I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?

> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.

What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?

> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.

Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?

I like having casual talks about nothing in particular without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for growth in many aspects.

The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly.

Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company that can do it should be and any that isn’t should go the way of the dodo.

But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.

One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their offices in order to facilitate random meetings between people:

> However, almost as many fruitful interactions described in the book can be traced to architectural features. Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate the building were included intentionally, so that chance encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”

Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:

> In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to investigate the effects of inter-office communication. They convinced their employees to where sociometric badges for the duration of the experiment and identified three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by about $200 million.

I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way, companies definitely should play around and see what works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.

Ultimately, only the social aspect (building relationships, small talk with coworkers) remains. This should not be completely discounted, but everyone should do an analysis of what they are willing to go through to be in office. A 20-30 minute commute or a slightly longer public transit ride where you are assured of a seat? Sure, office will be worth it. 1+ hour each way in bumper-to-bumper traffic? Might as well WFH.

That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.

And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably invisible to you because you don’t take the time to get to build a relationship with your fellow workers.

I’m honestly curious about where you work that that doesn’t happen.

Engineer only stand ups are a good one

I misspoke and I'm sorry, your suggestion of remote work staying is brilliant and definitely your original idea. I know we've all been embracing remote work, myself included, I'm glad you told me it's here to stay. That's great news!

That’s so wildly untrue and obviously so, I’m blown away that you could declare something so obviously false so confidently.

Where do you work? I’d love to short that company’s stock.

I’m betting you can imagine who is helpful and who is less so, and further I bet it’s pretty obvious in most cases, which makes the folks who are on the bad end of it defensive.

Why on Earth would I not want any of that, and spend all that time out of my life with people who are not also my friends? What a sad way to look at life.

People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense.

Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've implemented in companies comes from employees having beers together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things should be".

I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and another person who wasn't really in the conversation overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.

As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire buildings were built with this in mind.

If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres more to life (and business) than that.

Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and depressing.

It’s interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways, and it makes life better to know them a little bit.

"Revenue driving" is one metric. Another one is, "cost reduction", and still another on is overall zeal for the work.

A good conversation can hit any and all these metrics. And it all adds right up too.

I care about coworkers. When people are able to make it OK, it shows! Tons of small things happen, people helping one another out, feeding off one anothers overall energy, and more really matter!

There needs to be laughter, fun, and the good vibes that come from a group of people who understand one another well enough to appreciate the time they spend together.

A group like that will have plenty of the business conversations too. First and foremost, they will be comfortable enough around one another to have those chats with few worries.

Another thing to keep an eye out on is fear, blame and shame.

Much better to boil it down to choices and outcomes.

Did we make a bad call? Ok, great. The outcome sacked, so how do we avoid that in the future? Easy conversation that should not worry anyone.

Making failure into learning opportunities is another big one. People need to be able to try it whatever it is. And when they can share the experiences and draw own their more seasoned peers, they improve rapidly and feel good about the whole process.

I could go on here, but there are just a ton of human dynamics well worth the bit of time and attention needed to insure everyone is able to participate without having fear, blame and shame front and center.

I totally respect people who prefer the office life, I was just trying to offer a perspective as someone who is, like, half-aligned with you :)

Personally I find the negatives to required office work far worse than the positive of social opportunities in the office. Maybe I'm too biased to have an objective opinion on this (I'm in my early 40s and already made my office friends after years of being required to be in an office), but I would much rather have the flexibility of remote work, which still allows me to meet up with co-workers after work if we choose to do so. I absolutely agree that there's much more friction and inertia that would make those sort of meetups less frequent. But for me, that's a worthwhile trade-off.

I think businesses that are embracing remote work should still maintain a (smaller) office where employees can come in when they want to or need to, for whatever reason. Sure, this doesn't work when people are geographically distributed all over the place. But that can also be a choice when looking for a job: just as I might look for an employer that's remote-first, others can look for employers with office cultures.

I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"

Looking back though, I think the important thing is not physical proximity, it's conversation without an agenda. If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk: grousing about frustrations, daydreaming about improvements, comparing notes, etc. I think these things are important (not to everyone, I get that some people despise small talk, but to some people). If you only communicate in formal meetings, you can end up with 6 people independently realizing Greg's data lake proposal is doomed to fail, but not speaking up because they each feel like everyone else is on board.

And it hadn't occurred to me before this moment, but the way to get this back without returning to an office seems obvious: pairing and mobbing. That's the only time since I started WFHing that I've had or seen others having these kind of un-directed conversations with coworkers: during downtime in a mob. I need to think about this a bit more...

Whats stopping people from scheduling “shoot the shit” of coffee calls though? That’s what I’ve seen many do since the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you describe: people vent, talk about what happened during meetings, etc.

This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that can be about anything. It can differ based on the person and your relationship.

It completely feels like the scene from Arrested Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".

A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether you're in the meeting or at home.

So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private channel during the week that the messages are alive -- probably less than the chance of the person you're talking about standing around the corner.

Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

How would I know that these conversations happen over Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's or small private channels. And this was commonplace well before the pandemic and WFH started.

Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

It's hard to have a private in-person conversation outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people that you don't want to hear them.

I would find it highly suspicious if someone tried to have a backroom convo with me on a digital platform.

The failure there is that the person is afraid to tell that in the meeting. He or she has to rely on backchannel.

Simply smiling at someone nicely over the coffeepot a few times can make them disposed to help you later. A three minute chat about nothing, and now you have a contact in IT/purchasing/payroll...

* not a real statistic, but the intent is real

I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that directly leads to any of the productivity gain that the anti-remote crowd would like you to believe.

Not everything in life is about career advancement.

I think people who wants to work from home should be able to. I'm doing hybrid personally as well now, it's great for keeping my chronic pain under control. And I enjoy coming in couple days a week to a quieter office (as lots are doing hybrid/mixed wfh as well).

Internet has conditioned us to think that people can only have extreme beliefs, and any disagreement means their opinion must be the polar extreme opposite of mine. I can simultaneously appreciate opportunities I've got from socializing with people in a fully-WFO setting while also appreciating benefits of WFH ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This isn't about assuming extreme positions, this is about reading what someone has written and responding to it at face value.

Well said :)

If you're not ok with that, that's your choice to make: find jobs that give you those opportunities, and tilt your work-life balance toward work. Hell, you should be happy that I have more flexibility in my working arrangements and can make this trade-off: less competition for you to get what you want.

Yes, that's not what you said, just like that's not what the comment you replied to said.

I explicitly did not say "everyone should work from home", using words like "many of us", so right, "that's not what [I] said", and you're just making up an argument where none exists.

But you see, all the decision makers about the RTO are the sort of people who would be obsessed with career development. So they would be very biased against this sentiment. In an employer's market, they have all the power now.

Maybe what you describe works at some places or for specific people. Many companies will ignore your ideas. Your title is code monkey and that's all you do - shut up and listen to us important people. Some managers are very threatened by their subordinates, or are unimaginative. The business side generally wants what they want. God forbid you suggest some new approach.

And that's mostly what you get with this attitude that doesn't value any meetings / communication which doesn't relate directly to one's work.

But the organizations don't want to have code monkeys (typically), because to produce value, people can't just churn out code to complete assignments, they need to also understand the context, be able to identify made up problems, be able to design the most minimal solution covering the business needs etc. That requires understanding, certain alignment, communication.

> And that's mostly what you get with this attitude that doesn't value any meetings / communication which doesn't relate directly to one's work.

But all the things you've listed in the following paragraph are totally communications that relate directly to one's work. What is the case that unrelated communications are also essential?

Remote work will continue to reduce over the next couple of years. If you don’t have a real reason for being at home during the work day, expect to be back in the office soon.

Any real data on this? All the data our company has shows increased performance during WFH, such as an increase in deliveries and decrease in cycle time. So even if it's not as well formed, it seems it's formed sufficiently.

That’s not where it actually ends, however. How do you know what to work on? How do you know if you built a profitable thing? Being remote lets you ignore those things in ways that are harder to do in person.

Hybrid is probably here to stay, but “remote first” was a pandemic only thing.

Lol don't tell me what I think. Those are the metrics that our management uses. That's their focus, and are pervasive in the industry. Sure, you can talk about shipping the wrong thing. What's the metric called for that, or would it fall under rework? Our rework has not gone up. There's no noticeable increase in failed projects either.

"Being remote lets you ignore those things in ways that are harder to do in person."

No, it really doesn't. These same ritual and due diligence conversations take place remotely. Or maybe your org doesn't have good procedures?

a) we're not talking about how people decide what to build, as that has nothing to do with working remotely,

b) managers aren't involved in determining either what to build or how well the plan to build something was executed, and

c) the people who do decide those things have meetings which are irrelevant when talking about working remotely or in person.

Am I understanding you correctly?

How? That's certainly not what I've observed.

And I say this as someone who was also working remotely before the pandemic. I’m always wary of people who refuse to acknowledge the downsides of ideas they support…

You’ve got to do better if you expect to retain employment long term, and certainly if you expect to retain the privilege of working remotely.

You may have had a better experience. If so, then, with all sincerity, I congratulate you on your luck; I bear no ill will to those who happen to find genuinely good employers.

Just don't take your experiences as typical and use them to argue that the rest of us should act as if our experiences either didn't happen, or aren't common.

I've retained employment for nearly two decades, and have retained the "privilege" of working remotely for nearly half of that. I'm not concerned.

(Yes, I am aware of a few exceptions who attain "fellow" or equivalent levels, but they are the exceptions to my observation and such positions are anyway <1% of the technical workforce; not everyone can be a fellow).

