In my experience, remote workers are significantly more productive than on-site employees IF the culture is one of employee empowerment and trust. If you expect people to be mature, communicate effectively, and get things done AND you give them the tools and support to do it then being remote is absolutely no barrier. It just gives people an extra hour or two a day to think about things and do a little extra work because they are not commuting.
The missing piece is that leaders need to plan, execute, and communicate effectively. They need to empathize with their teams and work with people as individuals, which means extra time and thought and attention. Face-to-face work covers up for a lot of incompetence because that person is standing in front of you. Remote employees can't hide behind a herd and remote leaders can't hide behind an org chart. You don't need to spend millions of dollars on a building to cover up for poor leadership and weak culture.
For reference, I run a team of 10 remote employees and am responsible for highly technical engineers that support sales for a team that generates 8-figures of annual revenue on SaaS and on-prem software.
That is what GP says, too. GP was saying the advantage of in-person is agility and course-correction, which require intense discussion.
> The missing piece is that leaders need to plan, execute, and communicate effectively.
Maybe with perfect leadership this is tenable, but when responding in a quickly evolving situation, I can see the advantage of in person. It just doesn't seem realistic to expect leadership to do all the planning. Engineers "at the bottom" often have better perspective and should be at the planning table.
My personal perspective: I'm currently 100% remote and enjoy the improved throughput. I also have had to get better at planning, as you point out. But when I have to do heavy coordination, video conference fatigue gets real. I'd prefer to be in person for those days with >3 hours on video.
I worked in-person for the first 7 years of my career and remote for most of the last 7. This was true until the pandemic. It's not true anymore. Even in-office workers at my current hybrid workplace are using huddles and threaded chats to meet and decide things faster than scheduling a room or walking up.
The only thing that was consistently faster in-office was the espresso machine, and even that flipped around when the Bambino came out around 2019.
Literally none. PMs are disciplined, there's top-down and bottom-up accountability, there's good transparency of work status and blockers, and people can take days off, miss meetings, and still contribute to decision making because all the work is done in a shared space that everyone in the company can see.
We don't even need standups most weeks because everyone knows where everyone is just by looking at the related tickets.
The closest things to "problems" are in bridging front-end design and back-end implementation collaboration because they use different tools, but that was at least as big of a problem when it was turning whiteboard mockups and Post-its into engineering tickets.
All of the above can be avoided with remote work. However it is a lot easier to pick those things up in the office.
You know both premises can be true at the same time, right?
In my experience it's basically impossible to "plan, execute, and communicate effectively" in these environments, because if people knew what the plan was or how to execute it, someone would already have done it.
The company relies on quick and efficient feedback between employees, leadership, and potential customers. That's the part that's much harder with remote work. In a startup, if you tell an engineer to do something and it turns out it's impossible, you will see him grimace and cuss you out in person, and you can adjust the plan accordingly. With remote work, you don't get that body-language feedback, and he'll probably say yes while looking for other jobs and posting about how incompetent his manager is on Hacker News.
That sounds like an amazingly poorly run startup with horrible leadership.
The startups that I've seen that are successful purposefully try to fix that problem. We flew people out to customers, had them shadow them to see how they worked, and had a group of customer advisors. Out of all the startups I've been involved with the remote ones have done the best.
Honestly, the manager you're describing is incompetent. Why is that manager relying on reading body language instead of building enough trust with their engineers where the engineers would just say "that's impossible?". It seems like that manager is doing a poor job and is using remote work as an excuse for their own lack of ability.
But jokes aside, I think this is really unkind. You're never going to have perfect people or perfect situations. Saying a process works great under the best conditions is only looking at things inside a small sliver of reality.
> In a startup, if you tell an engineer to do something and it turns out it's impossible
I see a problem with that approach. To me, it's not about you telling the engineer what to do, they are not a tool to execute your bidding, they are a colleague with ideas how to achieve the goal you are striving for.
What is great about remote is that it kind of forces you to write down your ideas in some format, in PRs, in proposals, in documents. That gives the space and time for others to chime in, at their own pace, without your "body language" or your "room presence" shutting them down. Granted, it's not the American way with a top-down approach to startups, but if your working model is you simply tell your engineers what to do and they execute it, then imo you are missing 90% of their value.
