I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. There are some studies but they use estimations and proxies, carrying the same flaws as doing performance reviews based on lines of code.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
> Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach.
Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired. If someone wants to bail to a seaside town during the worst of winter, no problem.
People aren't forced to live in overpriced urban areas, they can live where they choose to!
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.
Since the pandemic began I have been putting under 3000 miles a year on my car. I am eating home cooked meals every day. Mid day I can walk down to the local grocery store and pick up food to cook later for dinner.
My QoL is insanely improved.
If I need maintenance work done (Late last year I bought a house that was built in the 1950s, so, yes, lots of that happening) I am here all day long if need be. I don't have to worry about when expensive packages are delivered, I am always here to pick them up. I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be. I can schedule doctors and dentists appointments at any time of the day and not have to take a day off of work to make them.
For many people with younger children (and therefore early evening bedtimes), having or not having a commute is not a difference of an hour or two of your day - it's the difference between spending time with your family during the week versus not at all. I've heard this from many friends (and some family) across different industries - hardly any have wanted to stick their heads above the parapet and single themselves out as being a problem.
I already empathised, but this whole thing has really thrown a light on what working parents (specifically those with primary care responsibilities like school pick-ups and drop-offs) in the workplace have been dealing with this whole entire time.
tldr; A great many people have had an increase of 150% of the time they care about the most by working from home - this proposal takes that away from them.
If you're going many days without any human interaction, then the issue isn't your inability to force your colleagues into the same physical space with you. The issue is that you're confusing your colleagues for a personal social support network.
Remote or in-office, that's not healthy. Go outside. Make real friendships with people you don't work with. And if you're struggling with that, then seek help. But don't force me into a car for 10 hours per week, just to help you fake a social support network.
There are those that end up cleaning up after everyone else that don't necessarily have the time to do that because the work needs to get done or someone gets blocked. I envy the people that get to clock out at the normal time, and are free to not consider downstream effects of what they do because that would take too much time away from their social endeavors. At least with WFH, you generally have enough contact info to call that sort of thing out, and ideally, wort it out.
But this doesn't remove the option for people to socialize or interact with humans. If not for COVID there'd be no reason that WFH people living alone couldn't have seen other people over the last two years. In fact, without a commute people now have more time to be able to socialize if they so choose with the people they want to socialize with.
You can't really get time with your kids when you work from the office, but you can get socialization when you're not working.
I think it's important to not confuse WFH life with WFH life during a global pandemic.
Many people WFH and their kids have been stuck at home, they dont feel safe popping to the coffee shop for a few hours of work, and they dont feel safe going to social events.
Once people feel fully safe doing those things and the kids are back in school in person WFH life will elevate for so many.
As a counterpoint people with young children seem to spend at least some time each week during work hours taking care of their kids while their partner (whose on maternity leave) is doing something else. Also the constant background noise of kids crying or some kids show playing it pretty annoying.
Cannot tell if the parent is missing /s or not... just in case not.
- Noise cancelling headphones work as well at home as they do at work. I love mine.
- Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.
Anyway, person-to-person and day-to-day differences in productivity are pretty large in my experience. Of course you could be in a bust-your-butt-for-a-promotion kind of situation, but you could also take the attitude that you're getting paid for what you actually do, and the fact that you are not top 1% productivity is reflected in your current "help-at-home-when-I-am-needed" salary.
> Noise cancelling headphones work as well at home as they do at work. I love mine.
This is actually the bug, not the feature. These people have bought noise cancelling headphones, so when they join a meeting everyone else it bothered.
>Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.
Why are you doing work outside of working hours? That does not make sense.
> These people have bought noise cancelling headphones, so when they join a meeting everyone else it bothered.
Noise cancelling headphones have directional mics that typically do a very good job of only picking up the wearer's voice.
If people really want to sound clear, a headset with a mic boom is every better. 0 background noise gets through.
These are all very well solved problems.
Heck my laptop back in 2005 (!!!) had a directional mic array. I could use an included utility app to control where in the room I wanted the mic to record from, I could record from in front of my laptop when going to lectures, or have the mics pointed at me when recording myself.
It might. If your office is in your home you may have more flexibility to get things done on an ad hoc basis if that were necessary (like something takes down production or someone needs something urgently).
If that were the case when everyone was at the office it just couldn't get done.
If you are one call, that is completely different and doesn't make sense in this argument.
If you are just picking up a call from your boss to work without being paid overtime then don't do the work. Only exception is if you have flexlible working time e.g. 32 hours per month then you just do a shorter day at some point.
> As a counterpoint people with young children seem to spend at least some time each week during work hours taking care of their kids while their partner (whose on maternity leave) is doing something else.
That is me, and I account for time off during day to play with my 10 month son by spending an extra hour after dinner finishing up work.
WfH gives me the flexibility to do that. WfH also means I don't have to take an entire day off if my son has a mid-day doctors appointment. Everyone wins.
> Also the constant background noise of kids crying or some kids show playing it pretty annoying.
Your company should spend the few extra $$ on good headsets for everyone.
Company has given out headsets to everyone, but people are impossible to please so most people (myself included) aren't using the official ones for variety of reasons. Plus a lot of it is about the MS Teams which has no software support for noise isolation or cancelling. I can see it clearly when I'm using Discord; if I don't talk, I don't broadcast. In Teams if I am quiet Teams will keep cranking up the volume until some sound AC hum, typing, whatever gets picked up and I am constantly broadcasting.
> My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach.
It works when the team is used to and knows how to connect with each other online and to keep those connections going through the day/week. I'm an (highly functioning) introvert and even I hate video onboarding. I've done it twice during pandemic and it sucks big time if the team is not ready for online lifestyle/workstyle. Several months in and I still don't feel like I belong, it's just all the people busying away on their own, like in a univerity groupwork. I miss my old work when the chat was actually a place for smalltalk, instead of a place for just sharing technical knowledge or updating progress.
Feels like some companies think that remote work is exactly like onsite, just virtually. Well, it's not. Dynamics is different, workflow is different, everybody has to adapt. I genuinely want to work remote, I don't think I'll be back to office anymore, but I still need the team that knows how to actually be a team online.
It's all purely anecdotal. I started a new job just when the pandemic hit. It was perfect timing, the lockdown went into effect between my last interview and my first day of work. Like everyone else, the company was not prepared for it. The only advantage they had was that they had a couple of long term contractors from another country.
So I went in and... it worked out really well. Quality of life is fantastic, productivity too. It's like we've never done it another way. For the contractors it was even an improvement, because now they were on the same level as the rest. Based on this experience, we have started to hire people from abroad and whoever wants can stay remote.
Well, 2 and 4 are also the disadvantages of remote. I've seen multiple projects generating millions of dollars a year that were originally spawned by unplanned interactions without an agenda between engineers and sales guys. You're presuming a working model where your only role is accepting requirements in planning meetings and outputting code that meets them, and a lot of teams don't work that way.
Not really. Just this week, I had a 15 minute chat with some sales engineers I'd never met before about a possible API extension that they say would help secure multiple deals a year - there's no way they would have scheduled a video call for that and I doubt I would have accepted if they did.
Outside of software dev, there are a ton of scenarios where onsite matters.
Ask anyone in hardware.
Sure, many and myself included here, setup home labs. Those really help, particularly when boards are small and or one can setup or build a test harness or other suitable device.
I currently work a mix, and onsite is needed, but not always.
My current preference is to do both, and my company just moved. We downsized office space, added a common work area, and I have a home lab and another person is building one up now.
Being sick is bot such a big deal.
We all got much better at the various comms tools too.
As for your other items:
Sales people, who are effective, will find ways. (As they should by the way. New money feeds everyone else.)
Point taken on the smells, but for me I don't care.
Perfect time management? Lolol if it works for you, great. Tons of people will struggle with this anyway.
Having a place to focus is all about the workplace. Can be at home, at work, rented... this one is not really an argument for work at home as much as it is workplace advocacy generally.
You know what, I agree. My last place of work we went remote at the start of the pandemic, but I'd already had two years of getting to know my colleagues and our relationships carried on as usual when we started remote working.
I recently switched jobs, and have been to the office once (to pick up equipment and get set up) and it's a completely different dynamic. I don't really know any of my colleagues, chatting online occasionally isn't the same as meeting in person, etc. I still game a few times a week with people from my last two jobs, but I can't see the same happening for this job.
On the whole though, I do prefer it. My work relationships are probably lacking more but my quality of life is greatly improved.
> I miss my old work when the chat was actually a place for smalltalk, instead of a place for just sharing technical knowledge or updating progress.
