My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach.

Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired. If someone wants to bail to a seaside town during the worst of winter, no problem.

People aren't forced to live in overpriced urban areas, they can live where they choose to!

> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.

I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.

Since the pandemic began I have been putting under 3000 miles a year on my car. I am eating home cooked meals every day. Mid day I can walk down to the local grocery store and pick up food to cook later for dinner.

My QoL is insanely improved.

If I need maintenance work done (Late last year I bought a house that was built in the 1950s, so, yes, lots of that happening) I am here all day long if need be. I don't have to worry about when expensive packages are delivered, I am always here to pick them up. I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be. I can schedule doctors and dentists appointments at any time of the day and not have to take a day off of work to make them.

And so on and so forth. WfH rocks.

For many people with younger children (and therefore early evening bedtimes), having or not having a commute is not a difference of an hour or two of your day - it's the difference between spending time with your family during the week versus not at all. I've heard this from many friends (and some family) across different industries - hardly any have wanted to stick their heads above the parapet and single themselves out as being a problem.

I already empathised, but this whole thing has really thrown a light on what working parents (specifically those with primary care responsibilities like school pick-ups and drop-offs) in the workplace have been dealing with this whole entire time.

tldr; A great many people have had an increase of 150% of the time they care about the most by working from home - this proposal takes that away from them.

Haha, you say. But my 3 year old doesn’t sleep before 10 :P

That said, being able to pick him up and drop him off at daycare without having to rush is really nice.

OTOH, WFH people living alone can go many days without any human interaction.

There is no arrangement that is "best" for everyone.

Remote or in-office, that's not healthy. Go outside. Make real friendships with people you don't work with. And if you're struggling with that, then seek help. But don't force me into a car for 10 hours per week, just to help you fake a social support network.

Believe it or not, a lot of people do make friends at work. I can see why that might happen less for you.

They didn't say anything is wrong with having friends at work, only that using work as your only social avenue is unhealthy.

What's stopping you from doing the same?

You can't really get time with your kids when you work from the office, but you can get socialization when you're not working.

dont threaten me with a good time

Then if it turns out the coworking mates are a bunch of jerks, you can switch without wondering if you'll be able to pay rent next month.

Seems pretty cool to me.

Many people WFH and their kids have been stuck at home, they dont feel safe popping to the coffee shop for a few hours of work, and they dont feel safe going to social events.

Once people feel fully safe doing those things and the kids are back in school in person WFH life will elevate for so many.

- Noise cancelling headphones work as well at home as they do at work. I love mine.

- Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.

Anyway, person-to-person and day-to-day differences in productivity are pretty large in my experience. Of course you could be in a bust-your-butt-for-a-promotion kind of situation, but you could also take the attitude that you're getting paid for what you actually do, and the fact that you are not top 1% productivity is reflected in your current "help-at-home-when-I-am-needed" salary.

This is actually the bug, not the feature. These people have bought noise cancelling headphones, so when they join a meeting everyone else it bothered.

>Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.

Why are you doing work outside of working hours? That does not make sense.

Noise cancelling headphones have directional mics that typically do a very good job of only picking up the wearer's voice.

If people really want to sound clear, a headset with a mic boom is every better. 0 background noise gets through.

These are all very well solved problems.

Heck my laptop back in 2005 (!!!) had a directional mic array. I could use an included utility app to control where in the room I wanted the mic to record from, I could record from in front of my laptop when going to lectures, or have the mics pointed at me when recording myself.

(That was a super cool laptop!)

If that were the case when everyone was at the office it just couldn't get done.

If you are just picking up a call from your boss to work without being paid overtime then don't do the work. Only exception is if you have flexlible working time e.g. 32 hours per month then you just do a shorter day at some point.

That is me, and I account for time off during day to play with my 10 month son by spending an extra hour after dinner finishing up work.

WfH gives me the flexibility to do that. WfH also means I don't have to take an entire day off if my son has a mid-day doctors appointment. Everyone wins.

> Also the constant background noise of kids crying or some kids show playing it pretty annoying.

Your company should spend the few extra $$ on good headsets for everyone.

My company uses WebEx, which in 2020 had no background noise elimination, but now days it does it quite well.

I can be in a room with another person talking, loudly, and it won't come through on my mic. But I also have a nice Bose headset.

My wife's headset with a dedicated boom mic also works really well in this regard.

Airpods, eh, not sure how much I trust people using airpods. :)

FWIW unless I am talking, I mute myself, and all of my colleagues do the same.

It works when the team is used to and knows how to connect with each other online and to keep those connections going through the day/week. I'm an (highly functioning) introvert and even I hate video onboarding. I've done it twice during pandemic and it sucks big time if the team is not ready for online lifestyle/workstyle. Several months in and I still don't feel like I belong, it's just all the people busying away on their own, like in a univerity groupwork. I miss my old work when the chat was actually a place for smalltalk, instead of a place for just sharing technical knowledge or updating progress.

Feels like some companies think that remote work is exactly like onsite, just virtually. Well, it's not. Dynamics is different, workflow is different, everybody has to adapt. I genuinely want to work remote, I don't think I'll be back to office anymore, but I still need the team that knows how to actually be a team online.

So I went in and... it worked out really well. Quality of life is fantastic, productivity too. It's like we've never done it another way. For the contractors it was even an improvement, because now they were on the same level as the rest. Based on this experience, we have started to hire people from abroad and whoever wants can stay remote.

Advantages of remote:

- 100% focus as long as you have a proper working place.

- Perfect time management as you will interact at planned times and under an agenda.

- No more smells from my colleagues atrocious culinary choices.

- No more being annoyed by sales guys trying to jump the queue for their deal this quarter.

Ask anyone in hardware.

Sure, many and myself included here, setup home labs. Those really help, particularly when boards are small and or one can setup or build a test harness or other suitable device.

I currently work a mix, and onsite is needed, but not always.

My current preference is to do both, and my company just moved. We downsized office space, added a common work area, and I have a home lab and another person is building one up now.

Being sick is bot such a big deal.

We all got much better at the various comms tools too.

As for your other items:

Sales people, who are effective, will find ways. (As they should by the way. New money feeds everyone else.)

Point taken on the smells, but for me I don't care.

Perfect time management? Lolol if it works for you, great. Tons of people will struggle with this anyway.

Having a place to focus is all about the workplace. Can be at home, at work, rented... this one is not really an argument for work at home as much as it is workplace advocacy generally.

I recently switched jobs, and have been to the office once (to pick up equipment and get set up) and it's a completely different dynamic. I don't really know any of my colleagues, chatting online occasionally isn't the same as meeting in person, etc. I still game a few times a week with people from my last two jobs, but I can't see the same happening for this job.

On the whole though, I do prefer it. My work relationships are probably lacking more but my quality of life is greatly improved.

That sounds more like a company culture issue. It's surprising that there isn't a small talk channel. You should suggest one, they can be pretty valuable

My company always had offices spread around the country that worked close with one another, so going full remote was a change, but honestly not a huge change.

We have regular coffee/tea breaks every afternoon, no work talk allowed. A variety of online social events helps round things out.

Is it the same as working in an office together? Of course not. But while I have worked on some great teams that gelled really well, IMHO the majority of work teams don't have deep bonds.

What WfH really did kill was the ability to create informal connections between teams, the types of connections that help Get Things Done faster than usual. I feel that is the one true, huge, drawback of WfH.

A manager I worked with once pre-pandemic had his idea of "business hammocks" for the office repeatedly shot down. He was a genius though.

I had the most ridiculously comfy couch in my office. Blue, threadbare, worn-in. Every time anyone sat down in it I warned them that they were going to fall asleep if they stayed there too long. Without fail, I'd hear wood sawing after a manner of minutes. Vendors, colleagues, the CIO, the CEO, my wife dropping by to visit, that couch was insidious.

The one we had was pretty great too, but not quite as intoxicatingly good as yours.

But, it had a big, brass buddha at one end. Rub the belly for good karma...

This thread is getting me to seriously consider another one. Just started a new company and we all know how that is. A comfy couch might be just the thing.

Sounds like nap pods lol

Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.

Commuting is different in different places. For me it is 15 minute drive to the office from a neighboring smaller city where property prices are 5x lower.

I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.

I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.

I live in an apartment complex so the super has the keys to do whatever work needs to be done without my presence. I could take my deliveries at the office (and I often did since I saw clear improvement on delivery dates when they delivered to a business instead of residential address). Doctor visits were never an issue, because remote work was always an option and many people did work a day or two every week remotely.

If past experience is anything to go by I will get flooded with people saying that I should just do better and be better remote worker (like I probably shouldn't be writting this on company time) instead of acknowledging that different people are different and working at the office fits me and my life style better and that I've optimized for that lifestyle long before the pandemic hit. I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.

People spending time on other things could be a sign that they either don't want to can't do full 8h anyway. I can't, just can't, my mind does not work that way. I can spend 2-3 days at the lowest gear just barely ticking boxes and then get everything done in one productive day. I'd be happy and I dare say more productive for the dollar when working 6h for 20% reduced pay. I now still work 6h but stretched to 8h and I don't have guilt free extra 2h for my own stuff because I feel like I should be accomplishing something no matter my health, the weather, my emotional state or other factors going on in my life.

It's a shame that people working in, say, low paying jobs in restaurants, care work, supermarkets, cleaning or factories can't say the same.

Dear god, people enjoying their life. This is the worst. Clearly society can't function unless everyone is miserable.

Have you ever considered that maybe the entire 8 hour work day is bullshit? That it is entirely possible for people to contribute productively within different time-frames?

>I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.

What does this have to do with working from home? What could remote work possibly have to do with your inability to stick to a gym routine?

>I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.

You won't "lose some people". Unless your company has the pay and clout that Google has, your company will be decimated by a wave of people quitting.

Have you considered some reading comprehension? Read the first sentence you quoted again and stop pushing your own opinion and gospel.

>What does this have to do with working from home? What could remote work possibly have to do with your inability to stick to a gym routine?

This too is super disingenious line of questioning. How aobut not being able to go to anywhere else? Feels pretty weird just to drive to the gym and back.

>You won't "lose some people". Unless your company has the pay and clout that Google has, your company will be decimated by a wave of people quitting.

ROFL

That has nothing to do with working from home though, it has to do with the pandemic. I go places during my lunchbreak in work from home now that there are vaccines and things are open again - it's so convenient, if I need to duck to the store or the chemist or I want to pick up food from a local cafe.

I'm going to be honest with you, I occasionally play video games during work hours at the office too. Way I figure it, if no one is saying anything about my output then they are receiving the value they expect for what they're paying me, and I'm not charitable enough to give them more than that.

I was only able to work from home during this whole thing for 2 weeks when the entire department had COVID (myself included). I played through Factorio[0] during those two weeks and nobody noticed.

[0] I didn't like it. It's very well made and I cannot say it doesn't successfully implement exactly the experience it intends to, I just didn't actually have fun.

