Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy. I'm currently full time remote (I'm on the East Coast working for a West Coast company). My previous company had its main office in my current city, but allowed a super flexible choose-where-you-work-from policy. It was the best.
Didn't feel like dealing with the commute or had a ton of heads down work to do? Stay at home. Wanted to go in to be present for meetings? Easy. Start the day at the office and go home to finish off the day and avoid the commute? Sure.
Of course they made it possible by actively managing it. No meetings before 11am ET (to accomodate those in different TZs). Every scheduled meeting required a Zoom/conference link. Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms" so remote people could call in. And of course, people all the way up the ladder worked from home at least some of the time.
Being full remote doesn't work for everyone. Providing a space for those who want it is such a huge quality of life bonus imo. But the biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion, despite your employees working preferences. This is the hardest thing to do, especially at scale.
Hot take: There's a whole way of communicating and handling team organization that grew up around 20th century business management culture, and it just doesn't work well with remote teams. Methods that do work well with remote teams, though, don't work well with traditional deeply hierarchical management structures. At best, they tend to make all those management layers somewhat superfluous.
This means getting people back into the office may be a matter of self-preservation for career managers, whether they realize it consciously or not.
The only hope I hold is that people with shared creative interests will eventually prevail.
The pessimist in me also considers that the allowed monopolies will then buy up those creative successes.
Unfortunately, some people go through such a traumatic experience which happens to result in FU money that they burn out and stop creating. That's a great shame for us all.
TBH, getting acquired by a big boring corporation in my early 30s, and having the startup into which I had poured countless late hours' worth of blood, sweat, and tears become a long and joyless coast into mediocrity, was possibly the greatest thing that ever happened to me both professionally and personally.
There was a brief period of anxiety over all the corporate bullshit, and the loss of edge, and all that good stuff. But, after about 6 months of that, a magical thing happened: I started leaving work at work. My demeanor became more placid. My sleep improved. I found hobbies.
I guess maybe, in some poetic sense, it's sad that I'm no longer driven to build exciting things. But, in a more mentally healthy (for me -- I'm certainly not going to begrudge someone else for continuing to be ambitious and driven) sense, that was benefitting a bunch of strangers more than it was benefitting me. I've done my time, and I'm now content to sit back and watch the young'uns take their turn to run themselves ragged chasing dreams around the office all week, and then watch my own young'uns run themselves ragged chasing each other around the yard all weekend.
And for better or worse, your kids will be shaped by the environment you provide. If you have so much money that they need never worry, then it will actually be harder for them to find their own place and be motivated. Think back honestly... if nothing you did really mattered in terms of your financial success, would you have been motivated to do what you did? I probably would not.
Already my children are a mix of complacent and unconcerned of the financial future and also driven to create. They know they will never be poor or hungry. Will that limit the raw expression and energy they have? It did me. I could not fail if I tried. I knew I was capable of anything, and I demonstrated some degree of that in various ways. But I had nothing to lose.
Eventually everyone begins to ask what the point of anything is. And frankly, we are left with no answers and just some guesses or assumptions. We basically decide what life means. If it means nothing, then why bother with any of it? If it means something, then we should put energy into whatever that something is. Money makes most of it nicer, but it can be a distraction for those who have it and for those who seek it.
PM work, management work and all of that is work, and someone has to do the work and if the managers / PMs don't do that work other people start taking up those jobs. That stuff doesn't go away with the magic wand of remote.
Yes there is an argument that those jobs make a bunch of extra work that may not of been necessary, but that also applies to engineers themselves. Every job role creates extra subjectively unnecessary work.
And I am saying this as someone who has been an engineer my entire career, I haven't been a manager.
Do we still need a manager who has power over the developers and partially decides which jobs exist, giving them not only an incentive to create extra work, but have a trump card on anyone who would call out their BS?
Do we truly need all this manual syncing and negotiating? Or has part of the corporate machine become addicted to all this red tape so much, they believe it is not only a necessity, but an insult to the individuals participating if the red tape is removed in its entirety?
Frankly, as much as I despise management work, I have a hard time buying the argument it really would be as terrible as it is now once you get rid of that red tape. Hybrid roles don't have an incentive to inflate the amount of red tape: they can go back to doing the other side of their role instead, and have an incentive to remove any existing red tape if it becomes suffocating.
For the former, a great manager will regularly ask, "What can I do to help you do your job well?" This person fights the political battles that need to be fought, takes bullets for the team, gets the team the resources they need, removes roadblocks, recruits, etc. The team already wants to work hard, wants to do their job well, and "manager-as-controller" is absolutely the wrong way to lead.
But when you're managing a team of undermotivated people doing more dreary work (which, honestly, might be most people and most jobs), a great manager will occasionally pick up a hammer and do some of the hard work themselves to boost morale. They'll find and remove the major pain-points of the day-to-day, improve training so the team is more productive, cheerlead a bit, try to improve compensation, make sure the team's major wins are visible to upper management so they can get the resources they need, etc.
But critically, this second type of manager ALSO needs to be able to crack the whip once in a while to make it clear that being deadweight won't be tolerated, and complaining won't be rewarded. When the work is somewhat painful, you really want to foster a kind of contagious, optimistic busy-bee state where everyone is eager to do their part and help one another, and you'll have to put on your "manager-as-controller" hat once in a while to get there.
Is that really how american workplaces look? Sounds incredibly dystopian.
Working in a faster-paced environment probably isn't the hellscape you're imagining: most foreigners I've worked with like it. Some don't. It is different, though - in England the slower pace of everything irritated me.
