I say this as someone who managed mixed distributed / WFH teams: If in-person conversations are an advantage (and they are), no company is going to willingly surrender them for the sake of catering to the people who aren't in the office.

That doesn't mean teams can ignore the remote team members. It's everyone's responsibility to communicate and share information. However, there's no sense in reducing the efficiency of in-office employees just to level the playing field.

The strategies that worked best for my teams were to structure the hires and the workloads according to who could work best together. For example, having an in-office back end team combined with a WFH front-end team works well, because the communication is naturally segmented across team boundaries anyway.

On the other hand, if you put one of the front-end devs in the office with the back-end devs while everyone else is WFH, you need to be prepared to make that in-office person the team lead because they're going to become the primary communication point whether you want it or not.

I love my mixed distributed/WFH teams, but I'll never deny that in-office communication still reigns supreme. That said, distributed can be made to work as long as you do your planning and structuring around the natural communication lines rather than trying to fight it.

Also, there's this new invention called "doors" that I wish companies would get on board with. I hear that "opening" one's "door" can be used as an invitation to chat. :)

They had a new building constructed, including a very coveted corner office. A student organization was absolutely delighted when they received that corner office, and thought it was a sign of growing appreciation for their work. Turns out, it was actually a way out of a political quagmire: professors had fought for that office so bitterly that it had gotten to a web of "ok, I will accept that you're not giving it to me, as long as X doesn't get it either". The student organization wasn't really hated by anybody enough to be part of this web, so they got it just as a way to avoid pissing anyone off too much.

Must be very new since our office had none bar for the meeting rooms.

This reminds me the time I was working at the office. We had an open floor plan, and so no doors (except the CEO).

It was sometimes nice to talk to people, but there were times when I was deeply in code, and someone asked a small random question from me. It was clearly because he/she wanted just to talk. This would have been better to ask through Slack as I could then continue my work and answer later.

So what I usually did was a) stayed home for deep work hours or b) put on my headset and listened to music to indicate that my "door" was closed.

And yes, with the CTO the physical door was an indication: if it was open, we went in and discussed something, and he was always happy to do so. When it was closed, we didn't interrupt him, and when we did, you could feel that he was feeling indeed interrupted.

I am curious on 1) the size of your teams, and 2) your opinion on how this would work with E2E product domain based teams (mixed skill sets) vs skills based teams e.g. User engagement team (front and backend devs covering sign on, emails, etc) vs Backend engineers (maintain all backend systems, etc).

The organization will never be perfect and stay perfect, but as long as you pay attention to it when hiring and designing teams then it can be close.

There is no sense in not teaching high level math to gifted children, yet it is still happening in the name of equity. Just watch and see in person meeting getting banned in the name of equity as we progress from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism.

I have seen this implication frequently in these discussions, that remote workers will get fewer promotions, lower ratings, etc.

The assumption is that this therefore makes remote work non-viable. I don't really get that. Trading off better compensation through promos and ratings is just a business decision for the potential remote worker.

Personally, I would trade never getting a promotion again for remote work. Google and the other companies like it already pay very, very well. If you've reached E6+, it's "FIRE in <10 years" well, even if you get "meets all" ratings forever. If you're in that position, you can be making 10x the median household income. You've basically won at money.

Commuting is miserable, and I bike, easily one of the two least miserable methods (walking being the other) of doing so. Open offices are miserable. Flexibility at home is amazing. Having my own space is amazing. Making my own food for lunch, in my kitchen, is great. Feeling unfocused and deciding to just take a nap in my own bed for an hour.

So yeah, maybe I'll never get a promotion. But, I don't think I'll do poorly enough to get fired, so... good enough for me.

Trade you say? Sounds like win-win to me! Not being made to manage/lead a bunch of other engineers sounds pretty nice

Leadership also implies that you are responsible / accountable for the performance of your team. Both your team as well as outside stakeholders will look to you for answers. Hence "management is not a promotion". Not everyone is cut out take on such a role, and not everyone is willing to take on such so role.

> Eventually you might master your domain of expertise and solving the same problem again and again for different customers may become boring

Can I pick this apart?

In the short run? Perhaps. In the long run? That's highly dependent on the industry and your role. Sure, the foundational challenges might be the same - e.g. reconcile user experience, content management and data storage - but the surface level solutions and problems are always evolving, which can keep the job engaging as you grow into it.

The "you're going to get bored in 5 years time" argument is value attribution. Would you make the same assertion towards a medical specialist having a long career in liver or eye surgery? Or an artisanal cabinet maker? Or a shoe designer? Likely not.

Then there are specialists in other industries like oil, welding, car body work, paint jobs,... I mean, even hair dressers - arguably - do the same thing year in year out. Many make careers out of those, and many others move out after a few years feeling that the job has stopped giving them value.

