There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon.
My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes.
I know a lot of people here really like the idea of several hours worth of undisturbed work, but my (again, personal) experience is that that leads to a much lower overall productivity for a team compared to one where people can easily interrupt each other to get unblocked.
The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely. Instead we were all set free, and when the first iteration didn't work out it's back to the office for everyone.
Sounds like you experienced a particular company's flavor of WFH, which sounds mostly worse than all the ones I have.
I've also seen situations that start to go bad like you describe, but in some cases we were able to nudge it back. For example, someone tries to schedule a meeting for a week away, so you push for a quick ad hoc call in a few minutes instead. (Not that different than in-person, when someone says "let's schedule a meeting".)
I've also seen experiments in WFH communication and team-building that aren't done well. For example, starting Monday morning with a ineffective all-hands that, rather than getting people on the same page and energized, sucks the life out of any refreshed start of the workweek. (Again, similar to if you'd herded everyone in-person into a large physical room, for the same content and delivery, only in-person is poorer view and harder to hear.)
Also, in the worst situations I'm aware of, it wouldn't matter much whether the people were in-person. You might figure out more quickly that there's a problem, or where the problem is originating, but that's not been the hardest part.
What in-person is best at is humanizing/personalizing people and forming bonds easily, with all the little cues that we've known since the '80s aren't conveyed as well through computers, and still aren't. (Well, for many people; other people are less comfortable in some in-person contexts, for various reasons, and tend to be more comfortable and themselves in other modalities.)
There's also the occasional high-bandwidth highly-interactive collaborative design, but there's no reason most of that can't happen mostly WFH when your timezones overlap and you have good tools (e.g., effective shared whiteboarding/diagramming that's actually better than a physical whiteboard).
Personally, my ideal is WFH, but being in-town or an easy commute away, for occasional high-value in-person interaction. With in-person emphasis on humanizing/personalizing/bonding (but naturally; I've seen these done in well-intentioned but miserable ways that people just try to get through, and it can be counterproductive).
My biggest gripe with this more-productive-in-office take is that for the last 6 years all of my teams have been distributed (by the company). So those gaps in between replies still exist, now I'm just sitting in an office instead of at home.
Edit:
To further my rant. This distributed teamwork was occurring long before covid as well. Half my team at an insurance company was based in 2 other offices in Florida and in Chicago when I was on the west coast.
Yup, exactly same situation here. My company jumped on the bandwagon to hire a lot of remote workers, some in different time zones even. Now some meetings are at awkward times for everyone involved.
8AM meetings, 5-6PM meeting, etc.
7AM-10AM for deep work was my go to sweet spot before everyone clamoring for meetings and slack during the day. Now it's just more meetings that could've been an email.
Remote work, when done correctly can be amazing. Most employers I've been with the last 6 years have been remote first and my personal experience has been very positive. My team, even those not in the same timezone, had a pretty good overlap on working hours. Communication via Slack/Zoom/Meet was near instantaneous. We got together once or twice a year at an offsite.
I also think it depends on the type of work you do, your team, and personal discipline. Not everyone is suited for remote work. So I hate blanket statements of "WFH is the future" or "WFH is the worst thing ever."
Remote work requires trust from management, but also personal discipline from remote employees. Some absolutely abuse it. Some companies are just not setup for remote work. And some jobs, even if possible remotely, aren't well suited for it.
But yes I agree with your last point, guidance is necessary on how to work remotely.
So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed.
I can definitely agree that if your company doesn't set an expectation of how remote/hybrid work will be conducted then there will always be some people who are overly laissez-faire with it. My own opinion is that remote work should be conducted mostly the same as if you were in the office. You're just not sitting in the same building anymore. Everyone should keep sensible hours that are close to the same hours of your team and be generally available. Seems to have worked so well for my company that they've begun closing down physical offices.
"So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed."
I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.
> I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.
