[thatsagreatcomm]

IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close.

It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.

[rcarmo]

As someone who's been working remotely (or nomadically) for nearly a couple dozen years or so, I firmly subscribe to the notion that the sentence "hell is other people" was coined because someone kept interrupting the author, or because they had to share a workshop (or an open space office) with apprentices, bolstering peers or customers barging in unannounced.

You can have spontaneous conversations in a number of ways, but anything that requires focus work suffers greatly because of the insistence in shoving people together without providing suitable spaces for isolated work--which is why I would, back in the 2000s, frequently grab the brick that passed as a laptop and find an empty meeting room to work in, and later (thanks to GPRS and 3G, not even Wi-Fi) "upgraded" to sitting in the cafeteria or a lounge for two hour stints every day just to get work done.

Yes, you need to coordinate with people. And yes, you need to manage them. But doing either by having them within earshot and "not knowing" what they are up to are truly the hallmarks of incompetent managers, or of a broken company culture. Set up office hours. Rotations. Anything but mandatory RTO at arbitrary days that will force people to spend 4h a day in a commute, be unable to pick up their kids from school, or aid elderly relatives (or friends).

I sincerely hope that I do not have to go back to an open-space office ever again, and that my trips to the office are driven by actual need rather than management insecurities.

[throw_nbvc1234]

> of a broken company culture

I agree with this in a sense. Every time someone talks about how they've been able to make remote work and how every company should as well, the thing that pops into my head is "well why doesn't the company just completely change their culture".

Can companies to this, yes. Should they, (opinion). Can it be understandable why a company might be resistant to completely changing their culture?

Take your example of "incompetent managers". How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills? How long would it take them to backfill those managers and what's the cost to the business in the meantime?

[ekianjo]

> completely changing their culture?

I thought we were already supposed to change our culture because of climate change?

Is making everyone commute again good for CO2 emissions?

[hedora]

> How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills?

Zero that would be missed?

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

Parent's comment is mildly revealing in a sense. Management does not want to learn new things. It already thinks it has all the tools needed. It had them ready and polished since 50s and they work so well. So well. And them youngins come in and upset applecart with all that remote work. Stupid pandemic ruined managing.

FWIW, I am exaggerating, but only slightly. I did overhear an actual comment from a manager that they had to 'toss out their toolset' to deal with remote.

[hedora]

Yeah; it's hard to learn new stuff.

However, at a tech company that's targeting an ecosystem that changes every few years, managers that are unwilling / unable to learn new stuff are incredibly damaging to morale and to the business as a whole.

If Google was making widgets that were designed in the 1950's, and have undergone zero customer-visible revisions, then yeah, they'd need conservative managers that can keep cutting costs / defect rates a few percent every year while investing as little as possible in evolving the core business.

However, Google isn't there yet. They're facing an existential threat, where Internet search is going to be lights-out in a few years thanks to LLMs, their primary revenue sources are being outlawed in large swaths of the first world, and they are a distant third in public cloud, which is the thing that's driving economies of scale for server-side compute (meaning they're dangerously close to falling on to the wrong exponential curve when it comes to datacenter hardware innovation).

If a manager can't figure out how to manage via zoom + slack, I seriously doubt they'll be able to figure out how to incorporate non-human intelligence into their team workflows while also pivoting from surveillance capitalism to a privacy-respecting revenue model, and also becoming customer-focused (at Google!! Hahaha!!!) enough to court enterprise customers.

[LinXitoW]

I mean, most companies had 2+ years of changed culture. RTO office IS the culture change, not the other way around.

[ocdtrekkie]

I work in the office, but when I really need to make progress on some stuff, I tell my boss I'm staying home. It absolutely makes a world of difference to be hard to find.

[beepbooptheory]

Imagining Camus bothering Sartre at the coffeeshop now.

[jason-phillips]

Hopefully there is violence.

[suslik]

And hopefully, Camus wins.

[psychomugs]

> "hell is other people"

Also, from the same author, "heaven is each other."

[hackeraccount]

I read somewhere - I can't remember where - that the expression "other people" was at the time (written during the German occupation) a euphemism for German soldiers. I don't know if this is true and I've never actually read No Exit so maybe there's no softening the phrase but it could be that there's some nuance there.

[chank]

> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.

Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it. In every office I've worked in in the past 20 years none of this really happened. It was 99.9% distraction. It's trivial to hop on a meeting with close collaborators or even non-close ones to bounce ideas off of. It's a mask argument for FOMO and the desire of those who simply prefer that environment for various non-collaborative reasons.

[UncleMeat]

I work at Google and I agree with the poster that something significant is lost when you aren't physically present near each other.

But I am also fully remote at Google and I am never going back. Full remote is too valuable to me. I just think that it is useful to be honest about challenges that some people and teams face with remote work.

[biofunsf]

Thank for you saying this so clearly. It really articulates my own feelings.

Something is lost when you give up in person collaboration. But that can be fine and perhaps it has no real impact on your team’s productivity. And even with this loss, the benefits of remote working can greatly out weigh the drawbacks. But I think it’s worth being honest with ourselves and acknowledge that it’s a balancing act, and not try to say that remote work is superior in all aspects.

[chank]

I can agree that "something" is lost. Just not what everyone is saying or thinks it is. I doubt anyone really knows. But agree that full remote is a different way of working and people need to get used to it still.

[JKCalhoun]

My experience has aligned with the person you're responding too. Often the best ideas came out of lunch conversations, slam diagramming on hallway white-boards....

[throwbadubadu]

It's strange (and also independent if real or virtual), but for me the worst ideas actually came out of those meetings where people "needed to brainstorm to come up with solution" - and usually also endless technical debt. The best when skilled people have enough time (!!) to think stuff through, mostly alone or small 2-3 ppl team, draft something up, and again others can have time to think this through and thoroughly review. Not that the other thing also sometimes happens, but majority not. Different problem domain, skills? (But anyway, totally independent if virtual or not..)

[j45]

Design by committee (where few are competent in the issue at hand) is different than the right people being in any kind of meeting.

Lots of people waste time and hide in online meetings too.

[fatnoah]

> The best when skilled people have enough time (!!) to think stuff through, mostly alone or small 2-3 ppl team

I like to say that small meetings of 2-4 people are great for figuring out what to do, and larger meetings are great to have a discussion about the plan made by the smaller meeting. It constrains the discussion and helps to limit rat-holing.

[garrickvanburen]

This can still happen.

Let’s be deliberate about it - eg “hey let’s grab lunch together and then whiteboard out a few ideas”

To me, this kind of deep collaboration is a reason to be in the same physical space.

Though it only actually happens a handful of times a year - even if you sit next to the collaborators daily.

[j45]

A recurring calendar invite can increase the frequency of good types of meetings too :)

[garrickvanburen]

Agree.

20+ years ago, it was considered good office manners to send an IM asking if someone if they were available before interrupting them with your physical presence.

