Why Five Days in the Office Is Too Many
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I dislike programming by myself, it is dull, boring, and much more error prone than when I have someone to bounce ideas off of. (Rubber Ducking only goes so far!)
Really every time this topic is brought up the overall consensus seems to be "it varies for different people." Some people seem to really benefit from working at home, some benefit from working in an office.
The real thing that gets to me is those who, for whatever reason, do not seem to understand that different people have different needs!
There are times I want to be in the office. There are times I want to be at a coffee shop. There are times I want to be at home.
As an executive, I feel like it's my job to provide as much flexibility to my team as I possibly can. Inspiration can strike anywhere, in any environment. I want to capture that for my business. I find that people really appreciate it as well.
Really it comes down to meeting management. Limit the requirement for face-time and structure the company in a way that you can minimize how often people have to collaborate. I find this makes the voluntary (and spontaneous) interactions even more valuable.
The Yahoo decision really bothers me in a really visceral way. My team is made up of highly skilled professionals who deserve to be treated like adults. Forcing them into the office is the opposite of that (at least to me).
As far as I've seen, there is little inspiration involved in most programming environments, just a lot of thinking.
I'll just leave it at this. Isn't inspiration often the end-result of careful thought?
I don't see what about an office makes it the right place for the thinking you see in programming environments. I've solved more hard problems in the shower than I have at my desk.
I know there are many people like you that somehow intuitively capture these abstract concepts, and I respect that. I just find it amusing that you can notice these things even when the person is out of work. That's when you differentiate the manipulative managers from the true ones.
My point wasn't particularly focusing in offices. Being pragmatic and rather emotion-less, I find programming requires more logic and method than feelings.
Certainly there are many dull development jobs that require no inspiration or even much thinking - I worked in many of them before I got bored to death and started my own business.
If you are in one of those dead-end jobs, you're not the kind of person that enjo is talking about.
Sadly, the company I work for is based in a place I couldn't stand to live, but it's telling that even despite that, I'm genuinely thinking about moving there.
Telecommuting is not for everyone, but being new to the industry, your perspective is likely to change over the next few years if you stick around. I'm not saying it'll reverse -- you may find that your first impression was right -- but your point of view will be altered by your experiences, and without those experiences to draw on, you cannot expect to have a well-formed impression of this arrangement.
Not liking working at home is not a good reason to move to a place where you won't like going outside.
Once I'm there, I don't know what I'm gonna do. Probably program at a cafe every day.
Let me know if you still feel that way in 20 years.
But it helps a lot if company policy doesn't force you to come in every day, or be in at 9am. And of course if the people involved are people that you like to work with.
Actually, this statement sounded so out of purpose, that I am having a second thought that I maybe have lost something here.
I have been fortune enough to have always had my choice of teams to work with, so far that has meant great coworkers and very challenging work.
If I'm not pounding my head against a wall I'm not having fun. :)
At any rate I think the optimal situation for me is a mix of both.
You see awesome offices in places like Google, Facebook et al where workers have plenty of space around their desk, and other areas in the building where they can work/socialise/relax.
Unfortunately most businesses are not like that, they cram as many people as they can into vast open plan offices where desk space is at a premium and you can forget having a quiet space to work.
Plus if you have decent colleagues, it makes the job more enjoyable.
I could understand 'going to work' if 'work' was a Foundry, or a Mine, but if we are sitting in traffic jams and on crowded trains for hours every day, unpaid, just so we can sit in front of a computer and program software when it is clearly more likely that we will be interrupted to 'sign a card for Jane from accounts who is leaving to have her baby' and lose our flow as a result then the corporations of the future will be leaner and more agile by being virtual.
Working with a remote team is not a choice about whether to collaborate or not. When a team is set up properly, remote work is no less collaborative than any other kind of work. The tools are there, widely available, and free. Everyone on a team needs to be using them, yes, but duh.
As near as I can tell, there is a shortage of talent. Smart companies will exploit the newly available infrastructure and realize that they can have "face time" remotely. Then, they'll have access to a much wider pool of talent. Win!
Is it me or are silicon valley companies -- startups, in particular -- really not into hiring remote people? Seems like, with the cost of living in the valley and the dramatic shortage of talent, and the volume and enormity of ideas, they'd have the most to gain. If I'm right about not liking remote hires, anyone have any ideas why? Provincialism? If you were worth hiring, you'd live here already? Hahahahaha.
Not only does physical interaction have a much higher bandwidth, it goes well beyond just the work. The more you interact, at lunch or in the hallways, the better you will be able to communicate with each other on all levels, and the better you'll be able to collaborate. And this is not a one time thing, this is a continuous process.
I would never hire people who lack the ability to recognize that vast difference to work remotely. For one thing, you don't have the ability to compensate if you don't even understand there is something to compensate for.