That sounds more like a company culture issue. It's surprising that there isn't a small talk channel. You should suggest one, they can be pretty valuable
> It works when the team is used to and knows how to connect with each other online and to keep those connections going through the day/week.
My company always had offices spread around the country that worked close with one another, so going full remote was a change, but honestly not a huge change.
We have regular coffee/tea breaks every afternoon, no work talk allowed. A variety of online social events helps round things out.
Is it the same as working in an office together? Of course not. But while I have worked on some great teams that gelled really well, IMHO the majority of work teams don't have deep bonds.
What WfH really did kill was the ability to create informal connections between teams, the types of connections that help Get Things Done faster than usual. I feel that is the one true, huge, drawback of WfH.
Agreed. I don’t if it’s for everyone, but i love it. No commute, healthier food, access to a bed for a quick nap, and a nice office. 10/10 would do again.
We had a couch for a while. At other jobs, I setup the back of my Expedition. Tinted windows, bedding, a few comforts and I knocked out the short nap all the time. Would/will do again.
Many moons ago I had a job with a private office. Brass nameplate on the door. I asked the intern who sat at a desk outside in the hall to kick me if I ever started acting all-pretentious-like. She agreed with great enthusiasm, but thankfully I kept a solid head about me.
I had the most ridiculously comfy couch in my office. Blue, threadbare, worn-in. Every time anyone sat down in it I warned them that they were going to fall asleep if they stayed there too long. Without fail, I'd hear wood sawing after a manner of minutes. Vendors, colleagues, the CIO, the CEO, my wife dropping by to visit, that couch was insidious.
The one we had was pretty great too, but not quite as intoxicatingly good as yours.
But, it had a big, brass buddha at one end. Rub the belly for good karma...
This thread is getting me to seriously consider another one. Just started a new company and we all know how that is. A comfy couch might be just the thing.
As someone who recognizes what's best for me may not be best for others, I will comfortably acknowledge some companies should do full RTO while others remain hybrid. If you do a four-square of RTO-or-Hybrid/Remote vs Success-or-Unsuccessful you likely won't reach some magical, simplistic conclusion like "(co)locating results in a (more/less) success". The real world is more varied than that. Enough companies will employ either strategy for workers to have their pick. But we shouldn't take a moral or capitalist ground for suggesting one style is superior. As technologists, we have to be remain sensible enough to recognize the multivariate nature of success.
Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
Commuting is different in different places. For me it is 15 minute drive to the office from a neighboring smaller city where property prices are 5x lower.
I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.
I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.
I live in an apartment complex so the super has the keys to do whatever work needs to be done without my presence. I could take my deliveries at the office (and I often did since I saw clear improvement on delivery dates when they delivered to a business instead of residential address). Doctor visits were never an issue, because remote work was always an option and many people did work a day or two every week remotely.
If past experience is anything to go by I will get flooded with people saying that I should just do better and be better remote worker (like I probably shouldn't be writting this on company time) instead of acknowledging that different people are different and working at the office fits me and my life style better and that I've optimized for that lifestyle long before the pandemic hit. I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.
> Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
People spending time on other things could be a sign that they either don't want to can't do full 8h anyway. I can't, just can't, my mind does not work that way. I can spend 2-3 days at the lowest gear just barely ticking boxes and then get everything done in one productive day. I'd be happy and I dare say more productive for the dollar when working 6h for 20% reduced pay. I now still work 6h but stretched to 8h and I don't have guilt free extra 2h for my own stuff because I feel like I should be accomplishing something no matter my health, the weather, my emotional state or other factors going on in my life.
In my company literally nothing prevents from them negotiating less hours, but people don't want to take the pay cut they just want to play Elden Ring or Warhammer 3 or whatever is hottest game that week. It is especially bad with the guys who have young kids because they have no free time so they "sneak in" some game time during the work day.
>Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
Dear god, people enjoying their life. This is the worst. Clearly society can't function unless everyone is miserable.
Have you ever considered that maybe the entire 8 hour work day is bullshit? That it is entirely possible for people to contribute productively within different time-frames?
>I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.
What does this have to do with working from home? What could remote work possibly have to do with your inability to stick to a gym routine?
>I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.
You won't "lose some people". Unless your company has the pay and clout that Google has, your company will be decimated by a wave of people quitting.
>Have you ever considered that maybe the entire 8 hour work day is bullshit? That it is entirely possible for people to contribute productively within different time-frames?
Have you considered some reading comprehension? Read the first sentence you quoted again and stop pushing your own opinion and gospel.
>What does this have to do with working from home? What could remote work possibly have to do with your inability to stick to a gym routine?
This too is super disingenious line of questioning. How aobut not being able to go to anywhere else? Feels pretty weird just to drive to the gym and back.
>You won't "lose some people". Unless your company has the pay and clout that Google has, your company will be decimated by a wave of people quitting.
> This too is super disingenious line of questioning. How aobut not being able to go to anywhere else? Feels pretty weird just to drive to the gym and back.
That has nothing to do with working from home though, it has to do with the pandemic. I go places during my lunchbreak in work from home now that there are vaccines and things are open again - it's so convenient, if I need to duck to the store or the chemist or I want to pick up food from a local cafe.
> Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example.
I'm going to be honest with you, I occasionally play video games during work hours at the office too. Way I figure it, if no one is saying anything about my output then they are receiving the value they expect for what they're paying me, and I'm not charitable enough to give them more than that.
I was only able to work from home during this whole thing for 2 weeks when the entire department had COVID (myself included). I played through Factorio[0] during those two weeks and nobody noticed.
[0] I didn't like it. It's very well made and I cannot say it doesn't successfully implement exactly the experience it intends to, I just didn't actually have fun.
Except productivity has not stayd at the same level. We can clearly see that we've been pushing fewer features per quarter into production.
Also one guy doing this overtly errodes the whole team. Like why should I work all day while you play video games or go skiing or whatever in the middle of the day? Yeah nobody is complaining because they are being nice and/or assuming that your productivity has dipped do to the pandemic.
Obviously these things are related. Would be insane to claim they weren't, but doesn't look good to advocate keeping full time remote working based on what is going on.
What am I gonna do? Go snitch on the manager and then dudes are gonna get a warning and know that someone snitched. Next thing you know my reviews take extra week to be approved and my questions go unanswered. That ain't smart.
Then this is a problem with your team. On the other hand, my team has been more productive. I enter work with more energy that would be wasted during a commute. I often work later knowing I don't need to account for an evening commute. We can multi-task during portions of meetings which don't require our attention.
You sound like a micromanager. If you have notable metrics that show decreased output, then raise the issue and correct it. But don't say that everyone should be subject to losing privileges due to your team's poor performance.
Kind a different to go out everyday and then hitting gym on the way to or from the office than sitting at home whole winter while snow piles on top of my car and freezes solid and then finally getting a permission to go to the gym.
And waking up early just to walk to the gym and back feels weird.
> Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
We as humans are not designed to be productive selves 5 days in a row, for 8 hours a day. If I'm not feeling well or having a bad day, I might finish working an hour or two early but make up for it by working overtime another day that week. It doesn't matter that I cut that day short - I wasn't going to be very productive if I wasn't feeling well anyway.
The 9-5, 8 hour work day was designed for PHYSICAL labor during the industrial revolution where output was directly correlated to time. This is not the case anymore. If someone can meet/exceed their responsibilities in 5 hours, why do they need to spend 8 hours just because slower workers need that time? This just punishes efficient workers.
>If I'm not feeling well or having a bad day, I might finish working an hour or two early but make up for it by working overtime another day that week.
That is no issue. In fact in my company we don't care how long you work per day or when you work. People tell us how many hours they can work per month and they get paid accordingly. Of course the union sets some minimum and maximum numbers we can do, but in essense it is normal to work flexible hours. Even to just take days off and do either longer days or work on a weekend/holiday if that's what you want. Or work hours "into bank" before hand and then take days/hours off. No problem with that.
My problem is guys literally working 9-5, expect "lunch break" takes 2-3 hours since they are playing a video game.
>If someone can meet/exceed their responsibilities in 5 hours, why do they need to spend 8 hours just because slower workers need that time? This just punishes efficient workers.
Except people will always find excuses why it wasn't their fault the feature/release/product didn't ship in time.
> My problem is guys literally working 9-5, expect "lunch break" takes 2-3 hours since they are playing a video game.
You missed the entire point of my comment. If they take 2-3 hour lunch breaks and meet/exceed their company and performance goals, then it shouldn't matter how long they are working. Results matter, not time.
