[EmilStenstrom]

Sigh This debate has been going on for years now.

Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting

Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)

Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.

[000ooo000]

>Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.

Sounds like you think software development is like one of those stock photos with 8 people smiling and high-fiving around a whiteboard. Devs are (mostly) nerds. Nerds have been collaborating in the online world for decades. They somehow managed to achieve things and build genuine friendships without ever being crammed into an open office - crazy but true. Everytime I hear someone say/suggest "dev needs to happen in person", all I can picture is a PHB.

[pitched]

I really, strongly believe that if devs were building genuine friendships with their team mates remotely, there would be no RTO. I have only ever seen the opposite: people are distancing from each other more than ever. Aren’t we in a “loneliness epidemic”?

[000ooo000]

The first thing to know about genuine friendships is that they usually don't form when forced. Sticking 6 devs from different cultures, generations and seniorities in a room and saying "ok be friends now" is wishful thinking, the kind of simplistic shit you usually get out of management. To think that RTO is a solution to this is naive, sorry to be blunt. It has far more to do with who you hire. Lazy/incompetent management would prefer the easier RTO mandate, as usual.

[pitched]

You can only incentivize the behaviour you want. It can’t be forced. RTO does do this in a stronger way than fully remote, in second-order ways. Simplistic as it might be, if those are the only tools available, those are the ones that will be used. It’s been five years since the pandemic now and a better way hasn’t been found yet.

[mtrovo]

In the end it's all about friction, communicating IRL is much easier and less constrained. You can make online work but you have to adjust your expectations of how much time something takes and optimise for a split between focus time and comms, which you don't have to worry too much in IRL, that works but you have to adjust your expectations of how many people are working together and how long it takes to cooperate and adjust course. So I guess you better find a team that makes this mindset work?

The main pet peeve I have is with the hybrid approach of having a single person remote where you have a constant battle of negotiating interactions between folks who hate interruptions and those who hate scheduling a meeting for a 10-minute chat.

Also taking a junior stance, a lot of us learned by just being around senior devs, when you just started you don't even know what you don't know, and learning by osmosis is huge.

[_petronius]

I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.

Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.

Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.

[olex]

RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.

[sublimefire]

> many teams actually perform better

the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research

[aeze]

I work together with my team and I socialize IRL with friends, family, or sometimes coworkers essentially every day of the week. I’ve been fully remote since 2018. Your comment makes no sense to me.

Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.

[PeterWhittaker]

Ditto, and I find that that socializing is higher value, because it is special: we made an effort to meet (and depending on one's WFH habits, that effort might be considerable), we didn't just shout "pub?" over the partition.

[pheggs]

> Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)

I disagree, this does not make any sense to me. You can work together with other people without being physically present, and you can socialize as well. We had regular after hour meetings online drinking beer.

[pitched]

“The medium is the message.” People who work remote become that person who doesn’t value their team, because that’s what the environment promotes. We work in companies because of the team and the community though, that is the whole point of them.

[hshdhdhj4444]

The arguments people make here are so strange. They could be true, but they pretend that (1) life before 2020 didn’t exist and 99% of companies from startups to large companies didn’t constantly work in a single location, (2) companies weren’t already paying premiums not just to hire in areas where their offices were but to pay people to relocate from cheaper areas to where their offices were instead of just paying them a lower salary to work out of the LCOL place, (3) that there isn’t a massive amount of economic literature on agglomeration effects and the advantages of being colocated while working.

If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.

I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.

[oytis]

If only there was a way to communicate remotely.