Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output (2023)
pallais.scholars.harvard.edu
pallais.scholars.harvard.edu
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
> Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
But to define that end goal to align with business needs you need some more people involved.
day in week in office works well for us because of that. Enough to talk about what's going on and what needs to be done, and plenty of time for mostly uninterrupted work
It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others?
I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues.
(I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.
We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on.
I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving.
It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .
This is literally opposite of “keep doors open”, if you find a better job you need to grind leetcode to get there.
Well for starters with over a decade of experience I still need to halt my entire life to grind leetcode for months.
What does a top leetcode score give you? The opportunity to build CRUD apps for FAANG. No thanks. What if I go towards working at a university as “retirement”? Well, now I’m just building apps to test hypotheses developed by someone else. Grass still ain’t greener and I still don’t need to be “collaborative”.
I think the modern developer views themselves wrongly as a world changing force. When in reality the majority of software engineering is getting paid a metric shitload of money to glue premade widgets together on a digital assembly line.
The good “deep” jobs are excruciatingly rare, typically vary wildly in pay, and highly competitive. It’s not like the early 80s and 90s when you could get in on some crazy cool world changing stuff like OS dev, networks, and things like it. Most of the highly available “cool” jobs are solved problems.
How would someone notice this? It's not like they can run multiple 10-year experiments and notice a pattern.
Sure, there might be lots of confounding factors, and it might not be causation at all. That's why the quote is from a speech, not a paper
> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
quotes like this are only used to dismiss observations you don't like
I observe so many ways to have known and unknown bias in this I call any outcomes cow manure.
Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.
a researcher in 1971 could maybe get yesterday's news via newspaper, or maybe radio -- but if they're closed door they're focusing, so they hear nothing else.
The world is full of people who moan “why do idiots run things, get all the opportunities, make money from easy ideas.”
Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.
Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it.
Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity.
Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
Maybe because idiots usurp all power and ostracize those loners?
Ever tried to really go against the grain in a relatively big corp? And I’m not talking about writing a couple angry emails/slack messages.
On top of that "closed"/"open" is a false dichotomy, since you can trivially change the state of your office. Have a hard problem that needs to be solved by the end of the day? You can close your door and have absolute focus. After that task is solved, you can just open that office again.
Real offices also entirely change the tradeoffs for remote/in office. A true office feels like your room. It's considered a private space. I knew people that would bring in their own lamps (and keep the florescent lights off), bring in rugs, hang art from the walls, have tea setups, a bookshelf filled with reference material etc.
Early in my career, we had offices, with doors, that you could close. Earlier in my career we still were writing Flash ActionScript. I wasn't asking about what it was like back in the old days where offices had doors. I was being cheeky about the fact that someone decided they weren't effective at bringing the "pod" together like it's some sort of nursery for software or day care for adults.
It's been a strange ride.
> I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that
Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems.
Also:
> 10 years
Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.
"psychics": pun intended? ;-)
> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on
Is clearly a quote from a different era. Not only have most engineers I've known never had a tenure at a job close to 10 years, I've found the foresight/planning window of companies I've joined is shrinking each year. In the era of "AI", leadership in most companies I've been at seem to think 3 months ahead is a bit too forward looking.
Also... how many people on HN even remember having an office? I had multiple jobs early in my career where I had an actual office with a window and a door. An open door office is nothing close to the misery of sitting at a desk in an open floor plan. The fact that you could close the door means you do have the opportunity for pure focus. Even when the door was open, it was customary to knock gently on the frame after very checking if it looked like the inhabitant was focused.
Richard Hamming describes a world of research that frankly doesn't exist any more today (I know because I briefly got a taste of the old world of research 20 years ago).
Personally, I like it open when I'm feeling social and in a good mood, and close it when it's noisy outside and/or I need to hunker down and focus for a bit without distractions. That doesn't say anything about understanding or solving problems, other than 'sometimes people need quiet to focus' which is not a very shocking revelation.
I guess you need focused work to make progress but once in a while you need contact with others to find inspiration or new ideas.
Another one similar phrase(kinda). "If you want to go fast go alone. If want to go far go together". African proverb.