Its a free for all for asking questions, sending messages, making unofficial FYI notes, its an attempt to document those conversations that would have otherwise taken place between individuals. Everyone from the top down has read/write access. Main objective to document those conversations, so nothing gets missed, like people being otherwise engaged in meetings/phone calls. Self Censorship takes place because everyone can view it, reduces staff harassment problems.

If you expect anything else, you might expect humans to not be like humans.

But I really enjoy socializing with folks with similar interests (e.g., tech), and I work with a lot of neurodivergent colleagues which puts less of a strain on my social battery as I don't have to be "normal"---we're all weird and it's fine.

Still, my social battery drains quickly nonetheless, I tend to have to leave after hanging out for an hour or two.

I agree most of my 'big breaks' were face to face, that was due to the point I was in my career at that time. I've still had some great progression during remote working times - sometimes you just need to make these things happen - contacting someone just for a chat if that is what you need, turning up to online meetings early to spend a little time chatting before the proper meeting, or asking specific people if they have time to stay on.

I really think half the problem is that we aren't yet used to the new rules of engagement, and are still figuring out what feels right. But opportunity is still there.

You are just as capable of taking a bag lunch to a cafeteria, or going out to eat...

Exactly, and how many of those conversations are wasted on nothing? Sure, there's a social element to it, so how about we highlight that aspect and not some "lightbulb" moment that derives from small talk.

I don’t really understand why many commenters here are expressing a sentiment that you can’t get to know someone digitally. Some of the best people in my life were met online, both personally and professionally.

I'm not saying it's worth 2+ hours of commuting. And honestly, I think it's bullshit that employers expect commuting time to be unpaid; if having people in the office is something they consider valuable, they should be paying for that commute time. But I reject the idea that those conversations have no value.

It will be impossible to quantify these "water cooler chats." For as much work gets done, just as much probably doesn't.

Companies that are all remote will survive but they won't thrive and in a competitive market will lose to those that are in person.

I say that after running a company that was one or the other at various times. The periods when we were all in person (constantly, not as a special event) is when real innovative progress was made.

Some of my best ideas that ended up being company changing started as a conversation walking to lunch with colleagues.

Initially these ideas were just undeveloped thoughts and I would never dream about booking a meeting to present them. Having a chance to develop them in a casual conversation might have been the difference between successfully building the thing and not doing it at all.

I love working from home but miss the unstructured collaboration.

Your company doesn't have informal communications channels for this sort of thing? Team/Slack/whatever? In every place I've worked for the last 15-20 years (it was different before that), such informal "watercooler" talks have never happened in person, whether everyone was in the office or not. It was always over electronic communications.

The reason for this is that it's less disruptive to other productive work.

The problem is that it is obvious how useless and misconfigured our entire corporate management structures are with remote work so the easiest solution is to go back to the office.

The pandemic was a fun exercise in forced, real efficiency but we need to get back to the Dilbert cartoon version of life because the Dilbert cartoon characters call the shots and put a ton of time into becoming those characters.

Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddling from management.

Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.

Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.

In my experience all my valuable connections have come from me working really hard on the same team as them and being goals oriented and meeting those goals; not wasting time dilly dallying in the hallways. Making meaningful connections in the hallway sounds like a middle manager thing.

Being sociable and taking an interest in other people via hallway convos is also a good way to build connections and/or friendships, but that has nothing to do with my earlier comment.

And before you reply: how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you? Keep in mind that a lot of people in tech (myself included) are literally digital natives who learned to socialize on the internet before adapting to doing it in person.

When you spend multiple hours together with someone day after day, you develop a bond. That leads to being generous and helpful and this connection is sorely missing in a fully remote world.

> how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you?

No setup will work for every single person. But for most of the humans, in-person interaction helps create better bonds. Here are some research papers[1][2]. Yes, there will be a few outliers who do not like meeting people IRL, but that ultra-small minority should not be dictating policies which go counter to human nature.

[1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/s41598-021-045... - "In‑person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion."

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321... - "In both experiments, positive affect was higher after in-person support vs. texting."

Lol. Never knew that, time for me to to go into therapy.

Otherwise, they probably just moved on to be another cog in the machine that has no say over hiring.

And if you are under 40 (probably under 60), yes, some of your coworkers will advance to positions of power. Nothing to do with luck, it's just numbers. But you can certainly increase your own opportunities by directing your helpfulness, generosity and competency towards as many people as possible.

Why do you assume he doesn't do that?

That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers offered/provided any mentorship?

I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.

It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.

I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.

I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.

The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.

One man's cynic is another man's realist.

In my opinion, OP's description of office life is idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus.

I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with.

I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful professional relationships, but despite having made many work friends, as stated previously none of them have led to career development (OP's mention of networking).

Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with

I STRONGLY disagree with this universal claim.

I think you just had bad luck

I never said that I didn't make friends, I said that I never made a connection that proved valuable in the context of networking, i.e. career growth.

My first decade of employment had zero mentoring and was basically just a gauntlet of abuse and unsafe work practices. Only time it got good was working w big blue, no abuse there. Idealic tbh. After that back into the slums of normie business. Got fired for upholding security standards lol.