> I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
Yeah, kinda guilty of that. Zero gym and during the winter hours where end of work = end of sun, I've had times where I take a walk. Usually more than 1 unproductive day leads to me just using a bit of the moonlight oil to catch up. Nothing super drastic, but e.g. last month there was a day where I just had a burst of productivity to ride for some 3-4 hours at 18:00.
Game wise, I'm never going full "well time to boot up the PS5", but I have been playing a lot more mobile games on the side while stuff compiles.
>I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine
Well, tech is an even hotter market than a pre-pandemic so in my industry I'm not too worried about anyone pursuing full remote. It can go vice versa for those companies that go full remote and for people who want that separation of life.
I still want some office to go into, but I do hope that this pandemic changes some attitudes about the times where I made need to take a "sick but still productive" day at home, or when I travel and need a week to just report in remotely. Flexibility is nice in a pinch and in previous companies that was a pain.
I don't get this. If you are sick then be sick. Instead of working 3-5 days in half capacity just take a rest day or two and you'll be back to 100%. As I've understood some countries have limited sick days, but that's not a thing here. I always tell my team members to take sick day if they don't feel 100% because over all it will be more productive if people work they they are healthy.
And as per pre-pandemic remote working days were always an option, just not full time since there were days like sprint start and ending days that were much smoother when everyone was present in person.
> I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example.
My team used to play street fighter or super smash bros during lunch.
However, a decrease in output is a separate issue that needs to be addressed by the employee's manager/leader.
> I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.
My company's office is close to only a couple worthwhile restaurants (WTF Downtown Seattle, if you aren't next to cap hill you are boned). While at home, I have multiple good options within walking distance to me.
Check if you are within shef.com's service area. Home made meals from local cooks. Great stuff.
> I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms.
Once they reopen, WfH means the time saved on commuting can be turned into gym time!
Prior to WfH I had to bring workout clothes and a towel with me if I wanted to hit the gym before lunch. Because my commute was on a bus, that was crammed full standing room only shoulder to shoulder, adding a gym bag in the mix was no fun.
Tooling issue is one thing. Choice of VoIP is MS Teams since it comes free with the IT package and Teams is complete shit to use.
Second it the actual logistics. It was always pain to accommedate the one or two remotees by having some kind of conference phone-thing. Over all it is just way more convenient and nicer to talk face to face. In my opinion even all online meeting is better than hybrid one.
Most if not all your points are moot if optional WfH is implemented. Which is what all the proponents of WfH want. I don't think anyone want's to force people to work from home. Just give us the options.
> I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.
What about all the people who already knew spending 2 hours commuting was a terrible use of our time before the pandemic, regardless of how much of a bigger house we could get?
So we lived in dense cities, in walkable neighborhoods, where the office was a 15 minute walk away but so were restaurants, parks, grocery stores, and theaters?
But part of the exchange we made was that our houses/apartments were small, and were for LIVING not for working. We don't have a spare bedroom to turn into a segregated office, so instead the work/home life has been an overlapping mess for 2 years.
You can probably still go back to the office even if your colleagues work from home. And if not, there are probably coworking spaces, or similar. Why must there be a one-size-fits-all situation?
Also, if WfH spreads, many of the people who made the same choice, getting a small apartment in a dense city for living only, will probably make a different choice now and move somewhere else. I know many people who did just that. I expect this will lower the prices of housing in cities, which means you could live in a bigger apartment if you wanted.
Because as soon as one person in the team is remote, the whole team needs to organise around that. Think of a 5 person team where 1 is remote and the others aren't. Your daily standup ? can't do that quickly at your desk, you need to find a room and setup visio. Going on lunch and discussing about your project ? Too bad. Got an idea you ran by a colleague at the coffee machine ? Now you need to setup a call or get everything in writing for the 4th dude. A state of the project on a whiteboard in the office ? No, you need to use Jira.
The only option here is either having a member of the team always one step behind, or changing the entire organisation of the team to revolve around that guy. People who prefer "in-office" work would rather make the effort of commuting so that they do not have to deal with that. So they expect the other people in their team to do the same, otherwise there is little to no point.
I dislike this comment because it implies remote workers are a burden. As soon as you have one on-site worker, you need a physical office space, security, and sanitation staff. These things are not free. Either type of worker imposes burdens when you objectively consider the fully loaded costs. I would argue adding a remote worker is lower cost because a Zoom call is cheaper than office rent and physical building maintenance.
Well...they are, for companies that have decided to be primarily office oriented, and have invested a lot in making that work. And similarly, office worker are a burden for remote oriented organisations because they incur costs that were not considered to be necessary.
My point is that "let's invest in great offices for those who want, but let people do what they want regardless" is not really an option, because you are paying the organisational and financial price, and not really getting the benefits of either.
I believe most organisation working in "hybrid" model will impose fixed days at the office - so they can get the full benefits of the "in-office" time. And let other days at home, so that people working better remotely can enjoy that as well. Teams will organise around that, eg by schedule most meetings on "in-office" days.
> Well...they are, for companies that have decided to be primarily office oriented, and have invested a lot in making that work.
This is awfully close to sunken cost fallacy - we have invested so much in it, therefore we have to use it no matter what circumstances.
> I believe most organisation working in "hybrid" model will impose fixed days at the office - so they can get the full benefits of the "in-office" time. And let other days at home, so that people working better remotely can enjoy that as well.
This is the worst option for many people because it would force them still live within reasonable commuting distance, resulting them not being able to move to lcol area or closer to their parents/communities/etc. What's the point then of allowing them to go remote when it's not really remote, but rather "not here, but still close"? Yea, it will work with some pople, but for others it makes things worse.
It's only a sunken cost fallacy if you consider that the cost to be in-office is lower than the benefits it brings. Otherwise you can see this as being able to get the benefits of an investment, which would be strange not to do.
Some agree with the idea that remote is strictly "better", but many do not. Bear in mind that we had the opportunity to create fully remotes companies for a long time, and some succeeded, but most companies were still office-only or office-first. Similarly, some companies will move to remote-first post pandemic, but it does not look like everyone will - far from it. And everyone is making their pro-and-cons analysis.
> What's the point then of allowing them to go remote when it's not really remote
Here is the point: this is not remote. It's office-first with some days were you are going to be allowed not to come, in order to lower the commuting time and get more "alone" time. For people who want to work remote, from anywhere, this is not cutting it. And it's not trying to. For people who still love the office but have some complain about having to go every single day, this is a nice option.
>My point is that "let's invest in great offices for those who want, but let people do what they want regardless" is not really an option, because you are paying the organisational and financial price, and not really getting the benefits of either.
Amazing how the realities of our financial system and transaction structure basically necessitates projection of a management groups will on others isn't it?
Couldn't have anything to do with the overrepresentation of psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies amongst corporate decisionmakers...
Remote workers are a burden when working from office is the status quo, though. No two ways around it. It sounds like that because that's what it is. Disliking it doesn't make it untrue.
> Your daily standup ? can't do that quickly at your desk, you need to find a room and setup visio
Yeah that only works for very small teams the moment you are like ten or os, even in an office first setting will be away for whatever reason, tradespeople coming, feeling sick etc
> Going on lunch and discussing about your project ? Too bad.
> . Got an idea you ran by a colleague at the coffee machine ?
> . A state of the project on a whiteboard in the office ?
> No, you need to use Jira.
Too bad that you need to put that into writing so later it can be referenced or you end up headscratching at a git commit which doesn't refer a ticket three months down the road
This only holds if only one member of the team is remote, which is often enough not the case. This is also moving the goalposts.
deanCommie's argument was around a choice of living arrangements based on the idea that work would happen at the office, and there not being any space for work at home, so a purely logistical one.
Coordination between on-site and remote workers is a separate issue, though I agree it is absolutely important.
> People who prefer "in-office" work would rather make the effort of commuting so that they do not have to deal with that. So they expect the other people in their team to do the same, otherwise there is little to no point.
I guess it works both ways. People who prefer "from home" would rather make the effort of communicating by text / visio so that they don't have to deal with the commute.
> People who prefer "from home" would rather make the effort of communicating by text / visio so that they don't have to deal with the commute.
Precisely ! That's why it's important to communicate clearly to every person of the team the working agreement that are expected - and to enforce them. If the agreement is that no one is expected to have to commute, and everything must be done so they don't have to, that's perfectly fine - as long as everyone plays the game. And any person still insisting to meet "somewhere" because they don't like emails/IM/zoom needs to be talked to.