Probably anyone working long enough saw a case of someone being promoted over "better" technically candidates, just because he happened to be always there when important things happened.
But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. When I went remote I was still helping people sort out problems, and when you ask for the back story you get to find out what other teams are working on, and where 1/3 of your coworkers are all struggling with the same API. That's a lot of ammo for a Staff, Lead, or Principal-track role.
Because you understand a lot more of the project, and you already have the trust of half the org chart.
This makes me think of people hanging out on Slack. But then the interruptions are constant if you keep an eye on it.
And if you want to e a lead or principal, better learn to organize your work into little atoms that you can checkpoint because you’re gonna a get interrupted. A lot.
If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.
A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.
[1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)
On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.
It's not complicated how teams should be located physically, but corporations refuse to learn and try to reinvent something every time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen.
Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give.
All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.
I've worked remotely with a team where everyone was very engaged, saw similar shared goals to work towards and everyone took accountability for doing work to reach that.
I've also worked remotely with people who basically barely noticed the work everyone else even did, nor cared, nor appreciated it. There was a sense of, let's just get any interactions over with and go back to our doing the minimum we can to not get fired.
[0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday
There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse.
@Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?"
full text:
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output.It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. They looked at one entity:
"We study the impact of sitting together in the office for software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer. This firm gave us access to the online feedback that engineers write about each other’s computer code as well as metrics of engineers’ programming output. "
So they base the entirety of this conclusion on code review comments and lines-of-code produced or something like that. That makes the conclusion even less supported than if they had done some actual research.
For a statement like this to hold you would at least need a control and a larger sample.
Compared to like a phase 3 clinical trial, sure. Compared to your average paper, and especially your average business paper I don't think that's the case.
At a minimum you'd expect a few more companies, more sources than just code review and code productivity metrics (this alone disqualifies the study because it centers on just one task: software development) etc.
But you probably missed that.
Or hoard
This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.
It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.
The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.
I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.
If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk
Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.
Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?
Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.
This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.
Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.
On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.
That only worked a couple hours a week and collected multiple paychecks? Probably not.
Sure, they hired duds. Just not that level of dud. And if they were, they found out much more quickly.
I don't know where you got this idea, but this happens all the time. The two most common topics in the remote channel of the big management peer group I'm in are:
1. People cheating on remote interviews (including substituting another person to take the interview)
2. People getting multiple jobs and being too obviously distracted to get work done, or the increasingly common getting a new job and not resigning from the last job because they know they can collect potentially $100K+ in paychecks and/or severance by waiting to get let go instead.
If you don't believe these things happen in remote jobs then I understand your resistance throughout this thread to any suggestion that remote and in-office are different.
Of course, but that's obviously a deflection.
In person hires can't physically be in two offices at the same time.
In person employees can't get a new in-person job and then not resign from their last job because they want to extract as many paychecks as they can before they get caught and fired.
In person employees can't substitute in a hired interview taker for the interview and then hope nobody notices their voice sounds too different when they start the job.
These are all real things that we've encountered with remote work (and more)
Saying X can also happen in Y! Is a classic fallacious argument used by people who want you to think two things are equal, when in fact they can have very different probabilities and risk profiles.
When I was working at a hybrid company we even had a few cases where people either couldn't focus at home (kids, family, distractions) or were insufferably combative in chat. Bringing them into the office solved it.
The two environments are not equal, no matter how many times someone tries to deflect with "That problem can also happen in the office!"
> If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges.
In person accelerates onboarding for all the reasons I mentioned above. It’s not a game of trust or “carrots”.
Critically, this is impossible if most of the team is already remote. You're not going to make the new guy sit around the office by himself right?
I think hybrid is where we'll end up once the dust settles. Avoiding the daily commutes, but a couple days a week makes a lot of sense.
It’s far easier and more efficient to search slack, find the person you need to talk to and DM them in your first week than it is to pester the person who sits next to you to figure out how to click the right Sailpoint buttons.
Well because obviously that trust only goes so far.
Everyone has to build trust and establish a reputation at any job. Every company treats new employees as probationary, whether they make it explicit or not.
You don’t get hired into a company and immediately have the same trust level as the guy who has been there for 5 years and has a long history of delivering results.
