I think they want it because they fear productivity losses that mean lower profits, and ultimately lead to the threat of becoming uncompetitive.

If you agree with that, is your position that these fears are irrational (because in your view, no such productivity loss would occur)?

Both effects depend greatly on whether most other employers in the industry agree amongst themselves on whether to allow WFH: If everyone allows WFH, or everyone forbids it, there's no incentive to change employers, so these are stable equilibria, all other things being equal. Employers prefer the no-WFH equilibrium since (they believe) that leaves productivity highest.

Bosses want rto because they can’t stand paying rent for empty space.

So for those large companies, the sunken cost is larger.

There are benefits to in office work. I don’t consider them valuable enough to offset the cost of 10hrs of uncompensated time every week or doubling my mortgage cost. I hope tax codes will incentivize allowing remote work options given the reduced burden to transportation infrastructure.

This is unlikely. Notice the parent post said:

>> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost […]

So you have a situation where:

- Most of your employees think of your company's success and their lifestyle as competing interests.

- Most of your employees are focused on optimizing their lifestyle rather than the quality of their work.

Essentially these are people who don't actually want to work and would be just as happy or happier on UBI.

Now if you have another company whose employees believe in the company's mission, prioritize company success, don't see a necessary trade-off between work and lifestyle, and enjoy working with their teams in person, the latter company will outcompete the former.

I recall one of my German managers said: "The difference between workers today and the previous generation is that we lived to work, while they work to live."

> Most of your employees think of your company's success and their lifestyle as competing interests.

There are only so many hours in the day.

Exactly. If you don't want to work, or don't care about your work, that's fine. There are other people who care and want to work, and care about their colleagues, and they'll show up or the company will go bust.

> Why would you do that?

Everyone has to figure that out for themselves. It's the same as asking "why do I work here?"

You have people who care about their colleagues, care about the product, want to work, often crunch voluntarily, the company makes a profit, and they still get laid off. That is .. well, it's sustainable in that you can always find more fresh grads willing to work in games, at the expense of leaving a trail of burned out and disgruntled former employees behind you, but it's also driving unionization.

This is a nice image you've painted but this company doesn't exist except in the minds of some CEOs and startup founders.

You know what actually happens? A CEO announces RTO, people are outraged, everybody is looking at their options, those who manage to do it switch jobs immediately, those who can't do it at the next opportunity, the ones who are left are a combination of extroverts who finally can have endless interactions with those who want them and those who don't, and a bunch of disgruntled employees who don't give a fuck about your company because of the way you treated them.

I'm sorry you've had bad experiences. I hope you'll heal and be okay or find work that makes you feel appreciated and rewards you.

I remember being stealth fired simply because I was never in the office and those who were assumed "he doesn't really work here anyway". Out of sight out of mind, and Zoom couldn't fix that. Colleagues just forgot about me despite the Zoom calls.

No, actually I haven't. I just have many colleagues who share their feelings with me. In my niche, all best-paid positions are remote only, I basically cooperate with teams from different continents, it's very rewarding. If someone tried to offer me a job forcing me to sit in an open plan office, I would laugh in their face, it seems so ridiculously absurd and unnecessary. The possibility of WFH (for those who want it) is one of the best that happened to the working class since 5-day workweek.

Economy will be the one that will determines the ultimate outcome, especially for tech companies, as they compete globally

Ah. Well, second hand anecdotes are certainly appreciated. Thanks for sharing.

> The possibility of WFH (for those who want it) is one of the best that happened to the working class since 5-day workweek.

Does "working class" have a different meaning today? When I entered the job market it meant "blue collar" or manual labourer. You seem to be indicating that you're what used to be called "knowledge worker"?

Nonetheless I agree with what you and others have said: wfh is great for optimizing an individual's lifestyle. Such a person, focused on their lifestyle, would probably do just as well if they were paid not to work.

As a business owner however, the question is: what is best for the business?

I would guess having employees that feel valued for their productivity and contributions would be what is best for the business, no?

It depends. I think what's best for a business is having employees who want to win and want the business to win, as a primary goal.

