> how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it.
IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text.
I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way.
The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked back to the office (or out of the company)
Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well. The remote teams I worked with were now a mix of people who could work well remotely and people who wanted to work remote but tried to force communication to happen like we were back in the office: Meetings for everything. Demands to “jump on a quick call” when a few Slack messages would have done the job. Then there were the people who read “Four Hour Work Week” and thought they were going to do their jobs from their iPhone while traveling the world or at the ski resort.
I don’t know. Having seen the before and after it doesn’t feel so surprising that remote work faltered when applied indiscriminately to everyone. The best remote teams I work with to this day are still the ones who know how to communicate in that old school IRC style where communication flowed easily and everyone was on the same page, not trying to play office games through Slack.
Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? So much of the discourse on this topic (from either side) seems to just boil down to generalizing ones own work experience as the norm and making inferences based on that. Maybe the reason it's so contentious is that people's experiences with remote versus in person work are not going to be expansive enough to be able to draw any conclusions about whether one of them is "better" for arbitrary groups of people, and we should just recognize that outside of teams one has personal experience with, we're just as likely to be incorrect as we are correct about how they'd work best.
> Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well?
Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers.
Working remote is a skill that must be learned. Many people have barely done it at all before their first WFH job. It doesn't come as naturally. It's not a symmetric comparison.
> Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age.
I'm not sure what your experiences were like in school, but during my early years, there were drastic differences between how much different classmates thrived or struggled in highly social environments. Just because everyone is forced to interact in a certain way doesn't mean that it works well for everyone equally.
> It doesn't come as naturally.
I'd argue that it doesn't come as naturally to a lot of people to work in largely dense social environments either. To your own point, this is something that people are actively conditioned for, not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and I'd argue that even despite that it still leads to a pretty wide variety of outcomes for people at an individual level not in small part because of how suitable an environment like that is for each of them.
To me, this seems like a pretty fundamental disagreement in how much uniformity should be imposed on a population based on how well that proposed norm fits with the members of the population. I imagine that to people who disagree with me, the idea that many people might work better in seclusion than in a larger shared environment probably seems radical, but I've yet to see a justification for it as the rule rather than the exception that doesn't end up coming from an assumption that people who don't prefer this are a small minority that aren't worth changing things for. I don't have any clue what the actual number of people who don't fit the assumed norm are, but I don't find it nearly as easy to accept that the threshold at which point it's worth reconsidering how we do things is comfortably higher based on any of the arguments I've seen presented. Maybe this is due to my perception of what a fair threshold would be being lower than average, but most of the disagreements I've encountered seem to already stem from an assumption that the number of people who prefer to work in an office-like environment is high enough to be the basis of how things get run in the first place, and then extrapolate the threshold from that fact.
> Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers.
> Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well.
I think the realization was more that some people are simply there, either at the office or at home. Of course the experiment worked fine. Those people were already not doing much. Not doing much in a different location makes no difference.
IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text.
I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way.
The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked back to the office (or out of the company)
Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well. The remote teams I worked with were now a mix of people who could work well remotely and people who wanted to work remote but tried to force communication to happen like we were back in the office: Meetings for everything. Demands to “jump on a quick call” when a few Slack messages would have done the job. Then there were the people who read “Four Hour Work Week” and thought they were going to do their jobs from their iPhone while traveling the world or at the ski resort.
I don’t know. Having seen the before and after it doesn’t feel so surprising that remote work faltered when applied indiscriminately to everyone. The best remote teams I work with to this day are still the ones who know how to communicate in that old school IRC style where communication flowed easily and everyone was on the same page, not trying to play office games through Slack.