Its not the screens during meetings that bother the extraverted ones, it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday.
This is what bothers me, why should I lose an hour+ of MY day because some people like the feeling of others around them. I don't get that time back, I don't get the money for the wear and tear on my vehicle, all so someone feels warm and cozy, unrelated to the actual productivity of the work.
Employers love to treat employees as numbers, but when employees say "Hey I'm a number, look at my productivity, don't make me participate in these rituals", people act like its childish.
I don't owe anything to my employer, because they don't owe me anything except the legal compensation for the work.
If professional managers with the power of economic incentives behind them can't match that with a remote team, holy fuck, they're terrible at their jobs, literally providing negative value.
There are clearly preferences for both styles. Choose the style you want and work at a place that can accommodate. No need to force everything to be one way or another. Why is that such a hard concept?
In an office probably works fine too, sure, but I don't think remote needs to prove anything, in the software world. It's proven. It's very proven. Managers that can't do better than some developers self-organizing online, with the same or better tools and a budget, must be pretty bad at what they do. I'm not making the point that some of them evidently find that incredibly difficult and even impossible, they are, which seems to me like telling on themselves. Guess they're bad at their job, should let a developer do it. It's pretty clearly not rocket science or something that requires some kind of expert, since it keeps being done over and over by people who aren't professional managers. Seems to just require someone halfway competent.
So if a company says, "we prefer a hybrid work model", then shouting out "but look fully remote projects can work as is evidenced by all these successful ones" simply doesn't matter.
My comment (that you were responding to) was explaining that apparently there are leaders who have seen a difference in product quality, velocity, collaboration, team morale, what have you, between fully remote and pre-covid in-office work styles. Presumably they believe that bringing people together is best for their company/product/team. You simply can't argue with that, at least not generally, since it's a valid viewpoint.
Rhetorically the existence of anecdotes to the contrary does not invalidate an argument/position/viewpoint.
There are valid anecdotes from people being more productive working remote. And there are valid anecdotes from people feeling like remote work has take a toll on their mental health and productivity and ability to collaboratively solve problems. And there are valid anecdotes from people who feel like a balanced hybrid model is exactly what they need. And there's even data that shows hybrid and remote work does improve productivity.
The only opinion I've state as fact is the observation that there does not seem to be one perfect solution for every person and situation and team out there. The only opinion I've truly state is that people should consider compromising on their work requirements because it's silly to rehash an unresolvable argument about which work style is the ultimate global best, ad nauseam.
If I were in charge of this topic at a large company, I do believe this is one of those "every scenario is a bit different" situations and I'd advise managers to work with their teams to make the right call. But I'm not so who cares.
Arguably you do, but there’s evidently a disagreement on the value.
The places that I and my friends worked at pre-pandemic were already like this. Meetings were held via videoconferencing even though everyone was in the office, people mostly interacted with each via chat and email, etc.
The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person.
You missed the "to live wherever the fuck I want" part that it absolutely kills...
No I didn't. That's called a remote job not WFH. If work from wherever the fuck I want is important to you then go work for a remote company or convince the one you work at that your roll can be performed remote, from wherever the fuck you want. Nobody is arguing against that.
That's the thing, it shouldn't be left up to the companies to be remote or not.
It should be a conversation between you and your company. Employment is a two way street.
It should be an available option enforced by law.
Did you think my suggestion meant that e.g. waiters and sailors would also work from home?
>You clearly haven't given a fraction of a second’s thought to this topic
Oh, the irony!
Anyway... you're deeply gravely missing the entire nuance: management/leadership at Google is arguing that "the job" of a general employee expected to be a collaborative team member can't be done completely remotely to a quality level or at a velocity that is acceptable for their business. Sure there are exceptions that the business decides are okay, like that ops guy working 3rd shift from Seychelles who isn't building product and closes all his incidents in an acceptable time window that meets SLAs, he's allowed. But they are exceptions, not the rule.
The law doesn't just handle objectively measurable things. It's not a computer algorithm, and it has to apply to society, where things are not always black and white. So, the law has differentiated such things since the dawn of man, it's nothing new. Examples of such cases would be obscenity laws, defamation laws, fair use judgements, personal/psychological damage compensation, etc, where there are general legal guidelines and court/jury judgment if further required. There are tons of other such examples in all legal domains.
>You've got to be kidding me if you think the law can tell a business whether an employee can perform their duties remotely or not... LOL I'm trying to even imagine the wording... please provide some example prose.
This juvenile "LOL" approach isn't very conductive to conversation. Just saying.
In any case, the law could give general guidelines, and also list some unambiguous remote-capable job roles, and the rest could be left to per industry evaluation, and, if it comes to that, case law.
"In order to promote workplace flexibility and adaptability in the modern economy, this law establishes a distinction between remote-capable jobs and location-dependent jobs. Remote-capable jobs are those positions that can be performed effectively and efficiently without the physical presence of the employee at a specific worksite. Such jobs may include roles in software development, content creation, customer service, and other knowledge-based occupations. On the other hand, location-dependent jobs are those roles that necessitate the employee's physical presence at a designated workplace due to the nature of the tasks involved, such as healthcare professionals, emergency responders, construction workers, and other hands-on occupations. Employers shall assess job functions and determine the suitability of remote work based on factors such as operational requirements, employee productivity, and the preservation of essential services. This law aims to facilitate remote work opportunities while ensuring that critical functions requiring local presence are duly addressed."