There's no actual evidence of that being true though. It's very much your personal take on it as you've said. I'm also hesitant to ask that if your work relies so much on being able to interrupt your coworkers at a moments notice is that evidence of other issues. Not having power to make decisions on the direction of your work? Poor documentation? Dare I say lack of confidence and/or ability to do your (not you specifically) own job? Seems to me the whole case against remote/hybrid boils down to certain peoples feelings about how they feel comfortable working. Not any actual statistical proof on the matter.
I agree that there's no good data to back this up, it seems really hard to collect. Unless you have a rock solid idea on how to measure productivity? The rest of your post is essentially "I hesitate to ask, but are you bad at your job?"
No, it's more that when you're venturing outside your usual territory it can be so much quicker to ask your teammates who are area owners.
If I'm modifying widget X that John built, and I encounter something non-obvious, I can spend an hour figuring out why that was, or I can ask John sitting next to me, and he can usually unblock me in about 30 seconds.
When I help people get up to speed in code I've written I usually say something along the lines of "if you get stuck and you've spent 5 minutes trying to figure it out, please ask me about it".
So coming back, your main problem still seems to be the unresponsiveness of your teammates when you can't force them to respond by being directly in front of them? If you're teammates are really that bad at responding then perhaps they are "bad at their job". Just about every job description usually has something about ability to communicate included in it.
So basically trying to fix one problem with another one. Can't please everyone 100% of the time.
What do you work on and what % of the day do you work on tasks that complex?
Hours is an incredibly long time. I'm not against people blocking off specific time when dealing with an especially gnarly bug or planning out a major feature, but for day-to-day tasks the cost of an interruption is usually a "right, where was I" once it's over.
Remote work is really rough with junior engineers. I'm trying really hard to help people but it comes in PR comments and scheduled zoom meetings instead of how it came for me, conversations over lunch, someone standing over my chair when I ask them for quick help. It's been so hard to scale people up. If I were a junior engineer I'd want return to office, but they seem to be the least likely to want it, because they've never had to come into an office before.
As long as you have shared hours for collaboration, this still seems achievable. The “standing over a chair thing” is just a ping, call, and screenshare away.
I’ve been both a new grad and mentor to interns and entry/mid level hires all throughout the remote era. On one hand, a junior can learn equally well by being proactive about asking for help or getting mentorship. On the other hand, experienced engineers can be more proactive about checking the status of their mentees. We don’t get to physically see others get frustrated or stuck, but good communication ensures that we can detect when people are stuck almost as well as when in person.
An interesting side effect - when we do get lunch in person, we don’t have to talk about work! By then they’re already unblocked :)
You should not be taking over the keyboard!! If you are typing, they are not learning, they are spectating.
If there’s something that’s just annoying and not super relevant, like a command they don’t know, you can paste it in the chat. In the absolute worst case (I’ve done this ONCE in 3 years), I’ve used VSCode Live Share [0]. I’m sure you can probably use GitHub Codespaces too now.
>The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely
There are multiple billion dollar companies that have been full remote for years and their strategies are public. This hybrid stuff with 3 days in office will be worse than full remote or 100% in office. My guess is it's just a way to get rid of people without having to do more official layoffs
most people who complain about not being productive with remote work are basically trying to work exactly the same way as they would in office. Processes need to be documented and when to use different channels for communication need to be defined
I worked for a company that invested heavily in remote, literally everyone was remote. Even with that type of focus, it was the most unproductive I've ever been because you would never be able to contact anyone in a timely way. It was the most frustrated I had ever been.
I now work at a company where I am remote, but my coworkers work in an office. Just by having everyone in the office makes it easier to contact someone on chat. But even then I am only about half as productive as I would be if I were completely in the office. Put me down as someone that believes 1 to 2 days remote work a week is convenient but I would much rather be in the office.
How did where someone was sitting affect their availability to respond?
I ask because I have a very old memory of reading that anything more than 70 walking paces away was a phone call or an email. I've seen that distant shrink over the years and I have seen people wuse electronic communication if someone is 3 ft away.
I could think of several causes for unavailability but I'm not going to speculate when you can simply answer.