Also one guy doing this overtly errodes the whole team. Like why should I work all day while you play video games or go skiing or whatever in the middle of the day? Yeah nobody is complaining because they are being nice and/or assuming that your productivity has dipped do to the pandemic.

> assuming that your productivity has dipped do to the pandemic.

Why do you not assume that productivity has dipped due to the pandemic and instead believe it is because people are working remote?

as long as their tasks are done, who cares? i take a 30min nap after lunch almost every day but i could also do a FFXIV dungeon instead.

You sound like a micromanager. If you have notable metrics that show decreased output, then raise the issue and correct it. But don't say that everyone should be subject to losing privileges due to your team's poor performance.

Wouldn’t that snow be just as annoying to deal with for getting to work?

And waking up early just to walk to the gym and back feels weird.

We as humans are not designed to be productive selves 5 days in a row, for 8 hours a day. If I'm not feeling well or having a bad day, I might finish working an hour or two early but make up for it by working overtime another day that week. It doesn't matter that I cut that day short - I wasn't going to be very productive if I wasn't feeling well anyway.

The 9-5, 8 hour work day was designed for PHYSICAL labor during the industrial revolution where output was directly correlated to time. This is not the case anymore. If someone can meet/exceed their responsibilities in 5 hours, why do they need to spend 8 hours just because slower workers need that time? This just punishes efficient workers.

That is no issue. In fact in my company we don't care how long you work per day or when you work. People tell us how many hours they can work per month and they get paid accordingly. Of course the union sets some minimum and maximum numbers we can do, but in essense it is normal to work flexible hours. Even to just take days off and do either longer days or work on a weekend/holiday if that's what you want. Or work hours "into bank" before hand and then take days/hours off. No problem with that.

My problem is guys literally working 9-5, expect "lunch break" takes 2-3 hours since they are playing a video game.

>If someone can meet/exceed their responsibilities in 5 hours, why do they need to spend 8 hours just because slower workers need that time? This just punishes efficient workers.

Except people will always find excuses why it wasn't their fault the feature/release/product didn't ship in time.

You missed the entire point of my comment. If they take 2-3 hour lunch breaks and meet/exceed their company and performance goals, then it shouldn't matter how long they are working. Results matter, not time.

Yeah, kinda guilty of that. Zero gym and during the winter hours where end of work = end of sun, I've had times where I take a walk. Usually more than 1 unproductive day leads to me just using a bit of the moonlight oil to catch up. Nothing super drastic, but e.g. last month there was a day where I just had a burst of productivity to ride for some 3-4 hours at 18:00.

Game wise, I'm never going full "well time to boot up the PS5", but I have been playing a lot more mobile games on the side while stuff compiles.

>I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine

Well, tech is an even hotter market than a pre-pandemic so in my industry I'm not too worried about anyone pursuing full remote. It can go vice versa for those companies that go full remote and for people who want that separation of life.

I still want some office to go into, but I do hope that this pandemic changes some attitudes about the times where I made need to take a "sick but still productive" day at home, or when I travel and need a week to just report in remotely. Flexibility is nice in a pinch and in previous companies that was a pain.

I don't get this. If you are sick then be sick. Instead of working 3-5 days in half capacity just take a rest day or two and you'll be back to 100%. As I've understood some countries have limited sick days, but that's not a thing here. I always tell my team members to take sick day if they don't feel 100% because over all it will be more productive if people work they they are healthy.

And as per pre-pandemic remote working days were always an option, just not full time since there were days like sprint start and ending days that were much smoother when everyone was present in person.

My team used to play street fighter or super smash bros during lunch.

However, a decrease in output is a separate issue that needs to be addressed by the employee's manager/leader.

> I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.

My company's office is close to only a couple worthwhile restaurants (WTF Downtown Seattle, if you aren't next to cap hill you are boned). While at home, I have multiple good options within walking distance to me.

Check if you are within shef.com's service area. Home made meals from local cooks. Great stuff.

> I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms.

Once they reopen, WfH means the time saved on commuting can be turned into gym time!

Prior to WfH I had to bring workout clothes and a towel with me if I wanted to hit the gym before lunch. Because my commute was on a bus, that was crammed full standing room only shoulder to shoulder, adding a gym bag in the mix was no fun.

Instead you should be an advocate for mixed teams. Why can't your remote coworker just zoom into the meeting with you onsite?

We can all be accommodating to each other.

Second it the actual logistics. It was always pain to accommedate the one or two remotees by having some kind of conference phone-thing. Over all it is just way more convenient and nicer to talk face to face. In my opinion even all online meeting is better than hybrid one.

I've seen people playing ping pong during work hours in the office. They even have tournaments sometimes.

The horror.

What about all the people who already knew spending 2 hours commuting was a terrible use of our time before the pandemic, regardless of how much of a bigger house we could get?

So we lived in dense cities, in walkable neighborhoods, where the office was a 15 minute walk away but so were restaurants, parks, grocery stores, and theaters?

But part of the exchange we made was that our houses/apartments were small, and were for LIVING not for working. We don't have a spare bedroom to turn into a segregated office, so instead the work/home life has been an overlapping mess for 2 years.

Also, if WfH spreads, many of the people who made the same choice, getting a small apartment in a dense city for living only, will probably make a different choice now and move somewhere else. I know many people who did just that. I expect this will lower the prices of housing in cities, which means you could live in a bigger apartment if you wanted.

The only option here is either having a member of the team always one step behind, or changing the entire organisation of the team to revolve around that guy. People who prefer "in-office" work would rather make the effort of commuting so that they do not have to deal with that. So they expect the other people in their team to do the same, otherwise there is little to no point.

My point is that "let's invest in great offices for those who want, but let people do what they want regardless" is not really an option, because you are paying the organisational and financial price, and not really getting the benefits of either.

I believe most organisation working in "hybrid" model will impose fixed days at the office - so they can get the full benefits of the "in-office" time. And let other days at home, so that people working better remotely can enjoy that as well. Teams will organise around that, eg by schedule most meetings on "in-office" days.

This is awfully close to sunken cost fallacy - we have invested so much in it, therefore we have to use it no matter what circumstances.

> I believe most organisation working in "hybrid" model will impose fixed days at the office - so they can get the full benefits of the "in-office" time. And let other days at home, so that people working better remotely can enjoy that as well.

This is the worst option for many people because it would force them still live within reasonable commuting distance, resulting them not being able to move to lcol area or closer to their parents/communities/etc. What's the point then of allowing them to go remote when it's not really remote, but rather "not here, but still close"? Yea, it will work with some pople, but for others it makes things worse.

Some agree with the idea that remote is strictly "better", but many do not. Bear in mind that we had the opportunity to create fully remotes companies for a long time, and some succeeded, but most companies were still office-only or office-first. Similarly, some companies will move to remote-first post pandemic, but it does not look like everyone will - far from it. And everyone is making their pro-and-cons analysis.

> What's the point then of allowing them to go remote when it's not really remote

Here is the point: this is not remote. It's office-first with some days were you are going to be allowed not to come, in order to lower the commuting time and get more "alone" time. For people who want to work remote, from anywhere, this is not cutting it. And it's not trying to. For people who still love the office but have some complain about having to go every single day, this is a nice option.

Amazing how the realities of our financial system and transaction structure basically necessitates projection of a management groups will on others isn't it?

Couldn't have anything to do with the overrepresentation of psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies amongst corporate decisionmakers...

Yeah that only works for very small teams the moment you are like ten or os, even in an office first setting will be away for whatever reason, tradespeople coming, feeling sick etc

> Going on lunch and discussing about your project ? Too bad.

> . Got an idea you ran by a colleague at the coffee machine ?

> . A state of the project on a whiteboard in the office ?

> No, you need to use Jira.

Too bad that you need to put that into writing so later it can be referenced or you end up headscratching at a git commit which doesn't refer a ticket three months down the road

deanCommie's argument was around a choice of living arrangements based on the idea that work would happen at the office, and there not being any space for work at home, so a purely logistical one.

Coordination between on-site and remote workers is a separate issue, though I agree it is absolutely important.

> People who prefer "in-office" work would rather make the effort of commuting so that they do not have to deal with that. So they expect the other people in their team to do the same, otherwise there is little to no point.

I guess it works both ways. People who prefer "from home" would rather make the effort of communicating by text / visio so that they don't have to deal with the commute.

Precisely ! That's why it's important to communicate clearly to every person of the team the working agreement that are expected - and to enforce them. If the agreement is that no one is expected to have to commute, and everything must be done so they don't have to, that's perfectly fine - as long as everyone plays the game. And any person still insisting to meet "somewhere" because they don't like emails/IM/zoom needs to be talked to.

Similarly, if the rules are : you have to come to the office 3 days/week, expect that some things will happen in person, show up, and play the game. If you start insisting that everything needs to be organised in a way that allows you to stay fully remote and not show up, you need to review your position.

The important part is to ensure that expectations are clearly expressed - and enforced. Which Google is doing.

But it's frequent enough you can still hold most of your stuff for inperson if you didn't want to have the overhead of remote working.

If that's the style you prefer, then you need a co-working space to replace the office, in the same way your place probably isn't big enough to entertain people for dinner so you use a restaurant. And it's too dense with the neighbours to throw a proper party with dancing, so you use the bars and clubs.

At least this is my understanding from having done a bit of both.

WfH means not needing to buy for commute. Buy for lifestyle. Still want to live urban? Get a co-working space.

I would also argue that small apartment can be very limiting also for living. I mean, sure, if you spend all your free time in those restaurants, parks, grocery stores and theaters, then it may actually work. But if you wanna do anything that requires personal space, then living in a small apartment is very limiting.

I love my solo lunchbreak walk just to empty my head or just think instead of having to talk or interact with team members.

International companies have been doing this for decades.

Until I retired at the end of 2017 I had worked for over twenty years in a team which had developers and domain experts in the following countries: Norway, UK, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, USA (several states), Canada, Poland.

Occasional collaboration is different from day to day, and I'm sure that's why GP emphasised 'asynchronous' - doing it with your close colleagues requires a shift in how you work, async written communication not chats, PR review not pairing, etc.

> I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be.

You have somebody else come over to cut your cat‘s claws?

I know a number of people that don't feel comfortable doing that, or have cats where you'd need multiple people, or to wrap them, in order to clip their nails.

I definitely don't clip as short as they do at the vet, but I have a great set of clippers, and learned that what works for our cats is to keep the clippers on my desk and clip one or two nails when they come for a midday sit on my lap.

I can still work from home when I have errands to run or medical appointments, but I much prefer being in the office.

Yes, I like working remotely most of the time. But I like living close enough to the office that if needed, I can go slap someone upside the head on a whim.

See your POV easily though.

A decade ago, maybe a bit more, I consolidated into a backpack. Laptop, often second portable display, various adapters, chargers, clipboard, writing tools, phone, earbuds (I still prefer wired, if nothing more than the crazy good mic mine have), sewing, grooming, first aid...

Seems like a lot, but it isn't, and where I go the pack goes.