Similarly, if the rules are : you have to come to the office 3 days/week, expect that some things will happen in person, show up, and play the game. If you start insisting that everything needs to be organised in a way that allows you to stay fully remote and not show up, you need to review your position.
The important part is to ensure that expectations are clearly expressed - and enforced. Which Google is doing.
I think a good compromise might be come in once a month but for a few days. It's infrequent enough that you can move to a lcol area and the company can replace the office with hotel or co-working.
But it's frequent enough you can still hold most of your stuff for inperson if you didn't want to have the overhead of remote working.
Surely you mean that the flat is for sleeping not living. They're too small for living, because all the living is done at the restaurants, bars, parks, theatres, offices and so on.
If that's the style you prefer, then you need a co-working space to replace the office, in the same way your place probably isn't big enough to entertain people for dinner so you use a restaurant. And it's too dense with the neighbours to throw a proper party with dancing, so you use the bars and clubs.
At least this is my understanding from having done a bit of both.
No? I can still have people over, and I can still enjoy my hobbies at home. But I don't have a spare bedroom going unused that I can make an office. My office can only overlapping with my personal "fun" space.
You can always move away from that dense city. With booming property prices you should even profit in case you own the apartment, just sell it.
I would also argue that small apartment can be very limiting also for living. I mean, sure, if you spend all your free time in those restaurants, parks, grocery stores and theaters, then it may actually work. But if you wanna do anything that requires personal space, then living in a small apartment is very limiting.
International companies have been doing this for decades.
Until I retired at the end of 2017 I had worked for over twenty years in a team which had developers and domain experts in the following countries: Norway, UK, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, USA (several states), Canada, Poland.
A lot don't have closely working together ('two pizza') teams distributed across offices, nevermind timezones more than one or two out.
Occasional collaboration is different from day to day, and I'm sure that's why GP emphasised 'asynchronous' - doing it with your close colleagues requires a shift in how you work, async written communication not chats, PR review not pairing, etc.
This was not occasional collaboration, it was daily video standups, real time collaboration, code review, frequent video discussions with other developers and domain experts, etc.
My team is mostly in office, but we do have people in 2 other time zones.
Communication happens mostly in slack (even for people in the office - because it would be too loud otherwise - open plan office, gggrr), but also to include people not in the office. I think having remote people in various time zones is fine, as long as we can "get together" once in a while. We do virtual board game night (well, afternoon for most of us) once a week, and of course, do sprint reviews and planning together.
As someone who has had both cats and dogs and currently has an otherwise well mannered dog who bites when his claws are touched, yes, that is a necessity with some animals.
> You have somebody else come over to cut your cat‘s claws?
I know a number of people that don't feel comfortable doing that, or have cats where you'd need multiple people, or to wrap them, in order to clip their nails.
I definitely don't clip as short as they do at the vet, but I have a great set of clippers, and learned that what works for our cats is to keep the clippers on my desk and clip one or two nails when they come for a midday sit on my lap.
As a young person without children, I much prefer the office - I intentionally live close enough to the office that my commute is a 20 minute walk or a <10 minute bike ride, so my commute is actually pleasant, and not having the forcing function of a commute to get me outside is actually worse for my mental health.
I can still work from home when I have errands to run or medical appointments, but I much prefer being in the office.
I also don't have kids and I don't necessarily prefer the office... but from over a decade now of experience working in remote and hybrid jobs, I've found that there is no substitute for shoving everyone in a room and telling them to figure out the problems with processes. Tons of things just never get resolved when working remotely because it's hard to communicate actual pain points to others because they'll only talk to you via instant messages or in brief video/voice chats. And it's hard to convey how much time people are losing to issues in projects. The issues don't pop up on a day to day basis, but they do pop up in long-tail projects and even in continuing development projects. And the worst is figuring out requirements remotely. When you're in person, you can pester people without their ability to filter you out until they get you the requirements. Remotely, well, they can simply just ignore you (and often do in my experience).
Yes, I like working remotely most of the time. But I like living close enough to the office that if needed, I can go slap someone upside the head on a whim.
Onsite/online split is the worse, unless you work with just a laptop and nothing else then you'd have to have duplicate setups at work/home and at least I'm always leaving things eithere here or there and then missing them.
A decade ago, maybe a bit more, I consolidated into a backpack. Laptop, often second portable display, various adapters, chargers, clipboard, writing tools, phone, earbuds (I still prefer wired, if nothing more than the crazy good mic mine have), sewing, grooming, first aid...
Seems like a lot, but it isn't, and where I go the pack goes.
I can go from cold, arrive somewhere, and be up and running in a few minutes. Have not maintained a dedicated office for years now.
I do have dedicated work places, and have a few things, cheap things, duplicated for convenience.
These days, I have a home lab, work space, well equipped. Can do most anything I need there. This was not expensive, but I did also get gear over time too. Most of it was opportunistic buys. Total deals.
At work, any gear I need I either use where it is, or it is in my workspace.
The end result is a very mobile way. I am currently out of State for a week, and am pretty much fine, minus some gear, but I am also not needing to handle the associated roles either.
For quiet, I am on cell phone, no desk phone for the last decade. Use a spare room, my car, at home space, whatever.
The big perk is being where I both want and need a very high percentage of time.
Would hate full time at office. Would have to have one to start!
Well, at least those of us who work in Windows can have a pretty great experience because RDP is the shit. Leave a session running at work with a bunch of shit open, connect to it from home and everything resizes and rearranges to fit however many monitors and at whatever resolutions you decided to pass to it, disconnect the session and login locally at work again...
And you basically have all the downsides of being full time in office. Have to live within commuting distance, have to buy the train/bus season tickets (or have a working car and fuel it), have to schedule deliveries/family time/exercise around your in office days etc.
My question is: how did people not realize this before the pandemic?
The workers of Silicon Valley (and other urban centres) literally created and sustained this problem all by themselves: "You have to get to Silicon Valley!"
People realized it. It was companies that were resisting it. I remember looking for remote work pre-pandemic and it was WAY harder, now it's more a default.
I'm in Uruguay, South America, so the pandemic has been an incredible boon to me. I even got a remote team management position !
I went mobile over a decade ago. Had some work travel to do, and it made so much sense I basically reorganized, ditched a desk phone (literally put it into a drawer, left VM announcements that I do not do VM, and have not had one since), setup a nice backpack with the goodies and never went back.
Through that time, I setup a home lab and just did more and more there, until about the only thing that matters is where stuff to work on actually is and whether I can move it.
People noticed it, but companies also knew what defense learned: long-term planning efficiency plummets when working remotely. And that goes for whether you're just two different in-office design centers working together, or if the entire team is remote. I'm sure companies are starting to see the decrease in quality and efficiency of project planning and management starting to show now which is why they're looking to return to offices.
An interesting note on this is the main reason any urban areas are overpriced is because of max desired commute to a high paying job. If more remote options become available for this, we will likely see a decline in pricing for real estate in those areas as well as a decline in gentrification ect.
The only thing that is (kinda) better IRL is impromptu debug sessions, or that initial couple of days when you are bootstrapping a new project, so it's nice to sit with person(s) who are working on this.
Even those are easily matched in quality with zoom/slack and draw on screen features.
> Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired.
Your blanket statement is wrong. If you’d said “likely not legal”, you’d be correct. Someone could very well get work visas and have their employer approve the travel and accept the likely required nexus in said country.
All great for you ... but hey lets think of the little people like the shareholders of google... 257 billion in profit in 2021 (share price closed 2800), from 89 billion in 2019 (share price closed 1350).
Hey look it works for them too, everyone is a winner!
What part of these profits comes from work actually done remotely during the pandemic ? What you are proving is that the Google model of hiring extremely talented devs, paying them handsomely, and asking them to spend days in their campus allowed them to create a company that takes in billion of profits even during a pandemic.
Which part of the Google offer significantly changed thanks to work done during the pandemic ? All these profits come from something that was built - in person - in pre pandemic work organisation, so we know that this was was successful.
The only big thing that I can think of on Google side that was supposed to take off during the pandemic is Stadia. I own one, and it's an understatement to say that it did not deliver on its promises. It is not the first Google product that fails, and it is hard to say if the failure is due to remote work, but still something to consider.
Honestly, the argument you made in the first paragraph is a good argument against companies getting too big rather than against remote work: what part of Google's profit comes from work done in the last 5 years?
Most Google products and services were mature in 2017.
>what part of Google's profit comes from work done in the last 5 years?