> you will see him grimace and cuss you out in person, and you can adjust the plan accordingly....you won't get that body-language feedback
I have never had anyone at work "cuss me out", whether that's been remote or in the office. That sounds like a very unhealthy culture to me.
Additionally, I stipulate that looking for inscrutable clues in people's faces can instead be replaced with building a culture where you reward people for speaking (or writing down) their mind and all contributing towards the common goal, and there is a healthy amount of discussion (preferably written). As a technical manager, your role is to provide a clear goal to your teammates, and work with them to a good solution, not analyze their body language and making decisions based on that...
> yes while looking for other jobs and posting about how incompetent his manager is on Hacker News.
I'd be doing the same if my manager's main job is observing my every facial expression and I am not allowed to say no or at least explain why I don't think the task that's been presented to me is possible to be achieved in the proposed way.
To add to that, a lot of engineering types are also very neurodivergent and just do not communicate on that level the same way as other people, leading to copious misunderstandings and miscommunications when it's not a "say what you mean, and mean what you say" sort of environment. That probably makes a certain other type of person uncomfortable, when their main skill is social hacking and not necessarily efficient management, planning, or collaboration.
It really doesn't for some people. I have coworkers who will never communicate through text; after the first 1-2 messages they always say "let's just have a quick conference call", and then it ends up endless as they talk. I personally mostly avoid them as much as I can.
My point is, there are different types of people, and some are more competent, some less. Organizing our work life, cities, traffic and everything around Joe the react dev, so he can have a structured way of working (like kindergarten, same time, same day, nice routine) where his manager can see in his body language that Joe is a tool, that's insane to me.
All the power to people who'd like to spend the workday with Joe the react dev physically, but I prefer having my distance from people like this, which remote is great for.
Before the "closure of the commons" in England, wage labor world-wide was virtually non existent. It took a series of very harsh and restrictive laws and concerted effort of capital and lords over many generations to force the peasants and independent craftspeople, to leave their fields and workshops and join wage labor in the mines, and later, the factories. Offices were really invented much later, but are an artifact of that same type of thinking, and so are managers, a new type of "work" all about managing how others do the work. With that said, all through and through and up to today, body language has been an important thing of how people perceive information and how they communicate. That's not something I dispute. I dispute that we need to be at a place for 8-10 hours a day so we can read each other's (and our leader's) facial expressions, in order to do good work. If people can't have the time or ability to clearly express their views in a written format, and instead I have to stare at their faces to guess what they mean, I don't want to be working with those people.
Programming is deep and creative work. You need to sit and think deeply, in that way it's NOT comparable to factory work (which is the field where most "modern" managerial techniques come from). You don't do the exact same thing all over, repetitively, without a thought, despite how Agile, Scrum, or any kind of managerial trash is trying to convince you.
The manager of today's office very often is nothing but a glorified taskmaster:
- daily checking if you are on time with this and that
- giving you this or that small piece of work that later needs to be pieced together to make a finished product
The same way, in factories, craft was lost because people were doing only a their small part before finishing the product, many modern office environments push for and think of programming as "factory work", thereby destroying the craft, producing cheap items, that were often lacking in quality.
I like to think and do programming work as the result of the craft of many independent professional craftsmen, who will organize in groups when needed, and work deeply independently or in self-organized groups, rather than a factory floor with a taskmaster looking for clues into other people's faces whether their daily quota is finished or not. So let the craftspeople organize however they want, they can read each other's faces and debate the merits of this and that on Zoom, and they can find a fit for their product and go to meet in person if they desire to do so. You don't need a manager for that or to force people to go to a specific location so you can observe them.
Don’t hire people who don’t value synchronous communication. People who want all communication to be async and don’t plan to respond promptly to messages (like the work/life balance crowd on HN) will not produce a dynamic team because that’s not the strong point of async communication.
Do quick calls when text conversation gets too long, build a team where you can expect people to actually make an effort to show up to the calls. For us we also have strategy calls with video regularly (but not too frequently), and make sure everyone is aligned to the plan and concerns are resolved before building. Make sure the team understands that for anything where they are unsure what to do or have any ambiguity around requirements, that they proactively ping the right people.
