[cloudwalking]

People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.

[Waterluvian]

Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote.

I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.

[ttul]

To whit, open source projects have been run for decades over nothing but email mailing lists. People participating in these projects feel a strong social connection.

[necovek]

And a bunch of conferences like FOSDEM, GUADEC, LinuxConf, PyCon...

All the while not forgetting that people contributing to free software have altogether different motivations: they are (almost) all in it because they want to contribute their own time to something they believe in.

Quite different from what majority of people in any company are there for.

[doubled112]

I agree with you.

> Just be a professional

In my experience, there are many people that find this an incredible challenge. This is where it can easily fall apart.

[cj]

Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of).

I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote.

One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all.

So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts.

Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to.

Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary.

This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).

[kwhitefoot]

>In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch.

Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty years and only met the sales people in the period before it was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales was something that happened only rarely and always deliberately.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer.

Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?

[jonathankoren]

Mozilla used to do something similar.

For background, at least half, or more of the company is fully remote. It’s so many, that the transition to remote work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a year. It was called “All Hands”.

I enjoyed the free trips to Whistler, Berlin, and Austin, and Maui, but it never really felt like work was actually getting done. It was conference room chats ostensibly about planning, but everything always felt a bit phoned in.

I never got it. Inevitably the real planning work would end up after we returned back to our regular locations, so it was more social than anything.

My personal thought is that RTO among the FAANGs is 100% sunk cost fallacy. They wasted billions on bespoke glass donuts, circus tents, and airplane hangers. There’s pride on the minds of these oligarchs.

[detaro]

Yes, all-hands like that 100% are primarily about social and unplanned factors - getting people to see and talk to people they'd otherwise not meet and talk to.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I’ve been in the glass donut, and it is pretty sweet. You would probably sunk cost fallacy yourself if you were in there too!

[yablak]

It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a time. Especially those with children.

[dsr_]

This is true.

Companies can make this more appealing by holding the meetings in nice parts of the world -- note, nice doesn't have to be outrageously expensive -- putting people up in nice hotels with suitable space for spouses and kids, and by making the week before vacation for half the group and the week after for the other half, with the option to stay in the same hotel at the company's expense.

This won't work for everyone, or every company, but it's a much nicer carrot than usual.

[mitthrowaway2]

Couldn't one say the same about getting people to come to an office 250 days per year?

[jedberg]

No. It's a lot easier to hire someone to watch the kids on a regular basis, and also they go to school during the day. I can hire people to pick them up and watch them after school, and then help them after work with homework and chores and such.

But if work wants me to travel for a week, it either means my spouse has to pick up all the stuff I do at home, or I have to find someone I trust to stay at my home for a week on an ad-hoc basis.

It's much harder to find ad-hoc babysitting than regularly scheduled babysitting.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Couldn’t the employer just hire people close together if they feel like that is an issue and still not have an office space?

[devoutsalsa]

When I owned a business, that’s what I did. Everyone worked remotely, except for me and a couple of people. I had a small coworking space simply because working out of my shoebox sized apartment was not fun. I hired everyone from the local area & occasionally had a meeting in the coworking space.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a time.

I believe parent is suggesting quarterly gatherings of the existing office team, the ones who share an office now.

[olliej]

Happily commuting for hours and being away from home most of the week is actually super easy for people with children.

[astura]

Most people don't want to be on travel every six weeks. You'd have to pay me a LOT for me to agree to that.

[wankle]

"People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully."

Our team doesn't, are we anomalies? People need to be mature, reasonable, responsible and accountable to work together well.

[olliej]

No you’re not.

There are many people who have never developed social connections outside of school or work and unilaterally decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if they can’t socialize outside of such an environment surely no one else can. If they can’t see a person as a person if they’re not face to face surely no one else can.

It’s unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.

[wankle]

Well, I was really more addressing social connections with my coworkers, we share jokes, care about each other too but most I'd say have families and several of us are geographically diverse, so we don't socialize with each other or very little. Outside work, I do have social connections, long term friendships. I wasn't addressing socializing or not across the board.

[olliej]

People need social interaction, sure, people also need to have social interactions outside of the office.

What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.

[irrational]

That happens through zoom. Half my team (including my manager) is remote. All of our meetings are over zoom, even when half the team is on campus at the same time. I go to campus, I find someplace to sit (we don't have assigned places to work), I hop on zoom calls as needed, I work, I go home. I never talk to anyone on campus - so my social connections are entirely the same whether I'm working from home or working on campus.

[JohnFen]

> It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually.

This isn't self-evident to me at all.

[l33t233372]

It isn’t self evident that humans communicate better in person than from behind cameras and screens?

Do you know how much time people spend on other tabs while in zoom meetings?

[JohnFen]

Correct, it isn't self-evident to me at all, but it depends on what is being communicated, of course. In-person communications are slow, and half of the communication isn't really about the topic at hand.

In terms of meetings, I've only rarely seen a meeting that couldn't have accomplished the same goals in 1/10 the time if it done without being a meeting. Whether in-person or zoom. The information density is far too low, too much time is taken up with things that aren't moving toward the goal, etc.

[scotty79]

More important role of those connections is that they promote inertness in the employees so they will remain employees even when they are disadvantaged because social component will hold them back from moving on.

[waltherg]

OP pointed out that meetings and projects have happened remotely anyways for a long time - an experience I share. The peers you describe aren’t in the same place as yourself even if you’re both in some office.

[devoutsalsa]

I had an in-office contract in 2019. No one in the open office plan wanted to be interrupted while sitting at their desk. Everyone had headphones on. I literally used Slack to talk to the people sitting to the left & right of my desk XD

[lostlogin]

> People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully

One size very much does not fit all, and that’s the entire point that those who prefer remote work are trying to drive home.

[davedx]

This is just conjecture, post some evidence for your claims

[Redsquare]

Love these soundbites with zero evidemce. Absolutely not true, plenty of us enjoying remote, we can socialise in a bar/restaurant. No need for an office.

[watwut]

That sounds like a reason why an employee would go to the office. But not really something employer would care about - they don't care about employees social lifes in other contexts.

[dasil003]

> "People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully"

[toomuchtodo]

Tens of billions of dollars in market cap of remote first orgs disagrees. You can work with colleagues without any superfluous social connection, it’s just a job, not a tribe or family. One should be both polite and effective; this does not make you friends.

The inability to support remote work signals the employer cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is managing from emotion instead of data.

(have worked remote for 10+ years)

[watwut]

Yeah, but we know that people were more productive in home. So, nah.

[Gigachad]

Because people will leave. I will no longer work any job which doesn't have an office. Remote work is depressing and isolating.

[ganoushoreilly]

I disagree, that's exactly why an employer would want that. Team cohesion is important.

[stuckonempty]

Team cohesion is important as far as being able to work collaboratively to finish a project, but it’s not clear that requires being in an office every day for 8+ hrs

[shyn3]

You can't have team cohesion and outsource so better learn to scale early.

[alar44]

You can do this through any video conferencing platform. Or do we need to smell our coworkers for teamwork to work?