And I don't want to hang "with friends at work" I go to "work" that has to be specified clearly and that I expect to deliver with purely professional merit driven collaboration and not friendships and gangs.
I have friends or would love to have friends out of the place where I work. I want strict compartmentalisation between work and personal life. As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours.
I could also surmise that in a knowledge economy, high bandwith and low latency connections are very importance, and that in-person communication are much higher bandwith and lower latency than remote.
Do you have any data to back this up? Also, what about other factors like accuracy, ambiguity and efficiency? Sending one single email to the entire company can be more accurate, less ambiguous and much more efficient than communicating it to each person one to one or relying on Chinese whispers.
You should consider that among the things less conducive to team productivity and mental health are "the guy in the room" types who exhibit the same lack of interest in normal social interaction with their colleagues you are claiming here under the incorrect label "professionalism".
If you are going out binge drinking with your co-workers, you're doing it wrong because it blurries the lines between professional and personal life in my humble opinion.
Very few deep friendships develop at work, at best they will be acquaintances you see once in a while.
So by all means, be nice and cooperative but keep your distance.
But what you're saying is legitimate, and it bothers me the amount of people acting like it doesn't matter. American society already isolates people. Work is a big (maybe the biggest) avenue to develop friendships as an adult, just like school is when you're a kid. Not everybody gets married and then their life becomes about their 2 kids and any social interaction outside of that is incidental.
Maybe in USA, but my experience in multiple (>5) workspaces in Poland as 28 years old spftware engineer, is that people over 40 are maybe 5% of devs/tech leads.
Maybe I'm being naïve, but I don't see how "toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics" would result from these casual friendships. If anything, I'm more likely to hold myself accountable to my team members when I know them better personally.
You're going to spend nearly 1/3 of your waking hours with these people. You don't need to be best friends forever, but working somewhere that you don't at least have some friendly interaction and culture sounds utterly miserable.
> Socialising at work is when you develop unconscious and conscious biases and it is a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics.
There is more to life than team dynamics. Metrics won't keep you warm at night. Perhaps I'm forgetting the HN demographic...
Why are you assuming remote == unfriendly? That's silly.
What people are pushing back against isn't being friendly or developing a good working relationship with your peers. People are pushing back against "Not mandatory but you will be judged for not attending" after work happy hours, or extra-curricular work events where you are expected to attend during your free time. Things that seek to place your coworkers as your friends, and take away from time you could spend with your family and outside-of-work friends.
This parasitic work culture seeks to make the workplace replace your family and friends and it's all centered around the office.
> There is more to life than team dynamics.
There is more to life than work, period.
What about them? I assume they will be welcome to go back to the office one the whole pandemic thing becomes less of an issue.
I'm morbidly fascinated by the polarisation that drives some online conversations. Admittedly I have probably fuelled some of that with my question, I'll try to do better in future. However, it was intended to point out that there are shades of grey here (as evident in the comments) while the post I replied to seemed very black-and-white to me.
I wonder if a better question might be something like: what does a healthy, productive future of work look like now that covid has demonstrated that some people will very much want to continue working entirely remote, while some people very much do not?
For what it's worth, I completely agree and sympathise with all the issues people raise here. None of remote, in-office, or hybrid are perfect. They all have problems.
It seems that covid has given us the opportunity to at least try to improve things, even though clearly the answers are difficult to find.
Slight tangent: I was saddened to read recently that Basecap has permanently closed their Chicago HQ [0]. I've held up this place as a model for how I'd want to build an office space should my unicorn/cash-cow finally hatch. No, it's not perfect, but I loved the fact they explicitly tried, and they explicitly recognised it might be seen by some as a waste of company funds, particularly when they also did things like deliver fruit & veg to employee's homes rather than workplace as an incentive to go home rather than stay late in that expensive office space [1].
I think there are major underlying structural issues that discourage companies from solving issues relating to worker happiness. Extortionate rent and service charges have produced homogenous high-streets, and they're homogenising the business districts too. The labels over the door of each building might be different, but the attitude inside is the same. Worker happiness is grist to the mill, productivity and the bottom line reign. I think we could do better.
A career at one company might span 5 years rather than a lifetime, and that's plenty of time to be affected.
One form of interaction benefits one type of employee. A second form of interaction benefits a second type of employee. Both benefit the company. Which form is best?