Business/work isn't as kind to some of us as it is to others it would seem.

It's no different. American corporate culture has assimilated FAANG 100%. The only thing remaining is the free food and fancy offices (but not for long).

There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.

Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.

Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.

So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares, remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire them.

I don't believe that, those are very different mode of communications.

> There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.

I think, this could potentially help, but we seem to be still very far from it technologically. It's still impossible to achieve realistic eye contact. Audio in calls is still tragically bad - it's actually somewhat shocking that nobody was able to figure this out yet.

> Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet.

Might work in theory, but in my experience not in practice. My company tried to organize some socializing remotely, but the attendance was dramatically lower than in the in person events.

> I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.

So what? Just because something is different, it doesn't mean you can't get useful benefits from it.

No, you're not going to have a random hallway meeting and conversation on on a chat platform. But the barrier to just saying hello to someone or asking them a question drops to near-zero when you have those chat platforms. Yes, it does mean you need to be more deliberate about making interactions happen, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

The "remote renaissance" is still very new. (And it started during a time that was not ideal for methodically exploring and learning a new paradigm.) It'll take many more years before people adjust and really find out how communication works best.

You've missed the point. It's wasn't that there are no benefits from it. It's that there are specific benefits from conversations that won't happen on a wiki.

This is a great example of how people can miss the point if you don't go round the houses with conversation and say something in multiple ways, so they can't misunderstand.

It's nice to be able to meet in person sometimes and going out is more fun. But it absolutely is not important for effective communication. Unless they literally have poor writing skills and/or poor reading comprehension.

Email and text (and surely Slack as well) are notorious for miscommunication as a result of missing emotion, lack of visual cues, not recognizing sarcasm/joking, etc. Dozens of studies and millions of personal experiences confirm this.

May be true in some small, limited segments of the States. The vast majority commute by car. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death. Very pleasant!

Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't magnitudes of time worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.

Actually I implemented this. When I worked in the office, I used to bike to and from work every day. Every week I tried to choose a (slightly) different route. An it was really, really good for my mental health.

For the first 10 minutes or so of the ride I still had some thoughts from work, then gradually they started to disappear, I got intrigued by new shops being opened, some random folks doing crazy stuff on the street etc. In the end, I could feel endorphins coming and finally felt pleasantly tired when arriving home.

Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride whenever I want instead to the office.

Thank you! I've seen far too many posts where someone is saying "I biked/walked to work and it was great; everyone else should be forced to go to an office so I can keep my nice commute".

How are so many people blind to the idea that, if they are working from home, they can still take a bike ride or go for a walk before and after work? Hell, they might even now have the flexibility to take that ride/walk during lunch, or at other times when they need it.

Pandemic royally fucked over that lifestyle.

I miss my ~30 minute commute (by bike) from my old job. It provided good delineation between home and work, and 1h of good cardio a day meant I didn't need to do any of that at the gym. I didn't have a need for that time to myself to choose what to do because I liked that choice being taken away for these relatively short periods and me being "forced" into doing a nice chunk of exercise. It also allowed me to ramp up to work thoughts on the way in, and to slowly dump my work thoughts as I went home.

Maybe this is also just me who, now working fully remotely, struggles to regularly schedule in a similar amount of exercise despite having more time available with no commute. Since it's no longer strictly required I'm less likely to do it.

But discussing this with other colleagues and we worked out that, as a generalisation, which side of the fence you are on these types of things comes down to whether or not you have children.

If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30 minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this time to yourself. If you don't have kids you've no idea why you would crave this time.

Allowing remote work increases possibilities, and you've presented a false dichotomy. There's nothing that says an employer can't still maintain a (smaller) office for people who want to come in (either every day, or a smaller part of the week). Employers could also provide a stipend so people like yourself could rent a desk in a co-working space (assuming they still exist post-pandemic). And at the most basic, assuming you really did have to work from home, there's nothing stopping you from taking a break and going on a 30-minute bike ride. You could even "simulate" your commute by taking that ride once in the morning and once at the end of the day.

Requiring people to come to the office reduces possibilities, and requires that everyone conform to the same mold. I totally get that you liked going to an office. But it's selfish to require everyone else do that just because you want to. And you don't need to require that in order to get what you want, too.

> If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30 minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this time to yourself.

This is completely unrelated. Please don't suggest that everyone else should have to go to an office every day because you somehow can't negotiate a 30-minute break from your kids with your partner. That's your problem to fix, not mine.

I work remotely, but I walk to an office. I also like to have a separation of work and home.

Also I'm very physically active, I do crossfit 4x a week right next to my house.

I find it easier to commit by not being tied to any other location other than my home.

I definitely go through phases where I need a lot more structure in order to make things happen. Having an office just the right distance away to go to was a good target. I could either run or cycle to/from it. A public transport option was easily available (this is London, so public transport is nigh on amazing) but I was able to resist that lazy option.

