We're now 20 years later, and they're still referring to it. But when any noninvited ask anything, they all get very very very vague. Whatever happened on the retreat, stays on the retreat. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anything illegal or untoward happened.
It worked. They became a tight social network. Ask anyone anything, and the right person and info magically appears. Even 20 years later, in a very political corporation, the trust built that weekend still persists.
Not saying the retreat was a wholesale bad idea, but it sounds to me like part of the reason it's political could be because there's an in-group and out-group derived from the retreat.
> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions?
Of course it's not an exact equivalent, but it doesn't need to be. Anecdotally speaking, the number of whiteboard meetings I had that I wanted to have were about 1 per year. Remote workers use tools like Notion, Miro, Jetbrains Code With me which have many/more of the advantages of a whiteboard.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
This one is company specific, but I don't need to be in the office to go to lunch with my colleagues. In my last office job, I had lunch with 2-3 colleagues maybe twice a week. In my current all remote job, I meet my colleagues once every other week for lunch, and I _still_ meet my previous job colleagues for lunch once a week or so.
> There is no value in body-language when communicating?
Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. With remote work, webcams do a reasonable job of picking up the "I'mn really uncomfortable with something you've just said" and "holy crap they've hit it out of the park". Again, in previous office job, a non-trivial amount of communication _in_ meetings happened in private slack groups that were messaging during the meeting - that still happens today. The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard, as most remote teams tend to practice async communciation practices (which are not required but are often combined with remote work)
That's... not all that body language conveys?
Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion".
Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth. They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.
You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs.
> The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard
And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.
And that's ignoring the fact that written communication lacks critical nuance (which ends up being poorly filled in with things like emojis) that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
I dont know where you got the idea that I'm pretending there's not trade offs, that's exactly my point.
> Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth.
And those still existed in the office. if I had a nickel for every time someone senior dialled into a call from their car with a kid in the back of it,I could buy a latte. Meanwhile, zoom and meet both have tools to help alleviate those concerns (raising hands, and queues of such).
> They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.
Again, it's tradeoffs. The tradeoffs are appropriate for work conversations, but maybe not for having a deep relationship question with my partner.
> And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.
I mean, yes? Written communication is pretty much a hard requirement for most office jobs, and anyone who struggles with it will struggle with email and mant other forms of communication.
> written communication lacks critical nuance
Hard disagree here. Good written communication skills can be as nuanced as verbal communication. Besides, nuance is by definition ambiguity. Communicating in a workplace by refusing to say things is a crutch, and is a recipe for disaster.
I'm autistic. My body language conveys things that are interpreted incorrectly by nearly everyone, particularly in management. This leads to me having to explain repeatedly that no, that's not what I'm experiencing at all, please stop.
When people don't get those cues from me, they understand me better, not worse.
But I find the real loss is hallway conversations and seeing the body language of the people I'm are not talking to.
Going fully-remote requires deliberate changes to the company culture to make implicit things like meeting in the hallway happen remotely. This is not easy and requires more upkeep by everyone than just showing up at the office.
If that's not a concern for you then have at it. But if you are at the start or mid way through your career, are motivated and still hungry for advancement I'd be VERY careful of spending too much time full time remote.
At the end of the day employers want to see what their employees are doing and employees want to avoid insane commutes / high COL rents / not feel like they are being spied on all the time, in part cause they maybe do 4 hours of work a day anyway. That's what's driving this. The rest is noise.
This is probably the most honest take I've read. Also, it's been proven WFH on a grand scale is effective over the past 2 years, so many arguments against the efficacy of WFH crumbled over Covid. Bottom line is employers who don't want to allow WFH will have a smaller and more expensive pool than they are accustomed to. There are enough WFH opportunities that going to the office is no longer a given. The current debate is employees who want to WFH that are currently employed by companies who don't want employees to WFH. It will iron itself out in a year or two one way or the other.
FWIW, I've gone to the office 100% of the time maybe 1/2 of my 20+ year career, mostly early on. I've managed to negotiate work from home days, both in the 90s, 00s, and 10s. I WFH full time today. I meet the guys for lunch every week. It's nice and it gets me out of the house. We're a small team though.