I can go from cold, arrive somewhere, and be up and running in a few minutes. Have not maintained a dedicated office for years now.

I do have dedicated work places, and have a few things, cheap things, duplicated for convenience.

These days, I have a home lab, work space, well equipped. Can do most anything I need there. This was not expensive, but I did also get gear over time too. Most of it was opportunistic buys. Total deals.

At work, any gear I need I either use where it is, or it is in my workspace.

The end result is a very mobile way. I am currently out of State for a week, and am pretty much fine, minus some gear, but I am also not needing to handle the associated roles either.

For quiet, I am on cell phone, no desk phone for the last decade. Use a spare room, my car, at home space, whatever.

The big perk is being where I both want and need a very high percentage of time.

Would hate full time at office. Would have to have one to start!

Well, at least those of us who work in Windows can have a pretty great experience because RDP is the shit. Leave a session running at work with a bunch of shit open, connect to it from home and everything resizes and rearranges to fit however many monitors and at whatever resolutions you decided to pass to it, disconnect the session and login locally at work again...

My question is: how did people not realize this before the pandemic?

The workers of Silicon Valley (and other urban centres) literally created and sustained this problem all by themselves: "You have to get to Silicon Valley!"

I'm in Uruguay, South America, so the pandemic has been an incredible boon to me. I even got a remote team management position !

I went mobile over a decade ago. Had some work travel to do, and it made so much sense I basically reorganized, ditched a desk phone (literally put it into a drawer, left VM announcements that I do not do VM, and have not had one since), setup a nice backpack with the goodies and never went back.

Through that time, I setup a home lab and just did more and more there, until about the only thing that matters is where stuff to work on actually is and whether I can move it.

Even those are easily matched in quality with zoom/slack and draw on screen features.

Just so you know, this is not legal. I hate it.

Your blanket statement is wrong. If you’d said “likely not legal”, you’d be correct. Someone could very well get work visas and have their employer approve the travel and accept the likely required nexus in said country.

Hey look it works for them too, everyone is a winner!

Which part of the Google offer significantly changed thanks to work done during the pandemic ? All these profits come from something that was built - in person - in pre pandemic work organisation, so we know that this was was successful. The only big thing that I can think of on Google side that was supposed to take off during the pandemic is Stadia. I own one, and it's an understatement to say that it did not deliver on its promises. It is not the first Google product that fails, and it is hard to say if the failure is due to remote work, but still something to consider.

Most Google products and services were mature in 2017.

I imagine maintanence. Even if they decided not to pursue any new products, features, or other major updates, keeping their services updated and providing various B2B support is a big part of keeping the whole thing running. It's not glamorous, but it is very specialized and requires top talent even for bug fixes, security patches, etc. at that level.

This is very true.

It is also true that these built products were operated in a remote work environment - meaningful, and significantly enhanced profits were extracted when operating these assets remotely vs operating them in person. Sample size is small of course and time will tell.

Stadia, not a great example, build in person - launched and operated remotely. Was its failure due to it being poorly built or poorly operated? Fellow owner and former user of the service, I didnt think it was that bad technically, but understand I am in the significant minority on that one.

Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote.

I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up. But I think it's probably quite a bit harder for people to be productive when they are new to the company, less experienced, and don't have that existing foundation to build on.

I think it's a solvable problem for companies that want to prioritize remote work, but I definitely don't think "managed to get through the past two years" means "it's a piece of cake".

What a miserable work culture it must be for them to even have the nerve to declare this.

Downvote away, I’ll be hiring some of them! ;-)

I hate threads like these because people will circle around generic talking points while missing all the nuance and context behind this actual decision, like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks, giving a heads up, having a well-defined policy.

Do you have the policy document or data to back that up? Asking because I am friends with a Google engineer who asked to go remote and was denied (even though nothing about their role requires them to be in-person).

They tend to promote from within and along the engineering track, which results in engineers reasoning from "What would I (a high-performing engineer) do?" and not necessarily what's best for the team.

Full disclosure I work at Google.

https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?distance=50&has_rem...

They may have reversed stance after I left, but I'm pretty sure the "15%" number cited is "15% of people that were considered eligible and had their manager support were declined."

15% is still something I consider significant. Why were they denied? Are there people getting preference based on manager or their own personal reputation?

No. These are shitty capitalist ploys trying to tell you the above is true when it's blatantly false. And well, they'd work you for no money, but they wouldn't have workers.

If anything, I'd claim to live in a high CoL area while being in the Midwest. They get their quality work, I get my commensurate compensation. Fuck them for thinking otherwise.

As others mentioned, if Google ignored supply and demand and paid for quality of work only, why would they pay everyone the high rates that were originally set by supply and demand in Silicon Valley? They’d pay a normal living wage for someone in India.

On the other hand, in theory the bottom markets will see their rates rise quickly (because they merged into one wider remote market) if remote is as popular as it apparently is.

Your compensation is not absolute dollars but what you can get for those dollars.

Ideally the same dollar would get you the same everywhere in the world. That is not the case atm.

Instead, people at your new location will provide the same quality of work for fewer dollars, because they see what they can get for those dollars. That is your capitalist competition.

Well, actually it is.

The people who applied and were accepted for fully remote aren’t the ones that need to go back. Only the people with an assigned desk in the offices that are re-opening are mandated to go back.

You’re getting tripped on the wording of an article that was hastily written after a reporter got wind of an email

But you are still using the same word that I was getting tripped up on. Either the return to the office is optional or it is mandated. It can't be both.

This seems win-win to me. Teams and orgs that consider remote-friendliness important can operate that way, while teams and orgs that don't think that can keep the team colocated. Ultimately, it means the vast majority of people's preferences are accommodated. Worst case, changing teams at Google is very smooth.

If it were truly "optional" for everyone even without manager approval, that's effectively "remote" because some people not being present means the team works in a largely remote fashion, and it also means space planning for expensive offices is very hard and result in office layouts that are not as productive.

For a big company with 100k+ employees, this seems like a good call IMO because it allows all working models to co-exist, and it can easily be tweaked after seeing how RTO goes.

The decision to work as remote-first or office-first is, as I understand it, much more broadly available than it was. You are given the option to go remote-first and not return to the office at all. Returning to the office is optional.

If you choose to go office-first, then you will be expected to actually be at the office. In that sense, return to the office is mandatory.

The only thing that's really happening is them saying "you need to commit to one approach or the other, and act accordingly". This is understandable, you need to plan office capacity and other such practical considerations

Googlers with assigned desk will be expected to show up to the office. Applications for remote transfers have been available for like six months and in the cases where engineers are unable to work remotely due to their role or their management disapproving, transfers within Google to other teams that are remote-friendly are nearly trivial.

It is mostly orgs like Sales that have hard rules against remote work where the word "mandate" with its connotation of a hard and unpleasant rule makes sense.

That seems weird for outside sales (i.e. large accounts) given you're often near your customers and (in normal times) should be in customer meetings rather than sitting in an office.

Worked for many tier 1 investment banks in the techiest corners of each org and some cases felt like startups with all the shiny new toys everyone else was using vs the dark ages of customized software straight from the nineties or some other entirely-in-house-built abomination in other places.

You need to make sure you aren't replacing them so fast that the median experience level is dropping, but it's certainly the case that the average experience level of the incoming cohort is expected to be lower than the outgoing one.

You see it at institutions, hundreds of individual "low bus factor" risks spread throughout the organization. The company would survive, but it would be a tough time, and a terrible place to work, during a large knowledge exodus.

If you get some talented engineers to join you because of the shortsightedness of Google then kudos to you, and more the loss for Google.

I'm not going back to the office ever there's no need to.. the company I work for has experienced explosive growth since we went remote ..brought on and maintained 100 new hires.

If they try to force me I'll find something else!!

Cities are dying some cause of remote work but aren't we tired of the govt controlling our lives (Biden's remark of all remote workers must go back..ha lmao). Umm the solution is to innovate cities and offer programs for remote workers to come live there for three to six to 12 months ..have a startup that owns buildings in all cities for remote workers to live in and congregate as well let's them jump from town to town every many months. City living Innovation not more govt control/lame ideas is what is needed to spur the economies of cities and their future prosperity.

Remote work in a lot of roles, especially knowledge working, is just the way forward and will be how these things function in 50 years. Companies that are able to scout talent globally will simply out compete those that insist on a local labor pool. It makes no sense to perpetuate commuting, just in terms of the environmental damage it causes, when we've shown that this work can still be done without having to load a single ~200lb occupant and spend energy moving them + 3000lbs of metal around for two hours a day five days a week. If you are finding your juniors are falling behind, then step up instead of giving up and work hard to come up with a viable pipeline that isn't "well hopefully in two months we are back in the office." Plenty of companies and organizations and research groups have functioned entirely distributed for years now even before covid. It's not rocket science.

We don't need to imagine it. Those of us who lead teams have tried, and we know it's harder to onboard people, and to socialize as a company, when you're working remotely.

I think the advantages of remote working greatly outweigh the disadvantages, and I will continue to work remotely if I can, but there's no need to pretend everything is better. It obviously isn't.

I think it's worth separating the two parties in this (the employer and employee). IMO too many comments focus just on the employee view and then wonder why the employer behaves differently.

Most employees seem to love it, although some certainly don't (I fit in the second category) - but most seem to find it preferable.

However my experience leading a remote team is that IMO it is worse for our particular company from a corporate perspective. On-boarding and knowledge sharing is worse, relationships degrade and it's hard to distinguish someone who is just struggling/slow and needs help with absenteeism.

I wouldn't say it's worse, but different. It requires thinking through the onboarding process in a deliberate manner. I think a lot of companies used to get away with onboarding by having the new person spend a bit of time with HR and then throwing them in with their team and hope it works out.

My onboarding process now is scheduled out and takes 1-2 weeks depending on the position. I make sure the new person has their computer a couple days before they start. I ask the new person during and after the process what's working/not working and refine the process from their feedback. I keep an open block of time every day for the person as long as they need it, etc...

I should add that we were already remote pre-covid, but still had to deal with all the same issues when we went remote. One of the biggest challenges we had and I see is that remote magnifies already existing issues around communication and management. I remember one of my managers asking 'how will I know if someone is working if they are not in the office?' and my response was 'how do you know if they are working now?'.

I'm also not going to argue in absolute terms that in-person or remote is better/worse than the other. They are just different.

Like, when an existing team goes WFH (e.g. when lockdown first kicked in), everyone already knows each other. You have your banter channels, you know who knows what about what, and for those conversations you'd prefer not to have on Slack you have non-company backchannels (e.g. WhatsApp).

But in the long term, after new people join the company and others leave, this degrades. It takes far longer for newbies to get to know people, social ties weaken, and trust falters. Doubly so for early-career joiners, who likely haven't worked an office job before.

That's all true if you let it happen. You don't have to though. If you recognize the problem you can put resources into addressing it.