Doesn’t mean you need to be on all the time and that async communication is not valuable, but you need everyone to know when it is and isn’t the right way to go. So long as people are making a best effort to value communication speed it works out.
Hire people who are motivated enough to form opinions, and confident enough to say they really think. Most people are not invested in their work, or not invested in the problem space enough to bother making the mental and research effort to form valid opinions on your problem space. This is fine for when things just need to get done (not everyone on the team needs to be a decision maker), but foster those who are ready to invest. Make it clear it’s a good thing if they do form opinions and are willing to express their doubts about the strategy to others/leadership.
For us we also have very clear owners of different aspects of our operations and product. Someone will make the final decisions on those aspects. This doesn’t mean they make all choices, they can choose to defer to someone they trust to make the call. But someone needs to be clearly responsible, and others need to know that if a conversation is not resolving that they can pull the right person in to resolve it efficiently. People need to agree to disagree at some point once those responsible make a choice.
This general approach works for us, people don’t tend to hate their managers if they understand why choices are made, feel that their concerns are heard, and are aligned ideologically with the approach and way of working. But it does require choosing the right people and setting a higher bar for yourself on alignment.
Basecamp has always been remote and asynchronous and they seem to be doing well.
If we create an environment where engineers feel comfortable enough that body language isn’t required as the sole feedback indicator in this scenario, perhaps the entire workplace would benefit.
There's a reason why generals who lead from a desk aren't really trusted, or why when executives skip off to New Zealand it corrodes morale in their organizations.
I feel this to the core.
That's a big if
Do you have an email address or a contact method?
As with most things it really depends, also having some people be remote and some in person is always going to disadvantage the remote workers and set them up for failure in management’s eyes so no surprise there.
This may be a company-culture thing, but before remote work, collaboration at my past employers was always "Swing your chair around and open your mouth". It didn't take a whole lot of convincing or a conference room.
Remote Work lets me silence the things I don't need to deal with right away while those that truly need my attention I can prioritize ahead of time or there are ways to "break through" the silence because its urgent enough to warrant it.
I hated not having that level of autonomony in the office. Mostly, so did everyone else once they realized how this wasn't as nice as it seemed
By definition this is more efficient communication when you can ping someone irl, interrupt their flow, and get an immediate response.
And yes, it’s significantly worse for deep work.
In exchange for losing deep work, you no longer have to write a detailed thought to your PM, wait 5 hours for them to ping back “sounds good to me”, then begin working on it the next business day not feeling sure if they even read what you wrote.
But you're also expected to meet your weekly "commitments" in JIRA - which means you're going to be working nights and weekends to do the work you're supposed to be doing since you were interrupted all day to do the work other people were supposed to be doing.
But you're right, this _is_ the tradeoff, and it's by design, since you're "exempt".
Only if you're totally overscheduled?
It is a balance: you need to do your own work, other people need you to do their work, and you also need other people to do your work. Depending on your and your company's culture you may need to block out sections of your day for deep work. Or you may need to ask your manager for support to not be the SPOF for a bunch of other people's work.
Please don’t accept the narrative that exempt means unpaid overtime is ok.
Now, the ideal answer in a situation like that is to leave and find a better job. But if everyone in a situation like that could just leave and find a better job, we wouldn't have situations like that for long.
But yeah; if you're in an organization that is not totally lost to corruption (of whatever stripe), or one that has to answer to higher authorities, like federal laws and the SEC, then documenting can be an extremely effective way to force, if not necessarily genuine changes of heart, at least skin-deep changes of behavior.
The case where I saw stuff like this happening second-hand (it was to a family member), the rot came, unfortunately, from the top. My family member was doing absolutely amazing work supporting the stated mission and values of the organization, and was having to fight tooth and nail to make it happen. Unfortunately, the organization's actual mission and values were much more along the lines of "make lots of money and pander to the people who will give it to us," so the job description was changed overnight to one supporting part of the organization that they had made perfectly clear over their years in that position they would have nothing to do with (because it was the part that most strongly violated the stated values). This was sufficient evidence that, after they quit and applied for unemployment, the state agreed this was constructive dismissal and paid out in full.
We're measured by both.
