And at my company, we've seen performance and throughput improvements across the board that the managers themselves agree with :)

Has this data been collected by a rigorous methodology? Have you done A/B testing?

How do you know that the graph that you see really is really thr result of coming to the office and not some confounding variable? Perhaps the weather was nicer over the period that the data was collected (or perhaps there was just a recent roind of salary increases) which had a positive impact on people and they would have worked harder regardless of whether they were at home or in office.

Without a carefully set up control group, that adjusts for these other potential factos, these types of upward trending performance graphs are useless.

Unfortunately, most manager don't even know the basics of statistics...

Do you mean to ask if I sent three of my colleagues on a multi-year doctorate research program for a question that everybody seems to already know the answer to and is in agreement, or if I let my team work on my product?

Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :)

Let me tell you that the history of statistics is littered with unsound, but plausible looking decisions, to which "everyone already knew the answer". One example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

So yes, that's exactly what I mean. Though if they need multi-year training for a simple A/B test, then you should fire them :)

If it was so simple, everyone would be doing it correctly. Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done. What you have done is talk down to someone else. All in all, I think your entire argument would be a lot more sympathetic if you made it by giving a concrete example of your own beliefs (what do? Is that really simple?), otherwise you will have to get used to folks not listening to you.

> Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done.

Fair enough - though I did mention a few basic things like A/B testing and survival bias (trying to being aware of one's own cognitive biases is the first step in making better decisions; to be aware means you first have to know them). And yes, it is not trivial at all and dependent on the context.

The best and simplest starting point would be to make a list of potential confounding variables (I mentioned a few of them) and then just looking at the R^2 statistic. That already should point him in the right direction.

I was less bothered that his methodology wasn't 100% correct, but rather by casually making a statistically unsound decision which has a big effect on people's lives, so getting it right is important - and then when called out dismissing it. I have a lot of sympathy for people honestly trying to make decisions rigorously and getting it wrong; but you have to try.

> Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :)

I have bad news for you if you think this doesn't apply to like 99% of of management decisions (and product, and...). Even, and perhaps especially, the ones that are trying to be "data driven": usually the data's shit, but everyone just pretends it isn't because they don't want to spend the time and money to do it right.

The "modern" "scientific" "data-driven" business world mostly runs on hunches and prejudice.

I don't think it's globally far less effective. I think it's particularly less effective when you need constant communication, say being next to your teammates throughout the day, or when the people are really unmotivated and they won't work unless they're being constantly physically monitored.

As someone who's in a startup and is very motivated, with coworkers who are experts in their area and there's little overlap in skillset, so that everyone knows what they need to do and do it well, without having to constantly synchronize with what each other is doing, I strongly doubt someone would be more effective than me simply because they're going to an office. Specially if you have a long commute and have a family.

If you believe that you are less effective as a manager of a remote team than a office one, that's a manager problem not a location one

Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done.

Don't force your team back to the office because you find it easier to manage them.

I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones.

> Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done.

Managing a team, remotely or otherwise, is not "easily done". If you find it easy you're either strongly underestimating your abilities or not doing your job right.

He is talking about the difference in difficulty of local vs remote, not the difficulty of managing full stop.

And he is right, managing remotely is a minimal change. I've been managing and working with people remotely for years, as has everyone who deals with coworkers not in the same office as they are.

It doesn't matter to me if they are in an office in another country or in their jammies at home in that same country, they are thousands of miles away from me.

I work in a hardware startup. I can feel the difference between sitting in my office and in the workshop. The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. I experienced the same in a crypto startup where you similarly have highly specialised skill sets that need to be transferred to “mortal programmers” like me. Sitting at home is great for concentration, but you lose the synergies.

I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101, not synergy of being around each other. Having a good culture around replying people needing help in a timely fashion (instead of letting it slide for days) is important.

To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help.

The culture of communication needs to change when people work remotely, that's the main difference. It's nice because now you can't just interrupt people with a tap on the shoulder, you need to ask for their time to interrupt someone.

What about a brave suggestion to make all work chat communication public to all employees. This would allow you to just randomly come across interesting conversations (tags, keywords, etc..) your coworkers have without inviting you. If on the other hand someone wants their communication explicitly private, there could be a toggle in chat app to enable that. Like you don't discuss sensitive topics near the coffee machine and just move to a meeting room.

So public by default, private by choice.

No this is a terrible idea. Spoken conversations are different to chats. For one the very fact that they're not searchable after the fact makes everyone more relaxed and not worry so much about saying something wrong that could get back to them later.

For another, spoken conversations are ephemeral but also point in time. Archived chats need to then be cross-referenced with time and date to check if those chats are still relevant. If partially relevant, which parts can or must be excised?

Nice idea. I would never talk to any of my coworkers again.

>To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine

The way to get these is to basically ban private conversations. Have everything as a thread in Slack or somewhere, create topic channels where people can actually join these conversations

Banning private conversations gets you fewer conversations. It's intimidating to talk in front of a lot of people. Even moreso without the trust built up from a bunch of in person interactions.

It would help if there were an easier way to convert a short 1:1 chat into a public thread with a consent click on each side though.

If there were better communication tools than slack I think I'd enjoy WFH more but I find that the commonly used tools dehumanize the process - there's 0 adjustments (like this one) to accomodate psychological safety and the tools are built around transactionality.

You want to get more conversations by banning conversations? That makes no sense.

We are not machines that convert money (or food/coffee) into code. Social contexts matter, there are personalities behind each face. If you understand the context of your co-workers then it's easier to understand online communication (since most non-verbal communication that happens in person is lost over online channels). Meeting in person sometimes just makes online communication more effective.

It makes perfect sense.

Often people will default to DMs for things, which makes it appear like no one is chatting and isolates these casual chats to 1:1 DMs.

If you encourage these kind of conversations to happen in channels (Public or private), other people can jump into the conversation.

I've seen the difference it makes when everything is done in public channels instead of DMs. Everything feels more lively and you interact with your team a lot more. Everything in DMs feels isolating.

> I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101

Most people are super duper slow typers.

Remote is less efficient unless most/all of your staff can touch type at a high rate of speed.

I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned.

> I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned.

Do you require formal touch typing explicitly, or a certain minimum wpm (how fast?), or both? Do you include iportant charcters (for coding) in the test?

typing speed for coding is irrelevant. the bottleneck with coding is not data entry.

the important thing is that they can type at a high rate of speed. i personally type at around 120wpm which is excessive, but anyone who doesn't type 40-50wpm is obviously not sufficiently skilled as a remote worker.

