> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.

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.

> 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.

I think we’ve got less than 3 years until that’s no longer true. A lightweight, wireless VR headset that you can easily put on when you want to talk to someone gets you all the presence you need for work related tasks. Transmitting points that track head and hand positions take far less bandwidth than video. Video calls have terrible lag compared to any of the VR social experiences I’ve had. The hardware is going to be key though, battery life, weight, hands tracking without controllers, and comfort. There’s good progress on all of those.

You sound like a right bundle of fun to work with.

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".

What about those who _do_ want a friendly workplace with some element of social interaction?

There is a difference between being friendly and becoming friends. The latter is dangerous and you will be fooled in thinking your coworkers actually care about you and you need to drink the corporate kool-aid, work overtime and be a true best friend to everyone.

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.

Ultimately, remote is likely going to win out. Most people in the white collar work force are older, have families and live in the burbs. The commute for a lot of them is 1+ hour each way.

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.

>Most people in the white collar work force are older, have families and live in the burbs.

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.

Software Devs make up a pretty small percentage of the entire white collar workforce

You can be friendly without having to socialise. Not sure why those things would have to go together? Doing socials after work is such a waste of time - sure it may be fun, but this way you are using up time that otherwise you could use to maintain friendships outside of work. 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.

Isn't this also how a lot of friendships start? People finding themselves in a similar place/situation/habit/interests. So to me it seems a bit natural that workplace friendships would naturally develop. It's healthier to make an effort to have friendships outside of work as well, of course.

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.

FWIW, I've built and strengthened plenty of friendships with coworkers via Teams, which obviously, I've used a lot more during the pandemic. This shouldn't seem that weird... I've made plenty of lasting long term friends over the Internet too.

Within time cliques form and some people may be coming to those events out of fear they'll be missing out instead of to have fun and some people may just not be coming and will be viewed by other team members as weirdos. From there it is natural to side with something you know and feel affection to and you may be unconsciously treating people who don't socialise with you worse than the others. Other things that may happen, often when also alcohol is involved, people may say things from their private lives that then other people may use against them or when you start talking about politics and it turns out some people have completely opposite views to yours. This is not helpful in any way.

> You can be friendly without having to socialise. Not sure why those things would have to go together? Doing socials after work is such a waste of time - sure it may be fun, but this way you are using up time that otherwise you could use to maintain friendships outside of work. 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.

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...

> 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.

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.

Sure, a 100% remote company might be friendly, for example. I mentioned "friendly" since the previous comment mentioned "friends". Not my intention to suggest inclusivity/exclusivity.

I genuinely don't understand why this was down voted. A comment would help. My intention was to be conciliatory and explanatory.

> What about those who _do_ want a friendly workplace with some element of social interaction?

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 wrote a long edit clarifying a few things, and lost it on submit thanks to timing out. Damn.

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.

[0] https://basecamp.com/about/office

[1] https://basecamp.com/books/calm

hybrid model, let your workers decide how they work as long they deliver.

In a hybrid model the people who choose to be remote are damaging their own impact and career development. That's a tradeoff they're free to make if they want but it's the reason why I think hybrid models won't last for too long.

The reality is that most people don't grow in the same company. They grow by changing employer. So what you just said here, doesn't apply to most people anyway. The ones that most like the current structure are the ones most rewarded by it as well. No wonder they don't want it to change. Most people get promoted by social acts, even in google.

Longing for a career at a one company it seems like a concept from the 80s-90s or movies, where you start as a janitor and finish as a director. However, this indeed can impact your day to day life at a company, as managers will develop biases towards people who they socialise with. That's why I think any kind of socials are a bad idea as they may be potentially discarding people who are bad are socialising but are great workers otherwise and that comes as a negative to a whole organisation.

So, some devil's advocate perspectives:

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?

It's not just about socializing or climbing the ladder - you need to communicate with other people to get stuff done. Even if you only care about technical contribution and getting work done, if you aren't in the office and everyone else is, you'll have a difficult time.

Except all of those people who worked from home fully before pandemic and somehow managed to do thei work just fine.

Could you explain why? Everyone is on Slack or Teams or even Discord and always available to talk during "office" hours.

If half the team is in office and half is remote on Slack, then the communication throughout (both useful and pointless) is much higher among the in person. Some simple examples:

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.

Whiteboards were a huge part of my daily work prior to COVID and the lack of whiteboards had a negative impact on my team. Touchscreens have not really been the same for us, it is too much overhead when all you wanted was to quickly work out an idea with someone else.

We dropped whiteboards in favour of collaborative editing of documents. People write their ideas and then comment in realtime. It took some time to get used to, but not many people miss it. Some people got reMarkable if they want to draw something and share - this is a brilliant tool, but unfortunately it doesn't support encryption, so the use is a bit limited, but to draw some flows etc is great.