I guess what I'm saying is that the freedom of working from home is just too much freedom for me. I'm way more productive and my employer gets way more of my time (not that they demand any extra time from me) but I'm lacking the initial impetus to get out of the house to do my own stuff.

Even something as simple as walking my kid to school (they're old enough now to make their own way) meant that I was out of the house and, on days without any early morning meetings, I'd walk on to the local pool to do a ~1h swim, or I'd run a long route home. Now it's just too easy to be holed up indoors and think "ah, I'll go for a swim/run/ride a bit later" and never do.

I know the motivation/planning/execution will come back eventually. I've successfully trained for various endurance events in the past but I guess my brain hasn't caught up with all of the changes that the pandemic has had influence on, including my working setup.

I have already told my manager that despite the official "you must work 2 days in the office per week" policy, if they ever try to apply that to me, I'm out. I'm looking for an excuse for early retirement, but it's just too much of a risk to disturb the status quo at the moment. Perturb the situation at your peril, employer-mine.

I got a seat-assignment earlier in the week (the official line is that they've hired too many people and can't place everyone, so some of us have 'volunteered' to stay at home). I was just about to enquire what was going on in Slack when he got to me first saying it was a group-wide thing and he'd reassign me to a non-desk seat as soon as he could. Which he did; and so I continue to work there...

Most people who commute across Puget Sound go the other way. They live on the west side and commute east to Seattle. That direction is a nightmare, with heavy traffic and long waits both in traffic and at the ferry terminals.

Going my way traffic was not too bad even if I went in during rush hour. I usually went in a couple hours or so later though and then it wasn't even noticeable. Similar coming home.

On the ferry I could nap in my car, or read in my car, or go take a nice stroll around the deck enjoying watching the water, or have a meal or a snack at the ferry's cafeteria, or relax in the fairly comfortable passenger seating area. There were newspaper vending machines with the Seattle Times, Seattle PI, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal which provided another way to spend my time on the boat.

I’ve literally never seen this. I’ve seen people sit around and gossip about coworkers or talk about the latest TV shows or movies or sports, though. (And nothing wrong with that. We can’t think about work for 8 hours straight.)

> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on

That’s the exact opposite of my experience. The first few months were awkward because it was slightly new and assumptions were made that we’d be back in the office in a few weeks. But as time went on, everyone became much more productive. But that’s just my office, not everyone else’s.

> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.

> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.

Or you can just turn off your work computer and do something else to create that space, like hang with your family or friends.

> That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.

These are not the same thing, although you aren’t the only one in this (frankly depressing) thread making this mistake. You don’t have to be completely best buds with your mentor, including outside of work.

Spontaneous discussions and networking don’t work as well online because it requires more intent to talk to the other person. That spontaneous networking is more important for junior rather than senior people.

Being “in the kitchen” is a sign someone is probably not really working on something at that moment, and therefore may be open to conversation about something other than work. That signal is almost always missing online, and therefore doesn’t happen.

I think remote is better for personal focus, but at a small cost to team focus.

There's more demand than ever before to live in NYC, as evidenced by record high rent prices. Cities don't need to be about offices.

The number of people who want to live in cities seems to be pretty similar now to what it was before the pandemic. I don't think urbanism is dying, or, if it is, it's not because of remote work.

If your business success is predicated on random encounters, then your business success is just pure luck compensating for a lack of planning and communication.

If you actually plan and communicate well across teams & orgs then your business will work equally well in person or remote (or a hybrid).

> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.

As an employer it's your job (via delegation) to facilitate how people (can) collaborate with each other. Relying on people doing that for you during their breaks is just lazy and poor leadership.

I can see how employees existing solely in the Slackosphere can be crippling to the sort of shop talk that can spur new ideas, but I see no reason why it has to be that way.

When I hung around in person, we'd chat with them about totally random stuff. You can learn from that, but it's not nearly as business-centric as intentionally talking to people about work stuff.

I call bullshit.

This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality.

In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to ask. And guess what? In 2023, that happens over Slack.

At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate business units were all competing for the same tender, they were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3 separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender #tender_response_customer and #project_unicorn_tender not one single person was in more than one of those channels.

Now all this goes away if your company only uses public channels and has regular discourse in them. But unless the company was built remote first, I've never seen this in my 25 years of professional experience.

And all of this is without counting the fact that most enterprises use Teams not Slack, and Teams hides information from everyone.

Don't get me wrong, remote companies can work, and some people do not work well in offices. But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.

But you are correct; however again in 25 years, the number of those years working for a company that had perfectly working leadership, management, communication and coordination is very very low.

But I've been in your shoes too. (ok, not that smart, but I sat next to an ML guy for six months once troubleshooting his Kafka woes). I don't every intend to imply that there is one perfect answer for everyone.

While I agree, I could rephrase your argument as "remote work is very easy provided that you adjust your structures accordingly."