That is traditionally done by managers, but it doesn't actually need to be handled someone who is anyone's boss in particular. It's handleable, often with less overall effort, by people who are at the same level as every other team member on the org chart. The whole boss/report dynamic tends to inhibit clear communication, because circumspect people tend to to communicate less-than-candidly with those who hold the power to advance or inhibit their career progress.
Our regional president also is anti WFH. He claims that WFH would eliminate quality mentorship that he experienced and the ad hoc conservations over lunch that lead to friendships and new business opportunities. This is a better angle, but it’s also not something that happens for everyone, everyday, or can be used to justify 5 days in the office.
My feeling is the same: while random interactions are important, they aren't exclusive to an office setting. Weird logic. It's been surprising to me how much ink has been spilled about this, and how few solutions have been offered.
A small group of co-workers willing to sometimes go off a tangent in a conversation is all it takes. Doesn't have to be face to face, much less in a hallway or in front of a water cooler.
If it's really valuable information, write it down so even more people can be exposed to it! It's like that saying about meetings: "this could have been an email."
I think management people are likely running on fumes … it's like the inverse of what introverts feel when they have to be in-office 5 days a week I suspect.
I'd add that the second take is also kind of outmoded, in that it assumes that mentorship, friendship, business opportunities must flow through your company. I've actually found more of this during the pandemic, and apart from my company …
True, serendipity (e.g. water cooler conversation) is harder in remote environments, but not unsolvable …
I guess not having your ass kissed daily must feel like "running on fumes".
The people working in cubicle-hell or open-office purgatory generally aren't the ones clamoring to get back inside the building. If offices were redesigned to give more rooms with doors to the people who want them so they can do some quiet focused work, even if it's not an assigned space, I think you'd see much more eagerness to return.
And that same assistant will screen time with the boss, something us plebs don't get.
On that: I think extroverts can tend to derive value from external factors, which may make them more hungry for praise (especially public).
(Edited because earlier version was murky)
It's not, really.
To think of it another way: what would happen if your mentors left for better jobs, got hit by a bus or even just retired? People need to be documenting things so that knowledge isn't lost and can be passed on to many more people. If it's really that valuable, just think of how much more of an impact it will have when it doesn't have to be passed on one-to-one.
If you have 10 employees, 5 are much happier and productive at home, 4 are the same, and 1 is completely taking advantage of it, old school companies seem to focus on that 1 person, rather than the 5 that are happier and more productive. They'd rather have nobody able to take advantage of the system than to terminate the 1 employee that's taking advantage of things.
Meanwhile, those who already have remote work skills won't stick around to have their time wasted by being forced to work in an office.
I think a lot of companies are going to downsize their office space in the future. Having a company place to meet is a good idea. I predict there will be some variants of WeWork which will focus on this concept, basically providing rotating company spaces - possibly complete with branding and decorations which would be swapped out each morning for the "company of the day".
Of course that was just to save money, since it was an expensive lease, apparently, but it did have the benefit that I didn't have any worries they'd force me to come back into the office once the pandemic started, or I'd have to go back to pack up my desk like my wife eventually had to when she changed jobs.
Other than a really rocky shift of our in-house data center into one of the main corporate data centers, it hasn't resulted in much difference as far as productivity, in fact we've been getting away with about half the staff maintaining the same systems (probably to our detriment if people end up leaving, we don't have much redundancy anymore).
Just makes me a little hesitant to find a new job because after three years I'm really used to WFH and I'm worried most other companies are itching to get people back into physical offices (like my wife will probably need to by the end of the year at her new job), even though there's not really any more room for me to grow at this organization in the next year or two based on what I've heard lately.
I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.
I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Truth is, I can't imagine I'll ever take another job that expects me to show up to an actual office everyday. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I worry a lot about how this cuts the bottom rungs off the ladder for junior developers. Senior developers can be very productive without frequent access to in-person help, and are valuable enough that they can get work-from-home if they want. But junior developers have more frequent questions, need to absorb software engineering culture, and need to have more work and task structure created for them. Remote work is really hard for them.
If it's disseminated via oral lore it's expensive to change and is often misinterpreted across a large enough org.
A silent killer of engineering orgs is bad practices that stick around because that's the way it's always been done. No one knows why because it wasn't written down. The only way to fix that is for someone high enough to provide blessing, but maybe none of those things are individually disruptive enough to get the CTO involved. So everyone eats the costs in perpetuity.
Much easier to just write everything down.
Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.
I'm always startled by comments like this because it's so counter to how I understand humanity. We are social mammals. No amount of good grammar and excellent font choice can substitute for sharing the same physical space together, an act that has been core to what it means to be human literally since we first speciated.
Yeah, writing stuff down is important. But engineering culture is a culture in the real sense of the word and trying to transmit that entirely through text sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm.
Humans are social animals in the sense that they thrive when being social with whoever and wherever they want to be social. I don't know about you, but I have more time to be social with the people (friends, family, neighbors, volunteer groups, etc) that I actually want to be social with when WFH. Being forced to drive to an office under the pretense of "this is how our evolutionary ancestors preferred it" is low key gross.
You can - and should - be able to disseminate engineering culture through digital means.
At almost no point in human history has that ever been true. Only in the very recent past has any notion of mobility and sufficient population density existed where one could choose who they socialized with. For all of our evolutionary history, you lived and died within your tribe.
Socializing can be done with people outside that very limited circle. Meanwhile, I can get my knowledge-sharing itch by looking up new techniques on the internet, going to conferences, etc.
Just because it doesn't involve beer or seeing each other's faces doesn't mean that it's not a real culture.
That's not to say that any particular group's culture will translate seamlessly from in-person to text/video chat, but the idea that having and sharing a culture in a text format is somehow lesser than having one in person doesn't make sense to me.