It isn't. If you are disabled, black, female, or older, an open-plan office is not a comfortable place. It's a halfway house for frat boys, but people for whom being unfairly evaluated and unjustly terminated is the kind of thing that happens at least once in a career do not, in general, do well in it.
Some people like it because they thrive on attention and being disruptive, and open offices are optimized for that behavior.
and that's perhaps only technically true... as soon as you start adding quiet spaces, collaboration spaces, conference rooms, etc. necessary for open office layouts to actually work, the plain 3-4 person office plans (which nobody had for years, i was lucky to have them replaced with open office only during the pandemic) are just plain more efficient. open offices, to the surprise of no one actually working in them, force people to the worst of both worlds: have to commute to work to IM with colleagues anyway to not disrupt the whole office. it's madness.
But in the era of WFH the cubicles and private offices make even less sense: if I spend most of my day isolated in a cubicle, then why can't I spend that time in my office at home?
Private-sector politicians and frat boys love open-plan offices; most of us are neutral at best, and with age most people come to loathe them.
Not sure what a "Private-sector politician" is, nor what your intense hatred of open-plan offices has to do with collocated workplaces in general, but I can assure you that the reasons people split across the remote vs. office spectrum is far more diverse than your generic bucketing of "white male jerks == office love; everyone else hates them".
It's kind of ironic that someone has such polarized, uncompromising views on the topic, supported by the reasoning that "they don't reflect and support a diverse and non-binary workforce"
There are plenty of more substantive reasons to not want to go back beyond "it's not fair".
And why on earth would open plan be specifically bad for black, female or older people? Do you think open plan offices are all like The Wolf of Wall Street?
As an aside, I sort of wonder why the best WoW guilds are fully remote, if in-person collaboration is such an advantage. I spent some time as an IC in one of the best guilds in the world, and being remote didn't seem like such a big deal. Later I spent some time in a leadership position in a much less serious guild (basically as bad as a guild could be and still clear the hardest content in the game) and if you told me I could have everyone in my team spend many hours per week in cars so that we could all hang out together in real life or spend that time learning about how the best players of their classes deal with upcoming encounters, it seems like it would be an easy choice. One might reasonably respond "Well, software is not like world of warcraft! Software is a lot more collaborative!" but in general the level of planning and ad-hoc coordination that goes into boss kills is unrivaled in software outside of companies like Pivotal Labs that spend an entire day on planning each week, communicate liberally throughout the day, and don't seem to end up with substantially more output than other companies as a result. I sort of wonder if this attitude is a cultural accident where much of the discipline of software engineering is made up of people who think that it's bad for people to take time to develop deep expertise in a subject area or people who have allocated so many people to a project that there isn't enough independent-ish work to go around.
I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!
Given the number of companies that offer fully remote or hybrid work, a comparable company that wants their employees in the office five days a week has to provide higher compensation and/or lower standards to meet their staffing needs.
The important question for companies is not whether they want to be in-person/hybrid/remote in abstract, the question is how much they're willing to pay.
Of course not. They're an ersatz replacement for the in-person thing. They do the job about 90% as well. Is that a problem? In the corporate world, most things are ersatz, if you're not an executive. Mediocre supplies, mediocre management, mediocre training, mediocre pay... why should we force people to shlep just to pretend their jobs aren't mediocre? A standard-issue corporate job can be done from anywhere.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.
Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote.
There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!
My manager worked entirely remote for our company since it's inception, literally in a separate time zone. I never met him, I don't even know what his face looks like. I still had better interaction, cooperation, and discussion with him than most of my other coworkers, excepting only someone who was already my friend before this job. When we wanted to discuss something, we brought it up in our teams chat, and they could go one for significant time or topics, sharing opinions, plans, work related thoughts and designs, and often personal improvement things including programming ethics and work adjacent learning presentations.
Don't force me to comply to your interaction style just because you don't understand mine.