"Zwayhowder, the way you've phrased this sounds very angry, could we just tone it down a little" is comment in slides/reports that I receive often :D

I'm just passionate, I swear.

This sounds so horrible as to be unbelievable to me.

I've worked remote since I was 19 years old, managing remote teams and/or entire companies most of that time. I have advocated for remote work since before it was a thing, so I guess I'm a remote work Hipster.

That said, some of my largest accomplishments started out via a chance in-person encounter. I can't understand how anyone would see unrealized opportunity in any other way? It'd have been realized if so.

Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add up.

I understand this definitely depends on your role but I'm absolutely stunned that someone could have 25 years of experience in an office setting and never have had a serendipitous unscripted moment.

Developers rarely get to lunches with customers even before covid

Now, even when people are all in the office, very nearly 100% of the communications are done via chat programs (even to the person next to you) or email. For good reason, really. It minimizes the risk of interrupting someone deep in the flow.

There's often the hidden assumption that "solving technical problems" equals "creating value", but that's not always so. Lack of communication often leads to solving the wrong problems, solving more general/complex problems than needed, overengineering the solution over actual needs etc. To avoid this, it's a good practice to talk about stuff you work on and getting feedback from other people, including questions you yourself did not think of.

I deprioritized collaboration as a result and now I get much better results. It’s not an issue because I am happy to explain the trade off up-front to anyone who asks. My job title is “software engineer” and my job role is to ship code. If you want me to be a staff+ engineer, engineering manager, or PM, happy to chat about a role change, but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

But once in a senior position, a person should start thinking "larger" than just their own code, especially if they want to further advance.

> but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

For sure. I would say from Staff position upwards, the collaboration aspect might take a larger chunk than pure engineering.

All this is of course very organization specific.

I’d say you’ be taken the wrong lesson from your observations.

Big formal coordination rituals typically are simply round robin of 1:1 communication. Occasionally 1:3, but never ever 1:n when the speaker isn’t management.

The reason is simple. Tasks are often independent. In that case, there’s no one to coordinate with, beyond updating the person running the status board. Even when there is a take that needs coordination, that coordination is already happening, just not at that place.

Or in other words, people that get the most out of these rituals simultaneously overestimate the average degree of connections in the social network, and underestimate the amount of communication that happens outside of their immediate view. Call it a bias in a local a hub in a network.

I can't believe the amount of people here denying this exists or that they've ever seen it. I wonder if they are the type to neglect social dynamics over cold, detached, ultimately flawed and incomplete metrics? They can't even conjecture about unseen forces and subtle influences, a sort of butterfly effect where an off topic conversation about the weekend leads to different technical decisions? Because all that stuff does happen. It can be very hard to quantify or understand.

That's one reason I hate cultures they put too much weight on performance reviews. They think they can measure individual contribution and productivity. They don't get the less obvious things that arise from group settings and informal collaboration.

I've had equal or better success following paths on my own that while being highly tangential/unrelated to my work ultimately provided valuable and relevant insights.

I guess my point is that valuable spontaneous connections require time but they don't require in-person interpersonal interactions.

I used to work at a job where I was required to go into the office (Florida). My teammates were 1. offshore (India) 2. in Nebraska 3. in Atlanta.

My manager was in Atlanta.

I had 0 teammates in the office in Florida.

What's the justification there?

I also had to do a lot of 2am-3am on call.

Our laptops were also tracked with Sapience Buddy.

I no longer work there.

I've personally found mentorship is much easier remote since you can more easily dedicate your entire focus on a person rather than just catching up real quick before meetings.

I had a team member who was really struggling with isolation. Mentioned it to me briefly in chat and I had him give me a call. That turned into regular bi-weekly meetings where we chat about work issues and whatever topics are interesting to us. It's helped us both tremendously.

The only reason for anyone to suffer remotely is deliberate ignorance by senior member of the team.

And because of the more private nature of remote communication, I've found colleagues are much more willing to open up about concerns and frustrations they have about the office.

Sure remote means that if you're a senior member of the team and want to abandon your responsibilities it's easier to hide, but some of my best working relationships have been founded remotely.

Spontaneous conversations happen every once in a while to creates an opportunity for collaboration, or maybe someone is working on a problem that another colleague worked on, so you can connect them etc. IMO, Happy hours in front of the screen are boring and feels like more work.

I don't want to go back to the office on a regular schedule, but I actually miss having stronger connections to my coworkers. I think the regular company meetings in a single location is an excellent alternative

To be fair, most of this doesn't happen in the office either. I don't see any real mentorship going on in my 10 years at the company. Comany culture is a joke in my experience. Management doesn't really care about the culture as long as it facilitates getting work done and keeping people in line. Networking might be easier in person, at least for some people. I personally think networking is toxic since it effectively means that outgroups remain outsiders and potentially promotes cronyism.

It has been certainly be nice distraction, and I definitely knew more people by name but I haven't noticed anything actually profitable for company happening there.

