I was a wfh maximalist like many on this thread at the very beginning of my career, but AFAICT it just comes from some combination of a) being a junior engineer that works on isolated bits of work and didn't need to communicate cross-team much or b) having work that doesn't require much creative collaboration. As I got more senior and moved towards different types of problems, my appreciation for the value of (though I still do enjoy and make time for WFH).
For those who say that Slack or email or VC are perfect substitutes: there's no substitute for the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of personal communication. Get good enough at running meetijgs of more than two people and you realize how much of the task of efficiently running a meeting involves reading micro-expressions and pauses to pick up on cues that help you direct the conversation (not to mention having n points of failure in a VC being accessed by n network connections). My team has been remote for a week and I've already noticed good meeting runners have worse meetings and bad meetings runners have even worse meetings.
Not exactly the most productive WFH conditions.
Most Junior engineers aren't working remotely. I've been working remotely for a decade with different companies and almost all of the developers on my teams have been mid-level to senior. The junior developers always struggled and had so many roadblocks, it made working remotely difficult.
It's really not that difficult to replace an in-person meeting with Webex voice call and/or screensharing. I go onsite once every 3 months for a couple of hours and it's all that's needed.
Our meetings regularly have 10+ people from different departments.
This is very much not my experience. I don't know what field you're in or the structure of your company, so I don't want to hazard a guess as to the difference. But the majority of the time I call a meeting, it's to have a fairly complex, dynamic conversation for which the communication bandwidth of Slack/email/GDoc is too low (otherwise we'd stick with async/chat). This means that few meetings consist of conversations that're fairly predictable. Which means the person running the meeting needs to know when to cut a conversation off or let it continue, what direction to take the conversation, pick up on silent hesitancy or disagreement from any of the ten people in the room, etc etc etc. I can go on and on about the techniques I've seen people use to run extremely effective meetings, as well as how poorly-run meetings don't use them. As mentioned, these rely on visual and timing cues that humans use to communicate, sometimes unconsciously. (I'm keenly aware of good and bad meetings because I hate meetings)
Only for people who can't read.
If you seriously think written text is as communicative as face to face communication, I would consider being evaluated by a professional for a social interaction disorder of some sort.
Of course, you could learn to write better and convey the same information over text.
Of course there’s still noise. Just like in text. Professional writers struggle just as hard to get their word choice and phrasing -just so-.
I'm looking forward to AR/VR taking over more cake of the need for physical needs.
Non-verbal communication is a huge part of social (and this includes work) interactions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_(computing)
Here's some information on terms you're clearly unfamiliar with that I used in the part you quoted. In the future I suggest you try and understand the words you're reading _before_ making a fool of yourself, but you do you. Hope that helps!
Basically, I think the key is latency. If you need to communicate two-way to work out issues, then you want low latency (because each response of yours depends on the other party's last response), so speech is quickest. (There's also texting, but that sucks because the data entry method is so slow; I don't know why so many people prefer it to talking, even for conducting intimate relationships.) However, if the communication is one-way (like your company disseminating some general information for all employees), then at least for me, reading is much, much faster than listening to someone talk.
I find almost all meetings to be a waste of time. Maybe 1:1s are the exception, but they're also pretty much optional - good to have a catch up with team members sometimes but if someone can't make it that day no big deal.
The problem with meetings is that a well run meeting needs to have an agenda and ideally written minutes, I don't think anyone disputes that (except for casual 1:1 catch-ups which don't). So you end up writing anyway, or wish someone had. Without the writing aspect meetings are often poorly disciplined, achieve little, run over and end with an agreement to organise another meeting.
In the end, work - the production of useful artifacts customers will buy - gets done alone. It doesn't get done in meetings with colleagues.
I will be really happy when this is all over and I can just go into the office and not think about it.
My fear, being a proponent of distributed work, is that high-profile places will half-heartedly try it due to the current circumstances, declare it to be a failure, and take us two steps back.