For some issues with new employees you can pivot quickly: If you discover that someone is not good at interacting with databases and is causing downtime and restore from backup situations, you pivot quickly and remove their database privileges while you observe their skill growth.
With remote, you can’t pivot quickly. If you’re 12 weeks in and the new remote hire obviously can’t communicate remotely or focus at home, you can’t pivot quickly and have them work in the office most of the time because remote hires don’t necessarily live by the office. So it’s a slowly earned privilege in companies that aren’t remote-first.
I’m surprised this is a foreign concept. This was actually the common situation with remote work before COVID: Gaining WFH ability was something earned and negotiated over time. It wasn’t widely publicized, but that’s how many of us started working remote.
'Trust comes on foot, but leaves by horse'.
I always tell juniors that even if their company doesn't have an explicit probationary period, they should assume their behavior and results are being carefully monitored for the first year to watch for signs of a bad hire.
Hiring someone is never equivalent to having full trust in them. Reputations don't start at 100% on day 1, they start as a neutral value that you need to build up over time. You also need to avoid breaking it down. It's much faster to destroy a reputation than build it up.
Disclaimer: While I benefit and often like a remote work or hybrid setup, I also know that my career and my ability to absorb new technologies has been crippled by the isolation of remote work. And, my success and my level of knowledge in my field is directly attributed to being physically around a lot of people and several related departments in order to ask questions and mingle with experts.
Remote work sucks for learning, for me - and I know I'm not alone.
Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.
Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.
So how come those who can handle it are being punished?
You can't go through a company and retroactively subtract a benefit from ~half of the people without getting completely buried under discrimination lawsuits from angry people who think you forced them into the office but let Bob WFH because you're illegally discriminating.
So the companies are changing the policy for everyone and then granting "exceptions" on a case by case basis going forward, using newly defined criteria.
Again, please don't downvote the messenger. I'm just describing what's happening, not saying I approve.
Some who already want RTO may use this as an excuse, but I would think it would actually reduce RTO pressure overall, as it confirms less short-term productivity, which is what companies actually care about.
The decisions around RTO seem to be more “gut feeling” based than data driven. Look at Amazon, a supposedly “data driven company”. During RTO, Andy Jassy admitted there’s no data to back it up but that they “believe” it will help due to improving culture.
Fast forward a year and they just did a first round of layoffs because “culture”. So I guess ultimately RTO was a failure for them that they won’t admit to.
> Proximity [office] *increases* development
Do you seriously expect managers to read anything beyond title?
The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...
In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.
As for the code review data they analyzed:
"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed- back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow- up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "
I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.
Long-term and for the company. Of course I’m going to dismiss it lol, why the fuck would I want to be left holding the bag?
1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,
2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),
3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,
4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and
5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.
Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.
The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.
In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.
Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"
Once they were shocked to learn that until 2019 office work was the norm, they’d probably expect to see massive improvements in employee health, satisfaction, productivity, reduced commuter miles, reduced emissions, children with better mental health, children doing better in school, etc.
Imagine their shock when they find that none of those are true, and in fact, some of those metrics have actually gone the other way.
This isn’t to suggest remote work cannot be helpful. Maybe things would have been far worse otherwise. But (a) it’s very hard to see in the data, and (b) remote work proponents need to stop sounding like the world disnt exist before 2020 and/or as if everyone was just miserable and life was basically impossible at the time.
*cant wait to see those down votes for this comment
All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.
* No Mail Mondays. Engineers are deep in the code and are not disturbed other than the on-call. Engineers are expected to have a stack of work they can make the progress on if they get stuck. These days are in-office.
* Work from Home Wed: Coordinated work from home day. This forces everyone to be available online, and nobody is missing in-person meetings. Response times expected to be quick in slack.
While not perfect, and we do have some employees that struggle with output on WFH days, this is far more productive than 5 straight days in office.
As in, are you skeptical of WFH and looking for downsides, or does your particular team just work better with more time in the office? I only ask because it's foreign to me; offices completely destroy my focus and I don't know how anyone does it.
Why is this here in the first page?
And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer).
Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth.
Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs.