We re-structured meetings to be more productive, for example: PMs are required to write all the requirements in advance of a refinement session so everyone can read them first, and you are expected to have read them. This opens up for async discussion (via Jira messages) and come refinement meetings, a way to ask and discuss directly.
In the last 2 years since thats taken place, I have not had another instance of waiting on a PM for a response.
In cases where we need something more urgent, there are always ways to get a PM on the line ASAP, we have protocols for that (seldom used, but they exist)
In my experience those people take forever to make decisions anyway so you'd be doing exactly that from the office.
Not sure I see the difference unless you are roaming the hallways ready to pounce to ask them a quick question before their next meeting.
The smartest person on your team is going to be interrupted the most. The worst person on your team is going to do a lot of interrupting. So your highest quality producer will produce less & your lowest quality producer will have their incompetence papered over. With remote, a lot of this interruptions are now on slack, and searchable.
In an environment with a lot of juniors that need coaching, the office definitely excels. For a team of mature engineers trying to work on challenging tasks, it can be highly disruptive.
I've been in a fully remote job and gotten more built in the last year than in probably my previous 5 years in office. Meanwhile when I was in-office, most of my coding was after hours (back at home).
Remote also means I spend less time in conference rooms listening to monologues and more time on 1-1 or small group zooms with productive screen shares of code/data/probelms.
Any large project will have plenty of technical debt that isn't important to clean up now but should be done. There are always new tools to try and see if they add value to your project. There are new frameworks to try that might or might not be worth telling everyone to start using for the next story.
The above does work for a tiny company of course. However for larger companies it is important.
How do you retain your smartest/best devs when you are putting them on the least important projects and expecting them to tolerate infinite interruption?
Certainly there is a tradeoff of coaching vs doing for seniors, and you want to raise your overall team up.. but in practice a lot of "agile" environments are very focussed on output, and want to see more points/stories out of higher paid people. It sets up an adversarial system where nothing is expected of some, and everything is expected of others.
You are also correct about team size. In an engineering org with 1000s of people, you want everyone to grow and no 1 person really matters.
In startups, small orgs, and teams of 3-5 devs.. you do need your best doer to, actually, well.. do.
If the product quality depends on you maintaining a flow state for extended periods, then you're either working in a research lab or it's a poorly designed product.
I say this as a dev who also gets annoyed when my deep focus is interrupted, but so long as the interruption is actually warranted (and with my company's culture it usually is) I swallow my annoyance, task-switch and get the job done anyway. I'm already earning a higher salary than than most people in the world with good benefits and flexible hours. I can be mildly annoyed at work sometimes if it helps get the job done.
I think you've conflated quality and productivity; you started talking about one then switched to the other. They are related but not the same.
Certain dev tasks require deep flow for good results/quality. Robust refactorings, abstraction design and prototyping. Basically anything where you have to preserve invariants under code transformations. This isn't all dev work, and isn't necessarily frequent either, but when flow state is required it's usually important work that's core to a program's operation, so product quality definitely depends on flow.
If you're working on such a task, an interruption requires a return to that flow state to ensure good quality, and that takes time and will definitely impact productivity.
Other tasks do not require going very deep though and so achieving comparable quality doesn't require much depth in your flow. Interruptions won't affect productivity much in such cases.
My two cents.
Now if you're getting constantly pinged for stupid shit that anyone could Google, then perhaps you should politely confront the person(s) doing so and make your expectations clear rather than declaring a pox on all interruptions.
Wouldn't this be true of just about everyone complaining about such interruptions though? I can't imagine anyone would mind being interrupted if the building were on fire. People just differ on what they consider to be good reasons.
I'm sure there are unreasonable people on all sides, both those asking for unreasonable conditions to interrupt them and those not respecting reasonable conditions for interruptions, but I don't think it's the majority of the people complaining about it. I've been in this situation a few times, and lots of people just don't have good impulse control and so don't even think twice about interrupting you if it's more convenient for them.
Our code quality here has improved significantly around this, and we are shipping faster than ever.
That isn't to say I'm unavailable (or anyone else) its that there is an acceptance that not all things are urgent, and if they are, its warranted to break through any focus periods.