The things that did happen is that I could just catch the few people needed to push things forward, drag one to the other and clear the roadblocks but grabbing a quick call on the communication system of choice isn't that worse.

The brainstorming on problems was better when in person tho, but that might be the mix of tooling and platform company I work for chose (MS Teams, need I say more?)

> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.

Yeah, the one remote work experience that has been my benchmark (in startup) had us meet every 2 weeks and just had half-party, half socialising, half-brainstorming thing. I feel like there is heavy underuse of tooling, back then our standard was voice only but screen sharing via ancient methods (screen session) that worked well, editors like IDEA also have very neat "editor sharing" feature that I rarely seen talked about

I thought it sounded great. Spent most of my time out of the office for the first 3 weeks. Quickly felt the downsides and got back in the office for the remainder of my next 2 jobs. Networking alone was more valuable for my career personally than anything that we actually accomplished in the office by being there together.

I don't know that the company benefited, but I felt like I did.

At the larger company though (business telecom), it was a lot easier for them to secure the network by controlling all of the devices and endpoints in the office, including camera access and building access. Dealing with all those employees on remote devices over a VPN would have been a huge security headache IMO.

Digital hallways exist in the form of private messages.

I guess more real-time digital communication such as video or call (video taking priority given that it contains additional sensory information) could come close, but none of these are 'memory-less' as physical interaction.

I wonder if I myself have blown through professional relationships in this way...I like to think that the cultures I'm in aren't so risk averse towards the first impressions they make.

I love reading things like this, because it tickles my hypocritical funny bone.

Where is the evidence for this? Where is the hard data showing that these "hallway conversations" ultimately generate more sustainable long-term revenue for the company? Because at the end of the day, that's the only reason a company should ever mandate anything that employees don't want: because it either generates more revenue, or saves them money. If you can't prove that requiring employees to be in-office accomplishes this, then there's no reason to do so.

Regarding hypocrisy: I recall as an individual contributor all the times I've been required to justify -- with hard data -- things I wanted management to support because I believed it would increase developer happiness and comfort, and thus increase productivity (and reduce costs). It was always hard (or impossible) to do this, especially before the fact, so management would often turn me down. And yet, we have this completely unsupportable statement -- "everyone in-office creates better connections that leads to higher productivity" -- that management is all-in on enforcing.

I think the real reason for "return to office" initiatives is mundane and obvious: ego, power trips, and an unreasonable lack of trust.

> But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?

If you already have an office and expect everyone to be relatively close, you don't have to fly everyone anywhere. You just have "come to the office" days. Depending on the level of remoteness of your workers, that can be as often as once a week, or once a quarter.

> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day

False. You're not taking into account the myriad ways people choose and need to live. I wouldn't do the SF<->south bay commute ever again (used to do that 10+ years ago daily). Are you telling me I'm required to move to take a job that's a 60-minute drive away? That's ridiculous.

> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.

Ah, I see. So basically you see "people are leaving cities in droves" and think the solution is "make people come to the office". Another unsupportable statement, and also unreasonable to ask of people. I live in a city, have no intention of leaving, and value the fact that I work from home, even though any job I'd take would also be in the city. I hate sprawl and would never go back to living in a suburb.

Maybe some people don't want to live in cities, though. Your "solution" to this problem is to require people do that (through completely unrelated employment considerations), just to keep cities healthy? How selfish!

At the start of the pandemic we went full-remote and it worked, because we all knew each other well. Yet even then, I felt the loss of informal (sometimes work-related, sometimes not) communication with coworkers.

Time passed and now I'm in a fully-remote job. It's alright, my coworkers are nice, and things get done. But it's not the same. I don't feel like a part of anything. I'm constantly subject to the distractions of being at home -- there's lots of interesting stuff to do here, and my ADHD makes it tough to ignore.

More than likely, I'll retire early rather than finish out a career that's some mix of WFH or going to a nearly-empty office.

Pandemic changes in work has thrust into the open the challenges with remote. But you ignore it at your own peril or curl up to the familiar return-to-work ass-on-the-seat model and be left behind.

Btw, if you need good ideas, you schedule and organise a brainstorming session or create an idea board org wide. You encourage challenging assumptions and involve your team in decision making. All of this need to happen irrespective of whether your team is local or scattered. Might as well use modern technology when you can and support remote and local discussions.

From the about 1 year i spend in the office about 10 years ago it was mostly annoying to have to "connect" (and the worst thing was force "team building", after 8h spend together in the office). Sometimes we had fun and laugh aut at the end of the day work is just work. everything beyond that is some weird, twisted invention by the HR and corporate mumbo-jumbo (especially part about "corporate culture") - remember, you don't own anything to the company, you are not a slave and corporation doesn't own you anything (which was shown by the recent lay-offs)..

In fact, a counter example: people regularly spawn random threads of conversation like the one you mention in Slack channels. A lot of times nothing comes of it, but some of these threads tag senior executives and managers within the company who have followed insights from threads into new cost improvement or even revenue generating ideas.