No it's like raising a baby using advice you read from books that are peer reviewed and revised over time vs. just listening to what your parents say.
We are sentient beings that have had writing for thousands of years. Perhaps we should start acting like it.
A million times this! If there's anything that WFH has done, it's exposed the big gaping hole known as "institutional knowledge."
> Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.
Or no process at all. Even on small teams, even on projects I start from scratch by myself, I GD document things. It's not that hard once you start practicing and make it a habit.
I swear, if a programmer had zero comments in their code and said "just come by the water cooler if you have any questions", they'd be fired within a week, yet we put up with this ephemeral bullshit for other things.
The benefit was this also made them amiable towards WFH situations. Big snowstorm? Everyone can WFH for the week. Want to go visit the west coast for a few months? Sounds great, we'll see you online.
Point being, as a junior dev I never felt left out in the cold. Some of the best pair programming sessions I ever had during that time were with a dude from Ireland while we alternated screen sharing. So as long as the team culture is supportive of remote collaboration, I think junior devs will be fine.
Two points, entirely anecdotal:
1) A few years back, I sort of "restarted" as a Salesforce developer. I had well over a decade of web dev experience, but I was new to SF. Everything about it was unique to this environment. I worked in an office, but my boss worked from home (ironically enough). So I was effectively remote working with him from the get go, and I found it worked really well.
2) My kids learn a remarkable amount of stuff on their own: Minecraft, Roblox, Scratch. All these programming environments that they've become really proficient at, and entirely on their own. This is effectively remote work. There was no one holding their hand.
I think the bigger issue is going to be getting employers to trust that the junior is working well. In truth, most junior employees probably don't have the maturity and discipline to be productive remotely. I certainly wouldn't have back when I was 18-22. I would have taken every chance I could to goof off, and not even considered whether that was a problem.
That kind work ethic (i.e. a bad one) tends to get beaten out of you pretty quick in the early days of a professional career. But a lot (most?) people fresh out of college still have that student mentality of viewing "adults" (bosses, teachers, parents) as authority figures to be rebelled against to some extent. I wouldn't trust someone with that mentality to be productive unsupervised.
The natural counter point is that if you can't be trusted, you shouldn't be hired. But I think that's a mistake. There's an awful lot of talented and smart young people who need a break or two in order to develop the appropriate work ethic and achieve their potential.
All of which is to say, I share your concern about opportunities for junior developers (and junior workers in general), but for different reasons.
I think this is something that would work for more junior people as well, and I'd be happy to break out / share a screen as needed.
My team and others have been having "office hours" meetings where everyone is just working, but often the cameras are off, mics are muted most of the time, and we only do it for a few hours a week.
I definitely agree that there is a lot of value in being able to jump in and ask questions in the moment. That's a big benefit of having these calls for us.
Maybe we should try having them more often. :)
Now we're all remote so we keep the same meeting open. I guess people have differing levels of comfort.
This sounds absolutely horrible.
It works well and (at least with how our team works) it's not invasive.
I would just turn both microphone and camera off; if somebody wants something they can message me, like a sane person.
And now you know how it feels to work in an open floor plan or cubicle where someone can come along and break your flow causing you to have to waste over 20 minutes getting back into it.
The key with the all day video conference is you can mute it and set your status as away when you need to do deep work. Can't do that in an office environment.
It's simply intrusive and unnecessary.
this is incredibly bad for the environment. i just hope it's at least not as bad as commuting
Once you've tasted freedom...
Surprisingly, the recruiters are starting to answer "sure - no problem..." :-)
History suggests that talent is not a cause to warp office culture. Office culture will out weather a loss of talent until the business implodes. If the need for talent becomes clearly paramount then it will be outsourced.
Beliefs and dogma. Amazon's justification was "Amazon is an in-office culture." That ultimately boils down to circular reasoning; the key decision maker (whoever they are) has demonstrated an immense lack of critical reasoning. Continuing this practice is in the same realm as continuing other hostile workplace traditions, although it is one of the less serious ones.
In my opinion, it is wasting a lot of money in the form of productivity. Every employee who commutes to the office has an overwhelmingly high likelihood of having some of their mental resources drained. You're wasting a good hour or two of superior employee performance in the morning, and possibly some near the end of the day when employees start dreading the journey home.
> biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion
This is a very important point. One of the major ongoing reasons that women are passed over for promotions is that they are the traditional/dogmatic caregivers. Home-first equalizes this, much like paternal leave does. If a home is unable to afford child-care, then men have just as much responsibility and distraction during work hours.
Some people may struggle to afford commute, for example, people escaping homelessness. Being able to work from home would reduce the burden on these people.
In addition, those who cannot causally/physically complete their job offsite (doctors, construction workers, tellers, baristas) won't have roads and public transport congested with people who have no business traveling to work.
> Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms"
We need conference rooms as an API. I should be able to add (and be billed for) a physical room to a meeting request as easily as adding a Zoom/GMeet - for when in-person collaboration is really needed. WeWork was in the ideal position to do this, it's a pity they doubled down on big corporate clients instead of "gig economy rooms."
Is this not pretty much how things work on Google Calendar or Outlook?
Informal communication, informal collaboration, a culture of apprenticeship. To the extent that the organization values these they are all served much better in person than remote.
All companies and all people are different. There isn't a one size fits all. But it's not like there are no benefits to in person.
This raises two obvious questions;
- Were those things definitely happening in a way that actually benefits the company, or were people simply assuming they're happening?
- Why can't those things continue to happen in an environment where people work remotely?