[andsoitis]

> send an IM asking if someone if they were available before interrupting them with your physical presence

Unless someone ignores IM (not even seeing notifications), sending a message is also interrupting…

[JohnFen]

I disable all notifications and just check IMs and emails every time I reach a place where that's not harmful to my work.

[garrickvanburen]

If they don’t respond…they’re not available.

[hedora]

You can disable slack notifications. It’s great, as long as you remember to periodically check it.

[j45]

This needs to be relearned both in person and online.

Poor planning on someone else’s part shouldn’t make an emergency on your part.

[lumost]

In the olden days, you could “spontaneously” be productive by spending 2 hours talking to coworkers about something that will never ship - meanwhile the due date for your actual project just went out by 2 hours.

I prefer coworking for the “body doubling” effect. Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.

[derefr]

> Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.

As someone with ADHD, there are a lot of seeming “anti-productive distractions” I use to help me focus, but which would never be allowed in an office environment.

I’ve measured it: I’m more long-term productive at work when I’m also doing chores, talking to friends, petting my cat, watching YouTube videos, etc. at the same time. The social pressure to not be doing these things (or the impossibility of doing these things in an office), starves my brain of the input required to solve work problems. If the only thing I have to focus on is work… then I don’t.

[garciasn]

> I prefer coworking for the “body doubling” effect. Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.

And this here is exactly why mandates are ridiculous. Just because YOU are unable to work remotely or YOUR leader is unable to lead you effectively when you're remote doesn't mean that your coworkers or their leaders are ineffective when remote.

[asoneth]

> Just because YOU are unable to work remotely or YOUR leader is unable to lead you effectively when you're remote doesn't mean that your coworkers or their leaders are ineffective when remote.

This does not match my experience at all. If my coworkers and managers are bad at collaborating with remote workers then I will not be as effective working remotely no matter how good I personally am at it.

Supporting remote work allows a company to attract employees from a larger pool of labor which allows them to to get higher caliber employees while paying the same or lower salaries. It also saves on office costs. I'm not surprised to see more companies doing this.

But doing so also requires adopting culture, processes, and tools across the entire organization. It's not something an individual worker can do on their own.

[commandlinefan]

Of course, you and I both know that this is the first, second, and only reason for RTO: everybody who doesn't know how to program a computer is convinced, and will remain convinced until the day they die, that the only way to keep us programmer grunts "productive" is to have somebody standing behind us monitoring our behavior with a clipboard 40 hours a week.

[lumost]

I cowork, meaning I work in a coworking space I pay for. This is significantly preferable to commuting for an hour each way to my actual office.

[zo1]

Such a remote scenario also heavily favors "extroverts" and other such people that are happy to "hop on a meeting" with someone. The key is that it's not "hop on a meeting", that's easy for an extrovert, it's that you're interrupting someone and taking time out of their day, and you don't want to disturb etc etc. Introverts, "shy" and other such non-people people, will struggle with that and they'll have t re-learn working in a work environment.

You get people that are "selfish" in that regard (yes you get introverts like that too) and don't mind taking up someone else's time or interrupting them. WFH heavily favors those people, and no one is speaking up about this.

[bluefishinit]

In-person work is way worse for this. Extroverts are constantly bugging everyone with small talk, talking loudly on the phone, in the kitchen, the hall, the bathroom...

Extroverts walk around and bug random people to get their "fix". Things should be async when you're remote. If someone pings you to meet, just ignore it until you are ready to deal with it. That's impossible in the office.

[zo1]

I agree that's what extroverts do - and it's definitely an interruption! But this scenario specifically is when the "introvert" needs to initiate a talk to someone. I'd argue that that is much easier in the office when the perceived amount of "interruption" they would cause to the other person is low, and when the natural flow of the conversation can bring up an entry point for them. It also makes it more likely for their manager/senior/mentor to notice they are having an issue without them having to initiate.

Thing is, the extroverts will now do the same, they'll just do it remotely and schedule incessant '1 on 1's with their reports, who are more likely to be introverts.

Overall, it's not an easy problem to solve and optimize. But the preference then should be to do what we've always done and slowly "peek" into potential different ways of doing it, instead of dropping the bomb and saying full WFH or full Y and here is why X or Y is correct.

[bluefishinit]

Honestly, I don't see how it could be easier for introverts in the scenario you mention. If an introvert needs something when they're WFH, they just send a slack message. I probably doesn't even require a face to face interaction.

For reference, I manage a fully remote team and we do one real-time video meeting a week, the rest is pure text and async. We are a very high performing team that consists of people new to the industry as well as veterans.

[InfiniteRand]

Introvert and extrovert are pretty blunt terms, there are people who find it easy to talk to others and those who find it difficult even when necessary, these might but do not need to correspond to wanting to talk to others (among other nuances). Introvert usually groups those who have difficulty and those who dislike talking to others, but with work from home that grouping doesn’t necessarily make sense.

If it’s harder for you to initiate conversations, bumping into people and common office occurrences can make it easier to start talking. But if you don’t like talking to others than bumping into people can feel intrusive.

[Makhini]

This is a completely stereotypical and offensive view of extraverted people. You conflated them with loud and inconsiderate individuals. I suggest you read up on what extraversion is, because it's not pestering random people with small talk.

[ernst_klim]

As an introvert with Asperger and an adamant pro-office guy I can't relate, what you describe sounds more like social anxiety or sociophobia, and require proper treatment (also facing (semi)professional conversations is a good treatment of its own since you know the topic and the people)

[Supermancho]

> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.

> Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it.

...probably because the scenario has been framed as a benefit and it is clearly not.

It's a lot easier to hit someone up on slack, as normalized behavior, than having to "accidentally" run into them in a hall. I know all the people I work with. I know that I can access them as a resource. When in the office or at home, if you can't initiate ideation without happenstance, you have a behavioral problem that is masked by working in an office.

[bentlegen]

I had a single casual conversation spontaneously in the office that directly led to a million dollar product getting created. It wasn’t even a “bouncing idea” talk, it came from nerds nerding-out at the lunch table.

That one example sold me.

Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom, but my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly — they’re not interested in any casual conversation. Most people say a word or two about the weather or their sports team then jump into their next Zoom call.

(Edit: note, I’m pro-working from home, but I don’t agree that you can 1:1 recreate in-person ideation/spontaneity over a screen with scheduled meetings. Based on the downvotes I guess that’s a controversial opinion in 2023. Wild.)

[red-iron-pine]

> Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom, but my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly — they’re not interested in any casual conversation. Most people say a word or two about the weather or their sports team then jump into their next Zoom call.

In person or remote, if there are other meetings I'm not hanging out, I'm off to the next one.

[JohnFen]

> Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom

Videoconferencing is the wrong tool for that sort of thing. IMs are a much better tool for that.

> my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly

This is my experience with in-person meetings, too. The millisecond the meeting is over, everyone goes back to work.

[BeFlatXIII]

> I had a single casual conversation spontaneously in the office that directly led to a million dollar product getting created. It wasn’t even a “bouncing idea” talk, it came from nerds nerding-out at the lunch table.