By contrast it sounds like you guys designed your product around maximizing the impact of flow states and minimizing the need for interruption. I bet you have good documentation too. I'm honestly jealous, it would take tens of millions and years of re-writes to do the same here, and our prime customer wouldn't be willing to accept the delay even if we had the funding.
So little is actually urgent, unless you have some business critical infrastructure you have to maintain, but that sounds like a different role entirely.
Seems pretty contradictory, no?
I also do wonder what the real value of it ignoring live requests is. You personally get to stay on task but what about what's lost? If you block two or more people isn't it worse overall?
I'd also argue, that 2 people being blocked because of X should warrant breaking through any focus period, as thats clear indication of an issue that needs more attention.
If you're talking about 2 people being blocked simply because they don't know what to do, thats why companies should have proper mentorship programs in the first place, it was a need hidden because being in-office made this less visible of a need, but it was always there, and dedicated mentorships are better than ad-hoc problem solving in these types of cases. Not every senior needs to be in the "deep work" pool (we do mentorship on rotation where I work)
Which works if the work is predictable. If you’re in a dynamic environment, that’s not possible. Hence, agility.
To take an absurd example, military command shouldn’t be RO.
On the other hand, the experts are just getting interrupted with noob questions, and end up helping several people with their tasks in a day and their own task is still there undone.
Noob get promoted and expert doesn't.
Expert hates the noob.
Clear enough?
My team is highly technical and generally requires deep thinking and little interruptions to make progress. The single best thing that remote work has done is stop the endless interruptions via shoulder tap at the desk.
I basically have the ability to completely block certain people, quietly ignore channels until I get mentioned directly (@here gets ignored), and cause the abusers of @here to not generate a notification for me.
I also don't see gifs and reactions, which is a big help in not getting distracted.
I've spent the last 20 years or so working for large conglomerates that have multiple satellite offices in different continents so huddles were always on zoom anyway. But they're still insisting on RTO.
I concur.
I’m a remote employee (no company office in my city)
I work remote 3 weeks and then 1-week travel to be in office.
It’s a great balance of the dynamic you described.
Everybody gets a good laugh, and returns to their tasks, or coffee chats, or whatever it is that they were doing, where ever they were doing it.
Higher status and more extroverted workers tend to get energy and motivation from going to the office. It feels good and is fun for them. Our brains have evolved to know when we're high on the social totem pole and give us copious feel-good chemicals as a reward.
For similar reasons, lower status and more introverted workers tend to not enjoy the office. They find it de-motivating and draining.
This isn't always the case across the board, and there are often other reasons involved like family/commute, but I think it explains the different camps fairly well in broad strokes.
All that said, an argument can definitely be made that having happy, highly motivated leadership actually is extremely important to a company's bottom line, so I don't think it can be so easily dismissed.
I have been remote since 2014, so far before the pandemic changed all of this. I also have 25+ years of experience.
I am able to handle architecting a major enterprise project fully remotely. The entire tech stack, writing code, handling pull requests, highly complex issues requiring communication between myself and other people to ensure everything goes smoothly.
It does.
We release updates on a weekly cadance and everything thus far (2 years with this current project) has been smooth sailing. And the number of issues, new features, and requests addressed in each update is significant.
It can be done remotely, without issue. I spent over a decade in the office, with an hour commute each way.
I am never doing that again.
With such a user name it goes without saying :)
And I'm just talking here about dysfunctional organizations, there are plenty of valid reasons for a functional organization to need in-office culture if they need to work through "legitimate" ambiguity (like designing a new technology or product).
Additionally, because the social fabric is weaker around remote workers in a hybrid environment, there may be a perception of them being less likely to remain out of any sense of loyalty or obligation. This seems like a potential stigma that remote workers would need to overcome in the absence of explicit inclusivity efforts by leadership.
I don't recommend holding loyalty to any company. Maybe to co-workers(s) or a direct boss (IE, if they leave, maybe you leave too. I've seen this happen) but certainly not to the employer, since it will never be reciprocated
However, there is a difference in appreciating a situation and being professional vs being ignorant of the ultimate fact: at any time, the business can just let you go, either via layoff or other means. Its best to be aware that unless you're in the C-suite, you're a cog in the machine.