1) quick clarification for a technical question - easier to turn back and ask your colleague
2) design minutiae which you remember after a 30/60min meeting is over - very easy to grab your coworkers in hallways or by watercooler and nail down
3) coming across interesting conversations among your colleagues by just being in proximity - not possible when you have to schedule a 30min chat for that
4) reading body language to know whether your colleague is stressed or relaxed or happy or sad - helps tailor your response which improves the communication
I haven't even delved into the timezone issue yet, which matters a lot even between colleagues on East vs West coast (let alone Europe or Asia). Meetings before 8:30am PT? PT people would still be waking up or dropping kids to school. 9-10am PT? Time for people in ET to have their lunch. 12-1pm PT? Lunch time for PT people. After 2:30pm PT? ET guys are already out for the day.
FWIW, at one of the FAANGs I worked that, HR shared data (promo rate etc) between HQ vs remote offices. But those were still remote offices and not remote employees who could work from anywhere.
Both of these are common scenarios at Google, though.
If any serious work is being done in a company, it does not look like that. Why do people keep pedalling this lie? A big problem in engineering is a lot of the work is done by engineers in private and the supervisors don't get to see it or experience it. So they think it happens by magic and that maybe the laughing execs actually contributed to it.
Unfortunately there's a huge amount of people employed in offices who literally do come in all day and don't do any work. Working from home means you actually have to have some work to do. What we're seeing is a load of people realising they have no work to do.
I've also worked in teams of engineers that did occasionally burst into laughter while gathered in rooms doing productive work.
I've seen engineers who did no work. I've seen managers who worked extremely hard.
It's all shades of grey.
You seem to be falling into the HN trap of “serious work = what I do” “not serious work = what I don’t do.”
I can assure you that group of people can provide value to customers/clients while looking like the people in that photo.
Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa.
Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.
I assume it's a bit easier if you are more senior and have a few company changes on your resume, but for someone for whom its their first or second job in the industry, it can be overwhelming. I think that's why often fully remote companies pre-pandemic seemed to be more focussed on hiring seniors.
Likely some of these problems can be mitigated as we learn how to deal with them, but this is one reason why I think post-pandemic most software houses will have to adopt a policy of encouraging some on-site work.
Also keep in mind that it may be slower than with direct in person mentoring but there can also be the opposite of in person mentoring and then being locked in the same office can become extremely stressful.
I also run a small team with new hires on one day and I'm seeing great productivity and teamwork.
We are going back to the office eventually but I don't think the on-site requirements will be as strict as in the past. In the medium term I see us moving towards a more flexible model beyond just the flexible allocation of desks (which imho. is a horrible thing, pretending to be office workspace and serving neither then needs of people there nor the companies output).
I would probably refuse some a new position if there was the expectation of constant pair programming, but I'm curious if others have different experiences.
My employer has always (started in 2007) been fully remote; we've never had office space ANYWHERE. It's a small team building a relatively niche product, and we're pretty successful, but what you say is true:
Getting new people up to speed is hard. And hiring "baby developers" is just not something we've done. All our hires are midcareer or later. I feel like a fresh dev needs the office environment to get traction early in their career, and we just can't provide that.
There have been plenty of companies where I thought we might have achieved more with an office.
Yes, I understand you can always improve your processes but there does feel like there are fundamental limitations with remote work.
The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. However remote work never brings the same connection to your co-workers as being physically present in an office and in my opinion that is extremely important.
I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Since that is at the cost of those living in the city with shorter commute, there will always be mixed feelings about working from home/remote working at the workplace.
One of the reasons there's so much opposing views on WFH is that there are also other big benefits, that apply only to a subset of the population. Among those are, the ability to optimize your workspace for your own needs, and not having to have the "connection to your co-workers". For some of us[0], this can easily make 2-5x difference in terms of ability to focus and lowered stress.
The more universal, but less important and a bit controversial benefit of WFH in many occupations[1] is that you get to optimize your whole schedule - work and private - globally. E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, and then work a little longer, instead of desperately trying to batch up errands and take a day off in advance. This also reduces stress, and allows you to rescue even more free hours in your life, at no cost to productivity.
> I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city.
Commute is a funny thing. Back in the day, my wife lived in a small town and worked in a different one, and her commute of 20km took less than my 4km commute in the big city, and that's using the tram system (which avoided most of the traffic jams).
The freedom to be anywhere is the important thing, though. It's not just about nice apartments, but also about being able to move closer to your partner's non-WFH workplace, or closer to extended family so your kids can see their grandparents more often, etc. I sometimes feel like an outlier here, but I'm planning to move back to a large city (different one than my employer is headquatered in, though!) - the costs of living will increase, but so will the access to benefits of modern civilization. Good cities are much more than work hubs.