IMO if speed is really an issue then whisper can take care of that. It's pretty good and fast.

So far, we have not seen that. People opt for meetings where they can speak versus using tools to become better at communicating via text.

> To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help.

Sometimes I think remote workers could use a new kind of watercooler. Maybe an online game everyone can drop into and play for bit while communicating over voice and chat? I guess not a lot of companies would be happy to install a bunch of time wasting network games, but I've worked on teams that ended up doing that while in the office anyway and it was great for getting to know people and talking about random things. Productivity obsessed people might hate it, but is hanging out in a FPS or MMO any different than standing around distracting others talking about sports with your buddy for 40 minutes every afternoon? Virtual workers need virtual spaces to gather at and a reason to want to go there.

Generally part of why I stop by the water cooler or whatever is also giving my eyes a rest from the screen and stretching my legs.

Good point, but working at home still affords people that opportunity, and I find it easier and more comfortable to do that in my home too

> you can still clarify assumptions via chat

Yes, at cost to latency, bandwidth and meeting time (you don’t as easily make 30 second video calls as you nag the person across the monitor).

> conversations about topics tangentially related

Not just that. Conversations about topics that are the responsibility of your colleagues but you still need to understand and challenge.

> communication needs to change when people work remotely

It’s totally possible, but requires a level of written clarity that few programmers can bother. FOSS is fully remote for the most, and it depends on a lot of textual protocols.

The more your job is cut out, the more runway your employer has, the less important you need quick communication.

In any R&D, being present is really beneficial. And office chatter is at the same time insanely annoying. Stand ups that drag into half hours, “let’s break everyone’s flow for a group announcement”, people who wanna smalltalk.

Best of both worlds is a mixture, when the circumstances permit it.

Wearing headphones and avoiding eye contact does wonders — my boss really picks up when I don’t want to talk.

It comes down to what kind of problems one is trying to solve. Innovation, 0 to 1 product stage (even 1-10 ones) is not conducive to remote. Whereas 'steady state' companies, where things are streamlined and most is about execution remote can work - no wonder call centers have gone and staying remote.

Similarly for people - young employees in 0-1 or 1-10 career stage cannot thrive in remote.

> The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless.

Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet?

This is quite the framing. The company gets paid for producing human value to customers, and unless you're willing to take a pay cut to work remote (oh, you aren't? I see.) the cost there is dominated by employee wages, taxes, social safety net (as meagre as it is here in the US).

Sure, the office costs nonzero dollars and so does commuting - but framing it as morality is misguided. A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly.

Are you willing to do the work to drop Google services because they want to work from the office and do all that bad stuff?

If you aren't, making people work from the office is the easy choice, their product gets marginally better for very low marginal costs.

>A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly.

This is not how businesses act in reality.

The didn't frame it as morality - they framed it as an economic and social costs. There is nothing in your response that convinces me that those costs are worth it.

> Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet?

That's very context specific. In many cities, employees commuting by public transport to a central location, rather than all individually heating/cooling their houses, is a plus for the planet and wealth of employees. For many people (including me) it's also good for mental health.

> Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting

Yes, but the commute is a huge cost.

I spend 80 minutes in traffic every day.

During this time I listen to podcasts, music, call people, and think.

I will be happy to have a remote-friendly job, e.g. when our systems are deployed in dozens of physical locations throughout the country, the DevOps role is essentially only possible as remote. But remote was just not a high priority for me this time. I really enjoy showing up. I'm not very social outside of work.

So I would not say "that's a manager problem": that's everyone problem, everyone needs to change their way of working and communicating. The manager, but also the person being managed (unfortunately, a common dev mentality is to blame everyone else first)

> I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones.

Doesn’t this partly imply you wouldn’t have good data to compare performance of remote vs local?

> I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while.

I've worked remotely for years before COVID and these meetups are always hyper productive.

I'm also burned out and need to sleep for a week straight afterwards.

Just because people get motivated seeing each other once in a while doesn't mean that's sustainable if they were in an office.

To me, working remotely was less effective in the beginning, it uncovered undiagnosed ADHD and after dealing with that I'm doing far better than I ever did in an office.

Office work is fine if you prefer it, working from home requires a lifestyle and an office space to make it work, something not everyone can manage.

But that doesn't make it worse at all, and as others have said, it requires different management skills, if you haven't picked them up, you probably won't see the benefits from your perspective because you're not letting your team work properly.

As a fellow ADHD’er and soon remote worker could you share any ADHD specific tips to be successful?

I’m both excited and hesitant as Remote work should let me work when I’m productive more (ie evenings) with exercise and chores in the afternoon “deadzones”, etc. That and not spending energy masking in an office environment.

However there classic adhd problems to contend with like keeping schedule, etc. I also find I need people to stimulate me. I’ve been thinking of a coworker spot in addition to my home office.

Not the person you asked, but, ADHD/ADD covers quite a lot, and what works for some might have adverse effect for others. It's not uncommon to be extremely focused and productive on certain tasks, then struggle immensely with distractions and procrastination for other tasks. I say immensely, because this applies to some degree to everyone.

I too felt I was only productive during certain times and deadzones. But, it turns out, I just need to be left alone to focus. Which not only means not being disturbed by others, but also not so easily doing it myself by wanting to interact with others. If no one else is working, nothing to do but focus. This same effect made working in an office exhausting.

I now work 40%, exclusively remote, and I get more done than I did at 100%. Some weeks by a factor of 2. "How is that possible?", consider that under normal office hours, I would clock in-the-zone productive work to about 2-4 hours. Remote: 7-11 hours. A bad week at the office: 10 hours, two good days at home: 20 hours.

"Yeah, but that's just you sucking at working in an office environment". Indeed. And there are dozens of us. Dozens! A good manager should strive to get the best value out of their workers.

Thanks! That's helpful to hear and goes along with what I've been thinking about myself.

It seems to me that many ADHDers work better with a few intense focused periods / days per week with more off days. Unfortunately in an office setting its almost impossible to achieve.

I'm looking forward to (hopefully) being able to do more fun things on off days than spending so much energy trying to look or be productive in an office!

Afternoon deadzone might be related to what and when you eat.

For me, they totally are! Any big breakfast or lunch deadzones me, along with caffeine.

Light lunch and no caffeine? I've got a good slow burn of energy throughout the whole day.

