[librish]

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.

[neilv]

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).

[Ancalagon]

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.

[harshalizee]

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.

[adoxyz]

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.

[chank]

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.

[librish]

"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.

[chank]

> 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.

[librish]

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".

[chank]

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.

[aaomidi]

A very works on my system take.

If you interrupt me it takes me hours to get back on speed.

[librish]

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.

[rosywoozlechan]

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.

[noisenotsignal]

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 :)

[un_montagnard]

Screenshare isn't the same thing as taking over the keyboard.

[noisenotsignal]

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.

[0] - https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share

[un_montagnard]

It's much easier to switch between driver and navigator when doing pair programming at the same keyboard.

[ren_engineer]

>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

[blindriver]

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.

[readthenotes1]

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.

[unxdfa]

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).

That's about it.

[dom96]

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.

[whateveracct]

I have deep collaborative conversations via DM all the time. If anything it's better because it's written.

[rosywoozlechan]

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.

[chank]

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.

[lfx]

But you can copy all of the contents to tickets, emails, etc. All is not lost.

[u801e]

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.

[whateveracct]

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.

[xakahnx]

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

[sokoloff]

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).

[unxdfa]

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.

[Macha]

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.

[dubcanada]

Ya instead you should be at an office so I can just walk over and bug you face to face instead.

[yuliyp]

In-person people tend to at least see "oh s/he's super-focused on something, I should probably not interrupt them if it's not important"

[hhh]

parents focus would be something like on Teams, a work-centric platform where generally people are online while working or are required to be online.

[DiggyJohnson]

Why?

[sokoloff]

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.

[xakahnx]

My company provides me a work phone with a separate phone number. This is where I get pages and urgent or intentionally disruptive calls/messages

[rumdonut]

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.

[bsg75]

> 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.

[harshalizee]

So no one can do any sort of deep work in your team. Should definitely mention that in interviews for potential candidates to spot red flags.

[bsg75]

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.

[WirelessGigabit]

Yea, let's interrupt our developers every 20 minutes because the PM needs a question answered.

'Hey, how are you?'

And then nothing.

OMG he takes forever to reply on Slack.

[prepend]

I use teams and zoom and frequently interact with team members. It’s pretty great.