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[0] - A subset of whom you could call "neurodiverse", but my current belief is that everyone's mind is different, and ones you'd call "neurotypical" are just good enough at hiding their peculiarities in the social context.
[1] - I.e. if your job does not require to actually be butt-in-seat for 8 hours a day, and your employer isn't of the abusive kind that decides to surveil you minute-by-minute anyway.
No cummute is saving me a workday of time a week. When I was home 1830ish the usual errand places are closed where I live.
I don't even remember how I did errands while commuting. I guess I didn't.
Sure, being in the same space is a different kind of connection, the question is which part of that connection is needed for work. I 'd personally rather share a cowork space with my friends rather than whoever the company chooses for me, and i think that's going to be a trend in places that house lots of remote workers. There are in fact cities being redesigned around remote workers like Madeira. I think the actual problem that people complain about is not the lack of physical bodies at work, but the lack of physical bodies in general. That needs to change if people are going to work remote in large percentages, people will need to either find more friendly neighbors or just start talking to their neighbors , like people did a few decades ago.
And then we haven't even began to scratch the surface of ways to connect with coworkers. I find that sharing a gaming environment (like e.g. secondlife) gives a sense of presence, space, and connection and takes away that lingering anxiety of "where is everybody?" that I get when i work at home. Slack also does that to a small extent.
Ultimately, remote work is objectively giving people more options, and that is a measure of progress, so I see the transition as inevitable. I think people are being held back by the current designs of modern big cities, which have been entirely shaped around the home-work routine. In fact, large parts of the rewards of "real life" (e.g. making new friends) has been moved to the office for purely logistical reasons (other places of congregation stopped existing). This isn't inevitable, remote workers will develop new habits in a few years. Historically it's the cities that changed to adapt to work conditions, not the other way around , and now a critical mass of workers is ready for the change (In fact, the switch to remote was possible years earlier, COVID just accelerated it).
In my experience part remote works much better, if not better than fully remote / fully office based. It's nice have a few days a week for in person meetings then some quiet time to get stuck into work at home.
I mean they must realise this is a pretty unpopular decision so why not share their justification.
Otherwise it's just an appeal to authority - "Ours not to reason why.."
Sometimes its easier not to share. In a perfect world we'd be more transparent. If its an popular decision, discussion potentially fans the flames of disagreement and ill will. E.g. People take some small point of the rationale and blow it out of proportion for why this is bad etc, why it isn't relevant to them without seeing a bigger picture etc. I think we've all seen this. Sometimes its simpler and more efficient to say less.
I don't agree with this premise. It's quite easy to share "we have data that suggests that this is the case", even if you don't divulge fully what that data is.
A decision where it's clear that some analysis has gone into it (even if you disagree with the outcome) is always going to be more accepted than a decision that seems completely arbitrary / driven by politics.
It seems that developers / ICs are asked to justify everything they do with data - making decisions from the gut is the privilege of the executive.
And there is quite a bit of data on it, most of which is widely shared internally.
Everyone who has made it up the ladder knows this and it's the single aspect that differentiates people who routinely get overlooked for promotions from the individuals who steadily rise through the ranks
A lot of politics gets much harder in remote work, and this is what these people are best at.
It's not productivity, it's politics that is much harder to do when remote working.
They also need to keep an eye on developers and need to feel thigs out, the relationship, their management status known and so forth.
That's very hard to do remotely and they feel their status diminished to that of the "resources" they manage.
That assumption has been thoroughly refuted by Google's reaction to James Damore's internal memo.
But that still assumes the executives making these decisions prioritize employee well-being and work productivity. No amount of correctly collected, analyzed and understood data on WFH productivity will help if the change isn't driven by concerns about productivity. In that case, this data is just irrelevant. I believe this is the concern GP is expressing - that the goals of the management are not well aligned with the goals of the employee (which is obvious), and the well-being of the company (which is plausible).
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[0] - I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt here to Google, at least in areas where it matters. I'm not usually giving it to a typical company, Internet or otherwise: just because you have data, doesn't mean you have the right data, have analyzed it correctly, or even employ anyone who could analyze it correctly (or employ decision makers who could understand and vet the conclusion of the people doing the analysis). In my experience, these failures are very common.
[1] - I have my doubts where it comes to their product decisions.
I'd disagree at least a little here. Google has been surveying their staff about what they want to do after the pandemic is over, see this twitter thread where Google published some of it's data: https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/1308529118531...