It's not really easy to make an adult feel valued because individuals have very different motivations and personalities, so good feelings as a goal is a shifting target.

Of course, if it were easy to answer the question, probably the Harvard Business Review would be a single article and not many decades of publication, and the debate about WFH wouldn't even exist because everyone would feel valued already and the problem would be moot.

I see. Thanks for that clarification. Most of the people I've worked with earn money by running fleets of servers and software that do the work that generates income. It feels weird calling them "working class."

If they're owning the servers and/or software, that's a capital asset. That puts them in the "petit bourgeois" category, like small shopkeepers.

If they don't own the capital assets they're economically dependent on, that roughly corresponds to sharecropping. We've had a few stories on here of what happens when the landlord decides to obliterate such businesses by changing the terms.

Got it. Thanks! :-)

It is very simple: you need best people. In tech industry, people are smart, they know how to optimize things, and they rarely believe in "company values" bullshit. You can choose from a limited talent pool. If you give yourself and them a choice, including the WFH option, you statistically increase your chances of finding the best people. (Also the ones "prioritizing company interest", provided such people exist at all.)

Also, if your company is in a remote area or is in a very specific niche, you basically might not even have that much choice.

Would that it were so simple! But are you saying this from your experience hiring for teams that execute well?

> you statistically increase your chances of finding the best people

Do you have statistics proving this? Please share data.

> they rarely believe in "company values" bullshit

Are you honestly saying that in all the interviews you've attended, you never ask and you've never been asked "why do you want to work here?" And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission? That's amazing.

I oversimplified it not to stray away from the main topic but actually they need to have very specific features like the willingness to collaborate, the ability to communicate when the time is right, being technically proficient and so on.

> Do you have statistics proving this? Please share data.

Let A be the set of people who like to work remotely and B the set of people who love to do hybrid. (I leave out the set of people who love full RTO because I haven't yet met such a person, even hard-core office lovers admit a day of remote work is doing wonders to them.) Let A1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set A, and B1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set B. From the basic properties of real numbers one can infer that A1 + B1 is at least equal to B1.

> Are you honestly saying that in all the interviews you've attended, you never ask and you've never been asked "why do you want to work here?" And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission?

Actually, they rarely ask it these days. Maybe the hiring folks are tired of this meaningless ritual? I once said I applied by mistake and they still wanted to hire me (I declined the offer as it was a different time zone, I realized this too far in the recruitment process and was quite embarrassed by mistake.)

This is a deeply frustrating response. I asked if you have any data to back up your claims. Recall "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Instead you give me the kind of thing that people who don't study mathematics think a mathematical proof looks like.

It's certainly not real world empirical data. Your response is worse than useless in this context.

What's even more frustrating is that your "proof" clearly shows that you only recently learnt about real numbers. (Why would you use real numbers for a countable set? Why would real numbers be a useful way of counting discrete humans? How many real numbers are there between any 2 real numbers?)

So you've just learnt about real numbers and you're probably a teenager. Then why are you saying random things to strangers on the internet and pretending to know what you're talking about?

This makes me so sad.

There are a very limited quantity of perfect employees, and you are unlikely to ever have the opportunity to hire one. The vast majority of employees have a mixture of good qualities (e.g., being hardworking) and bad qualities (e.g., expecting a higher salary). Your best strategy is to prioritize those characteristics that are most important to the role you are hiring for and be flexible on characteristics that are less important.

If you get your priorities out of order, even if inadvertently (e.g., by asking unverifiable interview questions that select for better liars), you will make suboptimal decisions.

No offense, are you being for real? Do you think a single employee gives even the faintest of a fuck about the company's mission?

Everyone bullshits it. We all know, and understand, that when you're asked questions like that you say what people want to hear.

People work for exactly one thing, money. The trick is making the money in the least expensive way - expenses being time, energy, and health. It's all fun going to an office 5 days a week until you're old, fat, and your smoking habit has caught up to you. And now what? You die feeling like you did the last 30 years of your life: shit.

Who will remember you? I won't. Your coworkers won't. The company as a whole won't. And what did you gain?

