I think what I'm seeing is that this isn't quite true. It's not where you work, but it is when.

I worked in-office for the first part of my career, then in 2020 went remote (coincidentally, right before the pandemic started). My 2c:

- overall, no major differences.

- casual chatter / schmoozing is easier. I can DM people async instead of popping over to their office or meeting randomly at the watercooler.

- Meetings are ~same effectiveness. Main note is that zoom makes it easier for less traditionally social aggressive people to get a word in - between the chat function, raising hand function (which is a lot less weird than doing the same physically), zoom eliminating height differences and evening out voice volumes (imo big effect here for women especially, it levels out soft-spoken people with the big booming aggro types).

- Coding is the same. I've always had a private office (except for a brief transitional stint in an open plan which I hated) so it's not like people were tapping my shoulder anyway.

People seem to mostly handwave towards some mystical "innovation" rate that arises from people being crammed together. I don't buy it.

The big thing that does hurt is when getting some sync communication time is hard. I've had no problem working with people with ~3 hours of timezone difference and 5 hours of overlap. It gets fucky when that overlap becomes 1 to 0 hours (so e.g. working from pacific US coast and trying to talk to Ireland/UK/etc).

On-site and remote are not so different, I think, once you stop writing critical business stuff on physical paper and whiteboards. Sync-possible vs Sync-difficult is where the big difference is and you need a fundamentally different social and organizational structure to how you work.

We tried that before, outsourcing was a huge trend maybe 20-30 years ago?

The problem is the second part of your sentence. There's a reason that particular business practice settled into a niche of call centers.

Good workers will want to be paid what they are worth, regardless of location. Everything, including labor, is priced based on what people will pay for it - not what it costs to produce.

Having worked with a number of overseas teams in China and India, it's actually somewhat difficult for US-based teams to work with teams up to 12 hours "distant" and also who have different sets of official holidays. I've been in so many status meetings that are either late at night for me or late at night for overseas team members so we can sync up, only to have bad network weather make it difficult to hear each other. Management tolerates these difficulties and added delays and inefficiencies because the labor cost difference is so large. While I love the idea of relocating overseas myself I don't think they'd tolerate continuing to pay what I earn as a US-based person once I was no longer US-based.

And then negotiating important things is fraught because it’s way too late/early for half of the participants.

That was already happening way before WFH took center stage during COVID. If they're gonna outsource you, they're gonna find a way to do it with or without WFH demands.

Turns out many of they were never really for remote work but simply gave it lip service because it was so uncommon and could be used to bash commuting in a car. Now they're quite open about hating work from home because their agenda was never about reducing vehicle emissions, it was about creating more transit that they desired since they don't want to own vehicles themselves. If people can work from home, that takes cars off the road, but it also reduces the need for public transportation. The latter is what they were truly after, not the former.

There's also a smaller group who want public transit to dominate because they see it as a form of egalitarianism. If lots of well-paid people can work from home, they're not forced to sit next to people different than them on the bus and train each day. It becomes easier for them to stop caring about the issues that urban areas face when they stop going to urban areas to work. This is also part of the reason why they get so angry about private bus services bringing workers into the city. Workers on those buses aren't forced to "sit with their fellow man" nor do they have reason to support increased funding for public bus services when their employer has a private bus that provides a superior service (at least for commuting).

[1] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/osdc/impact-covid-19-pan...

This is why I always use the cashier at businesses instead of the machine. I’m fully convinced that cashiers are the only “low” people that some people deal with all day and we lose something as a society if they go away.

In Seattle, Boeing employees are the beginning of rush hour. They like to work 7-3 and so the highways fill up just before the school day starts/ends. So getting even a few thousand people to avoid cross town traffic is huge.

This sentiment is weird to me. When people express this, I think they have a myopic view on work. Like they view work as a series of JIRA tickets that need to be closed out. As a senior leader, one of your jobs is to teach the younger folks how to do their jobs efficiently. Your personal output is not that important. You are there to be a force multiplier. Teaching is much easier in person.