Maybe just me, but I actually find I have an easier time staying focused when I'm away from my desk with just my laptop.

Multiple screens are great, and sometimes I have good success for a while after going back to my desk with its nice big monitor and all that after I get into a flow on my laptop, but when I really need to focus and am having trouble, oddly enough, just walking to another room (or a coffee shop, or whatever) and sitting down with only my laptop often gives me a good kick-start.

Dunno why. I'd go with "multiple screens = distracting" except that I mostly focus on my main screen when I'm at my desk, so I don't think that's it. The change might just break distraction loops (ahem, visiting HN) or something. Or maybe I can't fool myself with "well, work stuff is up on the other monitor..." Not sure.

> Or maybe I can't fool myself with "well, work stuff is up on the other monitor..." Not sure.

Major downside of being creative and quick thinking... our brains are really good at tricking ourselves. ;)

I've been using a LG C2 42" OLED as a monitor combined with a lazy boy in my home office. It's been pretty nice! Though I totally feel the bit about taking a small screen to a cafe when I really need to focus.

It really depends on what you're struggling with.

Getting a dog really helped me for example. Daily exercise also helps keep my sleep stable.

Meeting together once in a while is very different than either hybrid or in-office. I once worked at a small all-remote startup spanning from the west coast of the US to Eastern Africa. Yes, we all met in person for a week several times per year. That didn’t mean 3+ days per week in office.

And yes that company is still around and doing fine several years later even now. My last information on their in-person meetings is itself years old now, but when they got too big to have everyone meet in person together, they still continued the same principle, just in appropriately sized subgroups.

I'm going to get downvoted by the managers, but chances are, your team is doing just fine, but you can't keep up with that remotely.

When you're in the meeting, everyone politely explains to you what they're doing and they say "yes" to your ideas, so you feel like you're making progress.

But when they actually need to do focused work, which you don't want to know the details of because it's too hard, they do far better outside of an oxygen-deprived, loud office that they need to commute to.

This. Most of my interactions with managers are about explaining to them why I am doing what I am doing. Once in a while, they give valuable information.

I definitely don't need to be onsite everyday to keep up-to-date with a manager. One call a week is already a luxury, some interactions via chat (where I can report some progress and stuff).

Mostly it's managers who want to see their team everyday and talk to them, I guess because it makes them feel like they are managing?

I don't know your special teams/managers etc.

I switched from a technical position to a manager one one year ago. My team is remote mostly, myself included in different countries/continents. I do travel to the office to meet colleagues going to the office and having face-to-face time with some.

I don't need to see my team everyday but I do need to have a vision of what they are doing and busy with because we are working on a lot of different projects, pursuing sales opportunities and trying to balance the work based on skills/time available/opportunities to learn or emergencies. So I tend to do 1 team meeting weekly and weeklies with most of the time on the side at least, track project on slack/jira/crm and try to have a board view of my team while being read to deep-dive when needed.

Do I like being on site? Yes but mostly to talk with project manager and product owner, it is more easier to brainstorm/have meaningful discussions in a semi-informal setting of a coffee. For technical colleagues on my team, it is different depending on the tasks : creative/architecture/whatever or routine/operational.

Can't see my team on site everyday anyway but would prefer for some specific type of interaction.

Well that's just me trying to find my way in management so grain of salt and personal bias and imposter syndrome warning :)

That sounds very presumptuous, which is a pity because your message is valuable, but the presumptuousness implies that your opinion has absolutely no value.

The value in your comment is on bringing one aspect that makes the situation more "grey", but you lose it all by then depicting the situation as "managers are useless and devs don't need them", which is very black-and-white.

I'm not a manager and I'm not a dev (I work with data and often ended up coding my own system that sometimes ended up in production against my will), but I have observed a lot of devs who were saying "I'm doing fine on my own", and they were convinced it's the case, and ... they were not doing fine.

Some red flags are devs that complains that "the requirements are not clear" or "the company seems to not care about my effort". Sometimes it is true, but I've observed a lot of the time the same people also saying "just give me some requirements that I can follow step by step instead of explaining the bigger picture, I don't care of what this other team do, I'm busy" or "I redirect all the company-wide meeting invites directly to the bin folder" or "when I go into details of the code, the manager don't get it because it's too hard, but when the manager explains their needs and why it makes sense, I don't get it because I'm wayyyy too smart" or "when I go into details of the code, the manager don't get it because it's too hard, but when someone talks to me about something else than code, they have to learn to adapt to their audience and be happy that I pretend to listen to their boring work tasks".

They are truly thinking the problem is the others and incapable to even imagine their mentality is the problem.

Devs need managers who... code. This is the only way they can understand the underlying work. Otherwise their usefulness is significantly diminished.

The fact that the OP thinks you move the needle primarily by having great meetings together, and leaves out the engineering aspect completely makes it seem like he's the out of touch "ideas" manager, and for this archetype, the office is indeed a more comfortable environment - you can have coffee with everyone whenever you like.

As I've said, I'm coding and I understood perfectly the code of the devs I was working with, and yet, what OP said correspond to what I have observed sometimes.

This demonstrates that your logic "OP reaches this conclusion, so it's the proof that he does not understand the code, which is the problem" is wrong. If this logic was true, who do you explain that someone like me, who clearly understands the code (I've reviewed it, I've modified it, I've put stuffs in production integrating with their system, ...), agrees with some of OP's considerations?

When reading your comment, it is difficult to not be drawn to the idea that you are one of those persons I was mentioning, who are not understanding other employees needs and point-of-view and who interpret systematically any communication failing as "the other person's fault".

Engineering is so much more than code. Yes, managers need to have some part of their work in the trenches but it really is the case that many serious engineering problems are best tackled through meetings and documents rather than sitting down and sending PRs.

You might say that, but someone who doesn't know the principles will consistently produce misguided designs, and won't understand why certain options are better.

Meetings with such a person will cause the engineers to work around them instead of being lead by them. There's also no reason such meetings have to happen everyday at the office.

Not sure why you are talking about "someone who doesn't know the principles" to a message that explicitly says "Yes, managers need to have some part of their work in the trenches".

I've been in meetings that were power struggle without any progress, I've also been in meetings that were really useful to solve the problem, way faster than the contributors shooting in the dark because they think they too smart to dialogue. The direction of the meeting depends way more of the mentality of the participants and on their skill to solve problems smartly than of the manager. If you go to the meeting with in mind the idea that the meeting is useless, obviously, you will stir it in the wrong direction (and apparently, you are prone to jump to the first cliché conclusion, I can imagine that you will interpret any contribution in the worst way possible). It does not mean that with participants with a better mentality, the meeting would not have been 10x faster than with single contributors tackling parts of the problem.