There is an interesting idea here for companies to subsidize employees' home offices with all the money they're saving on not renting office buildings of their own, but that would make the housing crisis substantially worse and further increase hatred of tech. Imagine how badly rents would be driven up on apartments typically desired by families if you've got lots of single workers using work subsidies to get larger apartments than they actually needed.
If you can get 70-80% of the desirability for 50% of the cost (Boston would be like 80-90% and 60-70%, by my reckoning) while retaining 90% of the salary, and you make it perfectly acceptable on all sides to do so, a lot of people are gonna do that.
If I limited myself to the US, any state with zero state income tax, cheap land/housing, and mild winters would work. I lived in Florida for over a decade and would go back in a heartbeat if the job situation matched the Bay Area. A big suburban house near Las Vegas would be fine. Texas doesn’t seem bad either—lots of land!
Given that SF was not particularly appealing to live in 10 years ago, I think the story is more complicated.
My concern remains that companies who are doing this on the fly, due to an external influence, with employees who never signed up to be remote-first, with new, unfamiliar tools, and without the ingrained culture that a distributed-from-the-start company enjoys, will nonetheless tar us with the same brush when their experience turns out to be disappointing.
I'm sorry to hear the GP has to pay 3800 for a studio. I pay around 4400 for a 3 bed/3.5 bath townhouse w/ a 2 car garage in Chicago's suburbs; and I think what I pay is ridiculous.
Also, co-working spaces are no-go because of COVID-19 too, at least for now. So the current situation isn't so much WFH as it is WFQ, and co-working spaces don't meet that need either.
You’re assuming everyone works on the west coast....
The average square footage of a home in the US is 2600 square feet. (https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_estate/american-home-s...) I would assume since most developers in most of the United States make more than the average for their market, they would be able to afford the average home. In my market (a major metropolitan city), any developer with 5-7 years of experience could easily afford a place with an extra room for an office.
We were renting a three bedroom, 2 bath apartment with an office four years ago in the most exclusive part of the city with the best school system for $1700/month. It’s still about the same price. We bought a brand new build 3200 square foot house (5 bedroom/3.5 bath house with a large separate office) and are paying $2150/month all in with 5% down and still live in a great school system.
[citation needed]
Just because your use case, and likely that of most of your friends, doesn't lend itself to having a home office, doesn't mean that other people, with different costs of living (esp in land price), will live the same way. If $3,800 got you 5 bedrooms instead of 1 and everything else stayed the same, it's possible you'd voluntarily choose to downsize, but it also seems possible you'd keep it, and have 1 bedroom, a home office each, a conference room, and a (shared) workshop. Or however else you wish you divide up the space. (Hint: children take up a lot of it.)
Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.
Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses. Taking a walk for more than an hour is impossible because there is nowhere to go to the bathroom, unless you want to do your business in someone's bush. There are no drinking fountains, and if you get hungry on your long walk, you're screwed. It can get (seriously) depressing, compared to cities, where most of the stuff you pass by on the street is generally open to walk into and explore, and food/water/restrooms are readily available.
By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.
> Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses.
That hasn't been my experience. There's lots of things to do in suburbs, you just need to drive there. The rest of your comment is about some difficulties of doing walks in suburbs, which are quite foreign to me -- for one thing, I'm quite sure that almost everywhere in Seattle metro area, you're not more than 1 hour walk from a convenience store. Given how millions of people love going hiking in places even further from convenience stores, gas stations and water fountains, I don't see this as such a huge problem. The rest of your complaints are simply matter of your preferences: I for one thing couldn't care less about presence of places to walk into and explore. I'm not a tourist in my own town, I need to get places and get things done, and idly walking around the business districts is not one of my hobbies.
This may be a US thing. I've lived in about 10 countries now (but not the US), and I hardly knew anyone who owned a car in any of them.
That can be hard for Europeans to wrap their head around. (I live here and am a car enthusiast and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around.)
In the USA registration wildly varies by state and the actual stat is a quarter billion "vehicles" but in my state every non-rowboat boat is a registered vehicle (although essentially unenforced for small sailboats and inflatables) and every boat trailer is yet another vehicle and every RV is a registered license plated vehicle and every trailer and etc. My parents never owned more than one car although they had five "registered vehicles" at one point. Also any commercial vehicle that drives on public roads, in my state this includes SOME farm tractors and other farm equipment. Needless to say every motorcycle and moped is a registered vehicle, and in my municipality, resident bicycles are technically required to be registered although never enforced.