We applaud ourselves for self-studying, being fairly educated on average with backgrounds in being taught to self-study effectively and finding information online. Yet somehow the idea of juniors doing those exact same things, with or without digital aid of seniors, is unthinkable to many.

Surely somewhere this story feels off.

For many, the exact forced socialization through work, commutes and office culture that's going on is what drains them to the point of isolating themselves afterwards. I expect most people no longer working under that system to find a way out of their social isolation, given the friction for those venues isn't too high.

Maybe if we stop pushing people into a catch-all environment and give them time, money and means to solve their problems, they will.. solve their problems. All of those three have been dwindling over the past few years.

I don't get this idea that you need to be friends with your colleagues. Hpw does that improve productivity?

Professional yes, friendly even sure but friends? That's for leisure time and it shouldn't matter if their your colleagues or not.

Of course this is at a company that was remote before the pandemic.

When a person signs in the first day, they already have a bunch of meetings scheduled (meet and greets, explainers, etc...), some work assigned (I like to have a bit of a goal when exploring a new code base, but this work isn't expected to get done right away), etc...

It can be done well, but takes some thinking through.

People they want to keep will be able to continue WFH if they want. People who are on the margins or destined for the Performance Improvement Camps will have to come in and warm seats if they want to eke out a year or two more of existence.

(1) people who make their bosses look bad are first to go.

(2) next are people who are perceived to cost their bosses time, regardless of whether it's their fault.

(3) after that, it's usually the infanticide cases: i.e., the people who did nothing wrong but haven't been there long enough to establish themselves.

The infanticide is especially ugly, because (a) it means the company is firing people basically at random, and (b) it rapes the shit out of the resumes of the people affected, because they now have <1 year jobs to explain. The reason it happens is that, empirically, most of the people cut in mass stack-rank purges are new members of underperforming teams... who, by inspection, have had the least to do with the team's underperformance.

Underperformance does get people fired, but rarely. It's at least as likely to get someone promoted, because underperformers usually have a career's worth of experience of being shitty, and therefore have developed such political skills they can easily fail up every time.

Not at Google, you can't. Firing someone who's performing abysmally still takes up to 6 months, between all the process and PIPs and paperwork and shit.

At my work at very anti-remote employer, there are so many people who have obtained permanent remote. So I wouldn't be surprised people who Google thinks valuable would get individual arrangements and other who just themselves think they are valuable are in for rude surprise.

That's how tech companies usually do layoffs. Rather than admit they overexpanded and have to cut people (or that they are cannibalizing their own people to boost executive compensation) they blame it on departing workers by increasing the PIP-rape cutoff.

Basically a company's last effort to cover their butts before firing you. If you contest the termination, they can claim they gave you fair warning and a chance to improve.

If you're ever on one, the sensible course of action is to look for another job. You're next on the chopping block.

This sentence amuses me a bit. Does that also mean that American Democracy has only been proven to work for up to 245 years? :-)

OP's point is that 2 years of remote work isn't a test that a company can successfully go through a lifecycle of a team of employees. You know, onboard a grad, get them up to speed, get useful productivity, maintain whatever system/documentation, have them leave AND repeat this until the original members of the team are all gone AND then check that things are still ticking along well.

It may be that said companies are "going well" because there is 1 person left holding the fort while a bunch of new starters fumble around with their remote work, not getting up to speed properly.

Unlikely maybe? But the point is that 2 years isn't a proper test of such working conditions.

EDIT: remove political rub.

And when I say I am now working 11 years remote and was always more productive compared to be before (9 years in offices) you'll immediately say "anecdotal evidence", right?

Maybe look into your bias. It does look like you're trying to find scientific reasoning to support your subjective preference. That's not OK. Let's at least have an objective discussion.

Demeaning the positive results of remote work by pettily narrowing down their results to super specific borders, while at the same time implying that office work is the go-to thing to do is not being objective.

I think a key question here is how long and how often do you need to see someone to establish and maintain those relationships.

There were exporters/importers and othe long distance businesses relationships for a long time, so I don't think its every day for years.

  > It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person.

Two years is nothing. You just got warm in your cloths and started to perform.

Edit: There most be impossible to have a stable engineering "culture" in such companies.

Isn't this the main problem? I hate everyone who comes barging in and wants to "resolve issues" quickly. Not saying I love remote work, but I cannot stand working a place where people are "allowed" to disturb me. I don't even log into Slack/Teams/Skype or any of that nonsense; I don't even want to be disturbed in my virtual wold.

Onsite is ideal for management; endless meetings about progress/status, we can all "align". Issues can be resolved quickly. But for those who need to concentrate for long periods at a time; this is hell. And during the pandemic, many people got used to not being interrupted all the time, and I don't think any of them want to go back to that hellhole.

You sure your priorities are of so much more significance than what the person is working on that they justify destroying the concentration of intellectual property creation and forcing a preemption of this other person’s task or reorder of their stack?

If you’re blocked for lack of a task switch, what are you blocking in turn by causing a new interrupt and switch?

Instead of crashing the thread they’re on, why not go to the scheduler and reorder the queue or better re-weight the threading so priorities are worked more optimally?

If in attempting that, you find you run into contention, it could be the most effective overall output is if your task is the one in an occasional wait state.

Being a productive member of a team is about finding balance between what you're personally trying to get done and helping your teammates accomplish their tasks. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.

Your formulation of local vs global optimization of priorities is exactly the correct way to view this problem. My priorities and my colleague's priorities are approximately the same priorities, assuming we're on the same team or on adjacent teams. We are both shipping the same product and serving the same users at the end of the day.

That's why, like everything else in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle - interrupting someone 10 times a day for trivial stuff you can look up yourself by reading code or documentation is a waste of the other person's time. But wasting four hours running around looking for an answer to a question that your teammate can answer in two minutes is also a waste of time. The end user is not well served by either behavior.

My rule of thumb is 30 minutes. If I can't find an answer in 30 minutes, and I think a teammate knows the answer and can answer immediately, I will ping them or come to their desk.

Obviously you have to read the room. If the teammate you want to bug looks deeply concentrated in what they're doing, they're in the middle of typing, or you ask and they say "sorry I'm in the middle of something, come back in an hour", I'll leave them alone and probably take a break or something. But if they're just back from a coffee break or a meeting, or finished up a discussion with someone else at their desk, there's just no reason to keep banging your head against your desk.

And of course I hold myself to the same standard. Being dismissive to someone who needs your attention is immature. I always assume good intent, and if someone bothers me too often, I just tell them; for some people I will ask they show me what they've already tried. I find this almost always works.

Not saying people shouldn't want to be productive just that understanding delays and simply pyschologically dealing with them would go a long way in modern culture. Not everything needs to happen 5 minutes ago, is late, or is so critical it can't wait a few hours.

being blocked on a task due to missing knowledge isn't really "efficient". Especially when someone can point you to the right place in the span of a single slack message line instead of spending hours wandering through legacy code and still missing the full scope of the change I want to make.

Sure, if it's a one-off bug fix task someone internal discovered, it can wait a day. But these kinds of issues when highlihgted are never because "it happened once" One is coincidence, twice is happenstance. thrice is probably a habit and you learn that certain people aren't a reliable resource in terms of, well, co-working.

This is how you make "progress", by disturbing people who are working?

It's probably for the best that we work different places :-)

I suggest you try to figure it out for yourself first. I can't count the number if times I sent a message, "hey, bla bla," then 5 minutes later I return "never mind." If you can't figure it out, have some respect for the other person's work and time and send an email or message. They will most likely get back to you by the end of the day if not sooner.

Me more important then you right?

Yes that is a problem with my current team, but I can't really do anything about it. Working from an office would mostly sidestep it.

I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.

TBF, that's not a problem with remote work. If the only way people will respond to a valid inquiry is through in person harassment there are much bigger issues at your employer.

I would 100% do all my coding from home though, unless work returned to the “good old days” of offices with full walls and doors that closed.

Imagine Scotty beaming the team down for a meeting and all of them are in their pajamas, unshaved and groggy, some still holding their cereal bowls.

depends on office space and potential home accommodations. Like, if you have a dedicated 8m^2 office room in your house, it still may not be worth teleporting into an open space office. But if everyone can get a small private room to some more open floor structure for collaboration, it sounds like the perfect solution.

This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave.

Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation.

Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.

This.. this is exactly what Google did - everyone had the option to go fully remote.

Somewhere else I remember reading this would also cut your salary by 10%.

Some people did have requests denied. In my org, every single person who applied was approved. It is easy to change teams at google, so people who really want to work remotely can make it happen.

It totally depends on where you're living. It could even be a salary increase if you were previously working in a lower CoL office but have since moved to a high CoL region -- in that case your salary would increase. There's definitely no blanket single figure that applies (in either direction) to people who go fully remote.

E.g. my grand-boss is a fully remote worker based out of Manhattan. He's getting the highest pay tier.

When some historian looked at it they found that on average a serf of a French baron say 700 years ago worked less than 40 hours per week on average. Perhaps even less than 30. And there was no commute. David Graeber in his «Dawn of everything» discussed that.

David Graeber is the one who wrote this:

"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"

And I'm guessing his knowledge of what happened 700 years ago is going to be much less accurate than his knowledge of times he lived through.

I’m very good friends with a medievalist professor. Something they said to me recently was interesting. Today, most medievalists don’t really like the term “feudalism” and instead see serfdom as an extension of Roman slave systems. Not chattel slavery, but definitely not a mutually agreed upon and beneficial economic relationship. I’m not so sure that “serfs didn’t actually work all that much” is aligned with current consensus.

You think that saying “I’m a modern day slave” will garner you sympathy. In reality it makes you look like a muppet.

There’s actual slavery and human trafficking still happening today by the way. These people aren’t helped in any way by you clawing for sympathy.

"You’re not compelled to offer your services to any particular employer." But you are compelled to offer your services to an employer, whose ways of working are almost all similar to each other. And it's not like you have infinite choice.

Is it really a choice to move alone somewhere else just to find a decent employer, but sacrifice friends, family, and so on?

Is it really a choice not to work and become homeless, a social outcast?

Is it really a choice to be an entrepreneur, in such a competitive environment that most startups fail, and you need considerable savings to sustain yourself in case of bad times?

Is it really a choice to find such a unicorn of employer that fits a modern day humans needs for privacy, sense of autonomy, sense of progression, good work-life-balance, good compensation, good responsible manager who doesn't micromanage (...), when most employers (have to) follow the same corporativistic mindset to get as most profits as possible out of employees in order to survive in an extremely competitive enviornment?

Is there really a choice when you have children to take care of, a mortgage and are just too tired or barely have any time whatsoever to look for jobs or invest time into your own startup?

Should I continue?

Where is the choice? Where is it?

People are not bound by physical means with the threat of death. Sure. But if you can't see other more subtle and equally powerful binds, then you're blind.

So yes, this is the modern equivalent slavery, in short - modern slavery - and please you stop.

And it still exists, so the modern equivalent of slavery is still slavery.