Don't get me wrong, shitty meetings happen. But if all the meeting you've been were shitty, maybe the problem is on your side. And if you always end up with the bad manager, it may also be that, with your attitude, you are not worth the time of a good one (or not, but at least do not exclude this possibility just because you dislike it)

I'm not a manager and agree that in an office I'm more productive, but at home I'm much cheaper for the company and the company gets more for their money.

Realistically at Google I'd probably be an L5 or L6 software engineer so let's say I'd make somewhere around 400k USD. Working from home in Spain I make 80k euros and I cost the company around 92k euros with taxes, so let's round it up and say I cost to the company 100k USD per year.

I'm not 4 times less productive for working in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Spain, so even if I'm not in my peak productivity I'd say the company gets more for their money.

That's an insane salary for Spain, and remote to. Can I ask how to get such a wage there?

Regarding what to do, the most important thing is to find a company willing to pay that amount.

1- Foreign companies usually pay more money than local ones, specially American. Obviously there are exceptions but generally speaking avoid them.

2- Outsourcing companies (the so called "cárnicas") usually are the worst places to work, for salary and for conditions in general... Usually companies where you build/maintain the product pay more.

3- For individual contributors technology matters a lot. Kubernetes pays well, crypto pays unreasonable amounts, rust in general is very well paid as well, AI, etc. Find your niche.

4- Experience matters more than education and open source contributions raise your value a lot.

I'd say those are the main factors that will determine a position's salary, so it's a matter of finding the right position and being the best candidate *for that position*.

As for the technology I've been doing kubernetes for about 8 years now (that's before 1.0 was released). For this experience my salary is not insane at all, counting bonus and stock I was making about 35% more in my previous job, but I was quite tired of being a sysadmin and moved back to programming and that involved doing a pay cut.

There are definitely cases in which this is true -- yours, for example -- but I imagine Google has done the math on this.

Maybe you're just not a good remote manager?

No offence.

Perhaps you're a fantastic on-site manager. But you should consider the probability (from what I've read) that remote management isn't in your toolkit ... and it is a distinct skill.

I keep saying this — as a fairly senior engineer, remote has basically blocked me from actually doing many of the things that made me good at my job.

I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.

Fundamentally, information is the biggest asset you can have on the job, and I lost access to all the information that came from organic, unstructured, ad-hoc, and often passive interactions. Unfortunately, the more structured, proactive alternatives cost a lot more of my time and effort, so it's all around less effective.

That's perfectly fine and you can be 100% sure you will find an employer who will be happy to have an employee like you. Many other senior engineers, however, are different and prefer to work in a more structured way. For example, I regularly have scheduled meetings with juniors where we discuss their current work. I make sure they feel at ease and speak their mind so I instantly see when they go wrong. And I make sure everybody in my time has time aside in our calendars for the main work - and that time is the same for all team. We are regularly praised by the management and our teams for how effective we are. And we meet in person every 3 months or so.

Same here.

Have you tried having an always on video meeting for your team? Our team was fairly similar, and for a time felt like we lost a lot during the lockdown. But an always on team-video meeting really saved us. It has its drawbacks, interruptions become a lot more disruptive and emoting is harder with a smaller face, but there are advantages that more than weigh up for this, instantly sharing the screen with the entire team is really useful, and not having to travel several floors to help people lowers the barrier for helping people in other parts of the organization. And with the always on video meeting people can even drop by to say hello. It also helps focus the team on one thing, which is often a good thing. People can still do their thing on the side, but working as a team on one focused task is a lot easier.

I'm working a job at the moment that's fully remote and where everyone technical on the project is a senior dev. It's a completely different experience to pervious projects I've worked where we had junior devs and where I can relate to what you're saying here.

For me this is the first time I've ever felt far more productive working remotely since I can trust other team members are doing a good job, and when there are blockers or things to discuss it's easy for us to jump on a call and work it out.

I'm not saying there are no drawbacks, but I think for this particular project the pros far outweigh any cons of remote working.

I was very much in the hybrid camp a year ago, but now I think it really depends more on the team and the project you're working on. Some projects I've worked on before I can't even imagine working on from home since they've required a lot of collaboration with non-technical teams. But for projects where the technical work needed is well scoped and where you have strong developers, you might as well just let them work however they please.

I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work.

>I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work.

It's worth jumping into the HN Looking For Work threads from time to time to get a general picture of the people who use this site. I find it enlightening to realise that dogma about programming that seems foreign to me is mainly coming from people with massively different technical backgrounds. It also explains the webdev defaultism.

Yep. Peek into a thread about web frameworks and you’d think that software architecture never existed, and that very few are actually capable of working without them.

Tech’s skill requirements create a bimodal distribution of jobs, seemingly. Some places manage to break away sufficiently to spend less time dealing with poor code.

> I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.

There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc). You may simply have a preference for being around people and using the methodologies you listed here, which is fine enough, but remote doesn’t fundamentally block any of the outcomes you mentioned.

I've never understood why people think that remote should just work magically, without any effort on their part.

I don't expect it to work magically without effort on my part. What I'm saying is that it's a tradeoff, and that the tradeoff doesn't really work that well for me.

I'm simultaneously pretty gregarious and pretty introverted. Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me, but being a mostly passive observer and tactically jumping in is much more manageable, and all around a more efficient use of my resources. Work better in a pull- rather than push-based setup, if you will.

Thanks for clarifying.

> Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me

This is definitely the case for me as well. I've set up regular meetings once, to avoid all kinds of discomfort that arise when doing so every time. Though, I understand that such arrangements may not flow as easy as in-person ones for everyone.

You conveniently left out the part where they address that:

> Unfortunately, the more structured, proactive alternatives cost a lot more of my time and effort, so it's all around less effective.

chronofar's comment isn't incompatible with that.

I don't think a remote-first approach inherently takes more time and effort, but it requires a culture change.

If you alone are trying to adopt a remote-first strategy I definitely think it will take more of your time and effort, but if your company culture is remote-first I don't think it should.

> I don't think a remote-first approach inherently takes more time and effort, but it requires a culture change.

Culture change requires time and effort.

And without structured guidance shaping the change, progress will not be evenly distributed.

I think the harsh reality is that remote-first does inherently take more time and effort, even if some of that is a one time investment.