Everything in life is a game of cost analysis. If you're not prioritizing yourself and your own cost analysis, you're a sucker. There're people making more money than you, who are MUCH happier, who work less, and are healthier. Do you want to continue a life of jealousy and self-hatred? Or, will you demand better for yourself? Ultimately, nobody else cares, so you don't have to bother answering. This is just food for thought.

You sound very young or very jaded. That's unfortunate.

As for "Everyone does X", I'll remind you of the saying that "A thief always thinks everyone is trying to steal from him."

You wrote a long ass reply just to express your miserabalist nihilist world view. When you find yourself doing that online or in real life, just get therapy because while it might seem normal and sane to you, it's an unhinged and unhealthy state of mind. :-(

P.s. If you have time for a break, do watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi or The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness for insights on how others found meaning in the work they do daily.

I don't care about work because I'm not pathetic. Ultimately when you inevitably die you won't remember meetings, or cubicles, or water cooler talk. And that's really the big idea. Who do you want to be? What do you want to spend your care on? And, who will care? I can tell you right now - not a single person in your life who matters gives a single fuck about what you do at work. So WHO are you performing for?

And, to be clear, everyone does bullshit it at work. I have genuine interactions constantly when I'm out. Never at work. It's corporate America, everything is at least a little off, a little filtered. I'm not the first one to make the observation. To me, it's obvious, so if you're not seeing it, you might be socially deficient.

I honestly don't know who you're trying to convince. The lady doth protest overmuch me thinks. Perhaps you're hoping I'll collapse under the sheer weight of your tedious prose and say, actually, you're right, my work 'tis sound and fury signifying nothing after all, you're so right?

> Ultimately when you inevitably die you won't remember meetings, or cubicles, or water cooler talk. And that's really the big idea.

That's actually a small and pathetic idea because, unless you've made a groundbreaking discovery in neuroscience, I'm sure no one remembers anything after they die. People who mistake useless ideas for profound insights definitely need therapy. That's called delusion.

> Who do you want to be?

I want to be someone who does great work.

> What do you want to spend your care on? And, who will care? I can tell you right now - not a single person in your life who matters gives a single fuck about what you do at work.

I'm genuinely sorry no one in your life cares about what you spend most of your week doing. That's really tragic.

But even if I were in your shoes and no one cared, that's irrelevant. I care! and in the calculus of existence, my opinion of myself is what matters.

> So WHO are you performing for?

It's actually you who is performing, or rather affecting, a rather tired brand of cynicism. Incidentally, cynical people tend to perform worse than average in cognitive tests so …

But seriously, your talking to a man who was trained by Opus Dei. We believe that any work whatsoever is a sacrament which we offer to God, and so that imbues even the most trivial janitorial work (which I have done in the past) with deep significance. And that's even before I go on a long spiel about how I love my work and what I'm doing is literally what I dreamt of doing as a boy.

But good luck to you, friend. To each his own. It's your life, you're living, not mine. I wish you well.

> I want to be someone who does great work

You can be that, but you'll have to live with the reality that nobody cares.

I want to be a great husband, a reliable friend, somebody funny, somebody people want to be around. I think people care about that. I know nobody I care about cares about my PRs.

> I'm genuinely sorry no one in your life cares about what you spend most of your week doing. That's really tragic.

Nobody in your life cares either, you've just convinced yourself they do so that you can cope with your circumstances and mindset.

If you leave your job tomorrow, the world will keep spinning. Your coworkers will move on remarkably quickly. In fact, if you dropped dead right now, they wouldn't even stop working.

> I care! and in the calculus of existence, my opinion of myself is what matters

Right, I'm addressing your mindset. The fact you care is the problem, not the solution. It's a recipe for misery.

Because your influence on your work is inherently extremely limited. You are a small fraction of the big picture, virtually negligible and worthless. If you attach an emotional string to your work, you WILL face the failures of others.

Is this what you want? Do you want your pride to be in the hands of hundreds, maybe thousands of people you don't care about and who also don't care about you? Because, when people say they care most about work, this is what they're saying.

