[Tabular-Iceberg]

This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing now.

They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.

It’s the worst of both worlds.

[saghm]

> They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.

Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.

[erikerikson]

Except we're largely talking about salaried employees who aren't paid by the hour.

[saghm]

My point isn't that this is likely to happen today with software engineers, but that companies will 100% make decisions to improve their bottom lines at the expense of the well-being of their employees in the absence of other factors preventing this. Wasting time of salaried employees on commutes is a fairly tame version of that compared to what's happened historically, and I used an extreme example because my argument is that the main difference between then and now isn't companies fundamentally caring more about their employees, but improved safeguards for workers. Outside of those safeguards, sadly I'd find it more surprising if companies _didn't_ push to the absolute limit of what they could get away with rather than actually considering whether what they were doing was reasonable.

[erikerikson]

Thank you for moderating and clarifying a bit.

An example I would suggest is the push for "always more" no matter how much has been given.

Employer: "Great job succeeding in delivering our release death march on time! You are all the best!"

Us: "Comp time to rest?"

Employer: .oO(awkward choice employee...) "You agreed to a full time position, it will be fine for you to work your normal 40 and do make work."

That I've experienced almost that directly. Not in every role but it did happen. That particular company lied to me about the role too so I ended up leaving.

The thing that concerns me is that we start with these overly strong statements. The next stage is some of us become convinced of them. After that some of those transition to believing companies are obliged to them and start behaving accordingly. But these beliefs are bad for business and everyone involved. They create iterative counter solving games that reduce satisfaction and productivity. While I've always done my best by my employers, the concrete delivery of that effort has varied based on external factors but mostly the health of the work environment. No one has gotten as much of of me as startups that set a clear goal and let me work.

[TeMPOraL]

They may not be paid by the hour, but they're being graded by the hour.

It may be beneficial to the company to save overall "company time" at expense of wasting time for many individual employees, but I don't think this analysis accounts for the costs of people leaving or being fired. Both of those are very costly, but they're step changes and hard to attribute to any specific cause.

[erikerikson]

I've been evaluated half yearly or annually, never hourly that I've known.

Do you work in HR?

[tanjtanjtanj]

The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour.

Think about what the average salaried person (especially outside of tech) might get dinged on either explicitly or implicitly. Come in at 10:00 every day? Not being "seen" enough in your seat or around the office? Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack? Jira/Github statistics? These are not things that do not reflect a salaried worker's output but you're still getting evaluated by them on an minute by minute, hour by hour, day by ay basis.

[joquarky]

> Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack?

This has got to be an ADA violation for someone with ADHD.

Not that it matters anymore.

[erikerikson]

This has sincerely not been my experience, even as my role has blended into management adjacency over the years.

[goda90]

My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO.

But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to chat in person, etc were all encouraged. Holding a meeting over Teams when everyone was in office became almost a taboo. Even team building activities and events saw an increase in frequency.

[jvanderbot]

I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to.

In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time.

That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling someone from their flow to ask for help. And otherwise being around a bunch of hard workers helped build motivation.

It just doesn't translate though. No work environment I've experienced recreated that spirit of autonomy and esprit de corps. Instead you get open offices and a ton of "calls" and meetings subdividing time. Add in some boss standing over your shoulder and you bet I'll take my basement office over that any time.

[perrygeo]

I agree. Those offline jobs are highly productive and fun. I'd like to think they still exist somewhere. They did 15 years ago. But I'm afraid a whole generation of software professionals is growing up without ever experiencing it, just taking the current state of the industry as the norm.

I like the way you frame it as an "offline only" work environment. Offline vs online does seem to be the main distinction here.

It's not the remoteness. It's the apps and the intellectually-lazy culture they encourage. Slack, Jira, Github, Docs, Sheets, etc. So much of modern work is navigating those byzantine digital games to score virtual communication points, rather than actually communicating anything of value. Being terminally online is almost guaranteed to lead to presence monitoring, stilted communication, territoriality, lack of clarity, poor product quality and dehumanization. It can happen remotely, it can happen in the office. Doesn't matter. The app-ification of all communication lines is what's harmful.

