For some Facebook employees, definitely. Personally, I think I'll be finding a job elsewhere now.

To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."

For example, Coinbase didn't just allow remote but shut down the SF office for this reason. Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized, and employees are actively discouraged from eating with any teammates.

If you're the type of personality who gets energized by collaboration with teammates, if you like the real teammate relationships that more easily develop with facetime, then it's not a matter of allowing remote coworkers but whether those remote coworkers now get to advocate for actively destroying any office culture.

Again, I understand why there's many advantages of remote work, but let's not pretend the people who didn't want to go remote are unaffected.

I think it is totally fine for an employee to make the decision to work from home and obtain greater freedom at the cost of worse promotion outcomes.

The problem is that if employers say “hey you can work from home, but you are less likely to get promoted than your peers working in the office” they open themselves to discrimination lawsuits. What if there is a strong correlation between those who choose to work from home and a specific demographic? Well it turns out that women may be much more likely to WFH given the choice. Does this mean that the WFH policy is sexist given that women are much more likely to WFH and WFH employees have worse career outcomes?

I believe that this isn’t discrimination by the company because non-women who WFH have similar career outlooks to women who WFH, but there may be a case there and nobody wants to put that case to the test. Instead we get these WFH policies which bring everyone down — to accommodate those who made a choice to sacrifice their career prospects by working from home.

Disclaimer: I love working from home

Source: https://hbr.org/2021/05/dont-let-employees-pick-their-wfh-da...

Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.

That doesn’t fix the issue. Even if everything is declared “hybrid” there is still going to be an “in” group of people working in the office most days and an “out” group of people working from home most days.

> Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.

Having objective performance evaluations which are agnostic to WFH would be ideal but I am not sure if they are realistic. You are working against human nature and tribalism: it is much easier to have favourable opinions of those you interact with regularly. Not to mention that very few work places actually have objective measurements of employee performance, it is mostly all optics and how well the employee sells themselves.

The linked study (in my comment) says otherwise. WFH employees were better performers on average. This means that WFH employees — when normalized for performance — had much worse promotion rates that their office peers.

If the office mic in the room only picks up one person, the remote person will be left out; the 2 in office will feel disdain for the remote miscommunication.

I mean, that's kind of horrific, but it's the sort of thing people are thinking of.

The other mechanism is, even if people are in offices, construct teams so everyone is in a different one, and so everything is remote even if you are in an office.

It's horrific, but I expect this to be "accepted" behavior once we return to office.

My perspective on that is that, at my workplace, the L4 lockdown in NZ was actually a significant improvement, which might sound counter-intuitive. That's because there was an implicit decision-making process where people local to your floor/building/city tended to talk together and remotes were second class. Once we were all on an equal footing - forced to be explicit in who we bought into Zoom/Teams/etc sessions - we got improved and more thoughtful interaction.

Since we've left L4/L3 we've managed to preserve that culture, even with people dropping into a cadence of a few days in the office and a few days remote, because it's normalised the idea that every conversation has a remote component. That's persisted for a good 9 months, so we'll see how it persists.

I'm sorry what? How/why are they doing that? Huh? I'm lost

Is this permanent? My employer is reopening, but I'm expecting it'll be awhile before amenities like free meals and snacks get back to normal. There may be more health restrictions initially.

I work in a applied ML and really, the technical aspects of the jobs are the 'easiest', ie. most well defined. In most cases focus + time will be sufficient for me to produce technical work. However, the real challenges lie at the intersections of models, infra, code, product and users. The goal is rarely is to build the best solution, it's to build the right solution.

Solutions to these can only be found by collaborating with people who own each specific part. Intense whiteboarding, pair programming, brainstorming, etc were the most interesting parts of my job. All of them have been reduced to a shadow of what they were during remote work.

Also, if I'm going to spend 50% of all my waking hours with a group of people, then I better like spending time with them. Being cooped up in a room my myself all day isn't fun at all. (and I have a huge community outside work, but it I don't like waiting for the other 50% to enjoy it)

My coworkers are my good friends and if they weren't then I'd go somewhere else. (not drinking the Koolaid. I have no allegiance to corporate, just my nuclear peer group)

A 'flexible or remote-optional team' is a lie. Remote and in-person are diametrically opposed office cultures. Both require very different cultural traits to flourish. Ones that try to stay on the fence will inevitably converge into one of the two or end up as a complete disaster. ( coordinated 3 days at work, 2 days at home etc can work...but that's just at-office culture with benefits)

> My coworkers are my good friends

I think you need to make friends outside work. Live a little.

> and I have a huge community outside work, but it I don't like waiting for the other 50% to enjoy it

I literally addressed this. I stay in a group home and have a large community outside work. I don't want to wait for 6pm everyday to access people I like.

If anything, try making friends with people you spend time with for 50% of your waking hours. Live a little

Once a few colleagues are remote, all collaboration has to assume remote as the default. Even if I'm in the office I'm still stuck with remote collaboration, but I still have a commute.

The upsides for me of being in the office massively outweigh the downsides, but only if my colleagues are there too.

In practice I feel like you could just aim to have some teams be mostly people who like office and other teams be mostly remote. Would be awkward hiring wise though to send someone to a different team just on there office vs remote view.

If most of your team is not working remotely - let's be honest - it'll be hard for a remote worker to not feel disconnected with the rest of the team.

What happens if you don't?

If, after a few years, you still need to be told what to do in order to be productive day-to-day, you’re simply not developing, and unless you figure out what’s going on you’re probably going to struggle to build a successful career.

For my own team, the bar I set for giving higher assessment ratings was how well you could make and keep commitments to the team. If, after working in the code base with the group of people for a year or so, you couldn’t independently come up with useful things to commit to doing and couldn’t deliver in the timeframes you said you could, I would start asking you whether you are really happy and motivated doing what you’re doing with your career. For the few times I had to do that, the member of my team ended up admitting to themselves that they were making a mistake trying to do this type of work, and they moved on to something else where they were more happy and successful.

Roughly, "senior" at a lot of places.