For very extroverted people, the in-person experience might be superior, but I'd be willing to bet they just haven't put effort into connecting in online spaces. Until you've spent thousands of hours doing so, it's hard to knock it legitimately. On the flip side I've seen introverts really open up in these online scenarios in ways they never normally would, and I'm not about to design my entire life around something my team doesn't even want.
To each their own, I suppose, but I find this unhealthy. I would encourage my child to be interactive in person, not to hide behind the computer. I say this as a WFH IT employee who games - the desire to be away from people in person, the desire not to interact with others, the disdain for in-person contact, are all symptoms of a problem in my view.
I don't mean it to say I think less of people who are like this, or that they are worthy of derision. I simply think it is bad for the individual and the community.
We have 4 Wii controllers because when the kids were younger they could play with friends and the games didn't take a lot of explaining.
Going further back, you needed an opponent, probably because the systems were doing all they could to keep track of the action and couldn't generate an opponent, too.
A couple of times my son has had a friend bring an Xbox and monitor over to play in the same room at the same time. Given that most Xbox's are connected to big (and fragile) TVs, a "LAN party" would be quite a feat.
I don't really know, I am old enough to have experienced this, and LAN parties in the late 90s were indeed fun, but they took a lot of planning, expenses, and parents driving you there. I've been online since I was 15 and when we finally didn't have to pay by the minute everything was a lot better. No more coordinating for a full weekend, etc. That said, I have zero negative memories of splitscreen, except that the person who owned the game/console was always a lot better due to more practice...
Going back to when I was a high schooler, I was closeted and in boarding school, which admittedly had a significant built-in social life (that was of little interest to me), but I was also able to have a long distance close friendship for years thanks to Google Talk. I dare say some of my most important and formative social moments in my high school years were over Google Talk with my small group of friends. Sure we had antics in the dorm at my boarding school etc., but these were minor and fleeting interactions versus the deep and meaningful relationships I had over Google Talk, and anyone I actually cared about at boarding school also interacted with me that way, a good bit.
And FYI there are plenty of extroverted engineers. Some of us actually enjoy team sports as well as technical problems.
...you're in one!
Social anxiety is a genuine mental illness, and a protected disability. This kind of arrogant, ableist crap is exactly why we need to destroy the cultural norm that everybody being in the office all the time is the only way to do work.
It also means that anyone disparaging it like that in the workplace is guilty of discrimination against a disabled person, just as if they had called someone with an amputated leg a "worthless cripple", or mocked a hearing-impaired person for not being able to hear them when they whisper in a meeting.
Or are you just one of those people who thinks that all mental illness is just a lack of sufficient gumption?
The internet has been my main source of social contact since I was 12 (at which point I just stopped going outside and spent all my time building websites), so I guess I've adapted to this way of living.
Humans are almost infinitely adaptable, but if the vast majority of the world doesn't adopt a lifestyle similar to yours I fear you're really going to miss out a big part of what "living" includes. One large component: diversity, both in content and medium.
There's also the real and serious worry about "not going outside". this is terrible for your health and also has a huge corelation with poor diet and lack of exercise. You're so much more than your eyes, hands and brain.
During COVID is the first time I really stopped seeing other people (other than my wife and kids) and I actually enjoyed it. I have my own yard and house, so I do go outside on the occasion still, and make sure to get the mail each day. Some days I sit on my porch in the morning, if it feels nice. I do body weight exercises and yoga and I am having a full gym built in my basement.
That said, I still don't see many other people and I don't feel like my social needs are lacking.
I enjoy my life, it is good.
The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.
In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.
The rest of it you're right, seeing body language is helpful, getting a chance to hang out socially is helpful. But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home given that I already have a social circle.
If work were my social circle, like it was when I was younger, it would be a whole different story.
Very often back when I worked in an office.
> The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.
We took pictures of our whiteboards when we needed to save state, it worked great!
> In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.
I'm glad you are able to make it work for you!
> But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home
I'm with you on this! I'll never go back to an office full time.
All changes in complex systems have tradeoffs. In-person whiteboard sessions can be exhilarating. They also tend to produce imprecise (or no) artifacts that rely heavily on the context of the meeting for interpretation.