At some point, you need to stop with the digital games and just use your brain. Commit to the deep work of communicating. There are a shocking number of people who would rather shuffle tickets around all day than read or write a single coherent paragraph. Thinking in slack responses and Jira tickets is a symptom of brain rot.

[tass]

My most productive ever was being in a room of 2-4 people working on the same thing. Small conversations were encouraged but anything unrelated was taken outside.

I wish I could find that again.

[woleium]

It’s magic isn’t it! And then it’s gone, and you realize you didn’t appreciate it for what it was when you had it. I am sure i will say this about youth when i am older (still) too ;)

[leoqa]

I experienced this environment a few times: when I was in school in the CS lab, when I was working at AWS on a research team building a database and when I was working at a startup (early days, like 5 people). The startup scaled to 100s and we lost the spirit. Since then, it's been FANG with no spirit and now I've been WFH for 5 years, effectively stuck in a covid lifestyle.

Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.

[sanderjd]

Yeah the problem is that as soon as you're doing something that is bigger than like 8 people, it just doesn't really work anymore. Now people sitting in the room with you must coordinate with people sitting outside the room, and so either you have to listen to that, which is distracting, or they have to go elsewhere to do meetings and calls, which breaks the whole magic of the setup. In a big or even medium-sized company, it's nearly impossible to subdivide teams so well that you have small teams like this who are able to work with total autonomy for most of their time.

This is actually something I'm cautiously optimistic about with the advent of AI tooling. Maybe we can make a 5-10 person company work for a much wider range of businesses now? I think it needs to be planned from the start, as all the pressure from investors and just the status quo is to grow headcount at least to an order of magnitude or so larger than that.

But I do think I'd love to work in a very small business (or partnership, or co-op) that is explicitly not trying to grow bigger than a team all working directly together.

[wrs]

When I got the opportunity to build out an office for my own startup, I had it designed with different environments: an open office in the front, a big conference room, a few medium size rooms (for solo focus, meetings, or temporary workgroups), a café/meeting area in the back, and a nap room in the quietest corner (with a couch). All the meeting rooms had a big screen TV to connect to meeting rooms in our other office.

So on any given day, you could pick the appropriate environment to work in, while still being within casual reach of everybody else for those impromptu conversations. and of course people could have lunch together in the café.

I thought the temporary workgroup offices were a great idea. A few people working on a new feature could move in there for a couple of weeks to get focused time together, and have daylong conversations without bugging everybody else.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

Are these jobs at all attainable by people of unremarkable intelligence and aptitude?

In principle I don’t see why less clever people like myself can’t get together and solve less challenging problems in the same way.

[ironmanszombie]

"Opt in" is exactly what I expect of people when I need help. The closest implementation of your white board is me using Teams to DM people for help - when they have time. The expectation is they'd reply once they're free instead of instantly replying with a meeting invite.

[sneak]

I’m quite the opposite. Whiteboards are terrible. The most productive and aligned teams I’ve ever worked on formed on irc. We don’t even know each others’ first names.

Imagine if the Linux kernel took this approach.

[intothemild]

Lol, that sounds like hell on earth to me. Do they allow anything for Autistic people? or similar?

Cause that's just... the worst.

[pydry]

It's about maintaining a feeling of control, it's not about collaboration. Thats just the lie they tell to RTO.

Ive worked in:

1) collaborative in office

2) uncollaborative in office

3) collaborative wfh

4) uncollaborative wfh

Personally i found 4 to be the most tortuous (because of ADHD), but 2 isnt much better.

1 and 3 i think are roughly equally good while you're there but wfh has so many ancillary benefits like not commuting that it wins overall.

After experiencing 4 and before I experienced 3 I actually desperately wanted to RTO.

I think a collaborative environment is only quite tangentially related to inhabiting the same space, though. It's more about culture, trust and shared goals.

[drzaiusx11]

for me, #3 is the ideal, but communication and collaboration being primarily async is the key. face to face has a place but 90% of the time it “could/should have been an email”, and just exhausts me like nothing else… (“high functioning” AuDHDer)

[AbstractH24]

The trouble with 3 is that while achievable, it requires an incredibly high degree of intentionality and strong leadership.