It's like people who hate the interruption of a colleague sending a Slack message. Yes, such an interruption is slightly annoying, but part of your job is to help other people. Unblocking someone is most certainly more productive than whatever you were doing individually.

Ultimately, very few things are built solely by an individual. "Doing work" is mostly about collaboration if you want to build anything substantial.

I'm in the leadership position you describe, and I've found remote work to be amazing for teaching because of screen-sharing. It's so much easier to get the team talking about some code over Teams/Slack/etc. than it is awkwardly huddled around someone's monitor or looking at a TV in the office. Remotely, you're able to see the code and have high-quality audio, and you don't have to worry about some higher up manager seeing a group gathering and thinking now's a good chance to get some internal publicity...

Of course, none of the above applies if the tools aren't used. I think the key to mastering remote teaching is good scheduling.

For years now, well before the pandemic, this is how such things have been done everywhere I've worked. The two people aren't huddled around the same machine, they're each in their cubes doing screen-sharing.

It's just a better way to do it, remote work or not.

In my experience, most people learn much better from being shown concrete examples inside the workspace they already use compared to abstract examples on a whiteboard with lots of lines and arrows.

Also, when viewing/listening remotely, I will record the session -- especially if they're assigning a complex task or series of tasks. This allows me to playback and get things exactly right.

In person, I would have to smuggle in a recorder and it's often awkward or infeasible.

I'm in a agreement on this. I find reviewing changes much easier with screen-share than in person.

It also makes the process feel less confrontational in some respects.

Obviously I don’t know how these meetings go, just a passing observation

In my experience this is not the case for developers. Being over someone from behind or having someone peer at my screen while I'm typing is much worse than just screen sharing where we both have our keyboards and two large monitors.

There's nothing that prevents remote work from not being efficient enough to further the goals of an organization. It also doesn't prevent one from being a leader and teaching younger folk. In fact, I've had to do this a lot and it's much nicer to get people on a video call and share my screen to teach or do team programming than it is to find a meeting/conference room in the office.

Some people don't like interruptions _precisely_ because it prevents from doing an efficient job. And it's more than slightly annoying when you're getting interrupted multiple times per hour.

Yes, _very_ few things are built solely by an individual, but _nothing_ prevents remote work from "Doing work" as you put it or collaboration between teams.

I am actually doing mentoring every once in a while and it goes just fine over Skype thank you. I am remote since 2000.

Meanwhile I just replaced a software vendor in China with one from the US. 70% more expensive, but also cheaper in terms of rework, code quality, deep understanding of the subject matter and care. Oh, and meetings during sane working hours are understated.

I remember the first time I worked remote, I had an appointment that took me away from the office and had to work at a coffee shop for most of the day. I immediately felt more relaxed and got my work done fast. I asked my boss if I could be remote a few days a week. He said no, probably because it was a small business and other employees would want to do this as well. A few years later, the company became remote.

I wound up moving during the pandemic and when we started return to office, I wanted to work in the Boston office close to me. The company said it's not my team's office. I was still able to find a way to work at the office a few days out of the week. Now the company says you can choose to work from any office in the country.

It's not rocket science. Certain scenarios make more sense for in-office work (tight-knit team that needs to be in constant communication with each other or new employee who needs more guidance), remote work (you're more experienced or have self-discipline and can get tasks done on your own or ask for help with a good infrastructure), or hybrid work (both scenarios combined or you can have 1-2 days out of the week that are team days).

Otherwise, you wind up in an office where a lot of people are wasting time either way with lowest common denominator conversations, living in congested cities with price gouge real estate and soul crushing commutes or remote locations you don't really want to live in because commercial real estate was cheap.

The overall assumption should be that you're a professional who's treated as a professional by the company with respect (assuming your a high-paid employee with professional experience). A lot of these return to office calls and recent corporate behavior makes me realize a lot of managers (usually not great ones) or companies sees employees as children who can't be trusted instead of adults who can perform professional work and communicate effectively.

Haven't we litigated this enough? If outsourcing was so viable and so valuable, it would be done already. Are we supposed to ignore: time zones, language barriers, cultural barriers?

This threat has been waved at highly paid techies for the past few decades.

If they could have, they would have.