The trouble is that this one time investment is difficult to quantify.

I worked remotely for many years prior to the pandemic so I’m not against remote work. But I don’t think it’s fair to claim that it comes at no cost. I did find it incredibly important to still get to the office periodically for team bonding and to catch up on the 100 little hallway conversations that can’t happen remotely.

Cmon dude, you're twisting words.

I agree culture change requires time and effort, but "upfront investment" is not the same as "inherently takes more time and effort".

I even said it takes more time and effort if you are adopting it when other people aren't (I.e. unevenly distributed progress like you mention).

Not trying to twist your words, but to point out that remote-first really does require inherently more time investment.

I think you’re underselling the impact of the prerequisite culture change, because very few companies are remote-first or even know what a good remote-first strategy looks like.

If a company already has a solid and effective remote culture, great! But this is pretty rare, and can’t be considered a general case. Those companies are also made of people who fit the mold of that remote culture, and I question the merit of generalizing their success to a broader workforce made up of people who weren’t pre-selected for their compatibility.

And to be clear, I’m not saying I don’t think the investment is worthwhile; just necessary and not trivial.

> "upfront investment" is not the same as "inherently takes more time and effort".

We can agree to disagree here, but I just find this to be a rather odd conclusion. I’m not trying to split hairs, but think that “just change the culture” hand waves away a massive undertaking for most orgs, and it’s better to address this head-on than pretend it doesn’t exist.

That sounds a bit like "I don't want to adapt to this new work environment, please everyone, back to working like it works for me."

I don't know if that's fair. Consultants were flying "on site" for meetings at expense to clients for decades (for hotels, meals, etc) and the money was worth it, because being in person is, for some people, is more efficient for some forms of collaboration. I feel like we're having battles about the "best" way when they are just different - and the market will show the results.

I don't think referencing the value of consultants is going to help your argument lol.

Fair. I was one of those consultants (experts in software being implemented by the local team), though, and - specifically with teams that needed more help and interventions - going onsite was hugely valuable. I'm not saying remote is impossible, but I got much more done when I could sit with people 1-on-1 and build relationships/see what they didn't know to show me.

I've been consulting for well over a decade. I used to fly to visit my clients. During the pandemic they all learned to work remotely and I haven't made a trip since. We actually communicate more than we did before, and it feels like overall everyone is better at communication.

It's more like "we have to put in 2x more work for half the benefit" which kinda supports the idea that remote is less efficient (in some ways)

Who is "we"? It sounds like it's just him, and everyone else benefits.

You're exaggerating.

Requesting for people to communicate more in group chats instead of direct messages takes 5 seconds.

Scheduling regular 1:1s with juniors keeps a tight feedback loop. Schedule it once every x weeks and there you go.

>Requesting for people to communicate more in group chats instead of direct messages takes 5 seconds.

i just did that to my team and not only our productivity got better, but now everyone knows what everybody is doing (my team is brand new, and the company has this culture where everything is DMd instead of being sent into channels).

> Requesting for people to communicate more in group chats instead of direct messages takes 5 seconds.

Requesting something and something actually happening are two very different things.

There is also a meaningful difference between an in-person group chat and a group chat that will remain visible to the whole team for months or years to come.

This request becomes far more than just changing the medium, and requires everyone involved to adjust to the idea that everything they ask can be later analyzed without the context of the moment, and this has a chilling effect on the kinds of things that people are willing to ask. This in turn fundamentally changes the dynamic into something that doesn’t really replace the original junior/senior relationship effectively.

Accomplishing what the parent comment is talking about requires far more than “please use the group chat”.

> Requesting something and something actually happening are two very different things.

i.e., I don't have the respect of the people that are working for me.

I never had issues with people making sure chat remained in public channels.

> There is also a meaningful difference between an in-person group chat and a group chat that will remain visible to the whole team for months or years to come.

One can be referenced later with a simple text search.

The other could have been an email. And will probably end up with people forgetting what exactly was said.

> requires everyone involved to adjust to the idea that everything they ask can be later analyzed without the context of the moment, and this has a chilling effect on the kinds of things that people are willing to ask.

i.e., I work at a toxic company with toxic management.

Because those same people were speaking up regularly during in-person meetings and weren't being judged there.

Also, let's forget about video/audio.

> Accomplishing what the parent comment is talking about requires far more than “please use the group chat.”

Sure. It requires effort. No more so than what was required before. The difference? We blindly accepted what came before as the way things were.

>i.e., I work at a toxic company with toxic management. >Because those same people were speaking up regularly during in-person meetings and weren't being judged there.

Since there's far less lawyers on this site than devs (naturally), I'll chime in with my .02c. Face to face is king. Don't say anything you wouldn't want your mom, dog, or the news saying when you wake up tomorrow morning. And you'd be surprised the stuff that people will put into writing, even after repeated notice. Ever work in healthcare and have to deal with HIPAA? It's insane how flippantly I've seen patient info shared, like it's not the first thing drilled into you. It doesn't matter if you are Jesus reincarnate, I'm sure you have said some things you wouldn't want to be read out in court.

Part of the problem is that the tools we have are awful. Using a group chat on teams feels less like a casual chat with the people around you, and more like ringing a bell in the office to give a formal announcement.

> you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc)

Can you be more specific? "Public channels for team comms" -> they explicitly addressed that ("frustrated grumbling").

> but remote doesn’t fundamentally block any of the outcomes

Remote forces us to change the way we have been operating for decades. Why should we?

> Can you be more specific? "Public channels for team comms" -> they explicitly addressed that ("frustrated grumbling").

"Frustrated grumbling" goes to the tight feedback loops, make sure juniors aren't on their own island for too long without a checkin of some sort (if you want to manage things that way, I could also argue for letting juniors flail a bit in some cases but the person I replied to obviously prefers a more micro approach). Public channels were related to the desire to know what others were working on.

Further specifics depend on the dynamics of the team, but the point in there are various relatively easy ways to systematize remote work efficiently.

> Remote forces us to change the way we have been operating for decades. Why should we?

Why should people be forced to continue operating in ways they find suboptimal for a myriad of reasons (commute, distractions, tethering living location/family/friends to job, etc) just because some are unwilling to adapt even though solutions are readily available? The historical status quo is not often a great place to look for arguments for how things should be.

> There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc).

The debate between remote and in-office communication reminds me about the debates around generative vs human made art. Is text messaging "real communication", is a generated painting "real art"?