[drzaiusx11]

i don’t see how leadership has anything to do with it, at least any more than any other collaborating members of the team. all parties need “good enough” communication skills, which can be learned (to an extent). poor communication skills regardless of in office or remote will tank a project and if systemic, a company

[AbstractH24]

Because in a fully remote environment it is easy to default to having transactional relationships and only when a job responsibility requires them. Just like I do with a customer service rep.

You don’t see your coworkers in the hall, overhear them talking to their kid, or talk while working. Certainly don’t by default interact with folks who work in parallel.

Not saying that in office means these things will certainly occur. But because by default these interactions don’t occur, the likelihood of them happening organically is quite low.

[drzaiusx11]

i have many personal connections to my remote colleagues, but i don’t see how that’s required or relevant for going beyond “transactional” work. i could be off base, but i think you mean working the minimum that is required for getting “the job done”. depending on your intended work life balance, this may or may not be a desirable outcome. obviously employers want more, but that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to it. most things in life are transactional, at least from my experience. ymmv

[pydry]

1 and 3 both do.

[AbstractH24]

Certainly

But the bar is even higher for 3 than 1 and likelihood of it occurring organically lower.

[whatnow37373]

The commute isn’t paid, so who cares. Let them drive 4 hours a day. But don’t you dare stealing a few minutes in idle talk, because yes, not being valuable every second you are on company premises is stealing. You should feel bad. Now put on your headphones and work through your task list, you miserable ant.

[AbstractH24]

As much as I dislike the isolation of WFH, particularly since leaving the job I had pre-2020 that began in office and started doing fractional work at fully remote companies, I keep reminding myself that offices aren’t what they used to be.

Also, the kind of relationships I had in office as a 25 year old grinding it out on a sales floor aren’t going to be the ones I’d find as a 35 year old in revenue operations.

[lionkor]

That sounds awful. I go to the office to chat with everyone, it's incredible how much work gets done when you can just walk over to someone and debug or rubbery ducky in real time.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

Yes. I got fired from that place for being too negative and now work somewhere much more sane.

The CEO to his credit went on a campaign to improve the culture, but middle management obstinately refused to change a single thing. I recently heard he got fired by the board too, go figure.

[stitched2gethr]

Remote work did a number on middle management. When many of them realized that if they aren't the strategic brain at the top, and they aren't individual contributers, and they can supervise butts in chais, then they aren't actually providing that much value.

[firoso]

So adapt. Learn to curate your team and their work. Lead by helping people organize, getting obstacles out of their way, shielding them from alarmist BS from higher management, and stop worrying about butts in seats. Focus on agreements, goals, commitments, accountability, growth, and coaching.

It's not that hard.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Everybody is different. When I visit the office sometimes, I do it to socialize and talk about things not related to work mainly. And then I get back to do the actual work. If I need to communicate with someone, I simply ask them for their time - they can get back to me whenever they are free. This system serves me and my coworkers well but it's obvious there are many people who prefer synchronous in-person communication for most tasks.

[lionkor]

I don't prefer the in-person communication personally, but I know it's more productive for me, so I do it and end up preferring it. The same way I prefer clean code; it makes my and the companies life easier. Makes more money. I'm German, and it's painfully obvious.

[suzzer99]

Working in an open office on cool stuff with legitimate friends was the best work experience I've ever had by far. Most days it didn't even feel like work. Now I wfh full time with people who are just coworkers and I'm miserable.

[TeMPOraL]

That's the core aspect of my open-office experience too. Working together on cool stuff with legitimate friends? Best thing ever. Take away even one of {together, cool stuff, legitimate friends} - just a single thing - and open-office instantly becomes psychological torture for me, because for some reason, my mind parses this as feeling under threat, and gives me large amount of anxiety to deal with.

[roland35]

I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team.

When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.

[AbstractH24]

I’m part of the minority of folks who think the value of in office outweighs the cost. Particularly amongst those who aren’t in management.

But only if you are working in close proximity to those working on the same projects and leadership going up at least two levels. (leadership, not management)

Why large companies with globally distributed teams see value in having employees in office sitting side by side in isolation is beyond me.

[keybored]

That you say “two levels” suggests formal hierarchy, which is management.

[AbstractH24]

I mean, not just the people who ensure ICs show up to work and complete their task, but the people who are responsible for determining strategy, vision, and direction.