Without satisfactory answers to those questions it's impossible to assert comms and collaboration are actually reasons to return to the office. For example, my experience of remote working (many years before lockdown, and during lockdown) has taught me that informal comms actually causes more ambiguity and moving to remote often means people are prone to "over communication" where they leave very little out. That has led to pain for some because there's a lot more email and messaging to deal with, but it also means everyone has a greater understanding of the project. Overall I'd argue that the 'formalization' of comms on a project that comes from everyone being remote and asynchronous is more of a benefit than a cost.
Coffee breaks are a shockingly productive element that simply work better in person, at least in my experience (and this seems to be a common sentiment at my software company).
In-person conversations don't have technical difficulties, there's much better engagement which allows people to better read the audience and adapt presentations/design conversations appropriately.
Surveys among colleagues seem to agree -- hybrid seems good, remote only simply is not as productive nor enjoyable.
This has been happening with greater regularity when we have been working from home. All the time we will have informal communication on slack or jump on an informal unscheduled zoom call to mob on an issue. I worked on campus for 18 years prior to starting to work from home last March. I cannot remember a single time informal communication or informal collaboration happened. For some reason people are much more open to it over slack and zoom than they ever were in person.
Now that does happen in open slack channels but it seems to me far less frequently.
You're right of course, those qualities don't naturally occur remotely.
However, and I know I'm slightly taking your use of "culture" out of context, but "Culture" is often code for any number of implicit biases in a workplace. Known or unknown. If you don't fit in, for whatever reason, can you still not be a productive asset in the corporation?
I'm old. Tell me about it. I am not a "cultural fit" in companies, these days.
So I am doing my own thing. I'm extremely fortunate, in being able to do this.
I'm also never going into an office, or relocating, again.
In my experience, they do... It's how a project like Krita has grown naturally for over twenty years, bringing in new people, teaching them, having them become productive.
Of course, meeting in person, once or twice a year is important. But there's no need for offices for us.
Because most managers have a reactionary style of management. They are like IRQ handlers. Their state doesn't change until they receive an email from their boss or a phone call from a customer. At that point they react to it by running down the hall to find someone. Now, because they do not understand cooperative multitasking they preemptively interrupt YOU and now your day is f*cked.
1. Personally, working from home has been a mixed bag. When I'm allowed to focus on one single task, I can do pretty well. The comforts of having my own office room, high quality monitors, keyboard and speakers listening to music are very nice. The additional latency accessing my remote workstation not so great (and that is required, because of company rules not allowing source access outside of corp network). Also, anything that required a lot of human interaction has been pretty bad, video conferencing is a poor substitute, I've found (as someone who doesn't really enjoy socializing) and depending on where you are in the project (is the team already established, do they know each other IRL, the tasks are clear or are you just starting a new team for a new project, scoping up tasks and everything) it requires more or less interaction. At the beginning of a project there is a ton of little details that get missed in the initial plans which can be resolved very fast in person and which always seem to resolve slower remotely, no matter how good use we attempt to make of all the tools available (team chat, video conference, etc). As such, whenever my company asked in WFH surveys how I would rate my productivity, I always rated it lower than 100%, around 60%-70%. In terms of commute, it's a wash-off: yes, I don't spend time commuting now but the extra time I have I just spend it in longer videogame sessions at night (so not exactly the best/most healthy way to use that extra time) and when I was commuting to the office I'd often commute by bike (at about 100 miles biked per week) while now I barely bike a third of that because I force myself to get out on the bike every weekend to at least have some physical activity.
2. Company wide, based on the the surveys done, it seems most people have rated their productivity lower than when in office. As such, it is no surprise to me that the company is looking at an accelerated schedule to get people back in office.
Source: I’m a full time engineer happily working out of the PHX suburbs.
Personally, I have no intention of returning to the Bay Area.
There's dozens of us...dozens :-D
That is fine, but the salaries for 5-day-a-week-from-office jobs need to compensate for this -- not just for execs, but also for normal workers.
Living in a 1br was charming as a 25yo, and not so much for someone with a family. Driving for 1hr+ is also not so charming.
As a former co-founder, i'd happily take this trade --
1. Not compete on city salaries
2. Employees 100% WFH, work from wherever you want. NO salary grading based on metro area (that is so unfair)
3. Quarterly on-site, paid for by company
4. Invest in processes to enable good WFH productivity
I love living in the city. If work wants to keep me remote, I need an extra bedroom or dedicated office space.
This is a fair point. Not sure if you're from the US, but I'll note that the weighted majority of all US technology job opportunities are in cities and major metro areas. If someone wants to live in a high-cost-of-living area, thats a great problem to have, because probably half the tech jobs are already there in the Bay Area especially. There is also no shortage of compensation in such high-cost-of-living areas.
I think we've all had days where we've gotten to the office and had a problem we're working on that doesn't get solved that day. It is actually really taxing and feels really bad to not accomplish anything, as if you've wasted the day.
I've found that the ability to more strictly control distractions at home--not needing to deal with the pressure to chat with co-workers and eat lunch together, for example--has led to far, far fewer days of no-solution. At the same time, it becomes even hard to "give up" on that day's productivity and clock out, since there's no real leaving the office.
Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.
How? If I'm willing to work another job while I'm at my first job, no one would know if the code I'm working on my screen belongs to job #1 or job #2.
The employer could use screen monitoring, but then they could do that while I'm at home and see that either I'm working on a second project, or that my computer is idle for long periods of time when I'm supposedly "working".
Though I'm not sure it matters - if I can work 2 jobs and still provide adequate productivity to each employer, then why do they care?
I have so many meetings every day that I'm sure that I couldn't get away with working 2 jobs at once, even when fully remote.
Measuring programming productivity per person is very hard.
Measuring 40 hour attendance is easy.
