[bob33212]

I have done this for years. I have seen that some people don't like it for the following reasons.

1. They prefer a predictable schedule. 2. They don't like being at home ( family or workspace issues) 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics. 4. They are incompetent managers and they don't know how to manage engineers other than looking over shoulders and taking attendence.

[PragmaticPulp]

> 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics.

As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.

The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building.

We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.

[rootusrootus]

> It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels

I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.

[patmorgan23]

As some one currently doing an internship this is wait I don't like what COVID-19 has done the workplace. It's much harder for me to build relationships with my coworkers, over hear conversations (in a good way) and have informal extemporaneous interactions when me and my coworkers aren't in the same physical place.

[dml2135]

I'd say on top of that, remote work comes with some of the same communication problems as social media platforms. Without facetime, the assumption of goodwill starts to wear way.

[PragmaticPulp]

The quickest way to resolve political standoffs in remote companies is to fly people out to an office and stick them in a conference room for a day.

The agenda barely matters. People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.

This is why I never promise anyone 100% WFH or 100% remote any more. I tell everyone to plan for 0-3 weeks travel, giving some leeway for flying people out for face-to-face planning.

[notherthrowaway]

== People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.==

I’ve seen this work with unruly customers, too.

[zwayhowder]

The usage stats for our MS Teams instance shows this. Before COVID hardly any messages, after a massive increase as you'd expect, but private messages outnumber public messages 10:1 or more. Several times I've found out that there are multiple private chat groups all for the same P1 or Project instead of using Channels that all staff can see.

[nitrogen]

I saw the same thing with Slack stats at a company. Plotted over time, private messages started at like 10%, but eventually reached something like 80% after a couple of years.

[sevrinsky]

I've tried to convince my colleagues to use MS Teams channels instead of chat groups, to increase searchability and spontaneous joining (rather than needing to be invited). They've mostly resisted because they prefer the interface for group chats.

MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:

- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)

- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)

MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.

[ksec]

>As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.

That basically turn Office Discussions into Internet discussions. There are many things that just dont translate well with words, or even with Voice and Video Call.

[flyingramen]

> Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.

Since you say politics reasons wholly because of this reason, it’s not like Slack is not available if you are not fully remote.

[vkou]

It's available when you're not fully remote, but people prefer to have in-person meetings instead, because they have higher communication bandwidth.

[packetlost]

5. don't like the barrier to communication, isolation, and distraction that WFH brings.

It's not for everyone, don't act like WFH is some sort of amazing thing that only people in bad situations or who are incompetent dislike.

1. is straight up incorrect anyway, my schedule has gotten more consistent since working from home. It's entirely based on your own ability to start and stop your workday.

[coldpie]

Yeah, I'm 7 months into being forced to WFH and I still hate it. I like the work/life separation going into the office brings. I actually liked my commute since I took the bus, so it was time to read and decompress. I like seeing and talking to my coworkers. I like having the variety of simply being out of the house. I like not having work stuff at home, so when I'm home, I don't have the temptation to do work. I'm glad WFH works for so many people, but it sure does not work for me.

[packetlost]

Same, been in semi-forced WFH since late March, and don't like it. It'd probably be fine if I could go to a cafe or had a proper office. As it stands I barely leave the house except to occasionally grab food, and that's not nearly enough. Honestly the last time I felt this bad was my summers in high school where I didn't have a way to go anywhere, or money to do anything with.

[ghaff]

WFH is fine for me. WFH without my usual extensive travel and without the ability to otherwise mix up my schedule is tiresome. And I have a good home setup and have been working remote to greater or lesser degrees for around 15 years or so.

[packetlost]

Yeah, I think the combination of not being able to realistically take breaks or travel is having the larger effect. My home setup would be fine if I had the room to put my desk somewhere not in my bedroom (it's arguably more comfortable than my office) but the routine of: roll out of bed, make coffee, desk, make lunch, desk, make dinner, couch/desk, desk, roll into bed sucks a lot.

[steelframe]

I’ve just started nuking entire two-hour blocks of time out of the day, which is always pre-filled with back-to-back half hour crap meetings, so that I can go out on a bike trail. Most of the time people don’t seem to care, but on occasion when someone asks me why I wasn’t at their precious half-hour crap meeting, I respond that I had some kind of “carers” issue, and if there is anything relevant they need from me to send me an email about it, and I will reply with the info. Amazingly, that seems to effectively address whatever issue the crap half-hour meeting was for.

[alfiedotwtf]

Just curious... have you thought about after work going for a walk to a park etc and reading there?

[coldpie]

Yes and I did for a while earlier this summer. But I fell out of the habit and it's getting cold now here in Minnesota. It was nice to just have it part of my daily routine.

[specialist]

"...looking over shoulders and taking attendence."

Being micromanaged remotely isn't much fun either. Like having a stalker. I'd get voice calls within minutes of a Skype status update. "Ah, no, everything's ok. Just grabbing lunch. Thanks for checking."

[therealx]

These are truly the worst. I remember management being very upset when they switched from hipchat to slack as they no longer had such fine grain controls over visibility. Its somewhat inconceivable to me that, by now, they haven't realized it will only backfire.

[intricatedetail]

Report them to HR for harassment. Such calls are abusive.

[oblio]

5. They enjoy socializing with coworkers.

Even in tech, not everyone is an introvert.

[sidlls]

Introverts have never been the majority, even in tech. I'd also argue that with the rise of social media masquerading as development tools (gitlab/github), extroverts are now more over-represented today than even just a few years ago.

[patmorgan23]

I'm an introvert, I still enjoy socializing with my coworkers.

[alfiedotwtf]

Has anyone else noticed that the typical IT introvert turns into an extravert when talking to other IT introverts about the things that they’re passionate about?

[Tomis02]

Heh, it's almost as if "introvert"/"extrovert" are just labels we use without any scientific basis. ...

[dblohm7]

It’s more like people use those words without understanding their correct definitions.

[yf7730]

> 2. They don't like being at home (family or workspace issues)

Wanting to work somewhere other than your home does not mean you don't like being at home, nor that you have family or workspace issues. I would assume that some of us have a newfound appreciation for the energy and architecture of the modern cities and offices. I love my home but it's just not the same kind of space.

[patmorgan23]

A home may be more like an office than a steel mill but all three where built with separate purposes in mind.

[jamisteven]

Or, their home is not a place of work, its a home. I dont want my home to be anywhere near my place of work, or anything like my place of work. There should be a clear segregation of these two places.