I imagine maintanence. Even if they decided not to pursue any new products, features, or other major updates, keeping their services updated and providing various B2B support is a big part of keeping the whole thing running. It's not glamorous, but it is very specialized and requires top talent even for bug fixes, security patches, etc. at that level.
> All these profits come from something that was built - in person - in pre pandemic work organisation, so we know that this was was successful.
This is very true.
It is also true that these built products were operated in a remote work environment - meaningful, and significantly enhanced profits were extracted when operating these assets remotely vs operating them in person. Sample size is small of course and time will tell.
Stadia, not a great example, build in person - launched and operated remotely. Was its failure due to it being poorly built or poorly operated? Fellow owner and former user of the service, I didnt think it was that bad technically, but understand I am in the significant minority on that one.
> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.
Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote.
I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up. But I think it's probably quite a bit harder for people to be productive when they are new to the company, less experienced, and don't have that existing foundation to build on.
I think it's a solvable problem for companies that want to prioritize remote work, but I definitely don't think "managed to get through the past two years" means "it's a piece of cake".
But Google let most people who asked to go remote, go remote. And said several times that if you haven’t asked to go remote yet, they’ll give you a 30 day notifications before you need to go back
I hate threads like these because people will circle around generic talking points while missing all the nuance and context behind this actual decision, like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks, giving a heads up, having a well-defined policy.
>like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks
Do you have the policy document or data to back that up? Asking because I am friends with a Google engineer who asked to go remote and was denied (even though nothing about their role requires them to be in-person).
A little birdie told me that most denials were for specific roles (eg some entire departments were not going to let employees go remote, mostly not engineering). In engineering the bird told me most denials were due to being very junior, working on something that needed physical access, or poor performance
I find it very hard to believe that in the next month like half of the company is going to apply for remote positions. We didn't see this happen the last time we were within 30 days of a planned return (on Jan 3).
I wouldn't accuse Google of having an effective management culture.
They tend to promote from within and along the engineering track, which results in engineers reasoning from "What would I (a high-performing engineer) do?" and not necessarily what's best for the team.
I am a google manager of a hybrid remote team. It generally depends on your manager and your VP; both have to sign off. I’ve heard rumors that it’s harder for Junior members to get transferred, but I had two successful transfers, a junior engineer with a transfer request outstanding, and hired a remote worker today.
Orgs vary. There are absolutely people who had applications denied. All I can say is that in my org (hundreds of people), every single application was accepted.
At least until Q4 2021, Google also told large groups of employees not to bother applying for remote, as their request will automatically be denied due to a combination of role / team / organisation / tenure / office location / remote work location.
They may have reversed stance after I left, but I'm pretty sure the "15%" number cited is "15% of people that were considered eligible and had their manager support were declined."
>Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.
15% is still something I consider significant. Why were they denied? Are there people getting preference based on manager or their own personal reputation?
No, you won't, just like you wouldn't if you switched offices. Google is and always has been very clear about this. They pay market rates based on location.
You do keep your compensation if you don't move your address, otherwise you get paid a market rate adjustment for that area, which from what I've seen is quite fair.
Yeah, market rates, but those studies end up in bad offers outside tech-hubs as top 80% of the market is still targeting way less skilled people than the one they "want" to retain.
It's almost seems like the policy is designed in this way so it sounds fair and at the same time keeps new locations from popping up
Because where your computer, desk, and chair matters of the quality of work you do?
No. These are shitty capitalist ploys trying to tell you the above is true when it's blatantly false. And well, they'd work you for no money, but they wouldn't have workers.
If anything, I'd claim to live in a high CoL area while being in the Midwest. They get their quality work, I get my commensurate compensation. Fuck them for thinking otherwise.
If companies had to settle on exactly 1 pay rate everywhere around the world, the last thing I’d be willing to bet on is that they choose the salary of their most expensive COL location.
It has nothing to do with cost of living; it’s market rates which are set by supply and demand. London is super expensive but the pay is much lower than even the rural American pay scale since UK engineers don’t get paid well anywhere and will work for Google even if they’re getting half of what they’d get in the US. They could move to the US—Google would support the transfer—but they don’t, so there remains a supply of people who are willing to work for that rate in London.
As others mentioned, if Google ignored supply and demand and paid for quality of work only, why would they pay everyone the high rates that were originally set by supply and demand in Silicon Valley? They’d pay a normal living wage for someone in India.
They throw around "market rates" like there's a local market. Grouping employees into buckets by postal code makes sense for work-from-the-office arrangements.
On the other hand, in theory the bottom markets will see their rates rise quickly (because they merged into one wider remote market) if remote is as popular as it apparently is.
Your compensation is not absolute dollars but what you can get for those dollars.
Ideally the same dollar would get you the same everywhere in the world. That is not the case atm.
Instead, people at your new location will provide the same quality of work for fewer dollars, because they see what they can get for those dollars. That is your capitalist competition.
There is not a whole lot of nuance to the word "mandate". If Google was truly this amenable to requests to go remote, why "mandate" employees back to the office rather than make it optional? Sure, welcome people back who want to be in the office, but don't require people to be there.
Because the article reporting on it is shitty. Why not let the tens of thousands of Google employees who actually know what’s happening clear things up?
The people who applied and were accepted for fully remote aren’t the ones that need to go back. Only the people with an assigned desk in the offices that are re-opening are mandated to go back.
You’re getting tripped on the wording of an article that was hastily written after a reporter got wind of an email
>Only the people with an assigned desk in the offices that are re-opening are mandated to go back.
But you are still using the same word that I was getting tripped up on. Either the return to the office is optional or it is mandated. It can't be both.
It's team and role dependent, so it pretty much is "both" at the company level.
This seems win-win to me. Teams and orgs that consider remote-friendliness important can operate that way, while teams and orgs that don't think that can keep the team colocated. Ultimately, it means the vast majority of people's preferences are accommodated. Worst case, changing teams at Google is very smooth.
If it were truly "optional" for everyone even without manager approval, that's effectively "remote" because some people not being present means the team works in a largely remote fashion, and it also means space planning for expensive offices is very hard and result in office layouts that are not as productive.
For a big company with 100k+ employees, this seems like a good call IMO because it allows all working models to co-exist, and it can easily be tweaked after seeing how RTO goes.
The decision to work as remote-first or office-first is, as I understand it, much more broadly available than it was. You are given the option to go remote-first and not return to the office at all. Returning to the office is optional.
If you choose to go office-first, then you will be expected to actually be at the office. In that sense, return to the office is mandatory.
The only thing that's really happening is them saying "you need to commit to one approach or the other, and act accordingly". This is understandable, you need to plan office capacity and other such practical considerations
The fact that the policy is company wide certainly lends more pressure towards returning to the office. That being said something can be mandated but poorly enforced. In the Google case, it appears that the enforcement is tuned down by an (apparently) usable exception mechanism. One can infer based on this, that in the language of the article, the new policy is somewhere between “mandated” and “optional”. With all due respect, I think you are being overly pedantic.
Notably, the word "mandate" is not in the actual communication sent to Googlers. That word was chosen by the author of this headline.
Googlers with assigned desk will be expected to show up to the office. Applications for remote transfers have been available for like six months and in the cases where engineers are unable to work remotely due to their role or their management disapproving, transfers within Google to other teams that are remote-friendly are nearly trivial.
It is mostly orgs like Sales that have hard rules against remote work where the word "mandate" with its connotation of a hard and unpleasant rule makes sense.
>It is mostly orgs like Sales that have hard rules against remote work
That seems weird for outside sales (i.e. large accounts) given you're often near your customers and (in normal times) should be in customer meetings rather than sitting in an office.
There is already a huge google engineer hemorrhage. A number of principal engineers and other folks I thought would be google lifers moved to snowflake.
I don't expect this to affect Google's ability to continue to grow at 15-20%, though. There will be armies of younger people who still want to jumpstart their career there.
Google has always lost top people to the next hip large-but-not-too-large tech company as they try something fresh / try to win the tech stock lottery. It was Facebook over 10 years ago, for example. You could get counter-offers to not leave for FB in that era. Is the current attrition any different?
Google needs long tenure more than other companies due to its large reliance on in-house software. This is yet another move to shoot themselves in the foot. Luckily, network effects will keep them in business for another few decades.
Yes, but I can assure you there are vast differences.
Worked for many tier 1 investment banks in the techiest corners of each org and some cases felt like startups with all the shiny new toys everyone else was using vs the dark ages of customized software straight from the nineties or some other entirely-in-house-built abomination in other places.