Sounds like you don't know how to do it. Most people don't because this was thrown at them immediately and the structure of the company wasn't aligned around it. I'm on a fully remote team and have been for over a decade. We do not have those problems. We are vastly more productive than the rest of the company as a rule. Some things we do:
1. We have a daily morning zoom meeting where everyone goes round in a rota and tells us what they did yesterday and what they intend to do today and if there are any blockers or problems, call them out and we discuss. On Mondays this is longer so we look at goals and objectives of the team. We talk about non work stuff too. We're humans!
2. As the team manager, anyone is always free to bug me on slack and I will always respond within a couple of minutes. I will either help them to deal with the problem or find someone else on the team to help out who knows more than I do. Or I can help them get someone from an external team on the problem. I delegate this to someone else when I am rarely not around.
3. Have a team get together every Friday for an hour where we talk about anything work or otherwise related.
4. We have a team Q/A channel. Non urgent questions are asked on there and anyone is free to pick up something as and when they have a few moments. This is used for things like sanity checks, code reviews as well.
5. People are expected to ignore Slack for an hour or more at a time but must always answer calls in zoom (unless you're having a shit, gone to lunch, dealing with the kids, gone to the shop to get a coffee, whatever just call back when you're done).
It sounds like the issues you are facing are more to do with the specific people and their attitude towards collaboration than with WFH specifically. You either don't need a response immediately, or if it's important to you or the business then you should be calling the person that has the info you need.
Even outside WFH this isn't solved. There are many distributed teams out there, you need to come up with a way to work with those that are on the other side of the earth to you.
This is actually not great, because everyone else doesn't benefit, because it's in a DM that nobody else can see. In an office people near by will benefit too by being in earshot.
Don't know about you, but I generally don't speak loud enough that people outside the conversation generally overhear things. Also, word-of-mouth is a absolute horrible strategy to make sure things are shared across a team.
I've done the same in chat rooms where everyone on the team can read if they want to, even if the conversation is limited to me and another individual.
Yeah I think there's a place for both honestly. The place I work at encourages using a channel. But when it's deep and freeform, I think DMs is better. Sartre's Look and all that.
Have you tried calling people on the phone? This is the remote-work equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder. It's equally helpful for companies that have multiple offices where you need to collaborate with someone not physical near you
The absolute best way to
not reach me is by cell phone call.
If you’re not my wife or kids, use any of the text mediums, but I’m not picking up an unscheduled call (and if you’re not already in contacts, it won’t even ring).
I have told everyone they can call me at any time on my personal device. I don't own a company phone. I was last called 5 years ago because I broke something 2 days before and no one else could work it out. We got to this state because there's a culture of that being the absolute last resort. If someone has to call you then you need to look at the people round you and the situation you're in and the processes and documentation and make it so that people don't need to call you.
Yeah no, I've seen the operations team call each other, even outside working hours, for non-urgent matters that could 100% have waited. Some people just view it as the most active form of communication and get to it.
My (personal) phone exists for my convenience and utility, not everyone else’s.
I won’t answer 30 calls a day asking about my car warranty, credit card offers, insurance solicitations, and the “I’m your assigned staffing consultant and already working with some of your colleagues…” bullshit time-wasting calls just to save you a few minutes and allow you to also interrupt me.
If you’re a colleague, we have slack, email, zoom, and you can look up my number and text me on my private cell number. If that’s not enough, I’m sorry.
This was exactly confirmed by an internal study at the company I work for. Engineers that depend on collaboration suffered a significant drop in output artifacts. Those being largely junior or mid-level engineers. Staff engineers actually did better, although ironically they tend to be the ones coming into the office consistently (anecdotally).
One of the most surprising takeaways was that while engineers in the office more often claimed they felt less productive in the office than at home, in-office engineers tended to have higher productivity and WFH engineers when the actual numbers were examined.
> A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours
Fire them.
One hard rule I have for my team is not being responsive on IM for extended periods is treated the same as not showing up for work.
If people need to be taught how to work remotely, or anywhere for that matter, then the company has the wrong people, or maybe interns who need such training.
