[sokoloff]

> If every dev is not ready to fight for Remote...We have to fight to keep it...Remote or Die.

I had devs quit because we went remote. I have other devs still here but expressing a clear preference for more of an in-office experience.

Not everyone has the same preferences and not every dev wants to work remotely. We shouldn't be surprised when those differences of opinion play out in the remote vs hybrid vs in-office spectrum.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I always hear of this legion of office lovers but when you ask for actual number splits it ends up perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly being that the vast majority of people want 100% remote. All you office people can go work together then, don’t make it miserable for the rest of us

[majormajor]

> I always hear of this legion of office lovers but when you ask for actual number splits it ends up perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly being that the vast majority of people want 100% remote. All you office people can go work together then, don’t make it miserable for the rest of us

A comment like this making claims about what happens when you see actual numbers should link to some actual numbers...

Anecdotally, my social circle is increasingly preferring hybrid, which loses one of the most-frequently-touted benefits of remote (make your home wherever you want, even potentially super cheap real estate). IMO remote will likely hang on at bigger, cog-in-assembly-line type information jobs, but some sort of frequent in-person meetups will be hugely valuable for high-ambiguity/collaboration/creative work. For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Here you go:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statisti....

Note that this is Forbes, who is probably going to be biased towards in office work so the actual numbers from an unbiased source would probably be even more dramatic

> For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise

Why draw such a false dichotomy here? This doesn’t feel like an argument in good faith. The company I work for does onsites twice a year and gives people optionally the budget to meet in person once a quarter beyond that pretty much anywhere they want. I’ve never felt that I needed more than that to do high impact work

[likenesstheft]

> but some sort of frequent in-person meetups will be hugely valuable for high-ambiguity/collaboration/creative work

This is some vanilla scrum master bull shit, this isn’t how products or code get built.

[lsmeducation]

It's because they are straight up lying. Like c'mon, you get your OWN PRIVATE BATHROOM when you work from home. The benefits are so obvious, I wonder if the in-office people are legitimate trolls at times.

[jcranmer]

One reason people like me might prefer working in the office: I don't have a room in my apartment that I can turn into a home office.

(Also, in the home I grew up in, I never had a private bathroom, nor did my parents. What kind of luxurious abode do you live in, and why do you assume that everyone has the same living conditions as you?)

[lsmeducation]

Okay, you're on team office, got it.

This cardboard box living individual here has such terrible living conditions he longs to breath the air of commercial real estate. Does your bathroom have a stall? No right?

If you rent, your apartment comes with a private bathroom. If you have a roommate, at most one other person shares it with you. That's a pretty private bathroom. You ever been on line to use the bathroom before in the office? Do you think its fun to take a shit with 10 other people in the bathroom with you? lol

Stick a desk in the corner of your apartment and voila, home office.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Decent companies that offer remote will offer to cover the costs of coworking space for people like your use case. The company I work for does. It’s not office as the only alternative

[jprete]

I was happy to go back to the office because working at home is bad for my ability to concentrate, and I also need the personal contact with others. But my particular desk location has not given me noise problems or anything. I also intentionally moved to make my commute a 15-minute walk, because it's better for me to not spend tons of time commuting; I'm aware this isn't a serious option for 99% of people.

I've avoided talking about negative impacts from others' WFH because I don't want to encourage the company to take it away from them.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Also there is a bit of critical mass problem where if you’re something like 50% hybrid or more it suddenly is worse off from a career perspective for WFH people. What I mean by that is that the in office people end up inadvertently getting advantage over people that are remote in meetings, career advancement, etc.

Hybrid is tough to do right to prevent problems like this from happening.

I think the ideal model is 100% remote, cover the costs of a coworking space, do mandatory onsite sat least biannually, give people optionally the resources to meet with each other more often than that, and promote a culture where you meet frequently to collaborate remotely. Like we use Donut app on slack to randomly pair program every week and it works great

[RowanH]

Ran a dev team in NZ (which had some brutal lockdowns). I would say it was about 1 in 20 wanted to be at the office. Even to the point of almost twisting our arms on lockdowns to be back in the office. That leaves 19 out of 20 on varying states of happiness being at home. On balance obviously most people prefer to WFH.

The ones that didn't : - Lonely - Impossible home environment to work in (noise/kids/distractions/lack of good physical environment)

I reckon it would probably even out in the long term to about 9 out of 10 preferring to WFH.

[edit - should I add I left ~18 months later to start my own SaaS and love WFH, can't imagine ever paying rent on an office again]

[0cf8612b2e1e]

But but the free coffee! Sometimes there are even doughnuts.

[lsmeducation]

The Remote contingent needs to fight harder than the office contingent because the office paradigm has been the dominant paradigm up until now.

In-office work will realistically be seen as a niche when it's all said and done imho. Similar to LAN parties. It's not the way most people want to do things.

Time will tell I guess. But thanks for your anecdote, I hope as time goes on, we begin to see what a niche anecdote it will become.

[hotnfresh]

I’ve just recently encountered a company with a culture that doesn’t interact so well with remote work, and it’s been eye opening. Lots of preference for talking (in person, or call) as soon as a message exchange goes past about two messages, when often what needs to happen is one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly—the talking doesn’t help, either, just wastes more time. Awful weirdly-restrictive chat room organization, which is shocking considering nearly-leaderless online communities manage to arrange those kinds of things better. Everything important gets posted to one-on-one chats or ephemeral and invisible-to-outsiders small group direct messages. The effect is they’ve accidentally made a bunch of stuff opaque and secret that really, really should not be. It’s poison for collaboration.

