Your comment simply assumes that superior "velocity" to exist. Many of us have not seen it. For myself, and many of my fellow engineers in other companies, I found that I'm much more productive in remote settings. Our team's productivity objectively increased after we went remote. Conversations with colleagues shows this to be somewhat common in many other teams and companies.
Maybe your personal in-office experience has shown this fabled "velocity". For many of us it never existed, and instead we experienced constant low-value interruptions leading to inefficient loss of focus, lots of time spent "at work" but not actually working, instead socializing or wasting time in other ways that feel good.
I don’t really care where I work, but I’ve come to strongly value travel / face time with my coworkers given that my team is fully distributed and Google Meet is just not the same as meeting someone face to face. For example, I ended up having a 5 hour rambling conversation about the history of our company with another coworker which suddenly shed a lot of light on why I wasn’t able to make progress pushing for certain org-wide changes. This would’ve never come up in a WFH context, since it’s “inefficient socializing,” but in the long run it’s going to help my communication skills a lot.
And the last thing: whenever I’m in the office, I get lots of interruptions, mostly from other ICs (I’m a tech lead). Although my personal progress slows down, I’ve noticed that my coworkers all move faster because they tend to be more likely to ask questions in person than scheduling meetings to pair. In person we tend to dive a bit deeper into the “why are we making this change” which helps people grow more than a direct answer to the “what”. To be honest, Slack and email are far worse distractions for me than the office ever is.
Other people seem to be wired differently.
In other words, remote work is a lot like multi-tasking. People swear that they're uniquely good at that, too, and insist that it's only the old farts who can't get with the new trends.
Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup? And if they're still happy in that case, who are we to say they have to change the way they work? So let people realize that the decide for themselves instead of doing the reasoning and making decisions for them that they may not agree with.
Regarding social interaction, getting surrounded by other people at times is nice, since we're inherently social animals, but why would we utilize work to fill in that need? Getting isolated for an extended period of time would drive me insane, but getting surrounded by other people, who I may not be comfortable with, would also do the same to my mental health.
As for my case, I have found that people can disregard the practices we have developed in the WFH era since they can "communicate faster" now and that has been giving me lots of headaches lately. So when people say they are more efficient at the office, I automatically associate that with the tendency to ignore clear, coherent documents because people think they are "cumbersome".
> Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup?
Generally agreed, but caveats apply here: a lot of folks may prefer to work from home, but don't necessarily prefer the approach that leads to their greatest productivity. Also, most people don't properly account for intangibles, such as the creativity benefits of an environment where people spontaneously interact on a daily basis (it's famously the entire reason the Pixar studio building is designed as it is), or the mentorship of new people. Costs like this may be OK for a year, or three, but will eventually come back to bite you.
Finally, many people have reliably mis-aligned notions of what "productivity" is. For example, when a junior engineer disappears down a dark hole of code, it's usually a bad sign, even though they almost always think they're being very productive (I say this from deep personal experience, having fallen into this same trap many times over). The danger of this one is that even if you're evaluating by "outcome", nobody really knows if you're unproductive because you're drifting, or because you're distracted, or because of something else. And if you're far from the group, it's even harder to tell what might be wrong.
Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem. And oh yeah: haven't you heard that the manager of the Chaos team is talking about eliminating that use-case anyway? Spending too much time there would be toxic for your career!
I haven't found a way to replicate this with zoom.
This sounds like a lack of technical leadership. If the junior's boss is an engineer, and they do their job, then this won't happen. The story reminds me of my first job, which wasn't even remote, where my boss was a non-technical person and I was going down "dark paths" constantly because he couldn't recognize it as he lacked the expertise.
Juniors aren't going down a darkhole. They are asking on expert forums and trying out different things. It's part of becoming senior. They don't need someone to rescue them.
People interact on a daily basis remotely. It's form is different but it matches the medium.
I feel like the real story is something like this: a lot of people on HN are folks who have a highly introverted nature and work in jobs that demand extensive quiet time. Also, most are pontificating on the internet, but still haven't returned to the office. They have almost completely forgotten the velocity achievable when a team works together.
Can you overcome the limitations of remote work with better, more intentional documentation? Yes, to an extent. But my experience is that once you go back to working as a group, you'll re-discover that in-person communication has orders of magnitude more bandwidth. And if you have those best practices in place and work in an office together, you're even more efficient.
I don't hate remote work -- I do it myself, sometimes -- but nothing works as well as in-person communication. I forsee a future where most companies embrace a hybrid schedule, but demand in-person attendance on a regular basis.