Depends on what your purpose is. Of course text message isn't equivalent to a face to face meeting, nor is a face to face meeting over zoom the same as a face to face in person.

If the goal of the communication is specific (need requirement X by Y time), text is actually quite probably better (can take time to be concise and clear, use tools catered to the specifics, remove various other subtleties of face to face meetings). If you want to get to know someone or have low specificity communication needs, clearly an in person rendezvous is best.

You can't work remote as if you were in-office but just have conference calls now. You need to restructure communication and norms a bit, but if you do it can completely address all the thing you brought up.

> so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble.

Why cant you use standups to give updates and then take it offline if anyone is struggling?

You seem to be having some kind of Messiah complex where people always need you for help. If you leave the company tomorrow, the company will do just fine without you.

I used to do this "intercepting bad ideas" out of habit, but often the people who had the bad ideas had more senior job titles and salaries than me. It got me in a lot of trouble, mostly because I gained a reputation for being very knowledgeable (invited to everything) and for making supposed seniors look bad. They were not actually senior, the place just didn't pay enough and any actual experienced people were incidental and often didn't hold the title.

I eventually had to leave because I turned into a human Confluence replacement and architect on top of my existing work and still was one of the worst paid people (with little to do about that, management hates "mercenaries"). So I'm very happy I no longer feel compelled to do this working remote anymore, except when people abuse our platform.

There's some rules one can add when working in a remote setting to address these sorts of issues, for example set a time limit for when an Engineer needs to engage with their team and ask a question, 30 mins/1 hour/2 hours (depending on your culture and allowance for investigation) max. This ensures they're not spinning their wheels and allows them time to investigate/learn while ensuring they reach out to their team and share the situation to get the necessary feedback/discussions to move forward. This has the additional benefit of not having every minor issue be answered by colleagues, increasing the amount of learning and work of the individual Engineer versus offloading to their peers unnecessarily.

None of these issues couldn't be addressed in remote teams. It's not as if you can just take an office culture, have everyone be remote overnight, and have everything continue to chug along exactly the same as if nothing happened. Remote does require some adaptations. But in my experience, ultimately remote work is a drastic increase of quality of life without any decrease in productivity.

My company has worked pretty hard imo to reduce silo-ization caused by WFH. It has not worked. Everyone complains that about the stuff the parent did. Maybe our management is incompetent, but management isn't changing at this point. Some companies just don't have what it takes to transition to wfh, and I'd say the bigger the company the more likely that is.

I've still hit some of these same issues during 'co-location' periods. I'm somewhat comparing apples/oranges, but I've been at some large-ish orgs (1000s of employees colocated) and my experience was info-hoarding was pretty string outside a small network of the 'inner-circle'. Each dept had a few of these, and you'd routinely get hit with stuff out of left-field that apparently had "been in the works" for "some time", but the requests/items/issues were fundamentally flawed (logic, whatever). 30 minutes of talking with someone outside the inner circle would have helped, but... info is power. Hoarding it helps some people more than others.

I saw it happening in a 'remote' setup a few years back, except, it wasn't as intentional as it was in co-located work environments. It was more a natural consequence of people being remote. Issues/delays that might have been more naturally noticed in f2f settings lingered for months before surfacing. And... the more I dug, the more I was noticing this. More teams separated and working independently with few 'info hoarders' acting as informal intermediaries. There wasn't actual info hoarding with a political motivation behind it, but it happened all the same. Some aspects of working in that team were far better than '9-5 @ office' of 20 years ago, others were worse.

I'm not a "remote work at all costs" person, but also not a "return to shared office at all costs". Flexibility/choices I think are the optimal setup. Not everyone has a great home to work from. Many people work better with routine and physical space between 'home' and 'work'. We do, indeed, often get new info/ideas from the proverbial water cooler chats. There's no one 'best' way for people to get work done, and not one 'best way' for people to work together. My 'best' working style even changes depending on the skills and personalities of the other folks I'm working with.

Good point. I haven't even considered that overhearing "fuck this stupid bulllshit" and helping them out is much less friction than a junior clumsily writing out the issue they are facing (and overcoming the urge not to ask for help in the first place)

> I haven't even considered that overhearing "fuck this stupid bulllshit"

Why can’t this happen over IM ?

You still only overhear those within earshot

What if you were in a meeting at that time ?

I managed several dozen people scattered across Hong Kong, NYC, London and Bangalore. I couldn't even overhear the team at my location because I was often in meetings. Nearly everything was done async, with weekly video calls. The main cultural challenge was getting people to IM frequently and casually like gamers on discord.

From a CS angle, we know async is more efficient than synchronous code, but requires very careful implementation. Same for people. It works for OSS volunteers, it can certainly work for full-time employees.

I feel like there's a mid-level sweet spot of independence where remote work is just 100x better than in office - you don't need consistent support, and you don't need to consistently influence/help lots of other people.

But if you need consistent support (juniors) or you need to influence/help others (seniors, managers), then it's such a huge hindrance to getting traction.

You think you are good, while you sound like a shitty micromanager.

Your job at the office is to sit and listen to conversations like KGB?

Seriously, it sounds like you dont know how to structue work, nor manage people.

Our cultural norm is to have 90% of 1:1 communication in team specific chatrooms to let other team members chime in. This works best if everyone is remote or in separate offices. People in the same office obviously prefer direct communication, but I find this harmful if done extensively. My team has always been geographically diverse so strangely going more remote helped overall team communication.

>so it's all around less effective.

Organizing and growing teams is a challenge no matter what the environment, especially for a group that trends introvert. It is hard, whether in office, hybrid, remote, or mixed.

It is hard enough that it seems to me that people pick a side and then stop thinking about how to make the other options work - because why would you? If you picked iOS, why would you waste your precious time thinking about how you'd do it on Android?

But if you're not thinking about how to solve the problems you perceive in remote work, it's not useful to announce your problems with it as if that is any kind of conclusive argument. You haven't solved the problem, but that doesn't mean the problem can't be solved.

Another problem is that many companies are doing hybrid, and that means 40% of the time spent remote. Do the juniors just not get help on those days? Do they just "talk themselves into trouble" without the talking? If we can answer these questions for the two remote days, we can answer them for five remote days.

>I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.

Great. You're one of these talky people. Lucky you! We're not all like that. Let's see if we can be friends rather than competitors/enemies.

