But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.

This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.

Language barriers, dialects, and social norms can all be quite different when offshoring.

The local worker, even if they are working from home, is still more in sync culturally (presumably, maybe you hire some real weirdos).

You can also save money with hiring and retention due to happier employees.

Offshore is a reasonable comparison. Virtually all offshore implementations that I have observed result in at least one employee being forced into becoming an offshore orchestrator. Everyone now has to play telephone with the offshore dev through this channel. Even if they could contact them directly, you have a one day communication lag because you only get one shot a day to have a one hour sync with the offshore team. In bad scenarios, the offshore team has all communication channeled through the local team lead creating yet another layer and further communication lag. The point here is that engineering teams have been communicating how this issue is detrimental for years. We saw WFH work in a forced experiment (and had a lot of data about improved productivity). It is obviously not a direct comparison, but the egregious nature of blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH makes the comparison relevant.

You must read a different HN than I do

Having worked in offices, remotely, and with offshore teams I can say that remote work leads to really bad outcomes from team members who don’t want to be part of the team. Worse than having them in the office.

I think the big part is that, at least in work culture here, that you simply cannot call someone out for not doing their job. There’s no shame. No cost. Nothing to avoid.

There’s performance plans. There’s meetings. There’s never radical intervention that leads to the change needed to have people shit or get off the pot.

This is good financially for these people in the short term but in my experience much worse for their careers in the long term.

WFH would be way easier on us if people had the freedom/were enabled to leave jobs they hate.

I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names and lists of things they’ve done to fuck up or times they didn’t do any work just in case.

I honestly don’t think it’s your mistake to act that way, I think it’s the leadership in there who are not working enough to build enough trust in that work environment so that so you need a CYA folder.

If you publicize that list, you are likely to destroy yourself.

Nukes are an effective deterrent only if people think you have them (and think you might use them).

If I was their manager, that would be a really bad look for the person.

If you're delivering value then you don't need the file, and if you're not, then you should be fired.

garbage in, garbage out.

If you want me to be a part of the team you have to make that team have meaning and benefit. That I work with you is neither. Those I work with are no more important to me than the shit stain I power washed off the toilet bowl.

If we miss goals? What happens. Nothing. If we hit goals what happens? Maybe the PM and EM will get a small bonus and we're all made to work hard to achieve that level of productivity with no benefit. So, sorry, no, I don't want to be a part of your team.

That's exactly my point. Why be there except for your need of income to be exploited?

I'd also like to interject that "Productivity" metrics are almost never some kind of efficiency of human potential to create civilization against a hostile universe. They're b(i)ased on what the employer spends.

So even if a study says an employee is X% more "productive" at the office, that means ignoring all the time/money spent commuting, since that's typically shouldered entirely by employees.

So watch out for people conflating "employers get a better deal" with "offices are good for society."

It depends on how you measure the costs of remote... the company I used to work for saved $5 million/year in real estate costs by switching to full remote at the start of covid. That is one thing to consider when comparing remote and on-site costs.

*It took about 2 years to reach those savings as we waited for some leases to expire.

All that said, I fall into the camp of lets get in-person together once a quarter to plan and then execute remotely. We can meet up occasionally in between somewhere awesome (not in an office).

When people are spread across multiple offices and all your meetings are on video calls anyway, it's really hard to justify RTO.

And this even applies within the same city. Google has so many offices just in the Bay Area they end up having video calls with local people because it's better than taking a shuttle to another office (same with Apple/Amazon/Meta/etc.)

Discord is pretty good at this (channels, not calls), but there are probably even better paradigms (there still has to be a way to participate in multiple conversations at once).

Meanwhile MS Teams wants to put LLMs in their products to scan DMs for problematic thinking. If corporations want to record and scan everything I say, I just won’t say anything anymore.

People should be able to say what they think in any situation without the fear of reprisals.

But it doesn't work that way because management often can't take criticism and so you're left with back channels and politics to get things done.

This is a management problem and a culture problem not a problem with working from home or not.

I kind of see getting to know my colleagues as the same as having to commute an hour into work each day. It's just shit I don't want to spend my time on.

For you, your local optimum may be great, but global optimum for the company as a whole may not. And vice versa.

No doubt in-hall and water-cooler discussions provide some spice to the drudgery of the work, but for me the biggest challenge of office work is the commute.

So I'm kinda ok with hybrid/flex where 2-3 days are in office. I'm also ok with all the folks who are perma-WFH as long as they are responsive.