Totally anecdotally, lagging comp and bureaucracy are much bigger sources of attrition than remote work. For the most part, anyone who wants to go remote can.
Replacing senior engineers with juniors isn't sustainable though and their software quality is going to get a lot worse. Probably sooner than they think.
I mean... sustainably replacing senior people with junior people is the predominant arc of life throughout all human history. People retire or die.
You need to make sure you aren't replacing them so fast that the median experience level is dropping, but it's certainly the case that the average experience level of the incoming cohort is expected to be lower than the outgoing one.
It's not just about experience as an individual though, Google has hordes of arcane institutional knowledge about it's own platforms to maintain, like any large organization. Even if they were replacing everyone with senior devs and not juniors, you'd still be losing little bits of that each time someone left.
You see it at institutions, hundreds of individual "low bus factor" risks spread throughout the organization. The company would survive, but it would be a tough time, and a terrible place to work, during a large knowledge exodus.
This makes perfect sense, some people will be suited to some days on-site, and some off-site, but there will be others like myself where the commute is now a deal breaker.
If you get some talented engineers to join you because of the shortsightedness of Google then kudos to you, and more the loss for Google.
I'm not going back to the office ever there's no need to.. the company I work for has experienced explosive growth since we went remote ..brought on and maintained 100 new hires.
If they try to force me I'll find something else!!
Cities are dying some cause of remote work but aren't we tired of the govt controlling our lives (Biden's remark of all remote workers must go back..ha lmao). Umm the solution is to innovate cities and offer programs for remote workers to come live there for three to six to 12 months ..have a startup that owns buildings in all cities for remote workers to live in and congregate as well let's them jump from town to town every many months. City living Innovation not more govt control/lame ideas is what is needed to spur the economies of cities and their future prosperity.
Every single thread I see on this has this exact same comment. It's like a bot wrote it. Is it that hard to imagine that an onboarding experience remotely can actually be done well, or that you could actually make friends with people existing solely on zoom? I think people are making that assumption, just because it feels right or maybe because their own org is just throwing juniors by the wayside and hoping covid will end rather than thinking about how to train people electronically from the ground up.
Remote work in a lot of roles, especially knowledge working, is just the way forward and will be how these things function in 50 years. Companies that are able to scout talent globally will simply out compete those that insist on a local labor pool. It makes no sense to perpetuate commuting, just in terms of the environmental damage it causes, when we've shown that this work can still be done without having to load a single ~200lb occupant and spend energy moving them + 3000lbs of metal around for two hours a day five days a week. If you are finding your juniors are falling behind, then step up instead of giving up and work hard to come up with a viable pipeline that isn't "well hopefully in two months we are back in the office." Plenty of companies and organizations and research groups have functioned entirely distributed for years now even before covid. It's not rocket science.
Is it that hard to imagine that an onboarding experience remotely can actually be done well, or that you could actually make friends with people existing solely on zoom?
We don't need to imagine it. Those of us who lead teams have tried, and we know it's harder to onboard people, and to socialize as a company, when you're working remotely.
I think the advantages of remote working greatly outweigh the disadvantages, and I will continue to work remotely if I can, but there's no need to pretend everything is better. It obviously isn't.
> I think the advantages of remote working greatly outweigh the disadvantages, and I will continue to work remotely if I can, but there's no need to pretend everything is better. It obviously isn't.
I think it's worth separating the two parties in this (the employer and employee). IMO too many comments focus just on the employee view and then wonder why the employer behaves differently.
Most employees seem to love it, although some certainly don't (I fit in the second category) - but most seem to find it preferable.
However my experience leading a remote team is that IMO it is worse for our particular company from a corporate perspective. On-boarding and knowledge sharing is worse, relationships degrade and it's hard to distinguish someone who is just struggling/slow and needs help with absenteeism.
I wouldn't say it's worse, but different. It requires thinking through the onboarding process in a deliberate manner. I think a lot of companies used to get away with onboarding by having the new person spend a bit of time with HR and then throwing them in with their team and hope it works out.
My onboarding process now is scheduled out and takes 1-2 weeks depending on the position. I make sure the new person has their computer a couple days before they start. I ask the new person during and after the process what's working/not working and refine the process from their feedback. I keep an open block of time every day for the person as long as they need it, etc...
I should add that we were already remote pre-covid, but still had to deal with all the same issues when we went remote. One of the biggest challenges we had and I see is that remote magnifies already existing issues around communication and management. I remember one of my managers asking 'how will I know if someone is working if they are not in the office?' and my response was 'how do you know if they are working now?'.
I'm also not going to argue in absolute terms that in-person or remote is better/worse than the other. They are just different.
The main problem with on-boarding people remotely isn't getting them equipment, it's the fact that lots of people don't develop good relationships with other people, and learning that would have historically happened by 'osmosis' sitting next to each other and casually chatting gets lost.
I'd go so far to say that wfh is (generally) great in the short term, and awful in the long term.
Like, when an existing team goes WFH (e.g. when lockdown first kicked in), everyone already knows each other. You have your banter channels, you know who knows what about what, and for those conversations you'd prefer not to have on Slack you have non-company backchannels (e.g. WhatsApp).
But in the long term, after new people join the company and others leave, this degrades. It takes far longer for newbies to get to know people, social ties weaken, and trust falters. Doubly so for early-career joiners, who likely haven't worked an office job before.
But in the long term, after new people join the company and others leave, this degrades. It takes far longer for newbies to get to know people, social ties weaken, and trust falters. Doubly so for early-career joiners, who likely haven't worked an office job before.
That's all true if you let it happen. You don't have to though. If you recognize the problem you can put resources into addressing it.
It's mostly a realisation most organisations are illogical, bloated, developer unfriendly and/or too undocumented.
We applaud ourselves for self-studying, being fairly educated on average with backgrounds in being taught to self-study effectively and finding information online. Yet somehow the idea of juniors doing those exact same things, with or without digital aid of seniors, is unthinkable to many.
What if people don't want this tech pseudo-utopia? I understand where you're coming from and definitely agree that commuting is a problem but... we're already on the verge of a population crisis in developed nations, loneliness and alienation are at all time highs. I really really don't think that remote work is the utopia you imagine it to be. It's going to lead to more people who never leave their home or apartment, and maybe go days without interacting with people face to face.
For many, the exact forced socialization through work, commutes and office culture that's going on is what drains them to the point of isolating themselves afterwards. I expect most people no longer working under that system to find a way out of their social isolation, given the friction for those venues isn't too high.
Maybe if we stop pushing people into a catch-all environment and give them time, money and means to solve their problems, they will.. solve their problems. All of those three have been dwindling over the past few years.
I had a very well organized and documented remote onboarding experience. There was a list of meetings to schedule with the names of the relevant people and tasks to undertake, as well as a dedicated mentor that you met with as often as you'd like. At the end you met with at least one person on each team and got lots of time with your own team while they explained the systems to you.
Of course this is at a company that was remote before the pandemic.
I just wrote a sample of our onboarding process in another comment, and it sounds similar. And yes, we were remote pre-covid.
When a person signs in the first day, they already have a bunch of meetings scheduled (meet and greets, explainers, etc...), some work assigned (I like to have a bit of a goal when exploring a new code base, but this work isn't expected to get done right away), etc...
It can be done well, but takes some thinking through.
There's a 95% chance that this is a disguised RIF.
People they want to keep will be able to continue WFH if they want. People who are on the margins or destined for the Performance Improvement Camps will have to come in and warm seats if they want to eke out a year or two more of existence.
You can just fire people. If I had a report that was not meeting expectations I sure as hell wouldn't make "deny their remote work application, hope they are dissatisfied with the office, and wait for them to quit" be my plan.
In big tech companies, who gets fired has very low correlation to performance. Instead, it usually comes down to:
(1) people who make their bosses look bad are first to go.
(2) next are people who are perceived to cost their bosses time, regardless of whether it's their fault.
(3) after that, it's usually the infanticide cases: i.e., the people who did nothing wrong but haven't been there long enough to establish themselves.
The infanticide is especially ugly, because (a) it means the company is firing people basically at random, and (b) it rapes the shit out of the resumes of the people affected, because they now have <1 year jobs to explain. The reason it happens is that, empirically, most of the people cut in mass stack-rank purges are new members of underperforming teams... who, by inspection, have had the least to do with the team's underperformance.
Underperformance does get people fired, but rarely. It's at least as likely to get someone promoted, because underperformers usually have a career's worth of experience of being shitty, and therefore have developed such political skills they can easily fail up every time.