[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
I generally can't control housing prices, and whenever I suggest building more, the ire of the entire landed gentry class is directed into a singularity centered on my forehead.
>Could you not choose to live walking distance from work?
With housing prices being insane? No. There are like 12 different policy failures that make it impossible to live much closer to work than people already do, and it's only getting worse as rural America hollows out and people move to cities where there are amenities, like cafes and hospitals.
>Why is it the company's fault you moved three hours out to a low-COL area during covid?
Because these companies said we could? Why are you so quick to blame employees who would be destitute without a job, whereas these behemoth companies could fire everyone and just do nothing with their capital for ten years and be fine? People are just trying to get by and survive, and you're blaming them?
>If your org is going RTO and you want to stay with them, couldn't you just, ya know, reduce your commute?
Sure, I'll just get the magic "property price go down" wand.
* Working together in close proximity resulted in higher distractions that lowered output, but made it easier to identify meaningful priorities beyond what was on the Sprint Board and jump in to help when necessary. This extended to mentoring Juniors as well, who thrived on proximity-based work to a significant degree.
* Working apart allowed us to work at our individual best, with the consequence of a loss of cohesion. This was mitigated through daily standup ceremonies as a way of checking-in and asking for help, and I credit a string of three excellent people managers for building that functional working relationship between colleagues who didn’t share timezones or continents. This was frustrating for Juniors to adapt to (especially new hires), but at the same time the independent working mode forced them to figure stuff out on their own, learn to ask for help when they needed it, and build confidence in their own skills.
* The best balance involved hybrid/remote work models with a yearly (ideally quarterly or semi-annually), week-long “crunch week” of sorts. The global team got together in-person for a week, did some off-site activities first (offroading, volunteering, sight-seeing) to build rapport, then we spent a week in a conference room together banging out eighteen months(!) of bigger project timelines, planning, and triaging in-person issues with other teams (like PKI changes). This was always followed on with nightly dinners where we dropped work entirely and focused on human connection, especially with Juniors who lacked self-confidence still and needed to be shown that work isn’t what defines existence.
My ultimate takeaway is that it’s all about balancing the three for optimal outcomes: letting folks knuckle down at home or privately when they need to focus, building in-person collaboration around intention rather than spontaneity of presence, and ensuring global teams meet together regularly (in-person and over video conferencing) to build rapport.
Notes Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics
I'd wait for the revision.
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
Bureau of Labor Stats says: As of January 2024, the median tenure for all U.S. wage-and-salary workers was 3.9 years.
So that means we should all be working remotely, if productivity was the actual thing the capital & management classes were trying to solve.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current...
And, as ilc (dunno how to link to other hn users, sorry) has pointed out, this has been notated "revise and resubmit"
Forcing employees into the office is just pretending. Companies that do this are like little girls having a tea party with their dolls. They can see the faces and pretend like their presence at the desk is somehow an important part of "the job".
they didn't study alternatives to proximity, which isn't surprising because I'm not away of anyone that regularly works with a constant audio or video stream active?
I, however, will continue to never go back to an office and will continue to be productive far beyond what I can be in an office. Why is that? Because I'm a professional who is quite good at the work he does and is able to collaborate with people regardless of their location and lead successful projects and can adapt myself to others' working styles. Thanks, hold the babysitting, please.
I must have also missed the email telling everything about the re-org so that teams will only need to work with other teams in their proximity
It's also worth noting that I don't have a family to take care of, and that there are still issues with working in the office, like the commute.
If I had a missus and kids, I might feel differently.
Most offices unfortunately drain my will to live real fast.
Maybe if we tried to build offices what people enjoy spending time in...
The thing is, though, is most days, it's just me and my manager working at the office. Pretty much all of my teammates are in India, or are somewhere else in the US/CAN. We do have an intern but he's not here most days. As a result, it's basically me driving to the office to host meetings with people who, unless they buy plane tickets, cannot come by my desk to bother me.
So I've got that part of it going for me, which is nice.
For self-contained coding exercises remote is fine. AI does all that now but I guess I still need to prompt it.
Getting myself impactful projects, winning turf wars, new collaboration with a cousin team? Forget it. Impossible from home.
Get a life, bro.