How much of that $1M was reflected in your paycheck?

[bentlegen]

Seems off topic, but the equity I’ve been compensated with has been sufficiently worthwhile and I don’t feel hard done by. YMMV.

[t43562]

I have random chats in the "watercooler" channels with like minded people. It's whether you're interested in anything - not whether you hang out in the right room.

[bentlegen]

I hang out in those rooms too. My experience doesn’t mean good ideas don’t or can’t happen there. But I personally feel more “creatively productive” when I can read the room and gauge folks’ expressions/enthusiasm.

People are different. What works for me may not work for you, your team, company culture, etc.

[starky]

Mind that I work with physical products so often collaboration involves talking about and handling actual objects, but I've found that the team I'm on has lost something when relying on virtual collaboration sessions where only one of the people actually has the item they are talking about. This is especially true for the more junior members of the team who require more collaboration.

When I'm in the office I get practically nothing done due to this, but the end effect is that the whole team is more efficient since others are unblocked with a clear direction. This just doesn't happen as well when we are relying on someone reaching out to setup a call where we try to talk through a problem that is better solved by actually standing around to collaborate. I also see it happen with the newer teams in other locations, we miss the small details in things that you only think to talk about when you are sitting in a meeting room over a prototype that gets passed around.

[lifeonlars]

I know that different people not only have quite different preferences but also different working styles, but I generally agree with this.

IME the slight extra friction of initiating a call acts as a filter which means that I am less likely to ask colleagues either something which only saves me a few seconds, or to just start a nebulous discussion. Text chat is the right medium for both of these, even when in the office, as it's asynchronous and no one else has to hear it. When I call someone I tend to have at least a clear question or request for something that will make a significant different to what I can get done today.

The other argument against the benefits of face-to-face communication is that, unless everyone in your org works in the same city (or even, on the same floor - since most people don't walk around huge offices to ask colleagues quick questions), you should be practising with the online communications and finding good ways of working with them anyway. Otherwise fully distributed teams degrade into geographic silos, and teams with only a few remote people tend to just leave them out.

[steve1977]

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question.

Well, the person that got interrupted by you probably lost quite a bit of productivity because of you.

[asoneth]

I think this is the crux of why people have such disparate estimates of remote productivity.

Senior folks seem to experience more upside and less downside being remote whereas junior folks seem to experience more downside and less upside.

Depending on the makeup of the team, one or the other may be net more productive even if you yourself feel less productive. (It may also depend on whether your company sufficiently acknowledges and rewards the work senior folks do unblocking and mentoring others.)

[bluefishinit]

I don't think senior/junior is the right divide. There's tons of young people cranking out absolutely amazing things from home in the open source community. What I've found is that product focused people who ship with high velocity like remote work, regardless of their time in the industry.

Low velocity shippers who lean on process are the ones who seem to want to go back in the office. Presumably because you can mask not shipping by chatting with your manager or playing meeting roulette.

[sarchertech]

That lines up with my experience as well. I think though that there is a cutoff where very junior people are almost never going to be highly productive and require fairly constant babysitting.

I think you can mentor/babysit them in a remote environment, but it takes intentional effort.

This is just a symptom of a larger problem though, which is that people try to get useful work out of very junior developers. They should instead treat them as investments that will generate useful work in the future. If you can’t do this, you shouldn’t be hiring juniors.

[doxeddaily]

I agree, if you are hire juniors you need to know what you are getting.

The thing is not all juniors are the same, some are a lot more immediately productive than others. When it comes to remote work it's hard to bullshit, you are either checking things in, or you aren't. You can only go by productivity.

[asoneth]

I don't doubt your experience, but it is not my own. There are absolutely exceptions who prove the rule but on average we found productivity plummet with remote junior hires and remain similar for folks who have been at the company for decades across all skill levels. Even high-velocity junior folks seemed to be spinning their wheels or getting stuck when remote in a way that perfectly average senior folks did not.

I was anticipating employee pushback as the company switched from remote to return-to-office 3 days a week last year. But the junior folks I've talked to have seemed mostly enthusiastic (with significantly higher retention than when we were remote) whereas the objections mostly came from senior folks. The people who quit to keep working remotely were almost entirely senior folks.

[re-thc]

> I don't doubt your experience, but it is not my own.

Are your scenarios the symptom or the cause? Do juniors prefer in office not because of the office or other reasons? E.g. do they have the support they need remotely, is there enough documentation, etc? Usually requiring adhoc in-person interactions is just masking the real issues. The seniors are fine because they've already had workarounds for it.

[asoneth]

In talking to the junior folks the two things they bring up are mentorship and socialization.

With mentorship I think you're spot on with regard to adhoc interactions. Senior folks know who, how, and when to ask when they're blocked, or when they need to plant an idea in someone's head. Even though we have daily stand-ups, weekly 1-1 check-ins, and responsive mentors a number of junior folks seemed less comfortable admitting and asking for help when remote until it was too late. My company is overall the best place I've worked but has poor processes in this regard -- it's one of those places entirely run by engineers where everyone is proud of how "flat" the org is which is code for a hidden and ad-hoc org chart. I'll bet manager training and process could have minimized that, but it would be a tougher sell than RTO -- so you go to war with the army you've got.

With regard to socialization, the junior folks seem to hang out with each other after work quite a bit more. We also have lots of social events, presentations, movies, etc during work hours. We had similar sessions set up for remote folks that are well attended but don't seem to scratch the same itch.

[bluefishinit]

> on average we found productivity plummet with remote junior hires

I'm curious how you're measuring productivity. Most people really struggle with this and can't do it accurately.

[asoneth]

Normally I agree, but the differences were particularly stark. After a couple of years the top junior performers were almost all in-person. They were more self sufficient, more likely to still be working at the company, generally made the products they worked on more successful, etc. There were certainly exceptions, but the trend became fairly clear even to remote work advocates. I think that's why we had so few objections to RTO -- even folks who quit over it admitted it was the right choice for our company.

I'd wager better remote processes and culture could have shrunk the gap, and I'm happy so many companies are doing that well, it just didn't work for our company.

[doxeddaily]

Well sure, seniors have concerns outside of work that juniors often don't have.

[asoneth]

I think you may be on to a useful distinction there, but I'm not sure I agree with your implicit values.

Folks who consider themselves "high-velocity" seem to look down on process and prioritize their own productivity over the productivity of the team and the organization. They seem to believe that they'll be evaluated on number of features shipped, or tickets closed, or lines written. They seem to consider coordination with others to be overhead that distracts from "real work".

That mindset may work for small shops or independent features but in my experience successful large products are built by people who are willing to invest as much effort in coordination as they do in heads-down coding.

[bluefishinit]

> Folks who consider themselves "high-velocity"

I'm not talking about self-diagnosed high-velocity, I as their manager see that they are high-velocity, high-quality developers.

> That mindset may work for small shops or independent features but in my experience successful large products are built by people who are willing to invest as much effort in coordination as they do in heads-down coding.