Nationwide there's about 70M "things that move and pay registration tax and are not cars" that are registered as vehicles. Very near one per adult.
As a check on the figures, note there's only 105M "housing units" in the USA, so when you see strange figures reported about 300M to 400M vehicles its obvious that the average house does not have four cars parked in front of it, and that figure includes scrapped cars in junkyards and railroad cars and minecarts and things like that.
Don't you have towns and villages in the US?
Are you European by chance? We have these things but they tend to be very spread out due to our wealth of land, especially so as you move further west. Further a lot of them have basically slowly turned into boring suburban sprawl.
Active urban space, sleepy suburbs, and country-living are pretty much your options in most of the US.
Metro areas that are under, perhaps, 10M people, generally have nothing to do in the legacy cities. Everything fun has been built in the burbs for half a century. NYC is fun to visit, but only 8M people live there compared to 319M not living there. 98% of the population will never participate in "new urbanism" and so forth.
Take for example the location of the 2020 democratic national convention, Milwaukee. I know for a fact there's literally nothing to do in the city other than drive to the burbs.
Generally fun follows the people who pay for it, and anywhere there's no geographic constraint or travel time constraint, people always do the burb thing, and the fun follows them. I visit family in that area, and there's just nothing to do in the city, all the action is in the burbs.
You can have a burb 20 minute drive from Milwaukee so all the fun moves to the burbs to follow the money. You can't have a burb 20 minute drive from downtown NYC, so without the people moving to the burbs there's no fun in the burbs.
Until it isn't. That's the magic of the invisible hand at work. And when you can barely afford rent on a WFH-friendly apartment with work subsidies, think of all the regular families with non-tech salaries that can no longer dream of it.
My girlfriend and I both have a good number of meetings, which is incompatible with being in the same room as another person also yapping to their computer. When we both have meetings we need to be in a different room.
> Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.
I pay roughly $30 per month in total transportation costs, so this is negligible. My $3,800 rent at least gets me an apartment within walking distance (and easy biking distance) of work.
Most people aren't digital nomads.
I'm only trying to argue against a common sentiment here on HN, that working from home is more productive.
My personal beliefs are that a single WFH day a week in most instances might be net-positive for the company.
I’ve never grown more or learned more from other people than in the last 13 months at a remote startup. Even if it all folds over tomorrow I’m better off because of the opportunity. I say all of this as someone who is vocal about the challenges of remote work here and among my friends and colleagues.
The first year was a struggle but after that I've been solid.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-o...
https://www.bisnow.com/london/news/office/the-proof-is-here-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2018/08/16/open-off...
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/313034
For the bonus:
Commuting is also pretty bad for productivity.
https://www.tlnt.com/how-commute-issues-can-dramatically-imp...
If you're just aqui-hiring or buying successful products what does that say about your internal culture? Are you super focused on only your primary product, or are the people you've hired kind of not "new product" innovative?
I guess a lot of people think Google/FB == innovation, and they are without a doubt highly innovative, but when it comes to products I'm not really sure that they are. I think most of their innovation comes from improving what they currently do, not really expanding into new markets or with new products.
Maybe I'm wrong? What do you think?
1) Innovation doesn't have to be in creating new products, and can very well be in incremental improvements to existing products.
2) "new products" also doesn't need to be externally visible. There could be lots of innovation but just for things that aren't visible to customers.
Netflix hasn't come out with a new product since streaming started. But there are definitely a lot of new things that are built that are at least arguably innovative.
See https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16949366/google-htc-smart...
This suggests they at least partially outsourced the work initially and then acqui-hired their way into in-housing it.
Though, yes, it is possible that some of it was done in-house from the beginning. Just because they leaned on external resources to some extent doesn't mean they developed no internal capability on their own.
I have a feeling a lot of value is created during casual lunch conversations.