What you are talking about is the social obligations of being part of civilization. Yes, there is no free lunch. We must all work to live unless someone else is willing to foot the bill for us. But if that is slavery, then literally everyone in the world with a job is a slave and the word loses its meaning.

If a situation fits for 80% and there is no other single word that better describes it, i see you would just do nothing and leave a clearly wrong situation in confusion and undefined. People need a word and a clarity of meaning to rally behind it. Slavery fits really well, even if some things don't fit the historical original definition of it. If you can come up with a better fitting word, be my guest, otherwise please don't stand in the way while people are trying to raise awareness for the tragic lack of freedom that so many of us experience.

What I understand from your post, is that you want access to opportunities without making any sacrifices. It's an interesting discussion topic on its own. But the opposite of it is not slavery.

With how your health insurance depends on employment in the US, I kind of have the opposite impression that people actually do work under threat of physical harm; or violence, in other words, not unlike the working conditions of a slave.

You want some things that are available for money and need a way of getting money. That is very far from slavery. Every day you can choose to with or not, and what you want to work on.

1. You want to not be compelled to do any work to meet your daily needs.

2. You aren’t prepared to be self sufficient so you also want others to render goods and services to you, for presumably no charge.

Are these contradictory? If work was optional for everyone, why would they work and give you goods and services for free?

Sure maybe in future everything can be automated away but right now do you think it’s reasonable to want to do no work and also not want to be self sufficient?

A strong word better carry a stronger metaphor. No matter the framing, you are

- it is a choice to move alone somewhere, that is a chocie many make for college and post-college work

- it is a choice to be homeless. Not a comfortable choice, but a choice to make

- it is a choice to TRY to be an entrepreneur, but success is never promised when your job is to convince other people to give you money (which is THEIR choice).

- it is a choice to spend your time expecting perfection. Again, you are making a choice contingent on someone else's choice, success is not guaranteed.

- it's not an easy choice, but children can be given to others if you cannot provide care, and mortgages can be sold if you cannot afford payments. You not having the time/money to make your own company (which is a RISKY endeavor, and always has been) does not entitle you to free money.

I don't see how any of these relate to being a slave. Or even a minority/woman 100 years ago in the US. They didn't even have the option to work most places, let alone start up a business. homes would deny them for not being white or not having a man to backup expenditures. Still a step up from slavery, but still very much restricted because of who they are, not due to life factors they want to maintain (they had few to begin with).

So no, I don't see the slavery metaphor here as a valid one to make. There is more than one type of slavery, but we're in an american website. so you would basically need to very specifically frame your form of "slavery" if you're going outside what people commonly associate it with.

But if you do not participate in the system of employment, you will either be left to the mercy of others or die of starvation. Even if you own land which you farm and make all of your own stuff, hunt your own food - you will still have to work for someone else by selling them stuff you farmed, made or hunted yourself so that you can pay property taxes.

Modern capitalism is a world-encroaching system of slavery, made necessary by scarcity (mostly of land).

Capitalism is the opposite of slavery, you control who you sell to, work for, buy from.

But I do agree property tax is theft. Less taxes, smaller government, more capitalism.

To continue the analogy, isn’t the jailer/warden also a prisoner? He too is stuck in the prison, perhaps for different reasons but stuck nonetheless.

Choice is what prisoners and slaves don’t have, and we have plenty of both.

This reminds me of unvaxxed people pinning yellow stars to liken the situation that they cant visit cinema to holocaust

Focusing on the context of this article specifically, what makes you think that workers of a company worth 1.78 trillion dollars are slaves?

Here's what modern day slavery looks like: "Harassed, insulted and raped – that is everyday for thousands of women working in tomato and strawberry fields of Spain, Italy and Morocco. The vegetables and fruits they harvest are sold in German supermarkets and all over Europe".

The word cannot either have been misused as people have subsequently expended great energy defending its use.

Are we still talking about Google?

Being forced to live in expensive cities … and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.

In your attempt to throw everything against a wall to see what sticks you’ve contradicted yourself. Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment.

You want to work from home—own that instead of trying to pretend you are fighting for some great moral cause.

Citation?

https://www.acogok.org/why-transit-matters-environment/

There are a lot of factors to consider when making that comparison, and if you're going to criticise upstream commentators for handwaving justifications of their own lifestyles, it seems important to consider more the availability of public transit.

Neither of which have an appreciable business use in the near to mid term & are therefore totally irrelevant to an employer.

they may agree, but may not have the fortune of choice. Not everyone is being well compensated in a cushy office space. Google people certainly are, but that's a small slice of an industry that's a slice of an entire society.

perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)

Disagree, I think this leads to poor productivity, generally speaking. When I'm in the office, I'm honestly amazed anything gets done at all. There are so many disruptions, side conversations, etc. that I treat it as a "week off" on my schedule any time I have to go into the office. Once back in my home office, I can get back to writing code.

That said, it likely depends greatly on the job, but this is tech, and coders and engineers need a lot of uninterrupted time to think. It doesn't mean there can't be collaborative time, and in fact it can be helpful when scheduled appropriately, but I think productivity is better when you have a way to turn off interruptions when needed.

wut?

2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody within 1min.

I 100% agree with them.

I’m more productive as a remote employee, my coworkers seem to greatly prefer remote work, and there is a 0% chance the next job I pursue will be at a remote company.

It’s just not my preference.

I'm the kind of person who simply doesn't have a social life if i'm not already out in town at the end of the working day; I just can't overcome the inertia of being at home. So for me, working remotely has made me the most depressed, and physically unfit, I've ever been.

This was the state I was in and I tried medication for anxiety/depression for the first time in my life. It didn’t work well for me, but it gave me the impetus to change something.

I ended up going WeWork and it’s been great for me. Gives me people to talk to (all the staff there are friendly and some of the other people there like to chat) and a reason to get out of the house. I run/bike commute to get there so I’ve been much more active since I started going.

Good luck, and I hope you find something that makes it better for you. I know how rough it is!

There are a few things that I've realized make the difference between remote work and in person. When you are needing to talk to a team mate, working remotely you can just message them and get a response quickly, but this has the effect of interrupting them (or you), which can derail their train of thought. Sure, your still interrupting them when in person, but you can see that they are actively working on something and wait a minute or two for them to notice. They may also see you out of their pariferal vision, which alerts them without really interrupting them, so they can continue their thought before moving on to yours. It's possible to delay replying to a message, but for me personally this means I might take longer to reply to the message than I should because I forget to come back to it (also I swear Slack doesn't always play the notification sound).

The other thing I've noticed is that the lack of interruption can actually negatively affect me. Seeing others getting up for a break can trigger me to also take a break, which can prevent me from getting too lost down a tangent (or spending too much time on Reddit). Since it's in the preiphery though, this allows you to continue with your train of thought while still also being able to see it as a reminder. This allows you to better choose when (or if) to respond.

I think what message apps need, is to slowly fade in alerts, instead of harsh instant alerts. So you notice them, but aren't interrupted. This won't necessarily help with the tangent (or Reddit) problem, but it will help with the interruption of teammates.

You're wrong. When I need to stay focused on something I may ignore messages and be 100% productive. However when I'm at the office most people don't care if I'm working on something with my headphones on, clearly in the zone. They'll just approach me about the most benign matters most of which can wait for days even.

There are plenty of people who say they don't go to work to make friends, they go to do their job, and any kind of interruption not directly related to the work they're doing is unwelcome. Plenty of others who will go to great lengths to stay out of any conversation and work as independently as possible because "they're just there to write code" or whatever.

If it's not so wrong to say you want to go to work and be completely left alone, why is it wrong to say you actually go because you prefer the dynamics of office life and find it less disruptive than a remote equivalent?

An MBA - not so much.

Then I went back to engineering as there's much more actual value in it and less politics.

I think the poster has an issue with their company that they are projected onto the industry.

Couldn't the same be said of you? I don't think anyone is asserting that one system is the best. If an entire team/company is able to be happy and productive in a remote-work situation, then more power to them. Its often the case that some people prefer remote, some don't. The ratio varies between companies. Personally, as a manager, I would prioritize overall team happiness and efficiency over placating a few individuals.

People like this don't want a structured workplace because they prefer it; they want a structured workplace because they need it, because they never figured out how to live by themselves after university.

Aside from all the other advantages of WfH that have already been mentioned in this thread (like no commute, healthier eating, more fresh air and exercise, better work/life balance etc), I really don't think this description of office-life fits my recollection of reality, at all.

In the office it was much more often that wanting to discuss something in person with a couple of colleagues would involve:

1. locating colleague 1

2. going in search of colleague 2 who isn't at their desk

3. disturbing people in the open-office environment asking where colleague 2 is

4. deciding to check again later

5. noticing that colleague 2 is back at their desk

6. looking around and seeing that colleague 1 is not at their desk

7. going over to colleague 2 and asking if they have 5 minutes

8. colleague 2 is deploying, and will be done in 15 minutes

9. ask around and discover that colleague 1 has gone to early lunch

repeat again after lunch

Now with WfH:

1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2

2. problem solved after 5 minutes

1. Ask in Slack/chat if colleague 1 and 2 are avail

2. Colleague 1 is avail, colleague 2 no answer

3. Start call with C1, share the screen... something crash or C1 has network issues

4. C2 is still MIA

5. C2 joins, we work together for 5 minutes, than C1 doorbell rings, they have to leave

6. C1 is back, we work for 10 minutes but now C2 has to go to a meeting

7. you get it..

So, every rose has its thorns...

Even better imho, anytime working together with more than 1 person you don't have to awkwardly huddle around the single 22" screen on your desk squinting at the code. Everyone has the shared screen in full view and can even draw on the screen (yay, no more finger smudge marks) to point at what they mean.

OMG, I've been remote so long I had forgotten about this that literally drove me nuts.

> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person

I think this was more true for me when I was earlier in my career and remote tech really sucked. But now I see it as generally negative to have to sync with someone else to resolve an issue they (or I) am working on. In my experience, in-person bias is a symptom of a team that does not communicate well in writing (emails, Slacks, Jira, etc.).

> where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity

There is literally decades of published research that refutes this for knowledge work. IIRC the first studies were done in the 1950s or thereabouts, and I am not aware of any big studies that have come since that concluded differently. (IIRC Microsoft's campus was originally designed to give every engineer a solo office because Gates read _Peopleware.)

I will admit that working in interrupt-driven style does produce the feeling of getting more work done, whether or not that is actually true.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop someone from writing code.

As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It measures a controlled thing, but certainly nothing I would use to extrapolate that software engineering teams work less efficiently when people can interrupt each other with questions easily.

If you have any studies that you think are good feel free to link them, I'm open to being wrong.

It's unfortunate that companies and individuals, like yourself, can't respect the fact that others _are_ more effective remote and when they're not getting tapped on the shoulder by random colleagues.

As your GP comment pointed out remote vs in-office productivity likely breaks even. Companies should treat their employees like adults and let them work where they feel most productive and not cater to the preferences of upper-management or a desire to return to the status-quo.