I'm a big believer of enabling people to perform their best, which means accomodating their needs. If someone has a later circadian clock I'm not going to set up a meeting at 9AM with them. That's the same for work environment, neither remote or in-person is "better" but they are for some people. You will always have people who only excel remotely and people who excel and thrive in-person. Mandating one specific environment is not efficient in my view. I've always followed this and generated hundreds of millons in value through the years so I guess it works.

Are you hiring right now by any chance?

> I can tell that remote is far less effective.

This is a mixed bag. Remote work can be less effective if you don't have the right people. Employees who can sustainably work remote and generally keep their shit together without being babysat via Teams every day are surprisingly difficult to find. I am starting to think the "10x unicorn" is more common than the employee that you can trust to autonomously get their work done while at home.

Certainly, everyone on HN (and during the interview) will spin the most elaborate tales about how they are an exemplar of Christ and enumerate all of the virtues of their home office/life separation. But, many of us know how these things really unfold in the following weeks and months. I am a human too. I fuck off periodically and am probably borderline disqualified from working remote per my own criteria. This is really hard to do right over long timeframes.

I've been at it for a decade now and I still don't have any perfect answers, aside from sending 100% of the team back to the office 5 days a week. For whatever reason, both extremes are the only suitable option for my brain. The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.

Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only? We all have our ideal way of working and it is quite individual, by forcing one over the other we may get consistency but not best performance. In any case, this is in my view a power game. Now that market is soft let’s take advantage of it. Would love to see what happens when the wheel turns the other way around. Suddenly remote will be making sense again. On my end, I am only considering explicitly remote positions from now on. For what it’s worth, what confuses me is not the way of working itself but the expectation that I can switch from one to the other and change all the rest of my life, at the whim of strategy of the month.

> Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only?

It's not one brain making any decision here. There is strong consensus in our organization that remote workers are extremely difficult to manage relative to in-office employees. "Not best performance" is amazing if you are getting anything at all.

You're absolutely right that it's about power/control/domination. For better or worse, you have to force many humans into an office context before any productivity is possible. I know we like to believe every human is capable of completely unfettered WFH in the tech industry, but the world simply doesn't work this way.

This doesn't make any sense. From a management perspective, it should be easy to understand the scope of work from a high level. You should be able to track progress. If employees aren't delivering then try to understand why. If they can't deliver without someone breathing down their neck then the answer is to get rid of them, not create an environment where you can breathe down their neck more effectively.

> If they can't deliver without someone breathing down their neck then the answer is to get rid of them

Welcome back to my first point. It's hard to find people to replace this person who won't wind up in the exact same scenario. The trustworthy remote workers are in the minority. Until we all accept this it's going to be a really rough ride.

Perhaps the wide spectrum of takes on this boils down to the complexity of the underlying business. If you are running the equivalent of a B2B McD restaurant, I can understand how the bottom-barrel WFH employee & management techniques are viable.

It is surprising though that when power was the other way around, and remote was The way, productivity was still humming along. Something does not add up. I know how the world works, let’s not rationalise “domination”. I think I would not willingly work for anyone seeing himself as dominating me… even if they define it as just the way the world works and everyone does it.

I think the major difference here is that there are 2 flavors of WFH employee: Pre and post covid. Covid-era WFH was conducted with reckless abandon (out of necessity). Anyone and everyone was 100% qualified to work remotely because that was the only possible way.

Pre-covid WFH employees were hired among a backdrop of "most people still work in an office", so there were a lot of extra special precautions taken throughout. Those hiring remote employees wanted to hire remote employees. They weren't forced to.

Taken together, you now have a marketplace of workers where you get a radically different outcome depending on their "initial conditions".

That still does not address my point. Regardless initial conditions, during Covid, productivity was not impacted. So the “unqualified” remote workers still did fine. The question is what has changed since Covid, and what has changed is the clarity of employers direction with regards to working arrangements. That domination will come at a cost when it is measured by physical presence rather than delivery. In a sense it is also easier to just show up and do less. Let alone the confusion out of the fact that remote enabled geographic spread which now means that you start getting wrong way risk on enforcement and assertion of dominance. My argument is that in reality the world works in more mysterious ways than at face value.

> productivity was not impacted

This is a general statement about the economy that is plausibly true, but doesn't apply to all companies because different companies have access to different parts of the labor pool depending on pay, industry, and working conditions.

The kind of talent available to Facebook is very different from what's available to a mid-size insurance agency in Nebraska. I know for a fact that some of those companies in drawing from the low end of the talent pool saw their productivity fall into the dumpster during the mandated WFH period.

>The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.

We did this forever! If you were ever on-call or had to remote in from home, you were hybrid. WFH has always been supported by employers - as long as it was free.

>> remote is far less effective

I think it depends on the type of work, personality of workers and maybe other factors. For example, I used to work in a team where we were each doing separate part of the thing and it was not too beneficial to talk about work. Sure, we talked in the office, but mostly about movies, personal stories and stuff like that. I did a lot more work from home because the office environment was distractive and I get distracted easily. I can imagine that remote would be far less effective if I worked in a different department.

Could it be that it just makes manager's jobs easier?

The coordination part can be much easier in person, but the actual work part can be much worse, and what you as manager care about, and get rewarded for, is just the coordination part.

This comment claims to be able to tell, but doesn't mention any attempt to measure.

Most attempts to measure that I've read about find increased productivity with remote work. Do you believe your organization has circumstances that cause it to buck the trend, or that those measurements are flawed?

I don't want to take a side in this argument (pro remote vs offsite vs hybrid), but productivity measurement in agile software development is hard and I have never seen it done well, so it's hard to trust these measurements with this decision.

Another issue is the author's conscious and unconscious hidden biases and agendas. If a research is ordered by a video chat software company, you bet the result will be different than if it's paid for by a coworking space provider.

Similarly, you'll have a different result if it's done by a SF company who needs to justify their expenses vs. by a remote team headed by a manager from the woods in Wyoming.

By the third citation, you lose the source of the study, only have the clickbait outcomes like "86% productivity drop by onsite work", so I'm in the camp of "do whatever feels right for your team".

> [...] productivity measurement in agile software development is hard [...]

I'm sure its hard even for non-agile development. Likely for non-software development, too. For anything that's worth being called development.

> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective

As a manager I can't disagree more.

Remote really is a horses for courses situation.