For me, I'm in such a position where if the company goes under tomorrow, I won't waste my breath. And... for you? Will you cry yourself to sleep? What will come of your ego and image? If that's all you are, then you are not much.

> a rather tired brand of cynicism

Yes, advocating community and a love for life is "cynical"

What is actually cynical is believing your work is your self-worth.

> We believe that any work whatsoever is a sacrament which we offer to God, and so that imbues even the most trivial janitorial work (which I have done in the past) with deep significance

And I actually agree with this!

Your mistake is equating a JOB to WORK in general.

WORK includes emotional work, social work, chores, the mundane, and hobbies.

Your job is the least important work you do. It has the least impact on the world. Many people's jobs actually have a negative impact, because their company performs evil. Certainly, I wouldn't want to be working at Bayer Pharmaceutical when they gave thousands of people HIV.

You want to do work that's meaningful? Go make a cup of coffee for your wife or husband. Observe how that makes them feel and how it makes you feel.

If you stopped "working" tomorrow and had no means to generate income e.g. from ownership of capital you're working class.

So if you make bread, car wheels or SaaS for a living it doesn't matter, only whether you own the output and can sell it. Social class is a distraction from this economic reality.

It’s always had multiple meanings depending on context. Working vs capital class, wealth/income-based, job-based.

Being British, class here is tied strongly to your birth. My dad rents out multiple properties, I earn a good living as a software engineer. However we’re both working class because we were born working class. No amount of money can buy our way into the upper echelons of society because our accent will shut those doors.

I know 2 Boomers who have 8 figure networths and own their own businesses(manual work, think maintenance and installing stuff). They frequently take the opportunity to self congratulate("I worked so hard for 30 years") and complain about younger people("They don't work hard at all, always on their phone during their shift").

Can't say I was surprised when I found out that back when they started their businesses these fields were basically completely unregulated, that the regulations for these areas were in part lobbied by them(and by others like them) once they got off the ground and that both were sitting on juicy government contracts because the guy in charge of the finance department of the canton was in their unit during obligatory military service. And that's just the stuff I am aware of.

The point being: Older people really did live to work, but they never mention that their marginal rewards for extra work were much greater in most areas of the economy as compared to today.

Yes, times change and each generation has to figure out how to succeed in their own unique epoch. I agree.

As one of “these people”, I enjoy my job, but I can recognize the fact that it’s just a job. I’m amazed that you would classify people that don’t center their whole life around their job as people that would be just as happy without a job.

I have a lot of other hobbies. I definitely would not be happier if you just took one of them away and gave me money instead.

There's an old saying that "you become what you do". It's fine if your employment is "just a job" for you and you have hobbies you prefer.

But don't be amazed that there are people who define themselves by their careers as much as others define themselves by their hobbies. That's who you're competing with.

I personally have not seen that workaholic employees get consistent preference in workplaces. Often they get shafted the hardest, particularly in highly competitive workplaces (where, for example, supervisors may undermine their best employees who might threaten their own ambitions).

And the hardest workers are also prone to burnout, which often leads to catastrophic career failures: quitting suddenly with no backup plan, changing careers, having a breakdown and ending up nonfunctional for months at a time.

I have worked in a variety of workplaces, some that were circling the toilet, some that were leading their industries and nonetheless still shooting higher, and some that thought/hoped they were the latter but just didn't have what it takes.

The most consistently successful companies I've worked for have their employees work like tortoises, not hares. They want us to work hard, but sustainably. They discourage all that hypercompetitive nonsense that rewards backstabbers over hard workers, and they encourage us to have a life outside of work to keep us sane. They do this not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because they are insatiably greedy and focused: they want our next 20+ years of productivity and experience.

At this point we're all just speculating wildly from subjective biased anecdotes.

Data is required.

This works as an argument against 8h work day and 5-day work week too.

Ultimately if something is better for the society (and WFH obviously is - commute time, carbon footprint, land prices, housing crisis - it helps with almost everything) - we should just force companies to use it by regulation, so that there's no "race" in that regard cause the conditions are the same for everybody.