The entire team at an in-person org pays a global commuting tax. Employees are not an idealized frictionless surface; if they have to commute to work, that comes out of their productive capacity in some way.

What you are describing here is a team that is not managed well. If I had to guess, that team would exhibit features such as:

- critical information only shared in meetings and not recorded in writing (or recorded in a place the team does not use as habit)

- that same critical information re-discovered in subsequent meetings because it was not written down

- team cadence extremely sensitive to PTO because key knowledge is only accessible by speaking to the relevant person

- team cadence extremely sensitive to staff onboarding/replacement because both of these require hands-on in-person time from existing staff

- etc.

It's worth noting that all of these inefficiencies are experienced as "progress" by the team: "we made a key decision" (that we had decided and not written down a month prior) feels like something positive. "I spent most of today helping X get ramped up" also feels like an accomplishment rather than the more correct "our documentation and process is so opaque that we lost $X of engineering time today when an engineer was required to help another get onboarded."

Essentially, teams that need to be in-person to function typically underutilize the old technology (writing) and because so many teams work that way, most people do not notice how much time they waste.

This is not every team that leans heavily on in-person interaction; obviously there are outliers that are capable of using the technology of the written word while also augmenting with high-bandwidth interactions.

This research is categorically different from the research on working from home in that:

- it measures a facet of the workplace that is commonplace and standard

- it has been studied for several decades, and the results have held up. (IIRC the first such studies were done in the 1950s or 1960s.)

IMHO those arguing that people have changed enough that now they can better recover from interruptions than their predecessors could 20 or 30 years ago have the burden of proof, not the other way around.

It certainly works in the short term, in an emergency situation where everybody in a sector is operating under the same conditions out of necessity.

Whether it has long-term detrimental effects remains to be determined. My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past.

Have you maybe considered that it's actually not your team's fault but rather how the organisation transitioned into and approached remote working? That or you're an MBA :)

Most big tech companies are public. Record earnings and stock prices throughout the pandemic prove more than just not crashing and burning.

B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input

C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects

The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.

Wage earners have a couple percent more dollars every year, but the rich have massively more dollars. This is basically clathrate-gun inflation, insofar as while it's true that the rich don't compete for, say, food staples and therefore the illicitly printed money is often considered "harmless"... it goes into investment, which is a different market, we are told... the rich can and given the right circumstances will compete for other things people need, such as housing (see: Blackrock's invasion of residential real estate).

If you look at the S&P denoted in, say, houses... which I've chosen because housing is most people's biggest expense, it's actually been a mediocre market, the past 20 years.

----

[1] There won't actually be "back to normal". Just as 9/11 World didn't really end but blended into GFC World, which blended into Covid World... this one's going to blend into either European War World (if the current situation gets worse) or Climate Change World. The upper class will always need a crisis to hold over our heads (and, of course, several of these represent real crises that the upper classes did not intentionally create) to keep power.

Most of the big tech companies could have laid off 90% of their workers over the past 2 years and would have had even higher record earnings (and maybe stock prices).

What the big tech companies are concerned about is their continued ability to be productive and stay on top, and the fact that everyone had to move a ton of spending to online over the lockdowns doesn't mean that record profits during that time are sustainable.

There are pros and cons to remote work, and I wish more people were honest about the cons. I think a lot of people hand-wave it away because they like the idea of living where they want.

Having to do things not essential to a purpose is better to make them optional.

If I like working, I can walk around while on the remote meeting

I love walking and think it’s great for creativity and other purposes. I’m not against walking. I’m against having to walk just to get to and from a meeting.

I love whistling and singing. I would be against a requirement to whistle for 30 seconds before every meeting starts.

There may be a few ADA and liability issues with these ideas... ski lifts would be a fairly accessible fun option.

Of course, drowning on your way to a daily standup would be an ignominious way to leave this world.

Turn this on it's head though, now you're fully remote, maybe it's time to buy a zipline for the house? Maybe your house could be more fun.

You aren’t making any sense to me

At the same time, I think walking is great. It’s good exercise and good for the brain. But it has nothing to do with being a requirement for a successful meeting.

So I’m not against walking. I’m for it.

I’m against forced, unnecessary tasks.

You do understand that "I personally prefer" and "actually works better" and "better for everybody involved" are three different things, do you?

We were told for years that it's an established fact that remote work is inefficient and untenable. We have proven - with an experiment that we wouldn't rather go through, but we had no choice - that this is false. That doesn't mean it is for everybody - but it doesn't also mean that the thing you prefer is for everybody. So why it's ok to force one of these things onto everybody? That's what the managers should be able to answer.

That works for companies with less than 100 engineers. Everyone seems to have forgotten the good ol days where you had in person meetings and had to dial in half the team from Europe or include Fred who is working from home.

The actual time to get feedback in an office is between four hours and two days. Managers are almost never at their desks because they are attending meetings all day. Same for senior engineers. If you need a quick response IM is your best option.

Your whole team of engineers will almost never be in the same place. Someone will be in a meeting, somewhere. Or hiding trying to get work done. You might get lucky and the person you need to talk to is at their desk, but they will be busy trying to catch up before or after a meeting.

In office communication is already asynchronous. Every day you will run into these problems. The idea of (especially open) offices fostering communication is a complete fantasy.

Email and chat are the way actual communication is done in corporate America. Synchronous communication isn’t feasible.

People eating at their desks - we have a kitchen.

People having meetings and "quick chats" around their desk - we have many, many, meeting rooms.

People with other annoying habits (which I almost certainly have too) that make me sound OCD but... sniffing, throat clearing, drowning themselves in aftershave or perfume and so on.

Same awful 60min+ commute on a train.

Versus my home office with just me, quiet background music, and exactly zero distractions.

I'm glad all the multi-million salaried bosses that live a few minutes walk and have their own private offices want every one back...

A big part of the equation (for some) will be what kind of office they are being asked to return to? At the office my company used to have before it was acquired in 2019 everyone had a cube, not big by any means and not with full walls, but enough space to have a few pics of family, maybe a plant, personal nick-nacks, whatever, a sense of some sort of boundary to it. I could have easily been persuaded to return to that environment 3 days a week, because I did enjoy being around my peers. The acquiring company however, had plans underway to bring us into long elbow-to-elbow tables before work from home happened in March 2020. What would you call a food trough to work at instead of eat at, a "productivity trough"? I am open to tolerating that one day a week for cross team meetings (some have started trickling in already), anymore than that and I am out.

But this arrangement is only available to peoples who don't interact with the students, so it create some resentment. The workers who don't have that privilege have started to call us: la gagne de laptops, a derisive way to says the laptops class/cast.

"Allowing remote work has been proven to be better."

Because it increases the supply of candidates. I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.

I get that I'm leaving as an exercise for the reader "how to implement hybrid teams" and "how to fairly evaluate employees who are remote and not."

I've spent roughly a thousand hours of time with my family since quarantine began, that I otherwise would have spent commuting to work. I can hardly tell you how valuable that is.

Let me just glance real quick at how profitable my company has been over the last two years... oh, hmm, yeah, it seems like it can take the theoretic productivity hit from being forced to use IM to solve problems.

100%. Email and Slack are great for DEIA. In person meetings end up dominated by whoever is loudest/most aggressive. I know a woman who just left and in-person company for a fully remote position because of issues in person. She would tell me stories about a taller man who would purposely stand over people to intimidate them.

In person interactions literally stifled some of our team members. It’s going to be a challenge to keep this going, but we must - we owe all of our coworkers a voice. These interactions also drove meaningful productivity. I bet we more than offset losses from other lack of in person collaboration.

1) I can start work 2 hours before i normally do. I can skip all the "getting up from bed and get ready". I literally work until noon in my underwear. Then i usually go for a 30min run and get a shower and lunch. I also save 2 hours per day commuting. I save a shitton of money on expensive lunches too.

2) The "can you check this, or could i have a list of that" annoyances have all but vanished. People (usually manager kinds) have actually had to dig up their own stuff and do some work themselves.

3) As i work MORE effective hours from home i sometimes take fridays off and just do my thing. I'm always way ahead of schedule.

I firmly believe the "in office nine-to-five" kind of work is in the past. It's a legacy way of working and it has proven to be very unproductive compared to remote work.

(PS. As most of you guys i'm in the software industry, so i cant speak of other fields of work. My points are purely my own discoveries and strictly related to software development)

"We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it."

No, that's not about it. We've also proven they're able to have record profits. Whether they would have even higher profits if it was fully office, it's another story, but saying all that is proven is that they won't crash is false and just shows you're emotionally invested in having people back in the office because you want them to.

The tap on the shoulder is the most annoying thing working on site. There's no respect for the urgent & critical tasks.

You would want others to spend 2 hours commuting, wasting time on parking, food & fuel just to be able to physically speak to them.

What a waste of our current technological advantages.

Why bother working in tech, when you don't use it to better yourself and others?

It was insanely annoying. And when I told him to please stop, he started to wave his hand in my peripheral vision.

I pretty much gave up trying to make him behave. I mean those headphones are not that good you can just speak ...

Just the risk of such things makes it hard for me to concentrate. They need not have to happen, just that they could is enough.

I think it is the walking up behind me on row desks that is the problem. I have a private office now with my side to the door and in no way I feel the same.

e.g. you could answer, but state you are in the middle of something, can't focus now, and please send you an email. If you are politely obstinate enough they will soon learn they are wasting their time with the interruptions and will be trained to send an email straight away instead.

Well said. At these point, anyone who suggests one is superior to the other without discussing the pros and cons of each is probably too biased to have an honest discussion.

Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.

One thing I’m certain about, though, is that a lot of people who want remote work don’t necessarily do better when remote. I recruited, hired, and managed remote teams for a long time. The number of people who insisted they focused better at home but then couldn’t get anything done without constant performance management or nagging was surprisingly high. This even included several people who later transitioned to our office and did substantially better. A lot of people struggle to stay focused and productive when left alone at home to themselves. Going into the office can be the context shift they need to get productive.

I think a lot of the difference is that the people who prefer remote are just asking that they be given the choice to go remote. However, many of the people who prefer in-person are also expecting everyone else to go in-person. I recognize pros and cons to both remote and in-person, and believe what is right for me might not be right for others. If you give a team of 10 the option, and 9 of them choose remote, should the 1 person who likes in-person be able to make everyone else go in-person, so he has that "in-person experience"?

Additionally, I can't push myself to be productive for 8 hours straight. My productivity has gone way up now that I can have a good long break in the middle of the day. You can't really go and have a 3 hour break in the office and even if you did, what would you do? - at most you can sit in the cold kitchenette and stare at the wall, at which point I'm literally wasting my life.

I actually think offices/the rat is a large part of our sickness we have as humanity. People are "forced" todo what they dont want, and therefor, they are less empathetic to others plights. If "i have to, they should". "i need to goto work, slug it out, they should do. they shouldnt leech of the state. they shouldnt take our jobs. they shouldnt.". It feels like the root cause of so much conflict.