So while everyone agrees that A would be better, in reality the approximation of B will have to do.
I still work out some things on paper—I think well that way. Other times I have to get up and walk around to work something out in my head. I'd look like a constant slacker.
My experience has been almost the inverse of this. I wouldn't quite say 80% of people are less productive at home but I'd think at least above half? For various reasons mentioned elsewhere here (disruptive home environment, can't communicate effectively with co-workers remotely, etc). Many people just become very unproductive if they're not physically in the presence of other people being visibly productive.
I'd like to see some formal studies into this to get the true split.
Personally, I hope the future for work becomes as remote as possible as near to a 4 day week as possible.
Only reasons I can think of is as follows. - Someone in the CEO's direct reports is tasked with making a decision. - They start a survey on how satisfied the managers are on the work performance. - The survey does not go to individual employees. - Rightfully, the survey results wildly support return-to-office. - Decision is made.
Some other company may decide to be data driven, and use metrics which may or may not fully reflect the tradeoffs between work-from-home vs. office.
Or, the top leader makes the decision for the rest of the company. No questions allowed.
> Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy.
Agree. This should be the way.
Will they though? If some companies don't, that will be a major reason to change jobs for the better employers (who value your flexibility).
As much as I appreciate (most of) my coworkers, on nights and weekends I want to close my computer and spend quality time with my family, not see and talk to the same people I am already forced to talk to 35-40h a week. They might be ideal to you, but you're assuming quite a lot about everyone's situations if you think they work for everyone.
These could happen during the week or (depending on the retreat) the weekend, with weekends probably being given comp time in lieu.
If you think that a modicum of face time throughout the year for a remote team has no value to a group or team, I’ve got news for you.
If you think GP was referring to additional face time in addition to face time at a workplace, then I think you may be projecting and selective quoting a bit. Note that employees at this small company can work when and where they want.
Most 100% remote places I know of that do retreats typically have them during the week. A weekend retreat would be reserved for an activity that would only happen on a weekend and has buy-in from the team.
There seems to be a lot of resistance from remote workers about remote worker retreats happening outside of work hours. Is this actually a thing? I have never heard of it other than the weekend caveat (weekend only event with team buy in) that I mentioned above.
The occasional event w/ buy-in definitely can work, but that wasn't how OP seemed to frame it. Maybe I misinterpreted, maybe he badly explained his idea, I don't know. But I'd have given anybody sh*t for trying to make me work outside of work hours, remote or not.
Just curious... does your leadership go out of their way to offer comp time for travel outside of business hours?
For example, they say or strongly suggest that folks who have to travel at night take the next morning off.
I imagine that this may not be common, but it seems like it would generate a lot of goodwill for folks who have to travel.
Those are incredibly productive (it's probably 12 hours per day of "work" topics) and help forge strong bonds in the team. They're one of the things we're literally counting down the days until we can schedule one for 15 days after the last vaccine dose is in the last arm.
It helps that the most important aspect of our hiring process is about culture-fit - so much so that the final stage of the (pretty relaxed) hiring process is a presentation to everyone in the company who wishes to attend (regardless of role). Those presentations typically see 40% or more of the company attend. Crucially, every person in that presentation gets the opportunity to vote on whether the candidate is hired.
I've made friends for life at this company.
Having guests in the company was always an excuse to do fun stuff. Like driving one weekend to a beach/volcano in one country, planning to go to the movies in another one, and lots of tasty food. We could expense the food so we only paid for a bit of extra gas or extra bus tickets with our pocket.
As a perk we have full kitchens in our offices, and a couple of times a week we cooked lunch together with the foodie/cook ones. It was usually tastier than buying food nearby. And it was fun to learn about each country's home cooking style.
I miss that and hanging out and sight seeing with coworkers on weekends or after work... The daily commute to the local office not so much.
I've just said this earlier in another comment, but I've never had what I'd consider true friendships come out from work acquaintances. I just don't consider "I have fun with you sometimes" to be friendship, and there's exactly 0 people from all the places I've worked at I would feel comfortable say, calling at 3am if I ever felt depressed. That's friendship in my eyes, and a company retreat would never bring that kind of intimacy that's for me a requirement to actual friendship.
Now there are definitely people I would work with again without hesitation, and I'd grab a drink any time with most of my old colleagues.
But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
Some people handle remote communications just fine. Others were raised on a steady diet of internet flame wars and approach the screen names in their company chat the same way: As enemies to argue with every day.
Putting people in front of each other associates a real person with that screen name. Everyone starts treating each other better and working more cooperatively. The transformation is almost instant.
One important tip: Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible. Avoid anything on weekends or after hours as much as possible. You don’t want the team building to be an extra ask on top of their normal workload. It is their workload. Obviously flights and hotel stays must be an exception, but keep it in bounds of normal working hours as much as possible.
>Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible.
Yep. I sometimes hear people talking about how we should have team building events on the weekend. That's a big nope. In fact, while it's sometimes unavoidable, I sort of resent it when I need to travel on a Sunday to get to some event/meeting.
As you should. It was something that should have been your time, and became company time.
Maybe you should, then. I speak to my colleagues at the very least 30 minutes to 1h a day, and work full remote.
> But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family.
An approach I immensely dislike. IMHO it's a huge waste of time to pretend like most employees aren't just there to make a living. I'm not looking for a second family or to make friends, I'm here to provide my skills in exchange for money.
> But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
I don't need to like you or my coworkers to do it, they all just have to be remotely competent and do a decent job at it, and I'll do the same. Let's have fun at work when at work, then let's close our computers and have our own lives, please. If friendships evolve from there, cool, but I'm not actively looking to make friends at my workplace.
> My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
I'm 30, I'm still quite young, AFAIK.