The exact regulation is tricky, but sth in the spirit of "if your job can be WFH you should have an option of WFH" is a good starting point.

Isn't that what we want? Land prices averaging out? Then we can build where it's cheaper so more people have homes (with access to good jobs).

It probably won't be limited to suburbs, if you can WFH from the same state - you can WFH from another state.

I expect many companies will arrive at an equilibrium with at least 2 days WFH for focused work and 3 days in-office for collaboration. This seems to already be happening since the % of companies offering hybrid is up this year. The question is how many great employees laggard companies will lose before accepting that.

(Caveat: this does not apply to companies doing mostly ground-breaking work that have more mission-focused, highly qualified applicants than they can handle. Some companies may be surprised to find they are no longer in this bucket.)

Currently the hard-RTO companies in the news are clearly doing it for silent layoffs reasons as there are simultaneous leaks of 5-figure attrition targets.

Maybe a strong FTC/DOJ stance on antitrust, plus the top-down mandates will lead to more small company innovation as well.

The companies that make lots of money then end up being softer & more extravagant with their employee (ahem, GOOG and a lot of Mag7/FAANG) until some equilibrium point where they're so soft they lose their edge.

Then a new up&comer rises and the cycle repeats.

Probably it makes sense to start with disabled people. There are not a lot of them, so potential negatives wouldn't hurt society that much and helping disabled people generally is well received. So basically if disabled person want to work in a job that could be done remotely and qualified for it, you must allow remote work, or something like that. Then you can follow with people caring for kids or disabled elders, they often must be at home, but at the same time they might have enough time to allow for some work. With enough statistics smart people could make an informed decision, whether forcing WFH worth it or not.

You better be good then or have a niche/rare skillset. There's no intrinsic right to remote work. Things will mostly revert to pre-covid, where only the best/most disciplined/highest performers are given the freedom to WFH. Sure, some companies will be 'remote first', but for the most part, you'll need to be a special hire with an exemption carved out. I'm already seeing this in my workplace. Managers are begging leadership for remote headcount but getting Bay area headcount instead. The teams getting remote headcount are the hardest to fill/most in demand skillsets, and almost always very senior.

This is a double edged sword. You don’t care about the company, you care for yourself. Your company sees that and gives you a certain treatment. If you don’t care just quit?

The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.

But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is :

> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.

Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad.

It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.

We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years?

I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.

I know plenty of people that still study the letters that were used to communicate while founding the United States. It seems to me that the last 20 years has led to a massive decrease in the effectiveness of written communication because people don’t have to be clear or concise anymore.

We also don’t know that they understood each other as effectively as they would have if they communicated verbally in person.

It is far easier to understand someone’s true meaning in person thanks to tone and body language. Communication in person is quicker because typing/writing is slow. That speed allows for faster ideation and iteration.

It’s not impossible to communicate in written form at all but I don’t believe it’s as effective.

To your first point, we write more emails, more DMs, more online comments, more text messages etc than ever before. We clearly communicate more in written form now than at any point in history.

If we’re talking about the IC work, the benefits of WFH are acknowledged even by its detractors.

The people struggling with the “management” problem in remote work are either looking at the wrong place or being oblivious that it’s solution will come from adjacent fields like lawyers or accountants. Perhaps it’s time for them to look beyond their own field?

It takes years of practice to become proficient at this, even if English is your native language. Everyone wants full-time remote but few people possess the communication skills to effectively work asynchronously and I see very few people intentionally trying to develop these skills or being willing to put in the many hours of work required.

This may be the primary essential gap for remote: people need to dramatically improve their written communication skills. Until they do, they lack the skills to work remotely effectively.

Ironically, we used to do asynchronous highly technical long-form discussions over email and on mailing lists. It is where I developed a lot of my writing skills, and this used to be the norm. It worked pretty well and some older open source projects still work this way. Now everyone hates email because it forces them to write.

On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones.

One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans.

Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving.

(edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.

Maybe LLMs will solve this. Have them read the code and then be able to ask them questions about how it works?