But if someone told me to RTO, I would quit on the same day. There is no way I will work in an office ever again. My employer buys my time, not my body.

When vendor discussions move entirely to Zoom, everything is empty platitudes and keeping the relationship purely transactional. Something is missing. People make up their minds to buy before reaching out, or ghost you when they're no longer interested. The salesperson is just a point-of-contact answering questions and shuttling order forms and contracts. Nobody has a chance to work to earn someone's business anymore.

Zoom is leading the enshittification of the sales process.

What is Zoom using internally for chat?

Zoom never said video calls are the best way to work.

They said video calls offer a level of globally distributed collaboration unprecedented in history. And that’s true.

Actually, he does (well 10 meals a week):

https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/

Every fast food company has a "flagship" store near the HQ, often for the purpose of being seen eating there.

You can google around for the stories and photo ops. :)

But yes, not every CEO believes their product should be used all the time. But most of them at least believe in the core benefit they claim their product provides.

1. Force out the people who are making it suck. This is difficult with how managers are trained nowadays, never to take sides even if one party is clearly a drag on the group. Shunning and isolation are options, but ones very hard to keep up without support. If it's the manager who is the bad influence, you might as well be trying to shame a baron out of owning a castle.

2. Stop caring about work. Phone it in. Don't care anymore.

3. Don't be present physically in that environment.

Of course people want to work from home when every interaction is unpleasant, when management is badgering you into doing things. It also saves on transportation cost, cost of caring for family, every single thing that an employer likes to pretend is not their cost to pay. It's not about people being naturally 'introverted' or 'extroverted,' it's about the social environment everyone, including management, creates around them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner#Career

ICs job is literally to work not to come up with innovative new ideas to advance the company. Thats what MANAGERS AND EXECUTIVES ARE SUPPOSED TO DO and the ICs implement those ideas.

For some reason it's expected now for IC s to be doing managements jobs and for that reason they need to be coming into the office for collaboration?

The managers and executives are the ones who meed to be going into the office to collaborate.

Good management would come up with the ideas and efficiently break it down so that ICs can take the work and run with it no collaboration needed.

No this is all about control and 'cultural fit' shaming to fear people into doing their jobs rather than being a good manager that is capable of distributing work in an efficient way and treating people in a way that people are inspired to do great work for you a thousand miles away even without any supervision.

It's a lot more difficult to be a manager that people follow out of respect and love vs a manager people follow out of fear and constant monitoring.

I recently moved to the city where the company office is and I feel like a few days face to face with my team was a stronger connection than a year of MS Teams interaction. Suddenly my coworkers became real people rather than just emotionless icons on a screen.

I feel much more productive in write-first teams. Meetings can be done over Zoom then, and they’re always short and productive. Anything works at that point.

Genuinely, all these companies raising issues with training, and collaboration, and connection, but in the last 3 years have put zero effort to address these issues with respect to remote work so they throw the baby with the bath water and force people to return.

The Friday afternoon beer call was funny and entertaining during covid but it’s worn thin and people want to physically meet up again.

https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/

I swear, it isn't just CEOs but most humans just cannot fathom or think of others as living in a completely different headspace. The opposite end is service workers thinking CEOs are overpaid because they sit in a nice office and order people around.

Never wish another person's turd out your arsehole as george washington put it.

[0] That is, if his words are backed up with actual data - if these are just personal opinions, there is nothing to act upon.

Do they?

Maybe I'm the odd one, but all my close friends are from meatspace. I have acquaintances in online communities, but none that I'd consider close. And a predominantly online existence sounds downright miserable to me.

However ... this feels correct. This is basically the same as saying that Zoom is a meeting tool and there is a lot more to building a trusting and productive team than just having meetings. Building a happy remote team is definitely not a simple task. Sounds like Zoom is not doing what it takes, I think that says worse things about their company than their product.

So, Zoom is out as a product for us. We use discord at our company, which just _fits_ a remote workflow so much better than zoom. Which makes sense, given their job listings have a whole lot for "... or Remote" (https://discord.com/careers).

Zoom would be able to build a better product, for more users, and capture more value, if they understood how to build a remote working team, and put in the work to do that.

0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/new-google-c...

These people live such uninteresting lives.

They own real estate. They don't care!

Use Slack instead of other suitable platform. Zoom really isn't useful for more than call, that will likely be recorded anyway. Screw Zoom.

Y'all wishing you'd moved really far during those 2+ years.