I noticed that when our team went remote during COVID and ideation was done by async contributions to design docs, the completeness and reliability of our designs went way up. But again, it's never all positive. If there was a design that was underspecified or not fully understood by the team member leading it, the siloing could lead to analysis paralysis.
I'm not sure where you got that I said that, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I've been fully remote for over a decade. I don't in any way insist that fully remote work needs to be exactly the same as in-office work.
The tooling that has been developed during the pandemic has taken this space forward by leaps and bounds and I expect this to continue.
Instead of focusing on the how, I would focus on the outcomes you are looking for and lets investigate paths forward for those outcomes.
My two cents: There is still body language over video calls, Miro and other whiteboarding solutions work pretty well, not every day needs intense whiteboarding sessions so have onsites when those are required, and good riddance to the lunches with colleagues. If we wanna have lunch let's get on a call and/or have some one-on-one time setup instead of thinking that lunch is somehow a team building exercise.
Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.
This is a totally fair point, but multi-cursor online whiteboards are not the same as standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming with a colleague. "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc.
> ... it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO.
I agree and understand, but let's not pretend we're not asking everyone to essentially "beta test" WFH and endure the friction of finding these new techniques. There are tradeoffs here and it's not a seamless transition. Remote work is a skill that needs honing, whereas office work is 'the standard'.
> Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.
Working remotely has immense benefits, I agree. I agree so whole-heartedly that I will never work in an office again. That being said, despite all its benefits, there are tradeoffs that don't have equivalents in the WFH world. Anyone that dismisses working from an office entirely is either ignorant or being dishonest, in my opinion.
You keep listing the benefits as if they are problems.
After work drinks and pre-work drinks are just your work getting to consume more of your life than it pays you to do so, whether hourly work time not counted or salaried hours getting diluted.
I think we're misunderstanding something here. These benefits have nothing to do about progressing the work's agenda. It's about connecting with my colleagues in a way outside of work. Socializing, increasing our networks and bonding. Sometimes work conversations happen, because it's something we have in common, but I'm certainly not 'working' at these outings.
No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.
> There is no value in body language when communicating?
There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.
> I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience
Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.
> but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.
Exactly, and I agree with you. It is much safer.
A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.
Is it obvious though? They're garbage for most of the teams I've worked with. They're tolerable to the rest.
> No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.
Ok, but I'm asserting some valuable things being lost by going fully remote only, it doesn't do either side of the argument any good to be so ambiguous and non-committal to a point.
> There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.
Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though. I'm jealous that you work with such perfect communicators!
> Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.
I totally agree, it is much improved, even if we lost a lot of valuable things in the transition.
> A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.
I did not do any such thing. I'm saying fully remote work is great, but we're losing a lot, so let's not pretend that we aren't. There are facets to in-person work that are completely lost and not translatable to fully remote work.
If you aren't neurotypical, then read ribbonfarm. Conflict, double meanings, soft and hard power, etc. will be hard to understand without it. Most body language isn't that serious, but conflict is normal and you'll have a much easier time understanding why someone else starts conflict with you. It's long; first two parts are probably enough but it is generally fairly compelling.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team leans heavily on Miro, for instance.
> Lunch
Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.
> Body language
Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.
I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room.
> Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.
That's cool and I fully support your desire to do whatever you want on your break. For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!
> Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.
I understand! However I can understand body language and I find a lot of value in it. It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. If we worked in the same office you'd be free to have lunch (or whatever you want to do while I go have lunch) by yourself without judgement from me!
It's better! We pair it with a slack call and collaboratively edit it.
> For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!
And that's an outcome that happens with WFH, too. You don't need to go to lunch together to make friends.
> It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life.
That's good for you; but again, WFH doesn't prohibit you from seeing people. If you need body language then have a video call.
Well you sure as hell aren't going to get better at it by throwing up your hands and declaring it just isn't for you. I'm naturally introverted, but when I say that to co-workers they don't believe it - because over the years I have learned to adapt. I'm very extroverted at work - because it's necessary. Yup, I pay a price - it's exhausting and I need time to recharge. But the benefits of adapting to normal work environments instead of demanding the world adapt to me are immeasurable.