Atleast thats how it played out in my immigrant family. They came to this country, dedicated there lives to work, made money, and died before they could appreciate it. Ive now had an education, and realised that their way of life, back on an island, is more satisfying for the soul. So im trying to bring both of those concepts together and live the dream they had for me. Instead of how their parents slugged it out 12hrs a day, and never spent quality time with them... Which resulted in little growth of grow social/parental skills, talked to everyone like they were a client, and were easily manipulated by conservative media because they never had any time to understand world events for themselves.

No longer does remote mean isolation. I have better relationships with my neighbours and community. I have internet access at the level of any city folk. I have less worries, i can take breaks in my workday that are meaningful for me, and therefor i give more of myself to my job. Thats how being FLEXIBLE to your employees brings about efficencies. Much more complex then a simple commute.

I like keeping the windows in my flat open, and two years of working from home made me extremely uncomfortable breathing the bad air of an hermetically sealed office.

This productivity fetishisation is so weird

Personally I think I’m right! We should do it my way.

Being stuck in a chair all day with people watching you is not a good life. Being forced to adhere to arbitrary social convention instead of speaking sincerely and expressing yourself is not a good life.

Choosing to lay in bed, work in the sun, recline on the couch, say hi to your cat, be your most authentic self, is a better life. Personally not dealing with the anxiety and body pain makes me more productive. But maybe everyone is right and we can get more productivity out of people by gutting their personalities and self-appreciation; but if that's the cost, I sincerely do not care. I'd rather everyone enjoy their short lives than spend them colorlessly and regret their choices on their deathbeds.

Iirc it's very roughly like 20-30% want full remote, 50-60% want some type of hybrid (where there's a wide spectrum of hybrid models, from rarely-in-office to usually-in-office), and 10-20% prefer always or almost-always in office.

The ideal situation IMO is to have all options available: some teams are remote, some teams are in-office. The proportion over time should hopefully work out such that everyone can get what they want.

Personally, I'm happier and healthier with a hybrid model (where people work in office the same days) than full remote. And like you, I also know I'm not alone because of people I know who are very unhappy right now due to forced remote during COVID. I sincerely hope we soon enter a future where everyone has options that best suit them.

I'd like that too.

I am curious, why do you like going into the office? Does it give you something that you need, or does being remote too long make you uncomfortable because of something your mind is doing to you, which you have to escape?

I'd also add that I've always had and prioritized a short commute, and I like where I live and wouldn't want to move, so the cons are minimal for me. (The one thing I prefer about remote work is being able to take a 2hr mid-day break those days my brain is just fried; much easier at home, and I can then be more productive after that break.)

But, when work ends (quit, layoffs, terminated), those work "friendships" almost always dissolve into nothingness whence they came. When there's no more 40h/week together forced time, they dissolve. The after-work drinks are directly related to work. No common work? No common drinks. No more forced socialization means that fakeness is made apparent.

The real key: focus on not-work. Focus on clubs. Focus on get-togethers. Or parties. Or hell, hookups. Focus on things that don't use the "work" glue to force together. Those things will last when your job changes, or gets bought out, or whatever.

I could do those other things you say, but none nearly for as much time as the time I spend at work, so work friends come quite easily and naturally by comparison. Proximity has a big effect on making friends[0]. And I could do those activities you suggest in addition to getting to know people at work, because those other things happen off work hours. (Though realistically, I'm too old for parties and not single enough for hookups :))

Though, club thing has actually never worked for me. Those acquaintances end up feeling the most distant because we meet too infrequently. Probably requires a hobby you're really into so that you get more frequent exposure to one another (IIUC this makes CrossFit a good way to make friends).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_principle

I can't really disagree more with this comment.

Some of the people most important and amazing friendships I've ever made have been created in an office. So many people ex-colleagues are still great friends and over time, our friendships have even grown over the years, even after not working together anymore. Like seriously, I've made friends with incredible people living in cities and working in offices which I don't imagine will ever be replicated with online working.

I now work for a 100% remote, I love it and while I do make friends, there's no way the bonds are even sightly as strong as those I formed hanging out with people, in-person. Since working remote, I've had to make new friends to hang out with and what's funny is, those friendships seem way more lucid and difficult to maintain because it's usually just based around hobbies and the friendships can be soured by the slightest bit of annoyance / jealously or whatever because there's no real consequence to treating each other poorly.

When it comes to my peers that I've worked with face to face, we had to trust each other, share hardships and work through problems and that made us become closer.

What I believe will happen is there will be people who work in offices together, and they will have more leverage over the "remotes" because they'll be a core group of people who share closer ties. Eventually this socializing is what will bring people back to cities and offices, that's where the power will be.

If you could say your school friends were "real friends", you can say your work friends are real friends. Modulo some child-like naivety, you were only friends with your schoolmates because you had to be at school with them. Hell, say you're homeschooled, and you're friends with kids in your neighborhood; you're only friends with them because you have to live around them. You can always make this argument for all except purely Internet friends you plucked from the æther of some Discord server.

No-strings-attached friends are different from school/geographic/work friends, in terms of quality of life threat and the social strategy that should govern your interactions, but I don't think you can't say they're all friends.

So as always one size does not fit all.

Now I know that isn't always guaranteed wherever you work, or wanted at all stages of your life/career. But I understand if people do crave those things.

I wish it wasn't so popular for people in tech with mental issues to project them onto everyone else, instead of looking at the early family life that made them. Your parents failed if you are so afraid of the other. It is not everyone else's fault that they don't hate people.

Those who it's fake for are not allowed to throw it off. I get my socialization in groups I choose to be a part of where I don't have to curtail my every thought to avoid political retaliation that affects my livelihood.

And get a PhD before you start throwing around words like "mental issues" for things you disagree with.

Wittgenstein was not wrong. Language is meaningless without its connection to the rest of humanity.

Some of my colleagues struggled to maintain their health without their daily walks to the train, or just overworked themselves adapting to remote meetings and tools. Others are physically and mentally much healthier after substituting extra sleep, exercise, or preparation of healthy meals for the commute time.

A close analogy might be weight loss: "nothing" is stopping anyone from eating less, yet most Americans eat more than they should.

Going to the office meant a baseline of 7,000 steps a day, plus quite a few flights of stairs. Plus it was easy to go to salsa and gym after work (because I was already out of the house, so it was easier to to talk myself into going).

I struggle to do any of those things when i'm remote. I know perfectly well that I physically can, but that psychological inertia is extremely powerful.

Plenty of people benefit from imposed structure in their lives.

Yes, it's bad, yes, it's sad, but that's life. It's not all idealism and dreams.

[] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/

Do you experience Zoom fatigue? The sensation that, while this technology is convenient and useful, you're missing something important?

I think this whole debate is really about whether people have this sensation or not.

Zoom meetings are less tiring, because I dont have to care about how I look like. I can focus on content ... or not. I can make myself comfortable.

Seriously, what’s the difference between this and instant messaging?

I would argue that the ability to defer interruptions is enough to rely on IM, instead of physical interaction.

The situation is much more symmetric.

And I'm one of those managers who kept extra mouthwash and altoids at my desk too...

And maybe I'm just crazy but it seems like software even from the big companies has gotten worse through the pandemic. Which wouldn't surprise me that it's hard to keep everyone working together and on the same page through online calls and chats. I personally feel like I'm not quite as engaged being at home, surrounded by distractions compared to being in an office where my brain goes into work mode.

I find the idea that all your regular human interaction comes from people you work with infinitely more dreadful.

I did this, but now its just slipped into actually just checking slack at 10am then going back to sleep till 11:30.

Have you considered bars?

  We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.

There's probably more than one variable that went into that phenomenon...

I used to commute 1 hour every single day to an office building downtown, and my nearest colleague was in another office some 200km away in an entirely different city. Half of the team isn't even in the same time zone as I. Sure I did have other people hired by the same company sitting at desks around me, but we worked with entirely different projects so we never interacted beyond the daily "Morning!" and "Aight I'mma leave, see y'all tomorrow!"

Even my manager was located in the other office some 200km away, so I had no one to report to (be observed by!). My work was and is entirely measured by my contribution to the team, and not by where I happen to be located.

Remote working isn't a new thing that has never been tested before. It's just that you do remote working from home instead of from an office.

We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote suddenly and unexpectedly, without specific preparations, planning or training for that scenario, with employees in an especially stressing and taxing situation (pandemic uncertainty, childcare issues that wouldn't exist outside of a pandemic, with some people needing to work and care for children at the same time) and still be productive.

I'd say that's a rather strong result for remote work. Not proof that it's universally "better", because obviously things are complicated and the answer is always "it depends", but at least I'd take it as proof that it should probably be taken as the (or a) default option rather than an exotic alternative.

I found that actually opposite was true in my case. Less distractions ,less interruptions and we cleared A LOT of our backlog. It turns out a lot of those "urgent taps" turned to be not so urgent, or other person being just lazy(it was faster to walk 1min than to do a 5min read on our internal docs, or just google it)

Like...one time I was deep in the mental flow, headphones on playing some nice orchestrated video game music. Totally entranced. Someone came up and tapped me on my shoulder and I damn near shit myself.

Only when I was really junior did heads down code all day happen.

The second day I just worked from the hotel.

Switching cost from constant interruptions is a real phenomenon.

First of all, not everyone is in same building or on same floor, or in same country of a large organization. Google account managers, for example, don't tap tech support people on the shoulder.

Secondly, a related anecdote: An overly friendly project manager in a previous job used to physically tap/slap me on shoulder on a regular basis. I politely asked him to stop doing it. He kept doing it, and my polite request became an awkwardly agitated request in front of colleagues. I am male, and his unwanted physical contact had nothing to do with harassment or intent to irritate me. He was "just that kinda guy". I want to be tolerant of people's different ways as much as anyone, but please keep your hands to yourself.

I am happier and more productive working from home, away from the awkward grey areas of personal interactions and distractions at work.

And that's what is wrong about being in office, especially as a software developer I hate having my focus interrupted because someone can't send an email

I am infinitely more productive when it comes to coding working from home. The constant office interruptions made it impossible to concentrate for any length of time.

On the other hand, any in person meeting felt equally more productive than the zoom ones. Same goes for discussing issues, explaining them out loud to other people etc. without having to set a meeting.

So, for me, the _preparation_ for work is best done in an on site environment, the actual work I do better from home (where I actually also have the much better setup and equipment than at the office)

Covid showed that as a lower limit remote wont wreck companies atleast. I am convinced remote is a little bit better for the company (unless hardware/machine/industry centric) and alot better for many employees, especially in hard commute places.

If you're remote, you don't want to be left out if other team members are in person.

If you're in-office, most of the benefits depend on other people also being in-office.

Okay, sounds like you prefer remote work then? I don't see what's wrong with someone else preferring in-person work.

> The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency,

Disagree, there's definitely conversations that are much easier to have in-person. Both just "locally" for individual conversations, but also in terms team bonding and trust that allow other kinds of conversations to happen at all.

That said, I think it is _also_ about socializing.