People are split on what they want. Maybe people could be better trained to wfh, but some of us just prefer an office. While I am likely more productive at home (even with 3 kids there) I see that knowledge sharing with a large team is just harder (missing that hallway conversation, or seeing someone at a whiteboard and just learning random things).
The vast majority prefer not to come to the office everyday. Google says you can only work from home slightly more than 1 day per month.
If they took the survey into account, it would have been the opposite - you're only required to come into the office 14 days per year.
Having whiteboards around, I will see people talking about certain things or explaining some new system, and it's easy to jump in. Maybe these could be considered impromptu meetings, but they still have been great for me.
I'm not a developer, but I don't work with a group of people located in the same building, so all projects are de facto pretty remote heavy.
Me, I want to go back to the office. Like hanging out with my work friends.
Their spouses who may have worked outside the home, were home.
If they had not worked from home previously, chances are - they didn't have a dedicated office space - or even equipment.
Add to that the constant low-level stress of being in a pandemic with constant media impressions, massive social change events/activities (at least for those in North America with BLM and the moronic exit of the Orange-moron), and it isn't a stretch to think that productivity has been down somewhat.
Never did WFH until the pandemic, and will probably continue working from home for some time after things open back up. I have a hard time seeing how my day-to-day will differ significantly post-pandemic.
But a true work from home setup likely involves having a dedicated home office space, with the right setup. Even now, a lot of people don't have that.
I would assume for people with children being able to offload them to public education institutions during work hours will be significant difference.
From my experience (2 days/week WFH before pandemic):
1. People with kids have to babysit (I do not have children, but people who have are noticeably impacted by this)
2. Everything is closed, so casual outing to coffee shop or just grabbing a lunch with colleagues not possible. Some goes for just going to gym for a bit.
3. Before the pandemic, sometimes we did morning in the office filled with debate/design work, then lunch and then go home to bunker down and code. Again, not possible now.
4. Two adults in one room makes meetings annoying (well, basically openspace but without the free food).
5. Team beer is remote now, which I mean, kinda works. I get drunk anyway. But still, suck a bit.
And is it the same for everyone? Like for HR, sales, marketing?
and all of these companies are now asking their employees back to the office full time in a week or so.
i am sure that if productivity hadn't dropped during WFH then there wouldn't be such a big issue. but when the whole company stops producing, then it's pretty clear what needs to be done...
Is it their work conditions? IT limitations? Family? Just the fact that everything sucks?
the drop in productivity was huge and forced some of them to start letting people go.
It is also likely that we are talking about a young demographics which lacks the maturity needed to work remotely efficiently through self-control (I've been that kind 15 years ago for my first remote experience which was a disaster, but my second remote experience was opposite, extremely positive for myself and my output). I didn't pay attention to it when I started writing, but the fact that you mention "gamedev" is a good hint at this.
Sales and marketing seem to work as usual though, just from homes. Obviously game sales skyrocketed over past year, so it is hard to reliably grade their performance.
One production team that started transition to remote work before pandemic reported no significant slowdown. They hired bunch of highly skilled multi-disciplinary contractors all over the world and let go most of their regular staff, but it is fairly small team so I don't think this approach can scale.
When I see the OP comment which claims WFH is the only way and any other way to is just "backward thinking" in a very self-aggrandizing manner, I just remind myself that internet is safe haven for the type of people, whom I will rarely meet in real life.
I suspect that my employer will have us back in the office before the end of the year after a year of remote working. Although I actually sort of prefer the office myself, the whole "physically colocated" thing is especially comical in my situation (which I think is common in most big corporations) - none of the people I actually work with are in the same office, or even the same time zone, as me. So I'll drive a half hour each way to essentially be a remote worker anyway, and I definitely won't be the only one.
The cynic in me thinks that this back to office push is out of fear that it's far, far easier for remote workers to organize outside the view of the company. They are terrified and want to nip that in the bud as soon as possible.
depends on how replacible you really are.
if productivity stayed the same, no-one would have said anything.
Does it require 5 days a week? Maybe not. Is every person who believes remote work has long term negative impacts some middle manager from the 90s? No.
At my employer we have some pockets of embarrassing leadership like this, but thankfully I haven't seen it in anyone senior enough to make global policy like this. My department is letting go of remote teams and only hiring in a handful of cities around the world, while ramping up office space spending. It's more expensive, less flexible, and less productive... and everyone knows it. But I guess it makes some people feel important, and it's how some others remember developing when they last did it 20 years ago. So it's happening anyway, and many of their best engineers are now on the market.