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).