowadays.
I agree that being management doesn't make one a leader. Anyone who has been in the industry for five, ten years knows that a leader may or may not have a management title.
However. It has been the fad for many, many years now for Management to call itself Leadership. [0] This makes it slightly ambiguous, but not at all incorrect to refer to the "management class" as the "leadership class".
[0] I guess their little, tiny, incredibly fragile egos got overly bruised by the years of derogatory commentary aimed at clueless managers, and they -because of their tiny, inadequate brains- decided that A Big Rebrand would change the nature of reality.
Tons of team are completely split up across multiple states/timezones.
I think IG might be more local teams than distributed but I’m not sure.
These are reasons I can think of - they want to prevent people from doing second job, they want to maintain commercial real estate prices (even if it is artificially propped up) or most likely, it is just the good old ego thing (“you work for me, I make you do things just because I can”).
A lot of these decisions have very little quality data behind them.
There is no sign of a return to 2019 levels of Bay Area or even US share of headcount.
Around 2023 I was working at a company that was, at the time, just threatening RTO, and when hiring we had to decide if it was worth it to hire someone who (might) report to a different office in a different time zone. Which was not an issue at all a month before, when the company was still committed to being fully remote. The hours talking about it were a waste of my life for what, in the end, didn't even matter because they laid off most of the team six months later.
I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.
The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.
Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.
The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.
Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.
That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.
A proper execution of a cubicle office is actually quite decent.
But for a good workplace you also need to have good colleagues, including managers. That's universal, whether open plan or cubes.
And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.
You'll cross-pollinate across functions. Or at least increase the chances of that happening. Not saying that's worth the tradeoff. But my time in the office often finds serendipitious value in random off-team conversations, not scheduled time.
There are, however, a few times when getting together and discussing something in person is valuable, but this is no more than maybe a couple times a month. I can definitely see this being different for other roles.
I worked at Meta nee Facebook from 2013-18, and back then there were no documents, and the only way to figure stuff out was either spelunk through the source code, or talk to people in person. So I was very surprised that they ever said they'd be doing remote, and entirely unsurprised that they are moving back towards the office.
That being said, there was no tracking of in office/remote days, it was just expected that you'd work from wherever worked best for you but (almost) everyone was based out of an office.
Obviously varies by culture. And while I've never worked for Meta, I've been at your Mountain View and New York campuses more times than I care to have been. Everything–including communal spaces–seems laid out for individual work. (This was true before the metamates nonsense, though that obviously accelerated it.)
Frankly, the ones that tend to play, goof off and shoot shit together. And it’s not necessarily companywide nor evenly distributed. But it’s something I value tremendously in work cultures, both because it’s productive and fun.
I mean, I've heard good ideas being discussed, but at the end of the day we all have our in-progress projects and tickets, and future projects already planned out, so those good ideas never make it to fruition because everyone is busy anyways and doesn't have the time or resources to do anything about it. So in reality, those "cross-pollination" talks become nothing more but socialization moments, which is fine, but to force everyone into a miserable commute just to achieve a bit of socializing is insanity to me.