I've always modeled my team's process on open source development, which has successfully produced very high quality "big" software. Documentation in code, PRs and issues, async communication... I've never seen regular company process (things like Agile) produce software that matches the quality of that done with a more distributed and async process.

From that perspective, hiring accomplished open source developers leads to an amazing team. Back to my original point, those people may be 18 years old or 60 years old. The trick is to build a team of people who have a proven ability to ship.

[asoneth]

I'm not sure what more there is to say. I'm happy that you have created remote processes that work well for your team. I wish we were better at that. My personal experience is still that groups of high-velocity rockstar developers relying on asych coordination can deliver features faster day-to-day but are not as successful year-to-year. I do believe you that it's possible though, and perhaps someday fully-remote competitors with lower salary/office costs will eat our lunch. Perhaps it requires better managers than we have. Still, we ship software our customers love and are extremely financially successful so I have trouble faulting management for continuing to do what has proven successful.

> I've always modeled my team's process on open source development which has successfully produced very high quality "big" software

That's an interesting example and reminds me of an anecdote. At my last company I worked on a very (very) expensive fintech product. We had several competitors including an open source alternative that we were quite nervous about. I wouldn't be surprised if their code quality was higher than ours. But while many customers donated to them, spent a lot of effort integrating them, and talked about them a lot (especially when negotiating contracts) in the end we never lost a customer to the open source alternative.

Don't get me wrong, I love free and open source software and personally use and support several projects. But with a handful of exceptions open source developers seem to be more successful at creating tools for other developers than products for non-technical end-users.

[steve1977]

> in my experience successful large products are built by people who are willing to invest as much effort in coordination as they do in heads-down coding.

In my experience, successful large products make so much money that it's possible for non-productive people to exist in large enterprises. This wouldn't be the case on smaller case. But that does mean that those people are actually needed in any way.

[asoneth]

> But that does mean that those people are actually needed in any way.

True, the presence of people who spend time coordinating is not sufficient for success, nor is their presence in any way evidence of success.

But the absence of people who devote time to coordination has definitely sunk projects I've been on, including ones stacked with brilliant rockstars. It may simply be correlation, but I have never worked on a large, successful project that lacked people who were willing to invest significant effort in coordination.

[mmcdermott]

I suspect it's more individual contributor vs. leadership, where senior developers are more likely to be in some form of technical leadership role on their teams.

[ben7799]

This seems like it makes sense to me.

The senior folks are sometimes cleaning up messes created by the junior folks.

The last 10 years it seems like junior developers have become less likely to own up to their mistakes and senior engineers have to track down the mistake and then pull in the junior engineer to discuss what the mistake was and what the fix needs to be. The Junior engineer didn't want to participate at all and thinks their productivity is being impacted because they just want to keep working on whatever new feature ticket they think represents productivity. The seniors are thinking their productivity is increased when everyone is in the office cause they can much more rapidly find the people responsible and pull them into an in person meeting and do a full interrupt on the people responsible for an issue.

It's like the juniors are too incentivized by completing new feature tickets versus generating positive customer impacts or something.

I've been at 3 companies in the past 11 years and seen this at all of them.

[throwaway2037]

You wrote: The senior folks are sometimes cleaning up messes created by the junior folks.

I have seen just as much of the reverse.

[steve1977]

> Depending on the makeup of the team, one or the other may be net more productive even if you yourself feel less productive.

That is absolutely possible. In the end, the question is whose productivity is more valuable to the enterprise (and who do you measure that).

In my case, I often get interrupted by "non-producers", so I would guess my productivity is worth more. But I'm biased. ;)

[chrisallenlane]

Yeah. One of my favorite things about working remote is that people can't do this to me. It's a feature, not a bug.

[godshatter]

I don't understand this way of looking at things. I sometimes learn something new by answering a question from someone who is looking at things from a different direction than I am, or discussing something I don't have a quick answer to. That helps both of us. If I don't even have to think about it, it helps the other person be immediately productive (and learn something) at the cost of taking me out of "the flow" as opposed to having them beat their head against it for who knows how long while I get a a couple more minutes of uninterrupted time. I can hop back into "the flow" pretty much immediately.

If it happened every five minutes that's a different story.

[chrisallenlane]

> I sometimes learn something new by answering a question from someone who is looking at things from a different direction than I am, or discussing something I don't have a quick answer to

This can happen on Slack or whatever too, but with much less friction. I'm not ignoring teammates for days - I just want to be able to take 10 minutes or whatever to reach a reasonable place to context-switch versus being forced to do so right now.

> I can hop back into "the flow" pretty much immediately.

I envy you, but I very much cannot do this. If I'm working on something of sufficient complexity, I'm going to lose at least 15 minutes every time I'm forced to make a substantive context-switch. It's a huge drain for me.

[cdelsolar]

Can you jump on a zoom real quick

[escapedmoose]

“Sorry, I need to focus on something right now. Try asking [person]”

Or if I’m already on DND? Ignore, and create an appointment for later.

[bradlys]

This is a great way to get management up your ass and get fired.

End of the day, it’s all about the culture of your workplace. No one here really understands that. I’ve been interrupted more during remote work at some companies than when in person at others. It’s entirely culture dependent.

[JohnFen]

> This is a great way to get management up your ass and get fired.

If you get fired for doing that sort of thing, the company is doing you a favor.

[fullspectrumdev]

Status on IM platform set to busy, notifications suppressed unless from a select group (direct manager, etc).

So uh no. Can’t jump on a zoom real quick, I’m doing work.

[sensanaty]

I've literally never said yes to this question unless it was something incredibly urgent like prod being down or whatever.

[SketchySeaBeast]

"Sorry, you'll have to give me 15. I'll send you a message when I'm available, OK?"

[red-iron-pine]

"let me finish this email, i'll poke you in 10"

10 might actually be 2 hours, but whatever.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Well, ideally you follow through. The only way to get people to respect the social contact is by honouring it yourself.

[zoover2020]

Easy, just learn to push back or setup mechanisms like office hours to attend for folks whom are in need of support.

Like security, the human chain will always be the weakest link here. If you don't have backbone to stand up for your own time, that's on you - not the remote work inherently IMO.

[xenolith234]

It's always my direct manager that does this.

[dekhn]

or just "Hello, dekhn" without any additional context.

[Lio]

...and when you stop what you're doing and reply they don't follow up for 10 minutes, just a moment after you go back to your work.

[berniedurfee]

Sorry already in a meeting, can we chat here?

[mr_gibbins]

triggered

[dgfitz]

“Nope.”

[bluedino]

Your lack of communication can hurt others. One person being 'productive' while causing blocks for others isn't good for the team.

[JohnFen]

Why do you assume he's causing blocks?

I don't see what he said as lacking communication. It's enhancing it by allowing them to "schedule" it according to their workflow.

Very rarely does anything actually need an immediate response, and when it does, just call the person.