That however, is not an excuse to do bad work or act unprofessionally
Well, technically that would be a market inefficiency, so we should be encouraging employees to view their employers as fungible and switch jobs as soon as it's advantageous to them. If your employer is trying to keep you around through social ties instead of competitive compensation you're being taken advantage of.
If you are a CEO and need to bounce ideas off of I.T., legal, finance, marketing with highly dynamic environment, definitely need to be in same location. Think war room or command center.
Future job may look for prospects that are adept in AR office work and will be asked how well they use it
There's got to be some other process we could try to recreate (to the extent possible) that "together" feeling of the office. Maybe set aside an hour when team calls into a meeting but just keep on working as normal? And can banter/ask random questions etc. Otherwise things are just too formal.
You can always ignore people from remote till you are good and ready
I sort of agree on the virtual whiteboarding (it's partly a surface area thing) but I think we've also discovered that colllaborative docs work fine for a lot of purposes.
So it's possible, with the right interface.
However your team having 2 members that are remote, then generalizing it to all remote workers is a bit of a leap.
Outside of that I do agree. New technologies that require a high degree of experimentation and discovery lend themselves to in person work.
Also about half of the rest of the org is remote - folks that collaborate with my team, but who I don't have reporting-line responsibility over. So there's a good sampling across 30-50 people who I interact with as teammates as well.
In fact our in-person teams have the opposite reputation: they are slow but theoretically work on high business value problems, while the remote hive mind takes care of business in the background.
After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos.
A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.
> The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings
Exactly.
The big killer is being able to pop into a team's room and say "hey tell me about VLAN X" and get an answer from someone. or even just figure out who to ask. with teams that's much harder, you have to play the "find the right person to ask" game, and the visibility is poor.
> (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either)
Teams is fine if you need a IM client for people who are in cubes on the other side of the office and integrates with the Office suite. but for distributed team use it's garbage.
The economics of it are purely about labor efficiency. A company in the midwest that needs tech services isn't limited to service providers within driving distance. Service providers aren't limited in hiring. Talented people in developing nations get ready access to first-world markets without needing any connections. This was all thoroughly proven and justified before 2020.
I would love to hear otherwise. I haven't yet seen evidence to the contrary, and I'm very open to it. I don't think executives like culture changing without their fiat, which is what happend in most WFH transition cases. Some did end up embracing it anyway, but over and over again as of late, its being walked back, and even Amazon admitted they have no data to backup their RTO plans.
The pattern of behavior I'm obvserving aligns (to me) with what I'm saying: its C-suite taking back control because it diminished their executive power and increased competition for labor, driving up labor costs.
The difference is palpable in, for example, whether and how explicit norms around asynchronous communication are implemented, whether office budget is repurposed into services and materials that enable remote work (including, for example, company offsites), etc.
It's obvious that certain jobs require in-person presence, but I think the big reveal is that most white-collar jobs don't.
I'd like to think that any new software workforce can arrange itself to be remote-only if it really tries, and it'd be much better off that way. Can also see why an existing company would rather bring people in-office.
I've worked in a rather average team remotely during Covid and it was pretty bad. Lack of communication, difficult to get hold of people, low productivity. The team fared better before Covid for sure.
For me, being in office would add nothing, because my team is split between two cities, and if i ask a question outside of my team its highly likely we're talking about crossing oceans.
Like anything, its about communication
A good internet link and company hosted audio/video room is enough for us to share issues, unblock, pair or cut some slack.
When the plague hit, I was one of the few who knew how to transition from office to remote without a glitch - because I had the experience for how to do it. I honestly believe that fully remote can work only for a select few businesses, but mostly remote is perfectly doable for vast majority of tech and tech-adjacent companies.
To start, remote work self-selects for two types of people. Seniors, who already know how to work independently and productively - and the reasonably well-off who have the space and can afford to dedicate a physically separate study as their office. The overlap between the two is significant.
Several things are fundamentally more challenging in a fully remote setting. Such as...
1: Training and/or onboarding juniors. People entering the industry need constant supervision and near-synchronous assistance for a prolonged period of time. The first two years of your career you are clueless. Yes, you too, a HN reader. We ALL were! Training juniors takes time, skill, attention and - let's be honest - a personal touch. Doing that remotely is possible, but a lot harder. And only really possible in a company where everything has been built, from the ground up, to assume remote-first for everybody.