As a developer, at least with my limited attention span, I need periods of no interruption to get anything done. That's why sometimes I stop "working" in the afternoon and resume at 00:00 for a couple of hours to really get things done.
On the family topic, I guess it's a matter of our experiences. Even at my current company, I feel like at least 2-3 of my close colleagues are sort of family. We can discuss some life issues, and we clearly care about each other. We also are totally committed to a shared goal, and we give our all in a sort of intimate way to get the result we agree on. This is the kind of sentiment I want to foster.
So working in an environment that values and supports employees creating friendships that extend outside of the office has been a huge benefit for me.
A friend is someone I feel I can confide in and would not hesitate to call if I ever needed help with something personal. I can count those on a single hand, and in my case, none of those came from work, and that kind of deeply rooted relationship definitely wouldn't come from a company or team-wide organized retreat.
I have a close group of friends that I made at my current company. Some of them have moved on, others are still here but pre-covid we made time to hang out on the weekends or after work and during covid we've done zoom hangouts and stuff like that. A number of them were at my wedding, we were all there for support when someone's mom died during the pandemic and she couldn't travel home for the funeral, and we all supported each other when one of our friend group took his own life last year.
Obviously you won't find that applicable to every job or company, but I see a lot of similarities to making friends at work and when you're in school. You spend a lot of time with the same people everyday and you probably have a shared interest or two. Sometimes that means you find people you can be friends with outside of the time you're "forced" to spend together with.
This is not the US startup scene. There are decent alternatives which don't use people up. No VCs, so no short term fixations beyond having enough runway to last 6 months.
All that said, I do believe that doing things well and providing a great collaborative atmosphere (even family-like perhaps) can lead to high performance.
What I do not want is people merely trading their time, their lives, for a bit of money. That is not living.
Similar things tend to happen when one has a circle of "friends" related to a physical activity: when they stop or change clubs, they often lose most of those "friends", as often the only thread holding things together is a shared activity and location.
At least by recognizing this, people can opt to not put all their eggs in one basket, which lessens any potential loss. Also, it allows them to look at different ways to establish friendships, in a way they can withstand more changes. Finally, there is no third party (the employer) that can use a potential insecurity against them (e.g. less financial growth because Bob is so afraid of rebuilding his circle of friends, he'll accept a stellar performance netting him 1% wage growth).
And as others point out: forced participation into social activities is not something everyone is favorable towards.
When I was 22 and taking on my first development job, I would have loved to have a family-centric groups of smart, motivated people to be a part of. Instead, I did a contract with an IBM subsidiary. We worked sort of like a family, but our idiot manager ignored our scheduling advice and promised delivery in half the time we recommended. So we worked our asses off, as a small ad-hoc family, and still lost the next contract.
What if instead this "family" could be led by a manager who understands reality and doesn't overpromise and underdeliver?
If you ever work with any person or person in a high stress situation, they will become your family or your enemy. Family is much better. And if the greater circumstance is also comprised of family, then you can take on the world. If you don't get this, then you haven't experience it yet. This is not some Cali startup bullshit. This is real people pouring themselves into something they believe in - foolishly or otherwise.
Salary is fine, but I know firsthand that if there is good free food, I will stay and work through lunch (or at least talk with my colleagues about work challenges while eating the nice food).
Look, if someone is not happy with their work, free food or free trips is only going to hold them in place for a short while. They absolutely will leave at some point, and chances are they'll either do some damage on the way out or take some IP if possible. If you don't treat people well, you get what you deserve.
I think you are dreaming of the first kind, and everyone against you in this thread is having nightmares about the second.
But I've also learned something about dealing with "corporate BS" -- if it's at least reasonably well intentioned, one can still decide to make the most of it instead of fighting everything and killing everyone else's motivation.
But I do know what fun is. I worked in the gaming industry at one point, and later in life I worked in places with Friday parties and foosball and food and spirits. Party play time can be a whole lot of fun - the kind you talk about Monday and even Tuesday and then look forward to next Friday.
Foster an environment where people work hard and you all gain, and you get to play nicely on a regular basis, and you have a place where you don't have to compete for talent. People seek you out.
those who went out for lunch did because they needed some air and distance, and that was not frowned upon at all. but trust me, good free food is a powerful motivator to stick around!
Isn't it a big net tax advantage to provide this rather than they pay in after tax (and after employer's portion of payroll tax) dollars?
I'm fully remote and this is weird to me. I might go a day or two and not talk to anyone because I'm busy on a problem, but there's always sprint planning every couple of weeks. We also have a general rule that if a slack convo gets too complicated we just start an impromptu video call in the channel and talk it out. This normally leads to a bit a banter after figuring out what we needed.
I'm quite jealous of people who can work on laptops.
I wonder the degree to which people enjoy WFH is the same as the degree to which they enjoy working on a laptop. Even the people I know with a dedicated room for work set up want to go back to the office if they prefer multiple monitors.
Going outside, working just off the laptop, is a definite shift. It usually means less coding, but sometimes it pushes me to be productive in areas I normally neglect (documenting, planning, organizing).
To do real development, I am very dependent upon a big monitor. If I travel, I take one or rent one.
Honestly though, sometimes I just go for a walk. And often during that walk, with no screens, my brain magically sorts through some problems and gives me new insights.
If you work from home though, most people agree on dedicating some space and properly equipping it. Working always only on a laptop in a floater kind of way is something that I suspect most people cannot do with any real level of productivity.
So many of my breakthroughs happen on walks. Being forced to reconstruct the situation in my head makes me think about the nitty-gritty details in a much more systematic manner.