I also get the impression some folks here just kinda… aren’t comfortable with written language. Reading or writing it.

It’s so weird to see, but some of the folks who’ve been living this kind of job-life 10+ years, now I get how they think remote can’t possibly be as productive as in-person—but it’s mostly due to dumb mistakes that are also harming collaboration in the office. Most of them have no idea the place is doing things so entirely wrong, or how much better it can be with some simple tweaks.

[smeej]

It is absolutely incredible to me the number of people in professional roles who cannot read and write coherently, even when English is their native language.

I cannot tell you how many meetings I've had where someone told me I "wasn't communicating clearly" and I asked them to read the unclear message back to me so I could understand what would make it clearer for them.

And then I find out they can't read, at least not fluently. They either skip key words altogether or mistake them for other words.

I'm convinced fewer than half of American adults could read a random book out loud, fluidly, without preparation.

[trane_project]

I looked this up and found this report: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill.

I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns.

Edit: Found the source of this figures (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-...) which has data from more contries in the OECD. Japan scores the highest, followed by Finland.

[sokoloff]

> Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess)

The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention (OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5."

The PIAAC definitions of each level are here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_... and I would estimate that extremely few daily tasks would require (or even be aided by) level 5 literacy proficiency.

[smeej]

Most of my experience is in customer-facing roles, and I would argue that reading a customer email chain where they try to describe what is happening, sometimes with pictures, requires level 4 understanding.

You often end up with multiple documents (several emails, pictures, logs). There's often competing information (customers are speculating about what's wrong, but they likely include lots of other information because they don't actually know). And you definitely need background knowledge about the product.

Add in translating that into a bug report for the engineering team? A successful high-level customer support agent needs level 5 reading ability.

But my experience asking questions of my teammates in the company Slack channels tells me very few of them are even actually at level 3.

[steveBK123]

> one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly

This is exactly my observation on zoom/meeting heavy cultures

A lot of people cannot put their wants & desires into the written word.

With a lot of these people I end up taking contemporaneous notes in a slack message to then send back to them.

[lsmeducation]

Okay, so why do you think that will get better in person? Just curious. Why is "lets meet in person" the go to solution? Look, the RTO people are LOUDER. Period.

They will win this fight if the Remote or Die crew doesn't get loud.

[hotnfresh]

I think in-person talking papers over a bunch of dysfunction, in this case, at enormous cost in still-much-worse-than-ideal productivity (plus the overhead of offices). But does let things get done more efficiently than if they tried to take that dysfunction into a heavily-remote environment.

It also, separately, masks it—people working in-person, but hobbled by bad communication patterns, at least look productive.

I’m not claiming this is good, mind you, but that it’s made me understand at least one (I suspect large) segment of the “remote can’t be as good as in-person” side of the argument. If this is how they think “serious business” should or must function, no wonder they’re skeptical of remote work. Meanwhile they’re actually just organizationally bad at communication, in general.

[lsmeducation]

Alright, I guess.

In-office had a long time to evolve (half a century I'd say). Remote work kind of only had the COVID years. It's a baby in an incubator. The RTO stuff is kind of like infanticide. So while I understand your perspective, from a war point of view, we have no choice but to protect this baby. They want to cut this experiment off asap. Every little anecdote, every little corporate RTO plan, every little CEO saying shit, is just chipping away at such an infant life.

Give it the same chance the office bullshit had, which was decades. I kind of have to be militant about this. Thanks for the other side, but this baby gotta be kept alive.

If your team sucks, your team sucks. Doesn't matter if you're in office, or out of office.

[hotnfresh]

I’m on your side. I just think understanding the “enemy” is usually more beneficial than not.

[edit] to explain, I’m using this information to push the organization toward improvements that I can sell without mentioning remote work, but which, if adopted, will surely cause people here to notice a smaller difference between WFH days and in-office days. It may take a while, but this should reduce reluctance to allow long stretches of, or indefinite, remote work.

[ecshafer]

I don’t think the RTO people are louder, what they are is more powerful. You have a lot of upper management and executives that are RTO people, for whatever reasons that may be. But they hold a lot more power than the ic that like remote.

[lsmeducation]

The LGBTQ community got these people flying rainbow flags. You're telling me the actual IC community can't even get them to respect this platform? Maybe we have some learning to do.

Covid is over, so unless we start fighting better about this, they are absolutely going to chip away at this.

[likenesstheft]

A culture around frequent calls is toxic. It reeks of insecurity from some people who are afraid of paper trails.

[mmmm2]

Sure, not everyone wants to go remote, but many people do. Those of us who like remote work want to preserve it as an option.

There's already resistance from companies with leases and cities with "empty" downtowns. I'm hopefully the change will stick despite that.

[vsareto]

Higher costs of living make relocation and in-office work more restrictive, but that isn't a big concern for remote. Same for the travel burden. It would be very natural to see remote salaries become lower than in-office salaries on convenience, while in-office salaries go up because of that, but that's not really happening.

So while you should choose work for your preferences when you can, you shouldn't let companies gain advantages like under compensating in-office workers. After all, they've already mostly taken away actual offices for individuals.

This fight could be fought on that principle alone.