2: Active brainstorming. Bouncing ideas rapidly off of each other depends on establishing a rhythm where any communication delays are detrimental and can crash the cycle at any time. Having to devote brain cycles to communication delays and/or equipment detracts your attention.
3: Mob debugging. Very few things are more effective at complex root-cause analysis than having two or three people cluster around the same set of desktops, with enough large monitors to pull up new dashboards on a whim, and a whiteboard or three ready for quick scribbles and ad-hoc diagrams.
4: Random encounters. The US term is for some reason "watercooler effect", but in my experience "not at the office"-effect would be more accurate. If your culture manages to encourage people to take a walk outside the office setting, a small but meaningful fraction of those end up with valuable insights and outsized productivity boosts. Getting away from the physical office, while discussing things with coworkers, is an essential aspect.
5: Cultural cohesion. Maintaining a good company culture is tricky when most communication happens without leadership having any clue of it taking place at all. The only solution I can think of is solid trust.
Replicating or reproducing any of the above in a remote-only setting is incredibly hard. However - remote work has enormous benefits that don't necessarily show up directly. Such as:
Ten-second commutes. The ability for a remote worker to effectively flip from at-home mental state to at-work mental state, without having to endure commute is an incredible advantage.
Disturbance shutdowns. At remote work we can completely block off coworkers (or managers) from disrupting the flow. Just remember to also set your phone to silent.
"Friendly face effect". When your mostly-remote workforce does meet in person, they tend to spend time talking about things they have had simmering at the back of their minds. Stuff that has takenl iterally weeks to form. And they are for most parts happy to see each other. Compare that to office work, where seeing the same faces day after day gets dreary, really quick.
Encouraging async communications. When you have to properly think through what you want to convey, and actually take time to do it right, email chains can become quite fruitful[0]. Sure, the latency of communication may be slower, but the S/N ratio for non-combative topics tends to be high. (For combative topics, nothing helps. Best way to resolve them is to put the people involved in a cage and let them pummel each other to different shades of blue.)
For all of the reasons above, I believe that for most companies the best approach in the long run will be "mostly-remote". Have people meet in person for couple of days every couple of weeks, so that they can get all the synchronous activities done in one batch, and then let them disperse back to their home offices to focus on their real product-oriented work.
Onboarding juniors and non-senior new hires is still going to be tough. For companies that thrive on hiring newgrads, it's unlikely they could ever embrace remote work for real.
One of the unexpected downsides of mostly-remote is that a company going down that route is incentivised to have location based salaries. This works, mostly, when their staff live reasonably near large cities. But by incentivising their workforce to relocate to lower CoL areas during employment, they are actually also encouraging social isolation. I saw this first hand - and it's not healthy.
0: Writing a good email takes time. You may have to spend an hour on it, just to ensure that readership can not easily misunderstand the message you want to convey.
The modern Internet, the WWW, Linux, etc. and most of the core infra as we know it (and take for granted) was built in the 90s by people worldwide largely communicating via IRC and mailing lists.
If that's not an example of new and unknown technology, then I don't know what is.
Remote work seems to only be a manger problem.
So how can we help managers feel more "in control?" Or where can we hire managers that are like that?
Seems like the kind of task that should have never been created, but required you to schedule meetings first, which you didn't.
Failure on your side.
My experience is that remote workers often have higher velocity but lower agility. When there's a well-defined task and little ambiguity, remote workers can usually complete it faster than in-office workers. But when the task is highly ambiguous, requires many course corrections, involves rapid communication, or relies on a large degree of trust, the in-office teams end up more productive. It all stems from known research on the benefits & detriments of office work, i.e. offices build trust and allow higher-bandwidth communication, but they also have more distractions and a less comfortable work environment.
I think the trigger that would bring people back to the office is a new economic boom based on new and unknown technology. That creates a highly ambiguous environment where you're forging ahead in unknown directions and need a lot of trust in leadership to make progress at all. Established companies with known markets probably would be better off adopting remote work - the employees work faster, and there are already well-known processes and strategic direction. Of course, if you're already well-established in your market, it probably doesn't matter what you do.