Oh, but chairs for me are not a problem. I have been a very happy standing-worker for 13 years now. It started with hip and lower back pain in my early 30s, which seemed f'd up, and then some articles by a Mayo Clinic doctor who worked standing and sometimes on a treadmill. Turns out, it was good advice. Now I stand all day - sometimes 18 hours, and don't even notice. (To be clear, you always move a bit, shift your weight, etc.; it's not being a statue.)
I think it's all a balance of sitting and standing, and not taking one to the extreme. I say this as I just threw my back out a few weeks ago, because I was sitting all day :( So yeah, I'm not a model person to listen to either!
Slightly more seriously, there is no one answer. But in terms of total human history, sitting isn't something we spent a lot of time doing. Sleeping, lying flat, we obviously spend about 1/4 to 1/3 of our time doing. Standing or walking or running surely must be a big portion of the rest. Sitting would only be reserved for when you have the time to "do nothing". That's kind of a new concept. Thusly, I'm not afraid.
For a 50 year old nerd who hasn't exercised in a year, I'm still well above the health and capabilities of a lot of same age people. And when I'm in a good environment with outdoor play areas (mountain biking) or indoor gyms, I'm fit. Aesthetically, losing hair and gaining less elastic skin is much more a concern to me than some tiny purple lines in my ankles or knees :/
Well, allow me to be the first outlier. I typically use two monitors (tried three, didn't really add much to having two, for me); using two external monitors (attached to a laptop) right this second as I type this (and also a proper keyboard and mouse - the laptop to which they are all connected is under the desk, closed).
I am very happy indeed to continue using two monitors at home. A chap on my team uses four monitors on his setup and he's similarly happy to continue doing so from home.
Why do the people you know who like to use multiple monitors want to do so in the office rather than at home in a dedicated work room? Are they, at home, like, actually working ON the laptop? Typing on the little laptop keyboard, using the little laptop mousepad, staring at the little laptop screen?
I hate working on a laptop screen.
OTOH, I like the 34” ultrawide monitor I use at home attached to my dock better the twin 21” widescreens I had in the office, plus I get to use it, rather than a laptop, in the numerous meetings-with-computers, which were held in meeting rooms with in-person work.
Yet the last year has changed my mind. I have a 15" MBP from 2015 that is fine. My home office has an iMac, so I really don't want a second monitor crowding my desk. I just use the laptop's display and keyboard. Less stuff to worry about finding space for, or keeping the cats from fucking with.
And best of all, when work is done, I log out of the VPN, and close the lid. Of course I have Teams/Outlook on my phone if there's an emergency, but there's also a clear delineation for my family to recognize; if the laptop is open, I'm still working. If it's closed, then they can talk/pester/joke with me without worrying about my work. And it also helps me remember to not overwork.
I don't doubt that adding screen estate has value, but in the minimalistic spirit, anything added also subtracts something :) And in the same spirit, anything subtracted adds something else - in my case, the ability to work more efficiently.
Try to work on a single screen for a relatively long time (say, a few months). Over the time, you'll develop (because you're forced to) more efficient habits.
I frequently use two terminals side-by side; for this type of work, 1920p are enough [for me]. They're enough also for diffing source code, as long as the lines are not excessively long (around 100 chars fit on each side; comparing 2 lines long statements is acceptable)..
I think a use case where a single (1080p) screen is significantly inconvenient is for windows with a fixed shape, for example, debugging a videogame.
I bought a 43" (4K 3840 x 2160) and put an older (rotated) 24" right next to it - the setup works perfectly contrary to my initial worry of the main display proving to be too big. Advantage of the 43" display over an ultra-wide is that I get plenty of vertical space as well in addition to the horizontal space. That means easily having 4 80-column tall IDE windows side by side for reduced scrolling. Another advantage is that videos play full screen without any black areas on the sides. The smaller monitor is split between Slack and email - both always visible but not too distracting due to being in the peripheral vision.
Mind sharing which 43" monitor you have, and any other thoughts on its suitability for coding?
I would argue that 32" is enough. Maybe 35-40 if it were curved. Of course, if I could have a 1:1 aspect ratio screen which was spherical, that would be ideal. Even so, you only get so much benefit from larger size.
My primary monitor is an LG 27UD58 "4k". It is fantastic in terms of visual quality and even gaming. But as far as I can tell, there's no good upsize option. I'm hoping for improvements in VR style glasses which would allow me to look all around and see a virtual big screen on demand.
Two monitors are nice, but then you're always looking a bit to the left or right. Two stacked monitors are nice, but then you're looking significantly up or down. There's no good answer :/, other than a neural interface which does not yet exist.
However, few months down the line, this is the best decision I made for coding. The real estate makes a real difference. The quality of the panel is great and you soon get used to "bigness" and the ability to have so many split windows makes a huge difference in productivity. It'll probably really shine with a tiling WM/virtual workspaces (I use a non-tiling single workspace setup so that's just speculation though).
You still have to move few inches away if you are playing content full screen (my desk is wide but not very deep). I play Youtube videos expanded but not full screen and that is already big enough for me. For movies in full screen, I push my chair a bit away from the desk and put my legs on a small stool and then the experience is great.
I can understand why people who are working from their kitchen table want to go back to the office, but for those that have a dedicated work area, wouldn't they set it up the way they want?
I have a multi-monitor setup at home that's better than what I have at work since I'm not limited to IT approved hardware. Related, I also have a loud clicky keyboard that I can't get away with using at work since everyone in the shared office area can hear it.
Rules have been more flexible during Covid, but people have been working from home for so long now that height adjustable desks and external monitors something the employeers need to ensure that people have access to again, even at home.