[Mountain_Skies]

About ten years ago I worked at a company with a DBA who saw gatekeeping everything database related as a form of job security. But he also complained bitterly about how often he was interrupted. Even simple things like adding a column to a table required his participation. When developing, these types of changes are frequent and often blocking, so creating something like a ticket queue wasn't a good solution. Our manager was not only aware of the situation but seemed entertained by the inherent conflict it created.

Since going through that extreme case of blocking through gatekeeping, I try to keep my eyes out for ways to allow other to self-service as much as possible. It's not possible to eliminate all interruptions but it's often worth spending a bit of time examining how the interruption could have been avoided in the first place and if similar interruptions are likely, invest in creating something more self-service. At least in the DBA situation I was in back then, simply allowing developers to have local database or even control over development database on a dedicated database instance would have eliminated most of the blocking and interruptions.

[zabana]

Training a junior or helping a collaborator is everything but loss of productivity.

[nonethewiser]

In a way, but not the way that counts. If you spend all day helping people with their work will you be lauded when you make 0 progress on yours?

[lesuorac]

If your superiors don't consider you training people part of your job then you should either get them (ahead of time) to agree it's part of your job or you should stop doing it.

[re-thc]

The thing is it's not always obvious. You don't always spell out how many hours each day you spend training others and so management just thinks you're doing nothing.

[JohnFen]

Is there a company that will push your deadlines back because you're training people?

[saiya-jin]

And then seniors have to pull overtimes just because they need to semi-constantly babysit juniors, or clueless managers of other teams or projects who only know how to escalate and chase etc.

I get it, if you are junior, there are benefits. If you are senior (and not ie team lead and control freak at the same time), you lose. Hell you lose a LOT, can confirm. Offices are way more stressful, so this is clear downgrade for senior people. Constant noise and interruptions way overweight the benefits.

Guess who brings more added value to companies, juniors or seniors? (not talking about long term perspective, most companies are led by people who focus on next bonus only, and who they manage is steered that way too).

[JackFr]

A former boss called me the most distractable person he had ever met. I've worked in open plan offices since 1997.

But apparently I have superhuman abilities to concentrate, because honestly I've never found it difficult to ignore people around me to focus and get work done. And yet I don't feel special, most people I've worked with seem to able to do it.

I understand many people don't prefer it, and they should very much choose jobs accordingly. But I guess I'll stop pretending my preferences are based on objective criteria when everyone else does too.

[JohnFen]

> Offices are way more stressful

For me, this is the bottom line. Working in an office -- even the best offices I've ever seen -- is a pretty terrible experience in a ton of ways.

In my younger years, I kinda gave up on actually getting anything done in the office. It's just too difficult. So I'd take my work home and make up for the time wasted in the office by doing my work in the evenings.

Eventually I wised up and stopped doing that, but that didn't make working in the office any more productive.

[Technotroll]

You certainly should because you're building the company that way.

[vbezhenar]

Company which those juniors will switch to as soon as possible.

[tezgon]

I think it's generally better to take the short-term productivity hit to train the new hire than it is to leave them to the wolves for your own work. Two heads are better than one and all that

[lisasays]

When it is -scheduled-. When they just walk over to your desk and grab you -- it completely torpedoes productivity.

[JackFr]

How are you measuring productivity?

[lisasays]

By the only metric that matters -- collective output.

Combined with the negative metric of employee burnout, which inevitably follows from years of exposure to open plan offices, constant interruptions ... and the toxic positivity of company owners pretending how wonderful these things are for everyone.

[JKCalhoun]

I never minded someone asking me a question. At the very least I reason my 5 minutes loss of productivity saved their loss of perhaps hours.

[lolinder]

Some people don't work like that. When I'm in a flow state, a 5 minute interruption can break me out of it and slow me down for a half hour or more before I'm finally able to get back into flow.

[berniedurfee]

Same. I typically have 4 or 5 threads of things I’m working on simultaneously. It takes a bunch of time to get back in that headspace.

[masfuerte]

They are doing it wrong. If you keep two or three things on the go you can switch to a different one when you get stuck without wasting hours or interrupting someone else right this minute. Very often, having switched focus the solution to the original problem will reveal itself without needing to bother anyone.

[bionsystem]

I agree. Most people only see the 5 minutes lost though...

[elcomet]

But what if overall the productivity is higher ?

[lolinder]

An org can find ways to ensure juniors don't stay blocked while also ensuring that seniors can keep in flow state for long, uninterrupted periods.

Prioritize docs and tests. Teach juniors how to use docs and tests. Spread knowledge and mentorship around enough that a question on the team channel gets an answer from someone who is available.

All of these things have other major benefits in addition to restoring flow state for seniors—juniors learn faster, your tests are more comprehensive, seniors can basically onboard themselves, your bus factor goes way up. "Stick everyone in the same room" is just a local maximum, not peak productivity.

[commandlinefan]

> overall the productivity is higher

Then why is my performance review always individual?

[HDThoreaun]

The company at large doesn't care about your individual performance review when making decisions that effect everyone.

[JackFr]

You seem to think that answering my question isn't part of his job. It may be that you have the wrong measure of productivity.

[lo_zamoyski]

> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.

People repeat this like a mantra when defending open floor plans (usually managers), but I very much doubt it. Most people seem to hate open floor plans. The subject seems to have gone by the wayside with the pandemic (then it was a question of finding a quiet place to work in a house shared with other people). I'm sure it varies by occupation, but the cost of distraction relative to whatever benefit you might gain from conversation is like investing money in the lottery. Yeah, you might win something, but you mostly won't and the cost will be enormous. I sense a bit of classic FOMO opportunism motivating such rationalizations.

[ryandrake]

Leaning in to "spontaneous conversations" as a benefit of office work is so weird. I count "spontaneous conversations" as close to the #1 downside of working in an office. Your ideation is my distraction. Also, championing in-person conversation as a way to communicate in the office often results in poor official communication: It's better to have clear, written communication of company/division decisions than relying on "Oh, I ran into Bill in the hallway and he said the team's now working on the FooBar project this quarter!" And poor internal documentation: How does this API work? "Talk to Erica" vs. "Read the internal wiki here"

[Macha]

Not least of which is it leaves a paper trail for the next person when Bill or Eric decide to move on or get laid off.

[EliRivers]

You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

Depending on who you are, massive massive benefit. In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.

training is AWFUL remote. Not even close

Definitely agree with this as a statement on how things currently ARE (in general), but they don't have to be that way. A lot of companies who struggle with this turn out to be just really bad at training in general. Previously, they got lucky; the people in need of education scrounged it by interrupting people or watching people or asking someone to metaphorically hold their hand. Companies were training by chance, rather than by design. Remote working demands a different way of training people, a different way of managing people and measuring output; a lot of companies are failing badly at this and falling back to failing less badly at it in the only way they know (i.e. everyone back to the office so we at don't suck quite so much at training and management and collaborating).

[JohnFen]

> In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.

Where I currently work (100% in the office, sadly), there is a coworker who did this to me regularly. He was causing a serious loss of productivity, and wouldn't stop.