These conversations are unlikely to happen in passing hallway conversations and even if they did would likely not develop further than a couple remarks without forcing people to creating meetings to discuss topics that may or may not be important, which quickly gets overwhelming and makes people lose interest in further discussion. Having people sit around all day at an office in case such a conversation spontaneously happens is very inefficient when it can be done online in asynchronous fashion.

The central tenet of your argument is thus unraveled and the conclusion you must come to is that we don’t need offices. Accept it. Office workers aren’t here to serve as NPCs to fill your pretty little cities.

I'm supposed to move whenever I change jobs?

That's an interesting way to say "office politics."

Those spontaneous connections yielding noticeable results are probably an urban legend. 25 years in the business and I've never seen this happen. You're talking with people in your team/project anyway in regular meetings, so there is no reason to drag that into the hallway. Talking biz to people from other projects/teams is mostly impossible - would take hours to explain a specific problem to get a meaningful contribution. Never goes beyond basic griping and commiseration.

If you think those meetings are essential for company success you REALLY should examine your process.

Unhealthy separation: spending 45-90 minutes (one way) in traffic, polluting the planet.

Healthy separation: the 6 vertical meters between me working in the attic and my kids playing downstairs in the living room

I feel like this isn't really true in the SF Bay Area, it's too expensive even for most software engineers. We're not all making L7 @ Meta money.

I can see why you would think that but might I offer another perspective: we are better off without cities being built as commuter hubs for suburbanities.

Cities in the US are often located in very valuable real estate, most of which is used suboptimally for office spaces, which are occupied only during certain time on weekdays. I would like this to change. American cities should build a TON more apartment towers and dense housing in city centers that no longer need so many office buildings. Let the young, the weird and the creatives live in the cities and make them great.

In fact, I am seriously happy about the reduction in traffic to/from suburbs. Every weekday, most American cities turn into traffic severs, mostly commuters getting in/out of the city. This is just madness! And no doubt makes our cities more polluted (air and noise) and less desirable to live/work in.

Thank you for mentioning the importance of this. I graduated and entered the job market during the start of the pandemic. Getting a job was super difficult because every company suddenly implemented a hiring freeze. I managed to find a job at the company I interned at because they lost many developers due to the company being in the travel space (they didn't want to find themselves jobless in a pandemic, travel related payments were tanking). They were so desperate for bodies I got waived through because I was an intern one whole year before.

I quickly found myself in an empty office trying to onboard myself through the process, with a handful of tired devs trying to do the work that before had a team of 30. I spent my first few months in panic because nobody could find the time or patience to work with me, and the business logic was quite dense. It was still my first job and I hadn't worked up the courage to ask for help, and it was x10 harder when we worked from home. I could ask my fellow desk-mate because I could judge how busy they were, but it was torture asking people over teams and interrupting their flow.

Now almost 3 years into my job, I can definetly see how my anxiety kept me from progressing and I grew a lot. But WFH as a new person into the workforce, it was difficult until I found my footing and a routine. And a nice mentor. I am not ashamed to admit that it took me quite a while. Now I have more experience and I can work a bit more independently, so I appriciate our 2 wfh days. But most of our collaboration work is done best in the office.

I agree, but not with the hallways and kitchenettes part. Sorry, never have I ever seen anything productive done in the hallway, and coincidentally this is the part that many disagree with here.

But I wholeheartedly agree with the "spontaneous communication" part, but *in the office, at the desk*. There are many things that are much easier when you can just come to a desk of your colleague (someone on the team, or your manager, or your direct report) and discuss instantly, then maybe grab another person into this discussion, make a decision, etc. Yes, I see that happening all the time in the office. Just not in a kitchenette indeed.

Now, I agree that maybe not every team needs it. Consider the two extremes. One is when your daily work is mostly "executing tasks”. In this case, whatever is more *comfortable* is the best: for some it would be working from home, for some it may be working from the office. Or, on the other end, if the team is in the early stages of making some important decisions. In this case, I truly believe this team needs to be able to communicate spontaneously. If this team is Okay with Discord - fine. Or if this team prefers being in the same physical place - fine as well.

Bottom line: being in *the office* is *one of the ways* to create an environment for spontaneous communications, which works wonders for making a series of small decisions fast.

P.S. I currently work in a flexible hybrid environment: we just agree with colleagues when we go to the office, if we want to.

Clearly you don’t live in the Bay Area. My commute was 2hrs each way. That’s 4hrs a day, just gone.

And there's a major advantage to being able to operate that way since you don't have to be geolocated with your customer or your customer services folks and you don't need plane tickets and you can get it done with an hour or three virtually rather than having to take days out of your schedule to do an onsite.

I personally enjoy it and generally work remote 2-3 days a week, but it’s awful for the organization. At this point I keep doing it as I expect there will be some incentives offered to come back.

On the productivity side, There’s way too much babysitting and people in certain roles doing errands. On the work relationship side, units with turnover struggle as new hires don’t get assimilated well.