Yes. Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers and increased employee satisfaction (for some, not everyone prefers working from home). Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.

Its a tradeoff and I think different businesses will fall into different buckets and there will also always be some inertia to change. I do think that the 'new normal' is neither 5 days 9-5 in the office OR complete remote work but something more like a couple of days in the office and a couple at home every week for most staff. But this wil probably be a plurality of the workforce only, with substantial numbers completely remote or close to, and substantial numbers also still in 5 days a week.

>Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.[hard to measure]

Just throwing this experience of mine out there, when faced with actual dollar figures and hard to measure, vague outcomes, companies that I've worked for have nearly always acted on the dollar figures.

Depending on how your company works, the short term positives could be nothing compared to the problems that will arise when everybody becomes an anonymous cog in an invisible machine.

When it comes to their core business companies have a decent belief in what it looks like.

Playing a little bit the devil's advocate here:

Risk aversion and general tendency to apply gradual changes.

Would you bet your company to run an experiment almost no one else is trying? Perhaps letting your workers work from home works perhaps you'll miss all deadlines and generate all kinds of drama.

An external factors kicked in and everyone was in the same experiment. Things were messy but not completely unmanageable. Some were even surprised things kept working as well as they did.

Now, the big question is: will this take a toll on people? Will companies that choose to continue with this work style be put in disadvantage as other companies switch back to on-prem?

Because it seemed impossible, until now.

That would make the ones doing the firing redundant too. You want as many employees as possible as cheap as possible.

I've worked remote most of my career, and in my experience, the politics and work theaterisms are still there, just different.

For example, someone's perceived level of "effort" often becomes a function of how responsive they are. Do they respond to Slack messages at random hours, when team members in different time zones/aggressive managers ping them? Do they frequently communicate with the team via video calls and Slack discussions? Just like in normal office politics, their actual productivity or work quality is assessed less than their appearance of engagement.

That's just an example, but my experience in general has been that remote doesn't change anything about the cultural of management at a company. Whatever metrics mattered in person, there will be remote equivalents to replace them.

The positive here is that good leadership is still good leadership, remote or not. The negative, obviously, is that remote isn't the balm for poor leadership that many hope it will be.

The high performers work better, but half of the rest workers are doing nothing. I’m aware of people getting canned for stuff like outsourcing themselves, accidentally having sex on an open mic, illegally exporting computers to countries with export controls, etc since COVID.

Work at home is great for people with tangible outputs. I don’t want my salesmen fucking around in the office. But many workers with less well defined outputs are going to be harder to manage, and being in the office kept distractions away.

I am way more productive remote and it isn't even close. While I do like the social aspect of the office, it is such overkill.

To me post-COVID, the whole country is open for business. I want to join a company that values high productive remote workers and sees the massive opportunity this is going to create.

I agree with this viewpoint, and (post covid) there are options for replicating at least some of the social aspects of the office.

I recognize I'm not the norm, but working from home the past year has been amazing for my introverted personality. To imply that the office is a necessity for removing distress is an overly broad brush to paint with that does not apply to everyone.

WFH forces the kind of auditable accountability upon everyone I've taken for granted as necessary to thrive as a consultant. This popularizes communication modalities into the open long overdue. Use of more granular project tracking has gone up considerably as a coordination point to communicate early and often between teams, purely to reduce meetings only to where exploratory work has to be performed between multiple people/teams.

I'm seeing in my clients a lot of the big-talkers-little-execution ("all hat, no cattle") staff members get identified and tracked into more tightly-focused work efforts, leading to less stress upon the staff who usually bear the brunt of picking up the slack. The staff who typically thrive in this environment are highly systematic with their work, take notes instead of relying upon just memory, and effectively coordinate and work with team members in decision-oriented meetings.

Management is much more open to spending the necessary time to ramp up automation, simply because the effort leaves behind far more obvious artifacts, as opposed to pre-pandemic, where shockingly many clients still had armies of staff performing everything by hand "because we can't afford DevOps".

I still predict however a lot companies and people going back to offices post-pandemic. The socialization aspect is poorly addressed with virtual happy hours, or other tactics put on by really good leadership. We don't have the tech cost down enough yet to pull off the kind of virtual office that can replace that yet. I imagine "yet" as way better than Cisco Telepresence-grade AV (8K tiled video, full phased-array directional two-way video, latency management), floor-to-ceiling scale, in everyone's home office, that can reproduce say, a small open office with a central virtual conference table surrounded by virtual doors to virtual private offices that look into people's home office when their virtual door is open. Our species aren't built for the kind of intensely-close face-to-face contact all day long that is involved when web conferencing with each other over laptop cameras, so current web conferencing solutions cannot substitute for high-touch interactions that many managers and staff crave.