I completely understand this. I think best through conversation with others involving drawing on paper or whiteboards. Without being able to do this, I can really struggle to focus ideas and plans. Online just does not work as well for this, not for me anyway.

The reverse is true as well. A company with no focus on social interaction drives away people that enjoy socializing with their work mates. For them it makes the office seem like a cold and uninviting place and they’re more likely to take that job offer from a friend. I agree that everyone needs friends outside of work and that you shouldn’t be really close friends with people at work since it can lead to complications but there are benefits to being able to chat with the people at work about non-work related things and to let your hair down a little.

I see this claim made very often on HN. Is there any data to back it up?

Let's say ideal data exists in some hypothetical company which will convince you. What would it look like? Asking because this is an area where it will be impossible to get meaningful data unless a big enough company runs an A/B test over a long period of time to measure the impact on career development.

Can't we have data showing career advancement differences between onsite employees and remote employees? I don't understand your attack/sarcasm. We manage to find data to show salary/promotion differences between men and women, or between different races, why not based on the location of the workers?

How many companies exist which have meaningful representation of onsite vs remote employees at various levels of seniority? Can you please name a few?

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.

Fine, I'll play along and say that you're right: the data doesn't exist - which btw I never contested, I actually asked if there was any data available to back a claim. It is then equally fantasist to claim that being a remote employee at a hybrid company is either detrimental, neutral or beneficial to career advancement.

This sounds like a copout. Lack of data doesn't imply equal plausibility. It means that you need to use other methods of reasoning. And people do this all the time - it's not like every time you're faced with a new situation you go "Oh I don't have any data here, all of my options are equally good". No, what you do instead is use common sense, draw on experience, best judgment, mental heuristics etc. Those aren't as good as evidence based decision making but they surely beat throwing your hands in the air and saying that all of your options are the same.

Some of the best friends I have, I met online and haven't actually seen face to face. Still, you can have a workplace with a reduced (not eliminated) physical presence. I know of people who do flexible office visitation, so they have two days per week when everyone is in, and the rest of the time, people are free to either WFH or at the office. Seems to work out for them for now - those who really want to be there can be, while those who prefer to work from home can do so.

Then by all means go into the office and get their element of social interaction together and let the introverts get their stuff done in their preferred environment.

There are introverts who value a dose of in-person interactivity. Some find the structure of the work schedule useful in ensuring a degree of socialisation. My question was more around whether the workplace can function better for both introverts and extroverts. There are several comments in this thread that suggest entirely remote work has issues, and hybrid models might favour the extroverts (although one interesting comment suggests they'd experience an increase communications burden, repeating messages in-person and in chat). Personally I would not want a 100% in-person workplace. How do we resolve the issues that come with, let's say, hybrid working?

What about those who don't?

Well that was the point of the comment I was replying to, which I felt was somewhat one-sided.

world has already been designed for __them__ for almost forever?

Agreed. I wasn't saying exclusively. I just feel that swinging from one extreme to the other doesn't solve any problems.

> 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.

Both of these are common scenarios at Google, though.

That's great if so. Google however isn't representative of most companies by even a long stretch. In most companies, any stranger cannot go past a checkpoint without some RFID and what not that too with prior permission and purpose that's "reasonable" or at least your line manager is OK with it.

Agreed. Some people really seem to think work looks like this: https://www.dreamstime.com/happy-diverse-office-workers-team...

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 agree that execs who've never written code often have no idea what it's like, and I've worked with some who didn't want to know.

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.

I think you might be a bit jaded. I do work at a company where team meetings look a lot like this and yes we do get real work done. We don’t talk and joke around all day but there is space for it. Oddly, other, more somber places I’ve worked were much less productive. People were more guarded about asking for help or collaborating and there was little communication between management and everyone else which led to a very us vs them mentality. It turns out that liking the people you work with actually does make work fun and productive.

> If any serious work is being done in a company

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.

> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.

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.

The big wave of outsourcing in 2000s was a disaster. This is not just about knowledge. It is also about cultural differences that are sometimes more limiting than not having face to face time. It is about timezone differences that make it hard to have calls or meetings.

The reason cultural difference was an issue is one dominant culture enforced by presence culture. Without presence culture there would be no dominant company culture, it would be more distributed around the world. Also, timezones don't make it hard to have meetings, it's the same culture preventing it to happen. In my current company I sit in Europe, and it's easier for me to find a time slot for a meeting with my US and India-based colleagues than with people sitting in the same building with me.

I am reminded of my experience working for a German medical equipment company. We have distributed shared service centres around the world. Policy, best-practices, etc are formulated in the head office. For some reason we have continual problems with colleagues from one South American region who never follow best-practices and cause a lot of additional work for other teams who have to clean-up after them. I believe this is exactly what we talk about when we discuss cultural issues. We also have problems with giving these colleagues additional training and mentorship because they prefer to start a lot later in the morning, so our working hour overlap is very minimal.