Not just work but also profits (except of course where profits depend on people’s physical custom, such as restaurants, but that is no longer an issue). So basically a lot of these digital product and service companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Also not commuting meant fewer expenses meaning more disposable income. Essentially a free economic boost.
You can hop as easily to huddle as you'd do an interruption. Of course, a junior interrupting ALL the time in real life would be a terrible thing so you definitely need to strike a balance.
But I see most arguments for office is better from people who just don't know how to communicate effectively through tools and potentially are bad at cross location team collab, which happens all the time in big companies.
Actually I myself joined my current company after March 2020. I can't imagine a 5-day, in-person experience would be any more effective or productive. If anything, I was able to completely pay no attention the mandatory training of "corporate value" nonsense -- it felt great to be "in" the meeting but spend the time doing actual development or doing some household chores.
It may be novel for someoen who hasn't seen this before, but its not imossible to achieve.
That said, the problem I do see is that the folks hired into a fully remote environment have a significantly lower "attachment" to the company. Working together in an office fosters a sense of belonging to the group (over time) in a way that remote work cannot. This is the thing that isn't getting attention, IMO - but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we were all overly attached to our jobs anyway :)
I've spent years now in a fully remote team, and we had no problem getting people integrated and productive, and bonding everyone into a real team. Likewise, I was the newbie in in-office teams before and have felt like an outsider who needs to beg for help for months.
In my experience, remote or not is not the deciding factor for onboarding and team building.
Do you think the firm thinks about selflessness?
What are these strange values being introduced.
The "sphereical cow" version of a workplace is a place you perform tasks, which you get paid for.
Funnily, the one thing that LLMs are excellent at are brining new hires up to speed with older workers. They excel at democratizing tribal knowledge.
if slack is the only way remote companies communicate, they’re doing it wrong imo.
I'm all for training juniors, but the person doing the training should accrue the credit/loyalty, and the employer should also pay the trainer a premium as they are asking them to hand over high value expertise.
I have many team members who work extremely well in this kind of environment, but there will always be some who don’t. It’s both a choice and a skill to function as a part of the team, and leadership needs to cultivate that culture. I don’t see this being any different in person, though it may not be quite as visible to the folks making the return to office decisions.
Requiring everyone to be in an office because your personal learning style involves no personal effort and requires everyone else to enable you to be effective is in fact selfish.
Yep, this is exactly who WFH benefits, and nobody else.
- The people who need to stay home to take care of their children and family members.
- The companies who can't find [good] enough local talent, or can't afford them.
- The people who can't find jobs locally and cannot move, due to financial, familial, environmental, or other reasons.
- People with diverse needs who require a flexible schedule and safe space.
- if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from.
- if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.
- if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)
So yes, if you just need a paycheck for skills you already have, and that can be done remotely, that can be convenient. If you are looking for more you need to consider these kinds of tradeoffs.
Companies are just learning they have terrible onboarding processes and documentation. Turns out those things are important and being in-person is an expensive and poor quality bandaid.
There are 2 kinds of jobs in tech. Demanding jobs and chill jobs.
Demanding jobs involve effectively resigning your life to the company for 5 days of the week. The hours saved on commute and ability to actually get chores done between at-home downtime allows people to put a lot more hours from home than from an office.
Chill jobs on the other hand, lead to a terrible commute vs hours worked ratio. You're in the office for 40 hours of the week, but spend 5 hours commuting, 5 hours chilling during lunch break, and another 5 hours waiting in line to select one of 10 fancy coffees. That's effectively 30 hours of work, 10 hours of in-office loitering and 5 hours of out of office mind-numbing commute. Make those same people work 'real' 40 hours from home and you'd see a 30% productivity increase just from hours saved. Remote employees take meetings during lunch, coffee is instantaneous and there is no commute.
People complain about how much better in-person meetings are. But, have we even tried to make remote work palatable. Slack and Zoom are terrible tools for remote work. Give every employee a 2000$ digital whiteboard. Make them stand and give their presentations using better cameras. Use gather.town to make collisions feel more natural. Guess what? with remote work, all your meetings & interactions can be captured. You can send out meetings summaries & key screenshots for every interaction without ever lifting your finger. But nope, remote work is relegated to having the same in-person secondary tools (zoom, slack) without leveraging new primary tools that work well for remote work.
You can easily learn from coworkers working remotely, I personally have had no issues doing so. The idea that you can't is a weird one and I have no idea where it comes from.
> if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.
So make others know you through your impact. Your work speaks for itself. If you have to be in person to demonstrate your impact, are you actually having an impact, or just making a show of having one?
> if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)
Low cost of living countries come with plenty of their own barriers that prevent hiring, and out-sourcing isn't some new concept that has emerged from the pandemic era of WFH. On the contrary, what has emerged is the ability for those capable of WFH to move from high COL areas to low COL areas, or for those in non-traditional hubs to gain access to high paying, high quality jobs they didn't have access to before without relocation. Its a huge boon to those struggling financially.
People doing jobs with more qualified candidates in the pool will probably have a harder time, and that sucks. For them, I hope they can band together as a union and force companies to hire them remote. There is no excuse anymore about it not working, because the whole planet did it through a friggin' pandemic, and work actually improved. We just have to stick to our guns, because the suits will continue to try to ruin our lives as long as it benefits them.