If “deep work” means can’t function as a team member and communicate in a timely and professional manner, like we all did when working in an office was more common, yes I let them know.
I run a team that went remote with the COVID restrictions and have not gone back to the office.
I observed:
- Working from home is _different_, but we still have the same work throughput
- Communication is slower, but more considered
- Personal boundaries on DnD time are more closely held
- Needless communication was reduced
I wouldn't go back to an open-plan office for anything. Even when we were in the office, most communication was on Slack because everyone had their sound cancelling headphones on trying to control the intrusiveness of the environment.
Until these managers mandating that WFH ends show some actual evidence of the benefits of being in the office, i'm going to assume this is a manager's ego not doing very well without overlooking their team.
I'm sure if your job is a bit ... needless ... it feels even worse when you work from home. In the meantime, some of us have work to do.
It makes sense that a management structure still culturally rooted in the industrial revolution's pattern of "work houses" clings on to in-person work to justify the structure.
It's quite a sweet little survival mechanism, where those whose jobs would be a bit redundant with a different setup have the power to order everyone back to the factory.
I just won't have any part in it. It's time for change. It's time for work to mean something different, with boundaries applicable to the output.
We're not making fabric at Victorian looms ... we're building software.
I didn't need any more reasons to avoid working at Amazon. Their work culture is famously toxic and their way of back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace. But this kind of attitude toward remote work really seals the deal. Truly an F-tier workplace.
>back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace.
Amazon's work culture is toxic in a lot of ways and this RTO is idiotic, but saying this about the vesting schedule just shows that you don't actually have any idea how the Amazon compensation structure actually works. There's a lot of reasons to not want to work at Amazon, but the vesting backweighting isn't one of them.
I got an offer from them (in the Alexa/hardware group - UK), but the place looked like a cult - with all their mantras to learn for interview and stuff. I mastered it for interview and just told them some nonsense rubbish. Still went on the other phases and got an offer.
After all steps, somehow I felt $ would be life changing. It wasn’t, so I did the right thing and didn’t leave the current place to go there.
It’s incredible how many people here are ok with forcing people back into environment-destroying soul-crushing commutes so their co workers will be somewhat more productive and make the majority shareholders of their companies (which 99.9% of you aren’t, let’s me honest) a little more cash.
I think it works both ways. For every exec or manager who wants RTO for all the wrong reasons there’s a WFH worker who thinks they can coast and just collect a paycheck for doing mostly nothing.
And they’re both equally messing it up for a better way of working.
WFH makes it possible for some engineers (and managers) to not do any work and is often a case of "out of sight, out of mind". Without a strong way of gauging impact (a ton of hypergrowth startups and large companies are in this bucket), you can basically coast along doing minimal work.
On the other hand, there are a ton of engineers who are hyper-productive when working remotely but because companies don't know how to tell them apart from those who aren't productive at all, suffer because everyone gets dragged back to the office.
WFH has nothing to do with people not working, people don't work in offices just as much. Tons of people love to come in at 9am, make coffee, stand around talking, go for a smoke at 10am, meetings, out to lunch for 3 hours at 11am, back to work for 2pm, meetings, smoke break at 2:30pm, make some tea, go back to the desk for 30 mins, go to the washroom and back to the desk for 10 and now home.
It's not exactly like adding "remove" to it and now suddenly everyone is a slacker. Sure perhaps there may be a higher percentage, but that is not proven (at least I've not seen any studies) so only a guess.
I suppose it depends on the nature of the work, but if your job entails making something, it's not an option to not do any work. You might find cases of surreptitious outsourcing, but someone is producing something.
The second point is definitely a problem, though. Software engineering managers really should come to the role by way of software engineering. It's really difficult to determine the impact of a particular engineer, otherwise. Remote vs. on-premises doesn't significantly change that, though.
WFH isn't the problem in that case, failing to gauge impact is. There is always a way to gauge someone's impact. Do you seriously walk around the office checking to make sure people are working hard to gauge impact?