So I started doing the same to him, stopping by his cube a few times a day at random to ask some legitimate technical question.

The end of the week I started doing that, he complained to me about my constantly interrupting him. It was causing him to fall behind in his work.

I told him "Of course, I'll start messaging you instead of stopping by. Would you extend the same courtesy to me?"

He stopped needlessly interrupting me.

[lolinder]

Agreed! Companies were basically sticking a bunch of people in a primordial soup and then stepping back and hoping for abiogenesis. It turns out people are pretty creative, so you would often get it, but that doesn't make the primordial soup the be-all-end-all of company organization.

At some point you have to develop self-awareness, you have to develop structures capable of improving intentionally. Those structures will dramatically outperform the primordial soup approach, but they do take work to build.

[BenisMaximus]

Absolutely nailed it. Remote work requires a bit more upfront involvement but the payoff is a more independent and healthy workforce (generally speaking). This will 100% highlight any failures in your current system/model.

Our onboarding system has been terrible for as long as anyone here can remember. Remote just made it stand out but it was always shit.

[cmiles74]

Maybe it varies by field. For myself, onboarding new developers has felt about the same as it did in person. I can't just stop by their desk but banging a message into chat and then starting a call if their response seems to far off track is not that much harder. A little friction but isn't it part of my job to get past that and make sure this person is productive as quickly as possible?

Overall my team has improved with remote work. Before the pandemic it was a struggle to find developers, in large part because of our location (expensive New England college town) and the (unspoken but clear) requirement that people come to the office every day. Now my current team is comprised of developers from Toronto, Sweden, etc. We hit our targets and get work done.

I wouldn't trade it for anything and I hope the pay grade above me realizes the concrete importance of the people and the work over this abstract idea of "community".

[berniedurfee]

A sage mentor of mine, who was also a major proponent of remote work, said this about hiring remote: “Do you really want to limit your candidate pool to those within driving distance to your office? Why not your entire country? Time zone? Planet?”

[Leynos]

Historically, people at work wanted to talk about anything other than work. They'd talk about football, politics, last night's Britain's Got Talent, or whatever; yet spend a whole day struggling with a task without asking their colleagues at the same desk for help.

I'll take wfh, thanks.

[broast]

Our remote teams have this culture that you say is impossible. They're in their chats or voice calls all day communicating, and measurably crush the in-office teams' productivity, maybe due to the efficiencies gained by going async, or maybe due to the type of people (people who find interactions through text more meaningful than in person or verbal, and insist upon it)

The in office teams on the other hand seem to rely on synchronous work and so they block each other, and this seems to mean the group can only finish a small number of tasks per day, whereas our remote teams complete bigger work more frequently.

I also find a lot of our juniors or quieter folk are a lot more confident talking to people in the remote setting.

[taneq]

I've recently been finding that even where in-person meetings are an option, having everyone at their desk with full access to all their files, emails etc. along with the ability to quickly and easily share their screen is just more productive. There's far less need to make a list of things to follow up during the meeting because you can usually take care of these things as they come up.

[BenisMaximus]

>sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation

Only thing I've ever gained this way were some bread-making tips (which admittedly were pretty good).

Our office has handily addressed this problem by making communities of expertise that anyone can join, occasional icebreaker events, and monthly showcases of what we're working on or investigating (this usually is just a few minutes of presentation by each team and is optional).

Make it easy for people to connect and they will do so. Meanwhile when I'm at the office, it's headphone-city and the open office format makes those random chats very distracting and frustrating.

[tester756]

Disagree, twice.

>You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close.

I've joined company that wasn't remote-native and yet they were well prepared

They had training videos, documentation, presentations and introductory codebase walk - a lot of stuff

I've been really quickly productive.

So maybe training is as good as your effort put into that?

>You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

I can send message to someone over chat way faster than you can get to his office room / desk.

[time_to_smile]

Strong agree on the remote training being entirely possible. My first dev job was remote (long before the pandemic) and onboarding was not a problem at all.

In fact because you need people to get set up remotely, I find the documentation tends to be better at all remote companies. In-Office companies sort of assume that you can just tap someone on the shoulder if you get stuck so there's more often, in my experience, gaps in the documentation.

I particularly find this a strange claim since open source projects have been successfully onboarding new people remotely prior to there even being efficient ways to screen share/video chat etc.

[Jedd]

> ... people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart ..

Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or do you just believe it to be true?

[sgarland]

At my last company, we had to go into the office once per week. The hellacious commute aside (I would arrive somewhere around 10:00, and leave somewhere around 15:00 to avoid rush hour - subtract lunch, and that’s not a lot of work getting done), it was just full of distractions. I don’t want to take regular breaks to go shoot the shit, or to go have a beer after lunch. I want to get work done, and I do that best with headphones on and not being bothered.

[eoerl]

> It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.

There's no data on this, at the very least you could mention that it's only your personal impression ?

IMO (and this is clearly a personal take) there are two competing effects: - higher bandwidth and easier to align face to face - more distractions, interruptions, more complicated to get things done

If you're in a business or position where you have no IP or nothing hard to do per say, you'll see the first one dominate. If you're somewhere with IP and competitive advantages through smarts then I'd say (personal again) the second effect can come to dominate.

Google pulling a "no remote" move means to me that their competitive advantage in terms of engineering and smarts is not a priority + using the fact that the market swung back towards employers vs. employees. But not general comment about "this take is obviously so much better", this is just intellectual lazyness I believe

[SecretDreams]

Really depends on the stage of the project and nature of the work. Also, on the individuals.

Being in the office mostly means you can afford to have less gems because you know you'll spend more time in person walking them along.

I favour some WFH/Hybrid setup, personally. And I view a lot* of this new office push as mediocre managers being unable to leverage their talent.

[fullspectrumdev]

> the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

This is an anti feature of offices.

Usually that brief interruption costs about an hours productivity for anyone doing stuff like programming, etc, due to the massively high cost of context switching.

It could have been an email/IM.

> training is AWFUL remote.

This implies that the training is lacking anyway, in most cases.

[runsWphotons]

I agree that onboarding remotely is terrible. From a junior perspective trying to figure out what is going on remotely is hard. Things happen like you get stuck with things and wait two hours for a slack response which still isnt great.

[lolinder]

This is a failure to design. You can't go remote but make no other changes in your org—effective remote requires you to be intentional about the things that you previously just hoped work. There are lots of different ways to make it work, but it sounds like your company hasn't done anything.

[whateveracct]

I have spontaneous conversation and ideation daily at my remote job. In slack. Both with teammates in DMs and team channels, and in more general channels.

I have never had trouble asking people questions. And I get asked them all the time. In fact, that the questions and answers are written and async is superior. When I was in the office, people would frequently take conversations to Slack (or say "could you Slack me what you just told me?")

Personally too, I find written communication to be superior. I will do quick video calls with people but that's rare (and usually to the taste of the other person).

We also have excellent training backboned by mentorship.