Now, the big risk with a job is that it becomes extremely repetitive and there's little potential for agency as a worker to change the job. For instance, nobody gets happy spending 20 years in front of a screen clicking the same five buttons doing micro-jobs or data entry, or banging in the same 20 commands on a prompt for that matter,... But this has far less to do with the particular role, and everything with the work itself.

In that regard, it's arguable that "move towards a leadership role", or even "coach co-workers", are the only career options to move out of job which just doesn't give you pride and satisfaction after some time.

Moving lateral towards another engineering role, inside or outside your current organization, are completely valid strategies as well. Heck, it doesn't even have to be an engineering role at all. It's completely valid to leave the industry and do something totally different, if you have the financial freedom, and/or freedom from other personal obligations, to do so.

Of the young co-workers I've coached over a decade ago, about half went on in IT, and the other half moved towards entirely different industries doing entirely different things with their lives. And that's entirely fine by me if that's what helps them live happy lives.

I don't believe it works like that. U get fewer promotion not because you are remote worker. The problem is that you can become less valuable resource, who can effectively make less overall impact on the product. Hence lower rating. So for employer is not trade-off between pay/remoteness, rather between better employee or remoteness. Basically nobody cares if you are remote or not if you can do your job efficiently. And be transparent and manageable.

VC is automatically added to meetings, every room is equipped with the proper AV, and culturally, people often actually click the right buttons to start the VC even when they aren't expecting VC guests. I don't remember ever attempting to join a meeting over VC and having the main location forget to join (although it probably happened to someone every once in a while).

At least on our team, we tended not to have those 2 minute conversations. The code-review tools are top tier, so we would use those if at all possible. Most of our non-meeting communication otherwise was in buganizer (the bug tracker), Google groups via email, Google docs, or IRC (they were getting rid of it around when I left).

I think the only exception was Nooglers. We had Nooglers sit next to a mentor on the team, and they would usually ask lots of simple questions out loud throughout the day.

In at least one Google building I worked in, for a while conference rooms were in such short supply that if you didn't start the VC, after a few minutes some calendar bot would decide that the room wasn't being used, remove your reservation from the room, and five minutes later someone else would show up and try to kick you out.

I have set aside 30 minute blocks on my calendar for "drop-ins" for exactly this flavor of conversation. I'm the only person on the invite list, but others know about its existence and will find the link on my calendar as needed. Sometimes no one shows up, other days the block turns into an impromptu large group brainstorm, other times it's back-to-back 2 min conversations.

It's essentially another of the very popular nudge tricks that are all the rage at the moment, and will result in everybody being back in the office. The 'choice' on offer isn't a choice at all. It's a management device to all but eliminate remote working and allow them back into their comfort zone.

For remote to work everybody has to be remote and work via a central communication device. That way everybody is in the same 'office space' and the culture evolves around that to get the work done. Management then changes natures to suit the remote environment. (Note you can do 'all remote' on a campus - you give everybody an office!)

I can guarantee you that if firms were required by law to pay for the time spent commuting, they would all choose to go remote permanently unless there was a physical reason to be in the same space.

But it is for the workers to see commuting as part of work time, and calculate what they are getting paid per hour accordingly.

I’m not going to go across a building and up steps to ask someone a question unless I am out of other options. I’m not. You’re not. I’ve done too many 5 Why’s where one of the answers was “they made a guess because they couldn’t be arsed to cross the building to verify things”.

We might message that person, if we use it and they actually read their messages. At which point being in the office isn’t quite as transformative.

Now I have to find time in our day loaded with zoom meetings with other people with just as convoluted zoom meeting schedules to zoom with Fred for ten minutes. We might not find a good mutual time to meet until next week.

Scheduling zoom calls vs. leaning back in your chair when your coworker has a second is an entirely different animal when it comes to workplace efficiency. I'd say I'm spending a lot more of my working time scratching my head than getting things done vs. before the pandemic.

There are good things about working from home, but this is probably one of the worst parts in terms of work. It's like studying alone in your cramped bedroom vs in the library with your buddies in college.

Some people work half time, should we all not socially interact during their absence, because it would disadvantage them as well?

The enemy of better is best, and I feel you are actually making a case against home working by being so extreme in your demands. Some people would like to work from home, understanding it adds a social challenge, but still prefer it for a myriad of reasons.

And some people need to be in an office to be productive. I think it's a nobler goal to try cater to both, than set up some extreme all or nothing scenario.

Seems like giving people a choice is the right idea. Maybe being less involved in these impromptu conversations is a worthwhile tradeoff for being able to live where they want.

I don't think these companies have thought this through. Logically, the 3 days a week in office will slowly become 2, then 1. Or maybe teams will decide to only get together 3 days a month or something like that.

At that point, you're effectively fully virtual anyway.

These companies need to just dive right in, because the suggested format smells of poorly thought out compromise.

This is a tired take. Google Hangouts and Slack Video are quick and work great.