Personally, I'm less effective when physically at an office as I can't be as systematic handling the flow of work coming across as a stream of text. A large proportion of workers still vastly prefer speaking than typing, and I end up transcribing a lot of that walk-up verbal interaction myself and then following up in text format anyways, which is a big factor in the efficiency differential.

I think a lot of that can be addressed by having in-person social events once it's feasible to do so.

I spent many years as a consultant for several different large consulting firms. If we were productive, we were generally at client sites most of the time.

That meant we were rarely together as a group while working.

In order to promote teamwork, camaraderie and make sure we knew our peers, superiors and subordinates well, at least at the well-run organizations, we'd have regular (semi-monthly) team get togethers and at least quarterly office get togethers, either in the office or at a public venue.

That sort of thing is much less costly and since it's outside of the regular work routine, socializing and building relationships doesn't negatively impact productivity.

Whether or not WFH+regular get togethers is a good solution depends on the organization and its dynamics. But it absolutely can make a big difference.

I'm normally almost 100% remote but the past 9 months have still been rather isolating because normally I'm traveling about 1/3 of the time including to industry events and internal meetings where I meet among other teams members and other people from the company. Honestly, I go into our local office these days and I might not run into anyone I know because we've grown a lot and my direct team is very distributed.

Agreed. I'm hoping this does become the new normal, but it is a difficult balance to strike for leadership. There are different types of personalities, lifestyles, and life stages within any employee base, and there absolutely is a human need for connection even at work, which for some people can only be found in their specific circumstances in physically going butt-in-seat.

The lessons going into it now come from my experience at an all-remote unicorn, and your consulting based viewpoint would be valuable to hear.

Voice-centric. This is very difficult to internalize for those of us here who cut our working lives upon text. We literally live in a context cocooned in text: email, chat, complex application UI's, web pages, editors, calendars, and terminals. But we're vastly outnumbered by most people in the world who get activities done by interacting largely by voice or near-proxies. Whether with peers, direct reports, managers, stakeholders, assistants, or any other relationship, the majority of interactions are transacted over voice, snippets of text so brief they might as well be voice, sometimes highly-structured apps (like truck dispatch apps) that might as well be snippets of text, pictures (still or moving), and rarest of all the kind of text we deal with in our industry.

This is text that sits in unstructured form until it is internalized and cognitively, actively modeled. Even highly-structured code with strict AST's counts, because unless I've read the code before, it comes at me as a blob until I've applied cognitive effort comprehending it. If it wasn't this way, the majority of advertisements would be in long-form text. There is a highly specialized area of marketing that does do exactly that, but the overwhelming majority of advertising functions on this predominantly-voice ingestion pattern.

If your product market fit is outside of the group of people who are used to transacting in text (and even then, even inside tech companies, there are tons of people who still vastly prefer voice, even modulo the social dominance hues using voice to convey requests brings to the picture), then I don't know how to solve that problem without Uber-scale buckets of money.

From recording to synthesized structure. This is the passive inscribing act going through the converting process to active internalization gap to produce decisions and results all tools in this genre aim for. You cannot make people cognitively apply themselves to taking raw information, internalize it, and then offer synthesis. Watch a lot of meetings for the following: how many people are regurgitating the recorded/known data or only first-order consequences in their own words (thereby typically cementing their understanding), and how many summarize into choices, tradeoffs, and synthesize a proposed solution that take into account second- or even third-order effects? A great number of tools in this space fall into the recording trap. "Here, I enabled you to record this phone conversation, that web meeting, whatsit email. Now go make something of it."

We're still missing a data auto-editorial function not just in this toolspace but in general within the civilization. The Big Hairy problem space isn't recording, as much as accurate, precise, fast synthesis. We have too much recording as it is. We lack correctly finding the valuable parts of the recordings. As much as people like to dump on Palantir here, they're tackling that synthesis problem head-on; they're basically indiscriminately spraying a firehose of money at the problem, and they're chipping away at it through a lot of brute-force (which I suspect is the only way initially). This is why you see people asking each other over email for the same information they just emailed each other about last month instead of searching the email archives. Associative importance-based memory beats search beats raw data.

What is interesting to me about all this is we aren't even widely supporting interrupt-driven annotation and organizing, even though our biological hardware is optimized for that modality. Vision keying on motion, audio keying on differentials breaching background noise (and said background is cognitively processed, not just a decibel threshold), pattern recognition, and so on: our hardware platform is primed for an interrupt-driven existence, yet our SOTA computer interactions in the workplace are primarily batch-based. It is no wonder Instagram is a smash success, and Outlook having been on the market for a magnitude longer is "just" a square office app, despite one user of the latter conveying far more information in a day than in a week on the former.