There's no way I'd be allowed this much equipment and space in the office. I had a nice-ish 27' monitor there and a small desk crammed next to another developer.
As much as I miss the social aspects of an office, WFH has a lot of benefits. I realize this is not true for many, and a lot of my own money went into the office of my dreams here. But it's quite comfortable.
https://www.asus.com/us/Displays-Desktops/Monitors/ZenScreen...
When you do retreats do keep in mind that not everyone will want to spend a week or weekend away from their family, and that retreats with a bunch of people who can be social nonstop for 12 hours can also be the worst nightmare for introverts. Keep it optional, make sure it's clear that it's optional, make sure junior employees don't feel pressured :)
> We get the whole company together once a year for seven days so that Automatticians can create bonds that influence them all year long. So far we’ve done Grand Meetups in San Francisco, California; La Paz, Mexico; Oracle, Arizona; Breckenridge, Colorado; Mont-Sainte-Anne, Québec; Seaside, Florida; Budapest, Hungary; San Diego, California; Santa Cruz, California; Park City, Utah; Whistler, Canada; and Orlando, Florida.
> In addition to our all-company Grand Meetup, teams meet for five to seven days to brainstorm team-level strategy and bond in locales ranging from Boulder to Buenos Aires, Las Vegas to Lisbon, Montréal to Mexico City, and Vienna to Vietnam. If you join our merry band, expect to travel three to four weeks per year.
> As a distributed company we also know how to connect with each other from afar, and consider day-to-day social communication at least as important as breaking bread in person.
> Since our company consists of a distributed workforce, the majority of our employees work remotely from home, reducing the need to commute daily to a central workplace, and greenhouse gas emissions as a result. Employees at Automattic are invited to share the distance of their previous commute. On this basis we are able to calculate that we save approximately 18,207 kilometers of travel every work day.
> However, we also believe that it’s crucial to meet together in person several times a year, and those flights can have a very large impact. We don’t have exact data yet, but our rough estimate is that each Automattician is generating about 2,500kg of CO2 per year for work related flights.
Considering that they have 1424 employees listed on the map on their about page [1], let's do some simple math:
1424 employees * 2500000 g/employee CO2 = 3,560,000,000 g CO2/year
is the company's actual current footprint of the air-travel meetups.
Suppose a car emits around 200 g CO2 per km,
200 g/km * 18207 km/day * 365 days/year = 1,329,111,000 g CO2/year
if they forgo the meetups and do on-site instead. (And that's the worst case scenario of everyone driving their own car to work and zero public transportation use.)
Conclusion: Remote + air travel meetups is NOT necessarily more sustainable! In this case the CO2 emissions of remote work is almost TRIPLE.
Like, look at London. Mega house prices in the city, but they peter out pretty quickly once you cross the M25 and you start hitting semi-rural areas.
There are also people who don't work well remotely, especially if the salaries don't increase enough to rent a big enough apartment with decent lighting, or if the employee has children who constantly distract them, among others.
If you're a fully remote company, sure, it makes sense, but for a company with an actual local office, taking the team to Hawaii for 3 days just to have meetings that could have been had at conference rooms at your usual office isn't always appreciated by every member of your team, especially the ones who have {health conditions, children, pets, side gigs, ...}
But! If remote is the new way, then we don't have to live in the city center. Especially in nice countries with good train systems, we can live in more distant places where rents are cheaper and we can have an entire place with yard to spare. I'm in NL, and I have about 150 square meters of indoor space plus a big yard for less than 800 eur. Previously I spent 700 for 35sq meters and no yard. The difference now is that I'm in a village 2.5 hours from Amsterdam. As long as there are trains, I can go to the office on occasion.
I work in London, and the lack of commuting by train, stuffed with a hundred other people, has been the equivalent of very hefty pay rise, and an improvement in my health, such that I haven't been ill, at all, since Xmas 2019.
I want to go back, but only for a couple of days a week if possible. I know I've signed a contract with my employer stating my place of employment and so on, so I'm resigned to the fact that it will likely be 3 or 4 days.
But I agree with only a few of the original author's sentiments. Not having to share an open plan office with a hundred other people has massively improved my productivity and health.
This is a caste culture issue. It's orthogonal to productivity and real returns.
If you set up your chilled culture, you'd better stay bootstrapped. If you take VC money, most are going to push for a less liberal line.
The details of an ideal employee policy can be debated, but you’re right there with the 4 hours hard work, 2 hours social interaction, and the rest up to the employee. Especially a free trip with the staff every now and then to bond. Something you can’t really find at big companies anymore.
The only way to really give employees freedom to work from anywhere completely at their own discretion is to let them work full-time remote.
If you require any face time at the office at all, then they have to live within commuting distance, or at least within flying distance.
An employee may prefer to work from Bali, but if he has to go into the office twice a month, he can't (reasonably) do that.
That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company.
I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when). Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the birds, etc., while working, is just about as happy as I can be while also working on stuff that doesn't really matter much.
As I begin to form my own company, one of my priorities is to allow my employees to have at least some of their time completely at their own discretion. They choose when and where they work as long as they can attend some important anchor meetings (and obviously be productive). And for the social aspect, weekend or week-long dev retreats are ideal. 4 hours of intense serious work, plus a couple of hours of colleague social interaction, and the rest left to the individual to spend however they like, is the kind of situation I would have not even been able to dream of when I was younger.
And from a bean-counter owner perspective, do not underestimate the employee loyalty and overachievement motivation you can get by giving some nice free trips, nice free food, and quality equipment.
Big companies lack this freedom to treat their creative talent not because they cannot afford it but because the people in charge tend to not be creative thinkers. This is why most interesting things happen in smaller companies (and ultimately tend to get bought by the laggard big companies).