There are tons of things I can do now that I couldn't do before. Many of them are unpleasant. But they are necessary and without many of them I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. Good luck with waiting for the world to adapt to you. Let's get back together in 30 years and see how that attitude works for you. I'm sure the universe will have been incredibly unfair to you :p
This whole victim = anything hard/I just don't want to do is getting old. And it devalues people with legitimate issues.
But I'll say that I had social anxiety, and that sometimes it can be overcome (certainly not always). But it will never be overcome without stress, often painful stress; and the cruel harsh world is actually a very good training ground to force you to improve. I'm glad my shortcomings weren't coddled; I'm glad they were viewed as something I'd have to either fix or cope with.
There are degrees of anxiety and other mental/emotional problems. Many are not going to be fixed, some require medication, some are just too severe. But it's a gradient, and some can get better with exposure, and removing that exposure can be detrimental (even though that exposure is unpleasant).
> > I'm naturally introverted, but when I say that to co-workers they don't believe it - because over the years I have learned to adapt.
> > There are tons of things I can do now that I couldn't do before. Many of them are unpleasant. But they are necessary and without many of them I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. Good luck with waiting for the world to adapt to you.
Some people _simply cannot adapt_. It is not a possibility.
> Stephen Hawking was still quite expressive despite his limitations, although they did come later in life
He's a fantastic example of why you don't need to rely on body language to communicate emotion and feeling.
I have some grace; I'm willing to include those in my consideration that they have deemed unworthy of consideration.
I find that people actually give away more with their body language over whatever conferencing software you may use. When you have all the portraits up on your screen, the little micro things are much easier to spot. I hope I didn't give you even more anxiety! We are just trying to see how people feel in order to manage the situation :)
One of my coworkers is a slug with a nice hat; another is an alien.
So no, without a tablet to draw on I find online whiteboards 100% useless so far.
(Btw, this took me on a tangent trying to figure out the proper way to pluralize 'only'.)
There's tradeoffs to everything, the market is going to decide whether remote work is viable or not. Maybe the Apple tier companies can force office work, but startups that are remote are going to be able to snag some great talent who refuse to waste hours of their lives commuting
in my experience the people pushing for return to office are 95% managers who are feeling exposed that they don't really do much and potentially aren't needed. Also people who relied on office politics to survive rather than actually being good at their job
Not every perk is about oppressing your freedom or exploiting your time and labor.
I always went out by myself when I wanted to eat alone, or sat at my desk with headphones in watching Youtube and eating.
You can communicate with people to help them understand you'd like your break to be a solitary one.
We're a social species. Building relationships is something we do. Is it work? Yes. But it's also something we need to do.
Apple choosing the office over WFH in 2022 feels a lot like the US choosing coal over solar in the early 2000s - a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy that will look short-sighted embarrassingly soon.
If that's not important to you - like you are towards the end of your career and pretty much happy with where you are - then that's a trade off that might not have as big an impact. But it IS a trade off and people need to be honest about it and stop hiding behind ridiculous gobbledygook like the crap that was at the start of that employee letter.
I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...
That's neat! I hope you don't think your anecdotal evidence discredits my own anecdotal evidence about how useful they are. People use different tools and I'm guessing you're not intending to say folks that have been productively using whiteboards for decades are somehow wrong.
Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.
Having lunch with colleagues has nothing to do with 'backchannel communication'. Sometimes it's nice to hear about where we like to go camping, or what cities are nice to visit in their home countries, or ... nothing to do with work or shipping products.
No matter how 'correctly' you think you're doing things, you still haven't convinced me after over a decade of shipping products that online whiteboards are useful, or refuted any of my other points.
At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.
Wow! That's pretty extraodinary to me. I wonder how we use them differently?
It not obvious what carrot or stick motivates people to deliver. But there has to be a way to achieve what the team|org|company wants even with remote workers. As a company - clearly specify and quantify goals, regularly share metrics of progress, provide better tools for working and focus on the long-term.
In person I am socially clueless and add next to nothing to the whiteboard.