>management/leadership at Google is arguing that "the job" of a general employee expected to be a collaborative team member can't be done completely remotely to a quality level or at a velocity that is acceptable for their business.
They can argue whatever they want.
If employers were left on their own devices they'd also argue that people should work 12 hours a day, that paid overtime is detrimental to their business, that child work is fine, that their business don't need to provide safety standards and work accidents should be pinned into the workers being "non careful", that they don't need to hire women in executive roles because they're less competent and have impaired judgment "once a month", and a whole lot more.
In fact, they have argued, and practiced all of the above, before labour laws (that they fought against vehemently), had them begrudgingly accept them.
What is "acceptable for their business", based on their own judgement, shouldn't constrain what is accetaptable or even best practice for society, the environment, and so on.
That said, I'm also not convinced remote is amazing. I do wish they would move to more performance oriented metrics on who they are allowing to work from where. This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring. If you just want people in the office, surely you have a reason for that.
This is especially true for a company that famously lauds OKRs. If they work as well as we've been assured that they do over the years, make that your push. Don't focus on "percent in the office X days a week."
Yes, it mentions fully remote people with the hopes to get them to switch off fully remote. But the meat, as it were, is in the reminder to everyone else that absence factors into performance reviews. That is, they don't measure you by OKRs, but by attendance. (I can see an argument that it is "in addition to OKRs," but that doesn't change my challenge here. If those work, why have attendance?)
I'm reminded of the scene, "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
And again, I'm actually not fully pro-remote. But this is a bed they made.
This example is funny because tying school performance to standardized test scores has been a disaster that makes overall schooling less effective in favor of "teach the test".
More numeric performance metrics would have people work the metrics, not do the work effectively. IE back when programmers were measured by LOC, so they wrote senselessly verbose code to play the metric.
These policies both have costs (financial, talent-wise, administratively depending on what state/country you are in, etc.), and while it sounds ideal, it's not always a good idea to let an employee "do whatever they want". That's a less talked about way on how you cause office clashes. Sometimes the best way to settle those disputes before they start is to lay a foot down say "we are doing X", and inevitably let those who feel strongly walk.
Ideally while clearly explaining your rationale. Because you're communicating with fellow adults, not wrangling kids into a playpen.
That's the part companies forget, and reading fake platitudes or empty statemes like this memo don't make me feel confident either way, regardless on how I feel about remote vs. office.
No, if your rationale is "we are still paying for this building and must use it", just say it. If it's "we don't need an office anymore and it's saved costs", say that.
Hopefully, there will be companies that are in one camp or the other as well. That seems to be the only way to create a workplace that is beneficial to everyone.
Google demanding RTO, for instance, doesn't impact me because I have negative interest in ever working for Google. However, I still retain hope that the sorts of companies I am interested in working for will have a working environment that suits me.
We collaborate through reviews on PRs, virtual documents, links, search queries, and yes, conversations. But this has all happened in virtual settings for a long long time, and almost can’t work any other way.
But I have noticed that it's much harder to brainstorm ideas remotely. Where you want fast back and forth, everyone to speak their minds, notes to jot down. These aren't as efficient to do on a computer, at least not for my generation raised between tech and analog.
As a result, we never needed to have specific days "in office" or "you can do what you want"; as long as you could attend the meeting, you could be wherever you needed to be. I found just as much value on days in the office as days elsewhere, but the biggest value was that every day it was my choice.
Then the pandemic hit and we lost the office, and naturally I discovered the downsides of being permanently remote.
Today's "compromise" of forced "in-office" and "do what you want" schedule doesn't strike me as inducing the best collaboration based on what individual teams and groups need.
Perhaps having a goal of "optimizing productivity" is the problem.
If employeers were allowed to drive this to its ultimate conclusion they would adopt with forced servitude as the maximum productivity case (and historically and even now in many places had adopted).
But also, quality and productivity are not totally separate, let's not be coy. If you can't collaborate effectively then both productivity and quality can take hits.
If the product suffers, it's not because they're working for home. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, or the famous old examples everybody loved to have Avid and Quark, have made no end of crap releases, or crapped on their priorly good products, while strictly working from an office.
And that's with product oriented companies - corporate and government software is, of course, much much worse.
Still, why optimize for product quality either? It's a bottomless pit. We should optimize for a decent product (that would already be an improvement), and work-life balance. Work is 1/3+ of daily life, and people's time is not something people should be forced to sacrifice (by piling up forced relocation or commuting time, open plan or cublicle farm environments, and lack of day contact with kids, spouses, ability to drop the kids to school or handle some chore over the week, and so on).
We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.
I think that information is also known to people making decisions and is why we’re seeing hybrid policies which essentially codify the pre-covid behavior of taking a WFH day. Pre-covid, having two or three company sanctioned WFH days was the dream. Let’s not forget.
So what really annoys me at this point are the holdouts still arguing for 100% fully remote positions for every employee or the employer is essentially abusing them and just wants to creep on people working in desks and watch them type. I mean come on… fully remote just doesn't work for every employee, sorry. For every “I’m more productive at home” there’s an “I need face to face interaction with other humans to effectively collaborate”. That’s life.
IMO, hybrid work policies are an incredibly positive and generous outcome of the pandemic. If you don't like even that then either become a fully remote employee after a discussion with your manager. Or go work for a place where it’s explicitly part of the policy/job/contract up front.
Mostly sick of hearing whinny parroting of the same arguments ad nauseam.