To bring this into the concrete, for example we can attach video to a topic, so an even better interrupt-friendly interaction is being able to comment directly into the video, either by typing or talking into TTS/video-over-cam, and have that emerge into the topic alongside the video. That's half way there to summarizing with low effort by the users. As much as I like Markdown myself, unless I'm working with a developer-centric organizational culture, I point teams towards rich text editors (which are free to encode into Markdown). Organizing topics will become an issue, especially in cross-functional teams who are nearly guaranteed to have differing taxonomies and even ontologies. Coercing them all into a One Tag Cloud to Rule Them All seems to discourage adoption rates in my limited experience, which I suspect is due to some kind of conceptualization/modeling impedance mismatch between teams. With cheap storage and processing these days, I'd like to see the results of interrupt-driven, search-history-directed, team-oriented-categorization organizing. Build the associative net based upon what people say to remember about a topic, what they search for and linger upon the longest after apparently pausing their search, and what ML-identified commonalities they share with other team mates (relationships pulled from a directory service).

That's my off-the-cuff reaction.

Knowing the people you work with can make these relationships less abstract and more emphatic.

In the worst case interpersonal communication in the workplace is all about who tends to offload work on whom (e.g. the manager who records a 15 min voice message where precisely one minute matter to each of the receipients offloaded the effort of sorting and parsing to the recipients. This manager wasted then 14 minutes times the number of receipients time, just out of pure lazyness).

Remote communications makes this worse, because every email that leaves open a questions takes time/energy as it goes back and forth.

What? What kind of workplace do you work at that you need to resort to recording your coworkers to get to the bottom of conflicts?

In the morning, I don't need to commute an hour to the office, giving me an extra hour of sleep. My workspace is also superior to what I'd ever get in the office.

But the biggest boost in my productivity has come from the lack of distractions when working from home. If I'm trying to focus on something, I can set my status as busy and mute notifications, leaving me to work in peace without interruption.

An interesting factor is how this is dependent on how confident we can be to continue WFH.

Like many people, I'm nowhere near prepared to have a good home office, the house is way too tiny. Which was fine when I didn't WFH more than a few days a month.

But I could easily solve that by moving to a cheaper area where I could get a house with enough space for a dedicated home office. But to do that I need to be confident WFH will continue. Hard to predict what to do.

(So what I've done in the interim is lease a small office walking distance from my house, lots of vacancies right now.)

I had this problem and spent a few months working on the couch before buying a desk and office chair - I dropped a few thousand on these things alone. What gave me the confidence was the introduction of a WFH allowance and news a few people around the company had moved to the countryside.

Certainly not everyone.

At my employer a VP produced a report for 2020 showing how his division had increased both productivity and response times across the board by a non-trivial margin due to WFH.

Doesn't mean this generalizes across all teams but certainly at least some are seeing such data.

If you are a slacker at home I am sure you slacked in the office as well.

To me it all depends if we are talking from a middle management perspective or not. The company is better off but the redundancy of middle management is on full display right now.

There will be huge opportunity though for companies that get leaner middle management wise and poach high performing remote talent across the country. This to me seems very obvious.

Not to mention, it is not like you are going to have the luxury as a company of cutting remote cost post COVID. Remote cost is sunk cost for the remainder of my working life.

I assume the biggest factor right now with how the company spins the narrative with remote work has to do with what things look like with the timing and length of the office lease.

At some point in the future though, the cost of the office will become a competitive disadvantage.

I think one "secret" is that we have small-ish teams (3-5 engineers), each with a very engaged and technically savvy leader. I've known other managers to have up to 20 IC reports. I can see that kind of structure falling apart when remote in such a way that your underperformers start completely slacking off and you're too busy to even notice. It's way harder for that to happen in smaller teams where your team lead/manager is very engaged in the team's work and your relative output is quite visible.

How much of this is the result of working with an established team that existed before you moved to work-from-home? Do you think the same will be true for teams that are created in a work-from-home setting from the start?

I ask, because I am worried about training and retaining new people. A lot of work is not satisfying in itself. Part of my motivation comes from working together with a group of people I've come to known well. Often I care more about the people I work with than the problems I am working on. I consider this people aspect part of my intrinsic motivation to work.

I fear that once we're all working from home, our motivations become more and more extrinsically. After that, why bother working for THIS company or problem? Can I trust myself and my colleagues to be involved enough to finish anything in the long run? Or should I start to expect anyone to jump ship anytime?

This is not much different than working in a colocated situation, except my coworkers don't have to smell my B.O.

The tooling available these days makes remote work better than in person IMO.

For example, walking to a whiteboard and sketching something is easier than doing the same in zoom, unless everyone in the team owns a wacom tablet, and even then, physical "big visible charts" generally work better than online ones.

I think the trade off is in favour of remote, for me, but it is highly dependent on job, person, team.