Hell, I wouldn't even hire a person like that to work on site.
And the fact that there appears to be a strong overlap between people who favor remote work and short-sighted people who seem unable to recognize its disadvantages is not exactly encouraging companies to hire remote workers.
Yes, hiring managers read HN, and these kinds of comments aren't helping to promote remote work. Quite the opposite. The pro remote working crowd comes across as a bunch of immature self-entitled whiners.
Perhaps that highlights your points even more.
That aside, in my experience working at a good office is much more fun and a lot of the time nearly as productive as remote working. However I currently work remotely as the two hour daily commute is way too much, though I find that visiting my own office or other, nearer offices tends to help brighten up the work week. It certainly seems to me that communicating mainly via text makes it harder to restrain negative comments as you don't get the facial and body language cues. It takes much more effort to be polite and consider other peoples feelings. I wish it wasn't so.
Seriously though, I agree that -- obviously -- there are aspects of human interaction that collaborative tech can't touch, as it were. My primary point is that working at home is not working alone. Further, the collaboration tools (including video conferencing which helps more than you might think) have become very good.
How much physically together time a team needs seems to me to depend quite naturally on what they're doing together, for how long, the individuals involved, etc, etc. Maybe its once a week, once a quarter, or never. But, it is most definitely possible to work closely together without ever being physically together. ymmv.
So far it's working pretty well. People who need to pick kids up from school pick kids up from school. People who need to receive deliveries or have plumbers round don't have to worry about taking time out to do so. Additionally everyone's travel costs are miniscule when not on customer site, which I think is a massive positive for all of us. On the whole I believe that a happy workforce is a productive workforce, and that creating stress for employees is counterproductive. If we need meetings we can have them. If we need physical space together we can arrange it. Aside from that, I'd rather focus on the results than the time put in.
1. Rooms are strictly first-come, first-serve.
2. At the end of the week the room is cleaned and everything in it other than the base furniture is thrown out. Period.
3. The focus rooms provide no storage (no drawers or shelves). Just a desk, a whiteboard, two chairs for pairing, and either a display or a workstation.
- If I study at home, I have no sense of urgency. Home is the place I associate with relaxation, so it's kind of cruel to expect myself to get work done there. The general public in the library holds me accountable to make it look like I have a purpose to be there.
- There are places I'd rather be than the library, like home. This motivates me to get my work done as quickly as possible and move on to other things that are important to me.
- We are social creatures, and interacting with others is important to our well-being. Given two days where I get the same amount of work done, I'll feel more accomplished on the day where I adequately socialize. This is true even if my interactions are largely superficial.
Now, I prefer coffee shops for out of office working. Home is too comfortable, while I can hit Starbucks early and grab a taxi when the roads aren't so crowded after rush hour.
Some teams may prefer heavy pair programming and thus may need to be most of time in the same location. Others(most) would use some sort of hybrid where the 5 hours 3 days a week probably works well. And then some will be very much independent tasks where then locations are mostly irrelevant apart from whenever syncing is needed and general communications with other teams and stakeholders.
But teams and even when pairing you do not always need to be permanently physically in the same location if they know each other well and can communicate freely across chat and screen sharing etc. However mostly in person will trump all communications.
Way too many times management will try and dictate based on what they think is right without taking in the desires and the makeup of the team. This usually is shown in the form of all hands meetings on a very regular basis -- more than one startup I've been at have fallen into this trap.
If they provide an open mic for questions, it's a rare opportunity to put an exec on the spot in front of everyone.
400 computers are on the desk.
200 students are better than you. (everyone one of those students are individually better than you.)
200 students is better than none. (the total number is being compared as a singular item to the quantity 0)
- [Working] five days in the office is too much (I do think that the title should be "too much", not "too many")
- [Having] two hundred students is better than [having] none.
That is, there is an implicit subject, and it is not the plural noun, which is actually a direct object.
"200 students are better than me" means that there are 200 all of which are better than me, it's not grouping them together, just counting them. "200 students is better than me" would mean that as a collective they are better than me, but I might well be better than each of them individually.
Someone should design a small set, each in monochrome, to fit on A4 / Letter size paper, with simple explanation and example sentences.
>The freedom to work outside a traditional office was one of the main reasons I left the corporate world eight years ago, at age 23, to start a software company.
Maddening because she spent about a year in that "corporate world." Hardly a good sampling period.
I don't disagree with her conclusions, however to cast that wide of a net seems a little cheap considering not all business structures and markets are conducive to the same flexibility "knowledge workers" have.
This is an interesting approach that allows experiments. Would love to see how this will turn out. :)
(* - this guilt is a weird thing I can't really describe. It also lessens as I advance further in my career and am more sure of myself.)