Not at Google, you can't. Firing someone who's performing abysmally still takes up to 6 months, between all the process and PIPs and paperwork and shit.
Xoogler here, from what I've seen, SWEs converting to PMs did it because it was what they were interested in it, unrelated to their skill, and it's not trivial at all. IIRC (never done it myself but seen a couple of people who did) there is a trial period and if you don't perform well enough as a PM you either go back to being a SWE or need to resign.
This is quite sensible comment. I am sure not much liked here.
At my work at very anti-remote employer, there are so many people who have obtained permanent remote. So I wouldn't be surprised people who Google thinks valuable would get individual arrangements and other who just themselves think they are valuable are in for rude surprise.
Reduction in Force. It's a term commonly used when companies are undergoing a large scale employee trimming. I don't think that google would do call it that. Probably just managers encouraged to increase the % of people who go on PIPs.
Probably just managers encouraged to increase the % of people who go on PIPs.
That's how tech companies usually do layoffs. Rather than admit they overexpanded and have to cut people (or that they are cannibalizing their own people to boost executive compensation) they blame it on departing workers by increasing the PIP-rape cutoff.
A different way to do it is to bring on contingent labor instead of hiring people as permanent employees. I don't know if that is better but at least people know what they're getting.
Basically a company's last effort to cover their butts before firing you. If you contest the termination, they can claim they gave you fair warning and a chance to improve.
If you're ever on one, the sensible course of action is to look for another job. You're next on the chopping block.
Parent asked what it is, not what the acronym stands for. It's a modern euphemism for layoffs, redundancies or mass firings, sackings, depending on your flavo[u]r of English.
I'm not sure there is good evidence that tech was that productive the past couple of years by any work they were doing. Rather, they were the only game left in town.
I think so. Systems like remote work, American Democracy are not simple enough to have a scientific proof to provide guarantees. So many factors that might not otherwise have affected the outcomes could affect an outcome in future. So the only fair statements are that remote work has been proven to work for 2 years and american democracy for 200ish years :-) This is quite fascinating
I mean.. yes? Except not even that, really, because the actual modern structure of American democracy is really closer to 100-150 years old (ie. somewhere between the country being broken in half and the 17th amendment introducing elected senators). But in the grand scheme of "humans having governments" it's pretty short either way, honestly pretty proportional to 2 years vs. "humans having megacorporations".
Well yes. But in that sense, the Democracy has gone through a full lifecycle of elections, candidates starting, candidates retiring etc etc such that all processes for doing it are tested. So you can have confidence that it can handle a lot of things. But not necessarily ALL possible things so it may well be that something comes along and kills it. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 100000 years. But for now, it seems pretty stable.
OP's point is that 2 years of remote work isn't a test that a company can successfully go through a lifecycle of a team of employees. You know, onboard a grad, get them up to speed, get useful productivity, maintain whatever system/documentation, have them leave AND repeat this until the original members of the team are all gone AND then check that things are still ticking along well.
It may be that said companies are "going well" because there is 1 person left holding the fort while a bunch of new starters fumble around with their remote work, not getting up to speed properly.
Unlikely maybe? But the point is that 2 years isn't a proper test of such working conditions.
> I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term.
And when I say I am now working 11 years remote and was always more productive compared to be before (9 years in offices) you'll immediately say "anecdotal evidence", right?
Maybe look into your bias. It does look like you're trying to find scientific reasoning to support your subjective preference. That's not OK. Let's at least have an objective discussion.
Demeaning the positive results of remote work by pettily narrowing down their results to super specific borders, while at the same time implying that office work is the go-to thing to do is not being objective.
I joined a new org earlier this year, fully remote, and my last gig was only a week in person before the pandemic started. I have also onboarded half a dozen juniors in the last few months, again all remote. Your comment is completely out of touch.
My company is fully remote, and whilst I'd agree that it's certainly doable to onboard people remotely (we've absolutely done this successfully), I would also say it really depends on the types of people and I suspect possibly the roles as well.
>works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up.
I think a key question here is how long and how often do you need to see someone to establish and maintain those relationships.
There were exporters/importers and othe long distance businesses relationships for a long time, so I don't think its every day for years.
> It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person.
Clearly you have no idea how much churn is common in SV. At google after a 2-year tenure your "percent" (what percent of SWE is newer than you) reaches 50%. What personal relationships do all those who were hired remote and never saw the inside of the office have?
This is made somewhat misleading by insane growth. Even if there is no churn your percent is still surprisingly high because of new hires that are coming from new headcount.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack..
Isn't this the main problem? I hate everyone who comes barging in and wants to "resolve issues" quickly. Not saying I love remote work, but I cannot stand working a place where people are "allowed" to disturb me. I don't even log into Slack/Teams/Skype or any of that nonsense; I don't even want to be disturbed in my virtual wold.
Onsite is ideal for management; endless meetings about progress/status, we can all "align". Issues can be resolved quickly. But for those who need to concentrate for long periods at a time; this is hell. And during the pandemic, many people got used to not being interrupted all the time, and I don't think any of them want to go back to that hellhole.
That's great, but I don't want to work with you, because something you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress.
You sure your priorities are of so much more significance than what the person is working on that they justify destroying the concentration of intellectual property creation and forcing a preemption of this other person’s task or reorder of their stack?
If you’re blocked for lack of a task switch, what are you blocking in turn by causing a new interrupt and switch?
Instead of crashing the thread they’re on, why not go to the scheduler and reorder the queue or better re-weight the threading so priorities are worked more optimally?
If in attempting that, you find you run into contention, it could be the most effective overall output is if your task is the one in an occasional wait state.
I hope this will answer all comments below as well.
Being a productive member of a team is about finding balance between what you're personally trying to get done and helping your teammates accomplish their tasks. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.
Your formulation of local vs global optimization of priorities is exactly the correct way to view this problem. My priorities and my colleague's priorities are approximately the same priorities, assuming we're on the same team or on adjacent teams. We are both shipping the same product and serving the same users at the end of the day.
That's why, like everything else in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle - interrupting someone 10 times a day for trivial stuff you can look up yourself by reading code or documentation is a waste of the other person's time. But wasting four hours running around looking for an answer to a question that your teammate can answer in two minutes is also a waste of time. The end user is not well served by either behavior.
My rule of thumb is 30 minutes. If I can't find an answer in 30 minutes, and I think a teammate knows the answer and can answer immediately, I will ping them or come to their desk.
Obviously you have to read the room. If the teammate you want to bug looks deeply concentrated in what they're doing, they're in the middle of typing, or you ask and they say "sorry I'm in the middle of something, come back in an hour", I'll leave them alone and probably take a break or something. But if they're just back from a coffee break or a meeting, or finished up a discussion with someone else at their desk, there's just no reason to keep banging your head against your desk.
And of course I hold myself to the same standard. Being dismissive to someone who needs your attention is immature. I always assume good intent, and if someone bothers me too often, I just tell them; for some people I will ask they show me what they've already tried. I find this almost always works.
Really the only one who should be deciding if an interruption from one person to another is worthwhile should be the manager. They know whose time is more valuable to the company at that time. Plus managertime is easily interuptible.
Unless it's effecting your performance review or whatever, who cares, honestly? The obsession with efficiency and Taylorism is what's wrong with the current state of affairs in business.
Not saying people shouldn't want to be productive just that understanding delays and simply pyschologically dealing with them would go a long way in modern culture. Not everything needs to happen 5 minutes ago, is late, or is so critical it can't wait a few hours.
>Unless it's effecting your performance review or whatever, who cares, honestly? The obsession with efficiency and Taylorism is what's wrong with the current state of affairs in business.
being blocked on a task due to missing knowledge isn't really "efficient". Especially when someone can point you to the right place in the span of a single slack message line instead of spending hours wandering through legacy code and still missing the full scope of the change I want to make.
Sure, if it's a one-off bug fix task someone internal discovered, it can wait a day. But these kinds of issues when highlihgted are never because "it happened once" One is coincidence, twice is happenstance. thrice is probably a habit and you learn that certain people aren't a reliable resource in terms of, well, co-working.
It's not just about efficiency, it's about not hitting the brakes. When you've got momentum and you're in the flow, killing it is deeply unsatisfying, and I for one have a hard time getting it back. Obviously that doesn't justify bugging someone 10 times a day, but there's a balance to be found.
>That's great, but I don't want to work with you, because something you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress.
I suggest you try to figure it out for yourself first. I can't count the number if times I sent a message, "hey, bla bla," then 5 minutes later I return "never mind." If you can't figure it out, have some respect for the other person's work and time and send an email or message. They will most likely get back to you by the end of the day if not sooner.