Because there is bidirectional benefit in those people having casual interactions with ICs. Both as individuals and as a group.

[asdf6969]

> the value of in office outweighs the cost

For who? Your employer keeps all the value and only employees pay the cost. Why would I want this as an employee?

[darkwater]

Bingo if you are in your late 20s or early 30s. But then life and priorities change...

[szszrk]

I feel a bit like that, when we in the team started to introduce agile practices. Corporate agile practices, of course.

And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension...

Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers.

I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.

[swader999]

Volunteer for something your interested in locally on the side. It's the only way I stay sane.

[mr_toad]

I pretty sure that Teams has tanked productivity in some offices. It used to be that arranging a meeting required finding a physical space. Now some people are spending their days in back-to-back teams meetings and never get any actual work done.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

The counter to this is that you can actually have a 5 or 10 minute teams call which was all that was needed to resolve the issue / answer the question / or whatever the meeting was about. Whereas, if it was a physical meeting in a booked room then it would easily expand to fill 30 or 60min or whatever time the room was booked for.

I see this myself. I get a teams call with a manager and a few others, get something sorted and then end the call. Boom. done. The same in a physical meeting would have been a huge time suck.

Having said that. I like being in the office because there are tons of coffee room and hallway conversations that would not have happened if WFH, but were actually really beneficial to keeping everyone informed about whats happening.

[chubot]

People used to have phone calls for this! It was on the way out even 15 years ago, but a simple telephone call can get people unblocked pretty efficiently

[Tabular-Iceberg]

But then Teams will only let you book calls that start and end at the hour and half hour, making everything either back-to-back or with gaps too long for breaks and too short for focus work.

Teams goes out of its way to create colossal amounts of waste by design. Cui bono?

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Teams does have the same time booking quanta as physical rooms, but (at least in my experience), the expectation and norms around a teams call is to end when your done and sign off. Whereas in a meeting room you get the "ok, so that's resolved. We have the room for another 25minutes, so what else is going on with everyone?" kind of vibe and we all stay there for the full time block.

[mrbluecoat]

I work far more effectively remotely in isolation.

The article is specifically about those with ADD/ADHD, not a generalization.

[firoso]

I have ADHD. I doubled my productivity going remote and working from a well curated home office.

Charging station for my phone just inside the room, good sitting/standing desk and chair, good laptop, with a dock, 3 displays. A desktop with a vertical monitor I use for teams chat, technical documents, and work management only. Second laptop used for secure prod access tucked under a monitor riser until needed. Whiteboard. Couch with a small station for engineering journaling. I also take video calls from the couch often. Treadmill and elliptical, TV for watching YouTube tech videos while I'm taking a fitness break, bookshelves for my collected engineering journals and useful books. Roughly 275 sqft. Virtual body doubling helps sometimes but is hardly needed.

[anshumankmr]

Yeah I spent 2 hours in commute to attend Teams calls.. yay?

[firoso]

I am ADHD. I work remotely. My productivity went up substantially after leaving the open office. Body doubling is one of many tools, and it is not a required one. I do however often livestream my coding work in an open teams chat meeting and hang out with others im working with relatively often.

[dep_b]

God yes. I’ve spent 8 years working remote before the pandemic hit.

Only after that I started coming into offices again because my local freelance customers demanded it.

Spent most days looking at a bunch of nerds with headphones, being ignored until lunch. I had to drag people out of their cocoons to have conversations. Nobody had any collaboration lined up the days I came in.

I mean I see the collaboration thing, but most teams are more autistic working in-office than I was working remote. Apparently I was the only person reaching to other people all the time?

[Qwertious]

You can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the tiger.

[swader999]

Meh, we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the AI managers take over. Keystroke, app usage, bugs, velocity, eye tracking, stool samples... All logged and dash boarded in real time.

[eru]

If the AI is any good, it won't need the stool samples: it can infer all that data well enough just from your webcam.

[LadyCailin]

“Privacy regulations aren’t important, because I have nothing to hide.”

[Tabular-Iceberg]

The real value of AI is if they could make one that is capable of looking at dashboards. So much time is wasted making dashboards that nobody cares enough to look at.