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.

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.

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?

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

Is making everyone commute again good for CO2 emissions?

Zero that would be missed?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I prefer coworking for the “body doubling” effect. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But it hasn't happened yet. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it does happen, maybe it's just a matter of time. And personally I hope it does happen, as remote work is better for the planet and regional inequality.

But the trend seems to be more companies going back in person. Maybe they're all behaving irrationally or trying to prop up commercial real-estate or something. But it's also worth acknowledging the uncomfortable possibility that high-quality output from world-class rockstar devs isn't as critical for making successful products as coordination between perfectly average developers, and the latter being slightly easier in person is enough to offset the costs.

That's the trend with the megacorps but almost every startup that's been created in the past 3 years is fully remote or at least remote friendly (for the reasons we've both outlined with regard to access to talent and lack of office overhead).

> But it's also worth acknowledging the uncomfortable possibility that high-quality output from world-class rockstar devs isn't as critical for making successful products as coordination between perfectly average developers.

> I'm having trouble filling positions and we're in a major tech hub and can afford to pay near the top of the range

I have to say that in all of my years of management I've never struggled to hire amazing developers. Some of that is that I will only work on interesting problems and it's easy to attract great devs in that situation. I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to hire local to where I'm physically located though. That would be an issue in both crowded markets like the valley or non-crowded markets (with little local senior talent).

Have you ever tried building a purely remote team? The number one thing I'd recommend is to focus on trust. Remove as much process as possible and trust your team to do what you hired them for. If they're not succeeding, it's possible the wrong people were hired, which indicates that the wrong managers were hired.

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.

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.

> 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.

This sounds like a management problem. If you have productive people and that productivity isn't leading to success, there's a bigger problem in the company at the strategy and product definition level.

> Perhaps it requires better managers than we have.

That's the thing, if a company insists on working from the office it's a sign that they have bad management. Not every remote company has good management but the inability to manage remotely is a sign of bad management.

How many times have you had teams in both categories that were mostly the same people and environment for long enough to judge this?

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.

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.

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.

I have seen just as much of the reverse.

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. ;)

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

10 might actually be 2 hours, but whatever.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Then why is my performance review always individual?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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".

I'll take wfh, thanks.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.....

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

Sounds like slacking off to me.

> 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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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

Don't get me wrong, I love working from home as well and never want to go back to the office full time, but home is full of distractions. Everything from cooking lunch, to deciding to quickly throw on a load of laundry to talking with daughter about her day when she comes home from school are all distractions I don't have att the office.

> My 'commute' (a 30 minute walk)

Most Americans have a 30 minute drive at best, and state departments of transportation and the federal government are doing everything they possibly can to make sure more cars are sold, more highways are built, and lanes are widened because they'll be damned if someone is going to wake up with no car related debt and walk to work.

No state DOT is turning down a lane widening project, or a new highway build, or a "smart lane" because their jobs depend on it, even if it comes at the expense of us all. They really are not departments of transportation but just departments of highways and cars.

Recently I joined a community input/comment session regarding a $44 million "Smart Lane" here in Columbus. I learned two things:

1) These comment periods are a formality. A state's DOT will never turn down a big project.

2) The state DOTs are focused on metrics like maintaining existing commute times.

My city in Kentucky at least has been making all sorts of headway on multiple major "road diet" projects. Many of those projects are probably more expensive in the short term and maybe even in the long term, so it seems good for business too.

These "Road Diets" are amazing: fewer lanes, dedicated turn lanes, dedicated curb space for parking (and plants!). Traffic is safer, oddly slower but ultimately faster (median speeds are down but throughput is higher and accidents generally fewer; all commute times are better than the multi-lane equivalent times despite cars moving individually slower on average; fewer stops and grid blocks).

To maintain fewer lanes at faster throughput, they seem to need a lot more concrete and lot more road painting and that keeps jobs employed.

I don't know how you sell Columbus on the idea, I barely know how we sold ourselves on the idea, and I do know how much controversy it has been for some of the earliest streets to get put on such a "road diet". (Businesses looking at the plans complained that they'd lose a lot of car traffic and thus a lot of business. Results were mostly the opposite: slower median speeds meant more awareness of local businesses people were passing by. More dedicated street parking meant more people actually stopping at businesses. Slower median speeds, with sidewalks more protected by street parking and other furniture, also meant more pedestrian foot traffic, because they felt safer, something once long thought vanished never to return for some of these streets.)

I think states DOTs differ pretty widely. In Texas and I imagine Ohio, yeah they're very car oriented. But where I live, a lane widening project was just rejected because of how expensive it would be and instead they are using funding towards improving other transportation solutions that don't involve cars.

