He admits that he's biased -and angry.

That said, HR policies (both ones we like, and ones we hate) tend to be "one size fits all" policies. They don't adjust for individuals. There's reasons for that; usually, legal reasons.

Individual jobs require individual approaches. If I'm a bench tech, running a rack of $40,000 analyzers that I share with other techs, I probably need to be in the office. If I'm running tests on an Internet connectivity layer, maybe not so much.

Also, different people work better, in different contexts. Some folks can't muster the personal discipline to work out of their living room (or their home environment is not friendly to their work). That doesn't mean that they need to RTO, but they should find some solution. I know someone that actually rents a desk in a local accelerator, and goes there, five days a week, for a remote job.

I have a good friend that just accepted a position at Amazon. They are paying him a lot more than his previous employer. He's really good at what he does. Their offer was not charity. He came on board as a remote employee. He lives out East on Long Island, and the Amazon office is in Midtown Manhattan. That's at least a two-hour commute, each way. He has a new kid, and is currently weighing his options. That paycheck is making the choice difficult, but he's coming face-to-face with the things he will need to give up, for that paycheck.

In fact, with things like slack and Discord, there's far more conversations happening when employees stay at their desks.

Pretty sure multiple studies have shown that "water cooler innovation" is more or less a myth.

Ah! The myth of "It got invented at a water cool chat" thing. I tend to agree to this one, as I was talking more about informal chatting (like about the last vacation, maybe sharing restaurant suggestions, talking about the boss doing bossy things and so on), which in turn would enable some kind of bonding between people.

I'd appreciate some links

I'm pretty sure that when someone says "pretty sure" indicates they don't actually have the receipts. I'm also pretty sure that when someone requests "some links" they are a) trying to passively aggressively say they do not believe the comment, or b) they do not know how to use a search engine.

I am pretty sure, you're right! ;)

I would appreciate some of them as well.

I'm certainly more innovative when it's the opposite. When you're all on the same page from the beginning and you're deliberating in that way, you will often end up following a very narrow path. Divergence and ideation happens when you're given an initial problem and you attempt to solve said problem independently. THEN you come together and you can start to fashion together a solution, synthesizing the best parts of each solution. Even if someone is completely off the mark with the rest of the group, their lack of initial perspective can bring greater rewards in the long run as they've got a fresher mind to attack the problem from a different angle.

Depends on the company and atmosphere it fosters. In our, watercooler/kitchenette is just empty chat, very rarely long term beneficial to company unless you meet just the person you need right now, but then they don't sit far in any case.

One thing that office is irreplaceable in (again, depending on company and atmosphere) is getting some stuff done from people not directly on projects but with crucial responsibilities/access.

If I am physically there, I just go to their desk, and either sit behind them till they have time or we agree to do it within 1 or 2 hours. Now I am few months fully at home due to breaking both legs while paragliding, and some of those folks take 2 weeks of chasing, meetings etc. to get their 5-minute max shit done. While 50-folks project is blocked by them. Maddening.

That's not because of remote work. That's because either your managers aren't capable of doing their jobs or your co-workers refuse to speak up when someone isn't doing their part. I hold my co-workers to a high standard. If they're fucking up and it prevents me from doing my job, I'm not going to pretend like it isn't happening. They will know, and if it continues, so will their manager. The biggest problem with weak managers is that they don't know how to hold people accountable.

That thing you just described where you walk over to someone's desk? Doing it to other people seems like a feature, but when it happens to YOU it destroys your flow and interrupts your work. It quickly becomes impossible to get any deep work done, and you become far less productive. It's part of the reason ticketing systems were invented.

It's a flaw, not a feature.

Whether a flaw or feature is a meaningless academic discussion at the end, when entire IT of the company works like that. To get stuff done on time you need to do what is necessary, rest are details. I agree stuff is not set optimally, but when IT is a cost center to the business and looked down upon, this is what you get. Btw not everything is covered by some form of ticketing system, there are many grey areas.

And trust me, guy managing sFTP server (latest case in long line of cases) doesn't do any sophisticated deep stuff that requires 15 mins to get into the zone.

More often than not its the case of folks in various roles promising to do certain work by the end of the day or given date on the meeting, then happily ignoring all chats/emails/calls asking for it for another week or two past the deadline. Of course the excuse is in 100% of the cases how busy they are, when you know they happily spend 15 mins on coffee/smoke breaks multiple times a day. Absolutely 0 sympathies there, and this is one of general senior skills to get work done on time from such people too.

The solution to lazy or incompetent workers is not to watch them like children, or to make sure you're near enough to nag them like their mother. It's to replace them with people who do the work they're paid for. If nobody is being paid for it and it's worth doing, hire someone.

We have a "hybrid" office schedule, which I vaguely dislike and do not think is valuable, especially since my entire team is in a different time zone and I'm in a satellite office.

I was in the office the other week, and someone from the operations side of the project I work on started chatting me up about a recent company initiative to come up with projects to improve things, and asked my opinion about his suggestion. It was great info I didn't otherwise have and I got excited about solving his specific complaint in a productive way in the new system.

Except.... This was a companywide initiative. Why didn't the company have people present to all engineers instead of just submitting a powerpoint deck to leadership if they wanted collaboration on such an initiative? What if I was sick that day, would he have never talked to me about it and I never would have learned about this sticking point?

I'm available through email and Teams. Why didn't he message me? I message random coworkers all the time about feedback and ideas and brainstorming and questions, why didn't he?

Some people have no willingness or ability to communicate usefully digitally it seems, and they want to make my life worse to counteract that fact, but that's stupid! Just have a teams channel for water cooler talk! We used to have an extremely productive teams channel meant for devs to just bring up brainstorming and ask for feedback and wonder aloud and it resulted in all the supposed benefits that water cooler talk has, and it didn't waste my lunch hour!

Just talk to me! You don't need the excuse of physical presence! If the serendipity is utterly necessary (it really really really shouldn't be FFS), build a quick teams bot that just puts a few people in a chat room together occasionally!

Yeah what is the utility of those chance encounters and how often do people get actual water.

The most common thing I've seen as a successful water cooler encounter is getting a coworker from another department's digits for drinks after work

This feels a bit like rose tinted glasses.

It also removes petty sleights, sexual harassment, and political maneuvering.

The problem is when you are wfh and there are still people in the office who get more visibility from management simply by being in eye sight.

> It also removes petty sleights, sexual harassment, and political maneuvering.

All of these things can and do happen virtually.

I'm doing my part!

Would you like to know more?

Well, I don’t think anybody in Starship Troopers looked like they were being sexually harassed…

> informal "water cooler chat" which is missing at working from home scenarios.

I have a lot of that. Actually, in each company I worked for, I made sure we have a channel for informal communication, it is a work life changer.

Most people, even so called introverts, sometimes like to communicate, and they need to have a way to do so, and this must be done in a way that doesn't disturb others etc. This can be a slack channel, a weekly "coffee online" with your teammates, or even pre-daily informal discussion on any topic. Otherwise, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy which Bezos apparently doesn't care about.