Practical example: my younger brother worked as a designer for a company that manufactured light steel frames. Their USP was that their design office was attached to their factory, so they were able to provide better designs with a faster turnaround on manufacturing. Despite living a 20 minute drive from his office, he felt that his ability to have these conversations ad-hoc helped him do his job better. Slack would never work because the lads on the floor were never going to pop that up. Also, it physically can't replace him going onto the factory floor to see what a problem was and being able to adapt his designs. He'd occasionally go on-site for construction issues but this, naturally, is a case where the site has to be away from the office; it might be on the other side of the UK.

In contrast, I'm a manager at a fully remote software company (a very successful software company, I might add). The simple truth is that most of our work can be handled remotely. The biggest challenge is getting the right people together. This isn't a remote/office issue, though. I saw this in my office-based role previously, as well as hearing it from all my (office-based) friends.

If you have something in software engineering that you feel requires people to be fully in-office, please raise it and I'll try to outline how we manage that.

This, we have been working remotely for almost 10 years. You can be as effective as in the office and even better, but it also depends on the type of work you do.

As you say remote is nice for the worker, and i am certainly not less productive, but for "let's concentrate on this task today to get it out" i tend to drive to the office. And it is also nice to have chats and friendly banter with others that might be in on the same day. Ofc most devs seem to be the strightly professional and introverted type.

Remote you definitely get less of the gossip that might help you, either for advancement, or by planning to steer things / intervene.

>how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while

The operative phrase here is "once in awhile". I agree that there is a need for teams to be in-person at times. But somehow that translated to everyone being in the office 3X a week last year and now that's turning into a push for 5X a week at many companies.

It’s absolutely less effective for the majority of organizations and engineers. Most of the engineers claiming they’re more effective aren’t actually. They may get to do the part they like more (though in my experience that’s not programming despite their claims, that’s goofing off on HN or doing their laundry), but that’s not the same thing as being more effective for the organization as a whole.

(And sure you can blame it all on “managers” and how they should be better in all kinds of ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that remote, for most organizations and most engineers, is less effective as things stand today.)

> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.

Completely disagree, and the countless examples of successful remote teams disprove your claim.

Following the OP's assertion, they could have been even more successful if they weren't remote. Neither of these assertions (a general case assertion) nor a cherry picked set of anecdotes, proves the ideas.

Everyone is arguing about the age-old questions around productivity and how to measure it, in software development. Google's tracked metrics fell (probably after a time of instability or increase) and so the organization is reacting.

Would be super effective to live on premise, and not have a partner/kids (huuuuge loss of time), to have nutrition handled by intravenous feeding tubes, diapers so that you don't have to go to the bathroom anymore, we could work until 80 too after all!

Sooooooo many things to improve, we gotta please the capital overlords, god forbid we enjoy the progress we made so far to, you know, live life

No offense intended but if remote is less effective that's management's fault. Remote is a completely different way of working. If you don't adapt to it, yes it'll suck. But there is nothing you lack when remote. Even in-office, if anyone is not within 20 feet of you, they're basically remote. Ya gotta adapt and learn new ways of working, and then remote is more productive, not less.

> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective

With respect, this is a skill issue. I also manage people and satisfaction among those I manage is high (there is no change) and everyone else is just as happy with our output as they've always been. Of course there is plenty of complaining by other extroverted managers that they'd like to "see their colleagues more", but should that come at the cost of 2h per day for every single person? Absolutely no. If this is not clearly communicated they will abuse (IMO) their managerial powers by mandating folks do something to serve them. This is entirely the wrong attitude to take.

I agree, it's far less effective.

People will say that remote work lets them focus / write code or whatever, but that's not where the real work happens (or at least, it's only a tiny part of the real work).

The real important work happens when you can play the politics games, identify key players, uncover closely held secret institutional knowledge, and reach across silos to make projects succeed. You need to bypass the red tape and figure out how to get other people to complete the things that are blocking you. You need a way to back-channel delegate things when there is no official chain to do it properly.

Trying to deal with organizational dysfunction is always a challenge, but it's a skillset that any truly productive employee needs. It's hard enough in person - remotely is almost impossible. You won't organically find the right people in a zoom meeting and you definitely won't convince them to help you that way (and vice-versa).

You might think "well my organization isn't dysfunctional!" - well you'd be wrong. All organizations are dysfunctional, it's a matter of degrees and how well the dysfunction can be worked around.

Exactly. Only very little part of doing work is the coding. Yes you need that, but it's not _all_.

And when working remotely, what I see is that even good coders disappear "in the zone" for far too long... endlessly optimizing some unimportant part of code that doesn't ultimately matter, sometimes creating even worse code that was there at the first place.

And then you feel bad that you say "hey but this new version is horrible" when you know the guy worked on it for a week.

Okay it's doable remote, but it's harder. That's why I say "it's more effective to be not remote".

As a worker, I get it, I hate commute too and I hate not being with my family. But, when the company fails because the competition is just faster and can build things better faster, you won't get a job anymore. So, yeah, I am not for full remote.

> Only very little part of doing work is the coding.

I'm glad that I can get away with doing the very little part of work which is coding.

I have zero interest in "reaching across silos", "identifying key players" or "uncovering hidden organizational knowledge". This is the type of thing that a certain personality type might be interested in and it's not me.

I know that this puts me at a certain peg with regard to promotion possibilities. I don't care. I am not going to force myself into doing things I don't like in order to climb the corporate ladder.

There are definitely places where you can fit into such a role, but you need other people you're working with to do the grunt work and make sure you're aligned with what matters to the org.

If you don't have somebody doing that, you risk being stuck on dead-end projects or working on code that doesn't align with business needs, which can put you at risk when it's layoff time (fairly or not).

So even if it's not you doing that part, somebody has to, and if that "somebody" is also fully remote they'll probably have a tougher time navigating everything themselves, which means they're less likely to keep you focused on high visibility, valuable, and successful projects.

> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.

In my experience, remote work is only more effective for "heads down" type coding work where you need long uninterrupted blocks of focus time. Modern offices tend to have lots of distractions.

For work that requires synchronous collaboration or conversations, remote work is less effective. It requires you to explicitly set up meetings to chat, which is much higher friction than just walking over to someone's desk.

Remote work is also much worse for building cross team relationships. In an office, you can easily bump into people across the company and at various levels. You learn a ton from these people, and sometimes these connections can be valuable for your career or even personal life. I've made several friends once I started going into the office frequently.

In my experience the “productivity” many teams achieve on their “all in office days” usually amounts to a whiteboard of good intentions (and yes, whiteboard sessions are 100 times better in person), which indeed energizes your average PO/PM/manager.