Also, unlike Meet/Zoom, in VR you share everyone's screens at the same time (show a virtual monitor/laptop for each persion, have multiple shared whiteboards, have different people virtually standing in front of different whiteboards, etc....
No one even made that claim. From the open letter:
> We definitely see the benefits of in-person collaboration; the kind of creative process that high bandwidth communication of being in the same room, not limited by technology, enables. But for many of us, this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day.
I, personally, get just as much work done working from home. While I do miss the social aspect of the office, it’s just not worth giving up the hours of commute time or dealing with a lot of the in-person bs that work entails.
I realize this is a very privileged position but I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s an option.
There are great tools, which should be available for every worker in home, but that does not happen for some reason?
Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me.
You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.
Sure. single-cis-straight-white-neurotypical-abletypical-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).
Feel free to continue to argue that position.
I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only.
> You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.
Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately.
> Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).
When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries". I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.
>Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.
I suppose I do! I'm not coercing anyone to go to lunch with me, so I'm not really sure what your point is here.
> I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.
Not at all. I'm a results-driven professional and to suggest otherwise is offensive, to be honest.
> I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.
I'm talking about: socializing with my colleagues is one of the many benefits that is lost when we transition to full remote only work. The disabilities, preferences, or whatever other flavor-of-the-moment persecutions you care about is irrelevant to me. I'm going to invite people I enjoy spending time with to lunch and I don't consider the persons gender, sexuality, mental health, or whatever else you are talking about when I invite them to spend their lunch with me. I expect them to be honest and come under their own free will. I can't control anything beyond that.
If you want to spend your lunch with me, great! Let's go chat and learn about each other. If for some reason you find this offensive, or privileged, then I think we would not enjoy lunch together and that's good to learn, too! I wouldn't want to invite you to lunch the next time.
Good luck out there.
If you are in a position to influence a promotion, then an invitation to lunch is not simply an invitation to lunch. I would hope that you would be involved, either as a peer or a manager, since you come across generally as pro diversity.
The thing is, #neurodiverse message boards are full of posts like "My manager has asked me to go to lunch and I am terrified. What do I do?" Their fear is that if they don't go, they will be dismissed as not a team player, but if they do go, they may exhibit behaviors that uneducated NTs find disturbing. Many neurodiverse will just mask up and push through it, and many of us are effective at that. The right thing, of course, is to communicate (I wrote "have a conversation" and deleted it, because Autism) but many NDs don't have access to such support systems to even get the advice. If they are on a #nd channel, then we can help them.
So I'd ask you to consider that, unless you have absolutely no power in your organization, then yes, asking someone to lunch is a non-neutral decision ("coercion" is too strong a word) for an ND person that carries risks and stress.
I'm not asking you to stop having lunch with people. I'm asking you to consider ways to interact with ND people and to get familiar with the challenges ND people face.
I sympathize with your point, but object strongly to this analogy on the grounds that being racist is a choice, while benefiting from body language is not a choice. It's also very offensive, but that is a secondary issue.
Consider you are the only person in the room who can't speak French. Everyone else can speak French and your native language. Would it be appropriate for them to drop into French whenever you ask a question, talk about it, and then answer in your language? No. Not only would you feel excluded, but you'd also be missing out in vital information required to do your job.
This isn't up for debate. You can argue that installing a wheelchair ramp or not is a choice. Fortunately it is the law. Likewise, accommodating neurodiverse people is the law, at least in the USA and Europe.
If you take the position that "I am neurotypical and it is not my choice, so it is reasonable to expect everyone else to be able to interpret my body language", then in any company in the USA with 15 or more people, your statement would be actionable under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It's not a choice, it's respecting millions of years of social evolution. You are arguing that the way peoples brains are wired should be ignored to accommodate *you*. Good luck with that.
Also not sure where body language rates up there like someone with an actual physical disability or people just being assholes (your language example). Good luck filing some sort of complaint about being "forced" to interpret body language.
This feels a whole hell of a lot like "this is hard and I don't want to learn how to do it so I'll make up some syndrom to excuse it". Bah.
I don't think that's a charitable interpretation and is uncalled for.