[commandlinefan]

> spontaneous conversation & ideation

The company: All the magic happens face to face.

Also the company: All your coworkers are in a different country on the other side of the world who are asleep when you're awake. Figure it out.

[JohnFen]

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question.

That's a benefit to working from home. One of the worst things about office work is that it makes it easy for someone to come and interrupt your train of thought. It takes time to enter the flow, and almost no time to be shoved out of it, at which point you have to take time to get back into the flow.

A quick question can cost a half hour or so that way.

This is where IM or email shine. You can ignore it until you're in a place where answering it won't be so costly.

[snarfy]

I have a hybrid schedule.

I lose 2 hours/day commuting + 1/2 hour de-stress from driving through shit traffic. I get far more work done on my WFH days than I do my in-office days. I'm an IC and don't need to do much mentoring, and when i do it's always easier to do it remotely with screen sharing than to try and sit two chairs into the same office. The only reason I come into the office is to have lunch with my co-workers. I do NOT see them the entire rest of the day.

[xwdv]

Do NOT approach me to ask a question when I am sitting at my desk. I am trying to work. Send an email or some other message through another collaboration platform. Stay AWAY.

[turdprincess]

I think in-person collaboration helps, but with folks on the outside of your team. If you are on a small team or in a small startup, I don’t see a big impact of in person communication. You will be interacting with these same people so much that you will grow a close bond with them regardless. When I think about the small company projects I’ve done, it’s honestly hard to tell which were remote and which weren’t - the bonds formed and amount of teamwork was the same.

For large company settings it’s a different story - if I have to have tons of meetings with a pool of various 100 people for many hours a week, some of them occasionally, yes it would be super helpful to have all those in person to establish connections quicker. However, even with RTO there is little chance those people would be in the same office, so you would be stuck on video calls anyways.

There is probably a sweet spot of medium sized companies where there is a lot of people but they are still in the same floor where in office would be effective. But for google scale - not so much.

[no_wizard]

None these things are immutable laws of work though. They can all be fostered in a remote first environment, its just not the same thing.

Its a "lazy" solution to require RTO for the sake of collaboration, training etc. as there are demonstrated examples (like GitLab, for instance, also see companies like Linear, Supabase etc that are full remote and still pushing out great work).

While I get sometimes in person meetings are great, they really start to lose their effectiveness past a certain point, and I think thats pretty clear with these remote first companies that are successful is they took the time to re-think process, re-think culture, and re-think the approach.

What I find with RTO companies is they want to plug their ears to the idea of real change, because its a real effort to get everyone to do things a bit differently. For example, look at the struggles everyone seems to have around maintaining useful documentation and async communication. One thing I realized is companies that took remote seriously gravitated away from everything being a Zoom call and started pushing in earnest centralized documentation and async communication. Long form responses became the norm. In depth Wiki's became the norm. Those are two examples I've seen in successful remote environments that I think, anecdotally, remain true across the board.

Companies that don't give this real thought are the ones that seem to also be going back to RTO. To me, RTO is an implicit acknowledgement that the culture of the company is unchangeable, and leadership is unable to consider different ways people work.

You can have all this in remote first cultures, that much is clear.

That said, I think it should be everyone's individual choice, if one was to ask me. I have no issue with people wanting to work an office everyday, but forcing everyone to work in an office every day is the problem

[pnt12]

Counter argument: there's lots of ways to share knowledge remotely, some people just aren't used to it.

Learning: presentations, pairing, questions via messages, asking for a quick call to clarify something. Also: document your shit.

Ideation: set up ideation sessions before tackling a ticket. At the end of a daily scrum, ask people x and y to stay and trade some ideas.

[andreygrehov]

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

Isn't that the distraction people try to avoid? I don't think there is an expectation from anyone that people should walk over to someone's desk and ask questions. In fact, I believe it's the opposite of what's typically being welcomed – do your own research, dive deep into the problem, work with the problem from different angles, etc.

I do not believe that remote training is awful. When someone's trained remotely, they can always record a meeting and come back to that recording many times in the future. If something is unclear, just send a message. Nobody's recording screenshares in the office, so training/onboarding material from your co-workers gets easily lost. This leads to distractions, such as walking over to someone's desk and asking follow up questions.

[sage76]

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

Here's what typically happened in every company I worked at. I ask a question, they tell me to look at the documentation. I look it up, do what I needed to do, and at some point, it all unravels because the documentation is horribly out of date, and there was something else that needed to be done from the beginning, which this other guy knows about.

Training is always awful, in person and remote. Nobody wants to help or give any info, even when you are asking questions specific to the company product. Things that can't be googled, or things that the team would be better off just telling rather than letting the new guy struggle for a week.

No I'm not bitter at all.....

[mejutoco]

Sometimes I do a sketch MR and share that code. Then other people can give advice and check some specific implementation. I found in general discussions are more productive when discussing specific things. This also shows to people that you did some work. In general it makes them more receptive.

[ckdarby]

This is where feeding all written communication, tickets, docs, etc into a model solves this.

The model provides that "Google search" experience, but for specific to the company.

[lallysingh]

This is different for junior and senior engineers. If your work is a lot of smaller things and you need to ask a lot of questions, an office is useful. If you have deeper work and need to focus for hours, the open-plan office is terrible.

[berniedurfee]

Hard disagree on this take.

Working remote allows me to finish my thoughts, finish the task at hand or just take a breather when I need to. I think that’s the same for those who prefer remote work.

Async communication is far better for a team that needs to get through a never shrinking pile of work.

Remote work isn’t for everyone. It’s a preference, with zero impact on productivity or efficiency for those that prefer it.

I will admit one major downside. It’s easier to move one’s career forward, especially in management if you’re able to chat with higher level decision-makers as-hoc and in person. For those that thrive off of connections to climb the ladder, remote is a much harder climb.

[grimjack00]

I'd put more faith in the claims of valuing spontaneous conversation and just walking down the hall if companies actually had full teams in a single physical location, where this would be possible.

I've been in the software industry (QA and dev) since 2000. Other than a short time with a startup, I have _never_ been on a team where everyone has been in the same state, never mind the same city.

[jasonjei]

If that’s true how is the Linux kernel project so successful with collaborators from all over the world not even working under the same roof?

[itsboring]

Using mailing lists no less.

I would contend that the Linux kernel is the most successful and prolific piece of software in the world.

[mnky9800n]

A while ago on hacker news there was a story about a team of n<10 that was split between the east coast and West coast. They setup an always on zoom call on a dedicated screen in each office. Obviously this won't scale if you work with tons of people, but I would think it's quite useful if you are prototyping or building something together as a team.

[dunham]

I recall reading that the French Laundry and Per Se restaurants did this too. They had video conferencing set up between kitchens on opposite coasts.

[netjiro]

> a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart

Hard numbers from 20+ projects over 20+ years say the exact opposite. Hard core tech R&D projects, small and large.

When I compare the distributed all remote projects to those run in house, it is night and day difference.

[TheCoelacanth]

Yes, but you've already lost that by distributing people all across the world.