I knew guys working from home who worked 10 hour weeks for years. Yeah, eventually they got laid off, but it was a mostly paid vacation for a long time.
Not everyone is like that though.
There will always be people who figure out how to coast in or out of the office. Companies aren't that great at identifying hyper-productive employees in any sense. Great team members and management do that all on their own without regards to location strategy.
That seems false on the face of it. There are people (on HN, even!) who say they're more productive from an office, specifically without the distraction of children. These are people that "don't work" from home, so by your logic, they also wouldn't work from an office. Yet that doesn't seem to be true.
Thats if you take what a small number people say at face value and then apply that to everyone.
We can each only work with anecdotal evidence. In my working life I've not been able to observe a lot of people switching between in office and WFH. But those I have observed either got on with things in either location or carried on not really doing much, regardless of kids.
It would be cool to see some actual evidence... of anything really.
in my experience that isn't the case at all. People who are most vocal tend to be parents or those that have a harsh commute and that isn't a clean overlap with slackers at all.
Corporate tax incentives, like those Amazon gets for its Seattle offices, came with a promise that they would bring x number of jobs into the city. There are concerns in Corporate America that WFH puts them at risk of losing that free money. That's the incentive here. Not productivity.
> Jassy said he and the S-team, a tight-knit group of senior executives from almost all areas of Amazon's business, decided at a meeting earlier this week that employees should be in the office "the majority of the time (at least three days per week)."
Was the meeting in a physical office? Can we expect the policy to apply to them as well as the rest of the staff? You know, to make it easier to "ask ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch, in the elevator, or the hallway" of leadership.
When you've got a private office, a couple executive assistants, a private driver, a company paid hotel if you need to stay late and a (possibly second) house close by it becomes a much easier thing to do.
not really a big deal for them considering they have the big bucks to buy a nice home 5 min from the office, or you know, pay for a car service to drive them.
No, probably not. They’re executives, they probably have offices in different buildings corresponding to their business area throughout Seattle. Like the AWS head doesn’t need to work from the same building as the head of Consumer.
But yeah, I’m not sure that they always meet in person when they meet. I have no idea about that. But I don’t think that the majority of their job function entails meeting each other, probably it entails running their division.
I’ve been remote most of my >20y career, and my team now is fully remote. So I’m admittedly biased in favor of remote. That said…
My housemate recently started a not-remote job. They don’t go out much otherwise, and yet we’ve both been down with covid just shy of a month in. Sending people to work in person will inevitably spread this disease and others. I understand that some people are willing to take that risk for their own sake, but my housemate didn’t have a choice and neither did I. The effect of these kinds of policies for inherently remote-capable work is to prioritize whatever perceived or real benefits of physical presence over disease prevention. And the effect of that is inevitably a higher rate of spread of disease.
Some jobs must be done in person, and I think we can all generally accept that. But it’s reasonable to question the impact of some other jobs which could be remote arbitrarily demanding physical presence. Whatever the reasoning, if your policy is that people who could work remote mustn’t, your policy is choosing to risk infection of those workers and people in contact with them. Choose carefully.
(Of course I know no one making these policies is choosing carefully. They’re choosing to risk infecting their workers and anyone around them be it Joe Grocer or Grandma)
My last day at the office was almost 5 years ago, and I was one of the lucky ones with a closed-door office in a sea of "open floor" cubicles. As I walked in to the roughly 12x18' room which was occupied by 4 other people (only 2 in the year prior), I was met with a cacophony of noise as all four of them were participating in their own separate video calls, mostly with staff on the same campus (there was a massive meeting room shortage).
It dawned on me then how emotionally and psychologically draining the entire routine experience had become and I turned around and went home at once. This ended up being the best decision I had ever made for my career, my family and my personal well being. I hope to never return to an office space again.
My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes.
I know a lot of people here really like the idea of several hours worth of undisturbed work, but my (again, personal) experience is that that leads to a much lower overall productivity for a team compared to one where people can easily interrupt each other to get unblocked.
The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely. Instead we were all set free, and when the first iteration didn't work out it's back to the office for everyone.