> they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.

You cannot get around needing others to fulfill social needs, that's what social means.

In what way is this "forcing" in a way that's different than how other social interactions work?

Just like you don't want to be forced to socialize, others may not want to be forced to work on a remote team, and a team that has a free-for-all remote policy is effectively a remote team (as others have noted). If the decision is made at a group level, most everyone can get what they want.

You can address this with some level of coordination, hence why making this a team or org decision is win-win for everyone IMO. You will never have to take a job that doesn't align with what you want, nor will most anybody else. Seems like a great outcome to me.

Ultimately, the market will come to a conclusion at some point, and perhaps that will show what the comparative value of in-office vs remote is :)

I don't think this is true in the sense that you (or possibly the original commenter) mean. I think what happens is that if, e.g., 1/3 of a team is remote, the rest of the team has to choose between either excluding them by doing most interactions in-person, or leaning heavily on remote even though 2/3 of the team is in-office.

My own opinion is let the people decide what to do. Once a week, everyday, once a month, only when needed... Let people and teams decide.

I suspect this is the real reason for a push to return to the office.

Some things:

- make sure your laptop setup is documented (install x, y, z: setup like this) - document where all resources are, confluence, repos, dashboards, everything and how to access - setup virtual meetings with peers, in team and across company - one place suggested you reach out to 5 random people for a 10 minute chat - you could reach out to the lowest or highest person and the people being reached out to expected that random people would do it and it was fine - this really helped - setup virtual calls with managers, their managers, their managers - just ten minutes to introduce yourself to each other

I’ve had better remote onboarding that starting onsite and twiddling my thumbs for over a week not knowing anyone or doing anything - I’ve suggested I leave places if there isn’t anything for me to do or any way for me to work before.

I’m an in-house video producer for a tech start up. I absolutely do not need to be in the office most days, let alone every day.

I say this as a very social person. I like having colleagues. But the fact is I just don’t need to be in there most days, and they don’t understand what I do beyond “video,” so they don’t offer a lot of opportunity beyond that if we are being very utilitarian about it (which I generally don’t).

You can get all of that in a cowork space while others work remotely.

That's the real part highlighted by the pandemic: people are extremely reliant on their jobs for social interaction. With all the problems that come with it. We're practically raised to be dependent on jobs for way too many things.

Any examples that you've had success with?

Have you only ever worked for companies small enough to be co-located in a single office? This wasn't true at big corps even when we were all in the office.

Hey, the team that owns this is in Boston, 3 time zones from the West Cost. Oh, wait, that piece of software was transferred to the Zurich team, 9 time zones away, so they'll respond tomorrow at the earliest because there's no workday overlap. Bob might know about it, though, he's on the other side of campus - you can get there in 30 minutes on the campus shuttle.

On the flip side, there are people that prefer a company where everyone is remote. They want to be able to resolve any issues quickly over voice calls or slack, and do not want to feel at a disadvantage because they are isolated from in person discussions that could have just as easily happened over VC.

What company did you work for in-person where any issue could be resolved quickly?

What if many of them switch to companies that allow fully remote working? Google will lose out on a lot of talent and will eventually suffer in the quality of its products.

I personally believe there's no difference in the volume of work produced by people working remotely, providing they don't have small children at home. All these drawbacks are made-up by managers fearing to lose their jobs if workers keep working remotely.

That's bonkers. When people message you on slack you can prioritize and respond without breaking pace and train of productive thought. In person, if someome is talking to you and I also prefer to chat up, I will delay the conversation indefinetly or book a time wasting meeting that clutters your schedule. If you need someone else to comment and they're on a meeting you might schedule another meeting instead of asking them questions they can answer while listening in on the current meeting.

I could put in a good effort to be lazy and unproductive at home and I would still be more productive overall than in the office. I disliked wfh after covid for a while because I was so busy all the time. No more chatting with extroverts and walking to/from meeting rooms half of the work day (at best!) and I use to leave my pc off or at the office before, now I constantly work before and after shifts, on weekends,etc...

It makes me feel like my job is at risk because I don't have enough time to show desired output/kpi at the office. At least now I overwork and have better assurances of stability. They pay me well enough to where I don't worry about taken advantage of.

It's too easy to make such statements without measuring anything. Are issues really resolved quicker, or they /feel/ like that? Is overall productivity higher? Let's measure that?

And I disagree with your "tap on the shoulder" problem. That is easily resolved with a one line email/message which can be answered equally quickly with a one line answer without all the social BS ... if it needs more than that then it is interfering with productivity at that moment and a short or appropriate meeting can be scheduled to elaborate. Anything else and ... sorry, you don't value good work.

Any assessment looking at remote productivity during a pandemic vs. remote productivity with periodic in-person meetings and considerate, purposeful norms will get wildly different data.

We've proven that companies/organizations can go fully remote and thrive.

If you like working on site, good for you. Many don't like it, and are less productive working on site.

You made a bunch of baseless claims.

If you mean this literally (i.e. walk over to someone's desk/office the moment you have an issue to resolve), this is highly disruptive and partially the reason why some people hate going into the office, particularly engineers.

I understand some people prefer to meet in person but it's not an absolute necessity.

I wish companies would understand this.

Many things at a big company like Google require working with people in different timezones. I would say more often than not, if requires working with someone in a building far enough away that you have to do a video conference anyway.

However, it is important to adapt your company to a remote working culture. You can't simply replace your physical meetings with Zoom meetings. In order to ensure a good team spirit, it is also important to organise regular meet ups between all your remote staff at least once a quarter.

And regarding your approach to "quickly" resolve things, I shall refrain from repeating the words that software engineers use for people like you. You are assuming that your issue is the highest priority issue that needs to be resolved immediately. This can be highly disruptive for Software Engineers, especially when multiple business stakeholders tend to do the same.

If you expect that literally every business going forward is going to be happy with WFH then you're taking an unreasonable stance. The same is true in the opposite direction - as much as I'd like it to be the case, not everyone is going back to the office, structural changes have taken place that would make that difficult even if it were desired.

It follows then that some people will have to switch companies. This really isn't a big deal, the entire point of having a job market is that people should be continuously doing this otherwise the market isn't efficient.

You can see it in the rhetoric here - "forced to go in". There is no force involved.

Okay, we have two years of data. PROVE to me that you need to spend $Xm per year on office space for this company to work. Prove to me that you have to pay top of market SV salaries

I think the time is now to reframe what needs to be proven...its a business not a social experiment. Coming in costs more money, prove to me its money worth spending on a case by case basis. If you don't run a handson manufacturing line what evidence supports paying for a building where everyone has a space? We've already ditched offices for cubicles and cubicles for open plan offices just to save space (i.e., cost). At this point the burden of proof isn't on 'work from home is okay' just from a financial perspective.

Not everybody at Google is in one location to begin with.

It's "proven" better for me and I'm, never going back and that's all that matters to me. I feel like this is a trend.

Just don't be surprised when your colleagues leave for more flexible companies that don't feel the need to control their employees like they're in kindergarden

Obviously it’d be ridiculous to say it helped our business grow outright, but it’s clearly not a hindrance and 6mo in there’s been no discussion of ending it. Hell our CEO has discussed canceling Friday entirely.

What I know: the industry likes to emulate google, for example they like to emulate the google job interview process and google coding style guidelines. Now my question: does this decision imply that most places will start to work strictly from the office?

This comment right here made me angry and for reasons totally different from the discussion. Its about people who thinks they they are entitled to interrupt my workflow to solve their issues.

I think the situation has proven quite a bit more than "the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn". Can't say the degree to which it has impacted business without studying it. It could have been great, not great, or a drag but to say "crash and burn" or nothing seems a bit touched.

There's virtually impossible to refactor big corporations into real remote organizations - they're "remote bolt-on". For them, to remote is only to cope with COVID, other than that it's mostly a liability.

We probably need to wait for another half-decade to see it unfold - to see if there could be any "remote native" company that can disrupt the market and challenge big corporations.

Its been shown by example, this distinction doesn't change the fact that money and productivity go hand in hand. Counter examples are counter examples and certainly they exist, but several large scale examples of it not being sustainable prove the risks are indeed real if it's mismanaged...

Within the first six months, I realized there is no single answer that works for everyone. It really depends on the ability to institute async communication, self-regulate and whole lot of other factors IMHO.

me too. however, the reality is that I haven't worked in a company where everybody is in the same location in over 15 years. under that circumstances, fully remote is the better choice and I will not be forced back into an office.

The open office is the absolute worst possible environment for being productive. I could probably be more productive in the middle of a highway.

Google's stock looks the exact opposite of crash and burn, it doubled during these last 2 years of pandemic and remote work.

Yes, your team may be fully in one office, but it's pretty rare to work in a team where 100% of your work in handled in-team. If your meetings include other teams, they're probably going to involve video conferencing, at which point, it's actually worse to use a meeting room, because it means that some people are going to have audio/video problems.

I also like working in an office, but I also understand that real life means that being remote-first is the best approach.

This has been one of my main complaints about the full time WFH during covid. If we were all in the office I could turn around in my chair and ask whoever I needed to a question. With WFH I have had to sometimes wait 24 hours or more for a response. So I was stuck spinning my wheels for hours because I was blocked without knowing which esoterically name database table to query.

You stated your preferences. There are many (probably most in programming roles) who don't, so they'll go elsewhere.

It's better for me. That's the part that I care about.

What is really hard, is being a remote newcomer to an otherwise mostly on-site company.

--

Bless your heart.

:P

We need to have better productivity tools. No one has leveraged text to speech well in work communication, but somehow YouTube and TikTok can transcribe any video via AI... No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection... I'm not saying any of that could or should happen first, but nothing has really changed about workspaces, yet leadership is still expecting new results without further lockdown to make them feel better about paying ridiculous fees for their massively uninhabited work campuses.

The Pandemic created a situation in which very very basic (and in many cases dated) tech was foisted upon us for over 2 years as "new innovation", but it's simply not. The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 is the absolute scammiest most overly-abstract pyramid scheme ever foisted on our grandparents since Amway as well...

We are simply not innovating any more and there is a major ruse over that fact pulled by the entire IT industry) driven of course by the constant need to drive investment hype... And we're putting everything behind paywalls now so much that most of it is becoming pure clickbait, even on well known news sites.

We're praising people for marginally recycling old ideas now more than ever. We're also all paying way too much for the underwhelming mediocrity of it all. Take a look at how every year most of the latest tech advancement going on with mobile and other software-driven devices is the ability for major corps to better track and harvest data on everyone. Data mining, subscription services, and embedded advertisements are nowhere near as profitable as true innovation, but somehow most companies are even stuck on even rehashing those old ideas and calling them "winning".

If we could just fix all that s*it and get back to true innovation and listening to, funding, and hiring people that truly deliver real innovative results, the working world would be better in remote work mode, and it would connect us all better as if we were in an office with less risks and without another lockdown to no sort of accountability from decision makers again.

Pretty obvious from the rest of your comment.