In the past CDOT has been heavily car and highway oriented, but that seems to be changing slowly. Maybe other states are also considering different options to cars.

https://coloradosun.com/2022/05/16/i-25-no-expansion-central...

Most work places don't have a "quiet section".

The two worst work environments I've been in were an open office situation, where the noise and motion was far too intrusive for me to get anything done, and another place that had a strongly enforced "silence" rule. That was perhaps even worse. The office had no noise at all except for the incessant noise of typing.

I need something in between those two extremes, I think.

I struggle to work well from home, so renting my own nearby office worked really well for my productivity.

Later I also travelled (pre-COVID) and rented co-working spaces which had great benefits, and certainly bet working from a café or hotel.

A 30 minute walking commute is INSANELY rare, as is a quiet section, as even is a office cafe. I'd be far less pissed about forced in-office work if I had any of those things.

A 25-minute commute is common, at least in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d... (I expect many of them commute by public transport, which can be a bit less enjoyable)

Commuting is not equal. Short vs Long commutes, commuting where you have to drive, commuting where you physically exert yourself, commuting where you meander through a park or market on the way to the office and leisurely have breakfast on the way... these are all commutes but they might not all be experienced by everyone the same. Some people hate driving to work, other people have a sports car and love it, and some people might not mind sitting in rush hour traffic with some good music and a bong in their lap.

Personally I love a 15-25 minute bike ride to work. Nothing like it to wake up, clear your mind and get energized for the work day, and the ride home can be a furious workout to destress, or slow and blissful. But that is me.

A) Not all commutes are bad B) Cities should probably be designed to make commuting better (but that may require less cars and more public transportation and better urban planning) C) Some commutes can be good. D) Long term consequences of decreased activity and social interaction may not be apparent yet.

Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy? And on the flip side, if companies want productive employees over the age of 28, and deliberately don’t want to be remote, maybe they should start providing offices instead of desk clusters…

It was awful for productivity. One in-person day per week would have been OK, but the other time in the office was a waste. The only work that got done that day could have been done via a few scheduled 30 minute 1:1’s.

If management must force people into the same spot, I’d suggest considering a “Thursday we grab beers or go hiking, etc at noon” schedule.

It would be better for morale and productivity, and also cheaper than maintaining an office. They could even give everyone a free coworking account.

Because during COVID a lot of companies started saying that's their new philosophy and are reneging on it now that they feel they can, and a lot of us shuffled around during that time. People hired onto remote teams and are getting rug pulled now.

> you are in a remote role, and are now reneging

It's completely unreasonable for a company to force you to move, if a company asks that of you start looking for a new job immediately. There are companies out there that respect your personal life and don't want to consume it.

> Because during COVID a lot of companies started saying that's their new philosophy and are reneging on it now that they feel they can, and a lot of us shuffled around during that time. People hired onto remote teams and are getting rug pulled now.

Twitter is one of those companies. Any company that didn't say "you can work remote temporarily", but now wants to force RTO is also going back on their social (and potentially legal) contract with their employees.

I'm sure there are other but those are the two I know off the top of my head that promised work from home "forever" then went back on their word.

Well this is definitely not true.

My experience working from home was that it didn't change the amount of meetings at all.

I notice that people are much friendlier after we meet F2F. They remember that there’s a human who they know and have hung out with. This feeling fades as time passes.

I don’t know what the right answer is, and I feel a little hypocritical living abroad and managing my team. But some things are definitely lost by solely working outside the office.

We just spent a 3 day weekend at a casino, with food, drinks and some activities. I feel like there’s a big difference in the way people behave towards each other before and after the weekend.

This. My coworkers are colleagues. We have friendly professional relationships. But they are not my friends.

You get a little socialization going, you give people the freedom to choose, you still save money in total AND because the "hybrid" isnt randomly distributed, you might actually get all those "useful" communications happening.

You can only get quiet time if it is properly managed, and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home.

The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. A private space in the office is under the CIO’s control. I’ll let you guess how often they think a private space is worth spending money on.

> You're on the hook for all the costs of an office

Honestly, I'd consider that a small price to pay to be able to avoid going to the office.

To be honest, working in public spaces like that is just as bad, if not worse, for me than working in an office.

Anything else is just unprofessional, nothing to do with working from home in general.

> in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces

was largely unsuccessful almost everywhere and the trend was for more open, more distracting spaces as time progressed. It was to the point that complaining about open offices & wishing we could complain about cubicles like our predecessors was a tired topic on HN.