[AndreiCalazans]

Unintentional by accident remote work shouldn’t be considered the baseline for such comparison. This research does at best find results at Microsoft, thus it could be titled “effects of remote work at Microsoft” to not induce the sense of generalist research.

For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with strategies and tooling.

Nevertheless, I admire Microsoft for conducting such research - congratulations to whoever had the initiative.

[ryanSrich]

It’s a ridiculous study.

They should instead look at companies that are:

1.) set up to do remote work because they actually created a plan for it and executed on it. Not companies reluctantly forced into it by a pandemic.

2.) look at companies that have been doing it longer than 6 months. Focusing on the first 6 months of 2020 as the baseline for how remote work is “going”. Is beyond unscientific.

[emadabdulrahim]

I also don't understand how async communication is bad for knowledge sharing. I find that well written documents of what the team learned, tech specs, user research, etc, to be far more effective ways to knowledge share, while keeping records of the information for anyone to pick up later.

I was recently interviewing at a really compelling startup backed by YC and I asked them how they communicate and knowledge share. The cofounder showed me pages and pages of well structures bits and pieces of things and findings the team come across and document. It's easily searchable and it's well categorize. It's their internal wiki, and I believe it is one of the most valuable assets a company can have. The startup relies on writing as the main method of sharing knowledge, getting async feedback, and gathering valuable information on important problems.

It is one of the main reasons I was intrigued and decided to join them. Their product is also awesome.

[killjoywashere]

Can you tool-in a water cooler? A walk to the cafeteria? A weird smell several people notice?

[ninja edit]: someone downvoted you, it wasn't me.

[geofft]

Absolutely! I started a scheduled call for a weekly "monorepo morning tea" for people interested in the mechanics of our monorepo and how we build/version/distribute software in-house. No agenda, no commitment, the meeting link is posted weekly via a Slack reminder to a public channel. It gets a couple of folks from our build farm team, a couple of people who are experts in specific languages/runtimes (Python, Node, etc.), a couple of SREs, a couple of random developers across the company who find this stuff interesting, etc. The topics tend to be pretty wide-ranging but it's a good way to find people doing interesting and relevant work that you might not ordinarily think of talking to and hear what's on their minds.

Also, my company already had (before the pandemic) a voluntary program to match with random coworkers to get lunch, specifically to facilitate this sort of thing, and that's been turned into online coffee chats. Seems to work pretty well.

If you value these serendipitous interactions as part of your company culture, then it behooves you to properly support and encourage them. You can't just set off a weird smell and let the two coworkers who feel like speaking up meet each other. They're probably the least shy people on the floor and know each other anyway.

[ghaff]

Can you tool-in a water coolier on a different floor, a different building, or a different city? Because that’s the communication that has to happen at any large company. Very peopleiwork witharein my for now official office even if I went there.

[tobr]

Not literally, but you can dedicate time for everyone to occasionally talk to a mix of people they don’t talk to every day.

[kobieyc]

I agree that the title of this paper is misleading. I'm seeing more and more studies lately that try to extrapolate results conducted in noisy environments (microsft) to even noisier environments (all companies). Dunno wtf people are thinking.