It's not just docs though. Maybe it's going over an idea. "I'm thinking of solving this issue by doing X, what do you think?" Same, WFO, immediate answer. WFH, answer in 5 secs to 5hrs+ or never.

People will complain that getting a question takes them out of the zone. That might be true but it's never been true for any co-worker I've ever personally worked with. Nor with myself. It's always been easy and pleasant to answer a coworker's question. A few times a year I'm working on something so complicated I need to be uninterrupted for a few hours but that's rare, for me at least.

One of the funniest changes that came with this is that, even when everyone is working in the office now, we still communicate primarily through our WFH chat program because it is less intrusive.

It's also very handy for referring back to later — to the extent that when we do have an in-person discussion, we usually summarize it in the chat afterwards so that we can search for it in the future.

Mind you, we don't have the issues you describe (questions going unanswered for hours or not at all). With very few exceptions, such as when someone was out sick and I didn't realize, all of my questions have been answered within minutes. I imagine that is is because we are a relatively small team (albeit stretched across several timezones these days) and the chat is mostly pretty quiet.

My only complaint is that it has made the separation between work time and leisure time a lot more fuzzy. We all basically act as if we are on call all the time to answer questions, and it is common for my coworkers to even attend video call meetings from doctor's offices and overseas vacations just to say hi.

Unsure if you're attributing it to Feynman (although I do see the relationship in Feynman's thought process, but the quote is from Einstein:

> If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

... buuut really it's from Nicolas Boileau (1674):

> Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement. Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.

Tx'd:

> What is well understood is told with clarity, and the words to say it come up easily.

As well as a few others that are right on point:

> Avant donc que d'écrire, apprenez à penser. Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure, l'expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure.

Tx'd:

> Before even to think one should learn to write. Whether the idea is more or less obscure, expression follows through, 'ther less sharp or more pure.

In the office, quiet spaces to take a meeting from are scarce, but it's better established that your unscheduled time is actually spent on work.

By the way, LLMs really helped us here; we chat with a bot reading and extracting everything and storing it conveniently so it won't get lost for later.

The difference between "not a manager" and "working on their own part of the code" is important when you're talking about positions with a lot of seniority like staff or principal engineers, because those ICs are still expected to work on massive projects involving a lot of cat-herding and leadership that touch large chunks of a company's code, they just aren't doing it as the manager of a team.

Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few).

The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?

Except that if most choose full time remote, then those who favour hybrid (like me) or RTO have their choice made for them wrt collaboration and the other reasons given in the parent comment, so unfortunately, no, that's not really a solution.

Eventually things will balance out, with people in companies that have the right balance for them.

Once a problem is well defined, WFH is more productive.

Would it be as bad if everyone had a digital whiteboard next to their desk that synced with video calls? Probably not, but companies never pay for proper remote work setups (good cameras, microphone etc).

We're still stuck with Google Meet, which is honestly the best video call system (highest quality, most reliable) except that it doesn't support bloody remote control of other people's computers. So infuriating. "No click the next... down a bit. ok now type this... no not there in... no go back..." Ugh.

For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it.

For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours.

Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing.

COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive.

Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.

You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.

It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.

For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others.

They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others.

Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.

Fine if thats the job, but don't call it senior engineer and treat as an IC role that is also expected to clear lots of Jiras (hey! seniors should be able to do 3X story points if juniors are doing X.. what are we paying them for!).

A lot of "flat organizations" delude themselves with 30:1 IC:manager ratios where what's really happening under the hood is - 5 seniors on the team each fielding 5 juniors worth of interrupts all day, with 1 manager on top whack-a-moling crisis management.

I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020. Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation.

I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though. But we barely do any productive work at these meetings. We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done. In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person.

However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound.

Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them. Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time. That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer.

Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand. Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues. There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time. And working on the same codebase was horrible. One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns. And that was if we had a room with a display... If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing. If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking.

When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away. We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment. We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others. If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer. If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them.

I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed. However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects. Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time. This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later.

But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking." Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before. The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month. It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings. But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.