[jxf]

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question.

I can almost guarantee that this person doesn't want to be interrupted in their work at random by people "just walking over to ask a question".

[commandlinefan]

And it's never "just a question", either. Social etiquette being what it is, nobody ever comes over and says, "what port does Postgres run on again?". They come over and say hello, and chat a bit, then they ask about ports, then they go off on a tangent about networking problems, then they chat about their kids for a while, then they finally say, "oh shoot I have a meeting in five minutes, got to go".

[jason-phillips]

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question.

Yikes. One would hope that the distance between our cubes is sufficiently punitive so as to discourage these excursions.

Please, do not disturb while cogitating.

[ubercore]

Easy to onboard in person but still work remote.

[j45]

The efficacy of remote/hybrid can often be a function of how well the company worked distributed across multiple office locations prior to the pandemic.

Physical proximity (and being able to close a door) is a magnifier and multiplier in one way, and digital proximity (and disconnection) to be able to connect with someone is different.

How well the company works in terms of systems and processes that work well remotely prior to the pandemic is a starting point.

Being forced online/distributed at the pandemic doesn’t mean an organization is, or was any good at it.

Offices must provide what the home can’t to remain an alternative.

Offices (home or at work) should be helping me get more done with less effort compared to my home. Interruptions are an effect of culture, or lack of it. The fixed cost investment in better monitors, internet, seating and managing interruptions can go a long way to finding and keeping flow.

While day to day tasks may be ok working remote, problem solving is generally more effective in person when others are involved.

Onboarding of new team members goes much quicker with an in person component for the first few weeks before going hybrid or remote.

Remote work may be ok for one person departments but many are starting to experience burnout after Covid. What’s next in life and career and finding who and what tot all to with hands on or shadowing has its value. In person is also a retention strategy of orgs, fewer opportunities to wander without more effort.

Still organizations who lament about in person work are almost always guilty of falling prey to not reading the full study on open concept workspaces. And they’re free to demand in person work, they sign the checks and people can vote with their feet.

Orgs can do better, especially for knowledge work, by providing a door to close - this is an immense offset against working remotely. Full time open concept working is not a productivity multiplier in most cases.

I’ve worked remotely at a higher pace (more than 8 hr/day) for the better part of 2 decades, while having an office (with a door) nearly the entire time. In person always has its place. But I like flexibility in my life just as much.

In the US, offices might mean longer commutes and less time with family but it’s not necessarily like that everywhere.

It seems like some folks want to have their cake and eat it too. I have less than a 10 minute walk to my office, it won’t always be that way.

Currently we are designing our new office to have all the concierge type services the current demographic needs. Among the top of the list is full access to extremely fast internet (10-30Gbit) that is snappy not available at home.

Of course, it’s possible to solve problems remotely with some people more than others, which can be a function of how long you’ve worked together. I get to work with some of the same people for a long time, it offers unfair advantages like what is being described. Even in that case though, it’s faster in person than online. This is harder to talk about with some folks because they rarely have both feet in one job long enough (3-5y+) to go deep and wide on problems.

To the extent an organization is mature and not innovating too much, remote or hybrid work can be much more feasible. The better their systems and processes, especially companies who have distributed offices.

One reality is there are too many people who demand remote work and also have also taken unfair advantage of it more and more over time. They are then making it ok to offer their position off to the best value globally and not to just them. The role of telemetry of ones productivity or availability is a factor in this based on the tooling.

While interruption is enemy of productivity - instead of being being interrupted by people at work, other distractions await at home. Emails and slack can be far worse interruptions. Many people can’t resist doing certain activities at home that are far beyond.

Digital meetings that drone on for much longer online to overcommunicate can’t be more productive than being forced to stand up for 15 minutes to talk.

[iforgotpassword]

Fully agree. Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.

As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.

there isn't a single colleague in my department (~30 people) who preferred WFH where I feel they were more productive, or even on par. Quite the opposite, those who exclusively stayed at home when working completely lost touch, gave vague updates and excuses about what they're working on and what current problems are. When they returned to office (we've three mandatory days at the office now), it really showed how disconnected they were from all the process and changes that happened over the last two years. And I mostly don't have to care, I'm not responsible for these people, except for one instance my work doesn't even directly depend on them, but I can absolutely see why an employer wants to get everyone back into office. It's not worth keeping WFH up if for every one of those few who actually benefit from it, there are five others who you basically now need ten times the effort to make sure they di their hours and don't just bullshit you in endless video conferences with flaky connections and parrots going mad in the background and whatnot.

[msla]

> As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.

Sounds like slacking off to me.

[lifeonlars]

> Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.

> As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.

You prefer to chat with your colleagues during work, and you work well collaboratively with interruptions, but you can't envisage that other people have both different personal preferences, and different skillsets. Instead you accuse them of slacking off.

[iforgotpassword]

> but you can't envisage that other people have both different personal preferences, and different skillsets.

I can, but as said, I think they are rare.

> Instead you accuse them of slacking off.

I transparently stated the numbers where I got my anecdotal evidence from. I could go into detail of how and what individuals did or didn't do, but I don't see how that helps. Either take my word for it or you don't believe it anyways. And again, in my sample WFH folks were a minority, the majority was rather indifferent, and some preferred the office like me.

[lolinder]

This is such a classically offensive extrovert take. "Because I enjoy random and spontaneous interaction, everyone else must too." Introverts are just a conspiracy by the lazy.

I highly recommend reading Quiet.

I'm lucky enough to have found a team entirely composed of introverts. It's fully remote, and it's the most productive team I've ever been on. We have the most comprehensive test suite I've ever seen, the fastest rate of deployment, the fewest prod incidents, and I'm finally able to stay focused for a whole day without being interrupted for meaningless chit-chat.

That your team hired people who can't be trusted to self-manage is not a reflection on remote work, it's a reflection on your hiring process.

[iforgotpassword]

And your team is the norm rather than the exception? How about fields other than software dev? Just like the other replies, you pretend I said people who do better in WFH scenarios don't exist, at the same time you admit that you're "lucky enough" to have found such a team, admitting that it is in fact the exception.

[lolinder]

> Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.

This reads as though you called about half of the people here liars.

If you didn't mean to imply that most of the people here arguing for WFH are really trying to preserve their chance to slack off, I would read back over your post and consider changing your language, because it's pretty obvious that most people who read it took it that way. You can't blame other people for misinterpreting you when that misinterpretation is the most common way to read what you wrote. :)

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

One of my previous teams had little to do with software at all. It was simple office processing. Zero physical presence needed. Now, some managers did want to stand over your should to badger you to 'speed up' review, but I would argue that this only introduced more issues ( you only make more mistakes with someone watching over your shoulder ).

There a lot of jobs like that. Phone customer service comes to mind as well.

Now, there are jobs that can't be remote ( butcher for one ), but we shouldn't pretend its just development that benefits from remote.

[JohnFen]

> the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.

People who just want to slack off will do that regardless of whether or not they're working in the office.