If you're in a position of some power that's maybe what you'd prefer. I'm on the bottom rung and being able to walk up to someone's desk so they can't ignore me would be extremely helpful. Been WFH for a while and it is not uncommon for people to ignore requests, never reply to messages etc.
Yes that is a problem with my current team, but I can't really do anything about it. Working from an office would mostly sidestep it.
I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.
> I'm on the bottom rung and being able to walk up to someone's desk so they can't ignore me would be extremely helpful. Been WFH for a while and it is not uncommon for people to ignore requests, never reply to messages etc.
TBF, that's not a problem with remote work. If the only way people will respond to a valid inquiry is through in person harassment there are much bigger issues at your employer.
>I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.
depends on office space and potential home accommodations. Like, if you have a dedicated 8m^2 office room in your house, it still may not be worth teleporting into an open space office. But if everyone can get a small private room to some more open floor structure for collaboration, it sounds like the perfect solution.
I get the need to have uninterrupted time, but if others are depending on you to get their job done, it's kinda dickish to complain about people being "allowed to disturb you".
I’m not sure most juniors starting their first job during the pandemic would feel that way. Imagine being in that situation and all your colleagues are never logged in to Slack, don’t reply to your emails until the end of the day, expect to never be disturbed, don’t attend any meetings..
I’m a junior who started my first job during the pandemic (well, I had one month in the office before the pandemic). That wasn’t be experience at all. Slack and email were much easier to use for getting used to the job than being in person was. Of course, yes, some people need to be online to answer questions, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to be available all the time. Being online also encourages good documentation, which is a better habit to be in anyway.
People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons.
This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave.
Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation.
Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
The salary cuts depend on where you live. If you work remotely near your original office, there is no pay change.
Some people did have requests denied. In my org, every single person who applied was approved. It is easy to change teams at google, so people who really want to work remotely can make it happen.
> Somewhere else I remember reading this would also cut your salary by 10%.
It totally depends on where you're living. It could even be a salary increase if you were previously working in a lower CoL office but have since moved to a high CoL region -- in that case your salary would increase. There's definitely no blanket single figure that applies (in either direction) to people who go fully remote.
E.g. my grand-boss is a fully remote worker based out of Manhattan. He's getting the highest pay tier.
Software developers are not completely subservient slaves. But some of them are certainly obnoxious prima donnas and like throwing tantrums about their oh so terrible working conditions.
Ironic that some of the highest paying jobs out there are also the jobs that are most easily performed at home. Software dev really seems to be one of those win/win/win scenarios when it comes to jobs. Of course, there will always be a litany of complaints online because there's always something to complain about, but still.
Slavery is a strong word. But consider serfdom in Middle Ages.
When some historian looked at it they found that on average a serf of a French baron say 700 years ago worked less than 40 hours per week on average. Perhaps even less than 30. And there was no commute. David Graeber in his «Dawn of everything» discussed that.
>> David Graeber in his «Dawn of everything» discussed that
David Graeber is the one who wrote this:
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"
And I'm guessing his knowledge of what happened 700 years ago is going to be much less accurate than his knowledge of times he lived through.
I’m very good friends with a medievalist professor. Something they said to me recently was interesting. Today, most medievalists don’t really like the term “feudalism” and instead see serfdom as an extension of Roman slave systems. Not chattel slavery, but definitely not a mutually agreed upon and beneficial economic relationship. I’m not so sure that “serfs didn’t actually work all that much” is aligned with current consensus.
Slavery is a strong word but in reality this is what we office workers are, modern day slaves and that’s how I understood it, as an analogy. They pay us for our work&time and they “own” us for these 40-50hrs/week. Remote working is not the silver bullet and for sure it’s not suitable for all, but for some of us it’s a life changing opportunity. Remote working opened a new door and gave us new possibilities, allowing us a little bit more freedom on many aspects of our jobs, thus making the whole thing more tolerable. After all that’s the expected flow of our modern lives for most of us: study, work, die.
What a narrow minded way of looking at things. Just because a word doesn't fit 100%, doesn't mean we shouldn't use it if the main idea is there.
"You’re not compelled to offer your services to any particular employer."
But you are compelled to offer your services to an employer, whose ways of working are almost all similar to each other. And it's not like you have infinite choice.
Is it really a choice to move alone somewhere else just to find a decent employer, but sacrifice friends, family, and so on?
Is it really a choice not to work and become homeless, a social outcast?
Is it really a choice to be an entrepreneur, in such a competitive environment that most startups fail, and you need considerable savings to sustain yourself in case of bad times?
Is it really a choice to find such a unicorn of employer that fits a modern day humans needs for privacy, sense of autonomy, sense of progression, good work-life-balance, good compensation, good responsible manager who doesn't micromanage (...), when most employers (have to) follow the same corporativistic mindset to get as most profits as possible out of employees in order to survive in an extremely competitive enviornment?
Is there really a choice when you have children to take care of, a mortgage and are just too tired or barely have any time whatsoever to look for jobs or invest time into your own startup?
Should I continue?
Where is the choice? Where is it?
People are not bound by physical means with the threat of death. Sure. But if you can't see other more subtle and equally powerful binds, then you're blind.
So yes, this is the modern equivalent slavery, in short - modern slavery - and please you stop.
Slaves can be bought and sold. Their children can be bought and sold. Slaves can be physically punished and even killed without legal recourse. They have no rights. They are property.
And it still exists, so the modern equivalent of slavery is still slavery.
What you are talking about is the social obligations of being part of civilization. Yes, there is no free lunch. We must all work to live unless someone else is willing to foot the bill for us. But if that is slavery, then literally everyone in the world with a job is a slave and the word loses its meaning.
There can be different kinds of slavery. Let's not get bogged down by details shall we?
If a situation fits for 80% and there is no other single word that better describes it, i see you would just do nothing and leave a clearly wrong situation in confusion and undefined. People need a word and a clarity of meaning to rally behind it. Slavery fits really well, even if some things don't fit the historical original definition of it. If you can come up with a better fitting word, be my guest, otherwise please don't stand in the way while people are trying to raise awareness for the tragic lack of freedom that so many of us experience.
Yes, improving your life situation requires sacrifices. And different outcomes require different sacrifices. Free people have the autonomy to choose which sacrifices they make. Enslaved people don't have that autonomy at all.
What I understand from your post, is that you want access to opportunities without making any sacrifices. It's an interesting discussion topic on its own. But the opposite of it is not slavery.
> People are not bound by physical means with the threat of death. Sure.
With how your health insurance depends on employment in the US, I kind of have the opposite impression that people actually do work under threat of physical harm; or violence, in other words, not unlike the working conditions of a slave.
You are not compelled at all. You can probably afford some land in the middle of nowhere and grow your own food.
You want some things that are available for money and need a way of getting money. That is very far from slavery. Every day you can choose to with or not, and what you want to work on.
Yes, go to the middle of nowhere and isolate yourself from everyone you know. Nice!! Also you need to be able to afford such a house with proper terrain to be able to cultivate every kind of food needed to live (not easy and needs a lot of learning). You can't do this by yourself also. You need more people to take care of such effort. So convince your family or friends to do the same and abandon who they know? Good luck with that! And for all of this we have to sacrifice the amazing feats of technology and go back to the middle ages because everything costs money. I'm sorry, but there has to be a better way where it's possible to have a good middle term. This that you present is no choice at all. It's almost like saying "Hey you can always kill yourself, so you do have freedom!" /s.
1. You want to not be compelled to do any work to meet your daily needs.
2. You aren’t prepared to be self sufficient so you also want others to render goods and services to you, for presumably no charge.
Are these contradictory? If work was optional for everyone, why would they work and give you goods and services for free?
Sure maybe in future everything can be automated away but right now do you think it’s reasonable to want to do no work and also not want to be self sufficient?
>Just because a word doesn't fit 100%, doesn't mean we shouldn't use it if the main idea is there.
A strong word better carry a stronger metaphor. No matter the framing, you are
- it is a choice to move alone somewhere, that is a chocie many make for college and post-college work
- it is a choice to be homeless. Not a comfortable choice, but a choice to make
- it is a choice to TRY to be an entrepreneur, but success is never promised when your job is to convince other people to give you money (which is THEIR choice).
- it is a choice to spend your time expecting perfection. Again, you are making a choice contingent on someone else's choice, success is not guaranteed.
- it's not an easy choice, but children can be given to others if you cannot provide care, and mortgages can be sold if you cannot afford payments. You not having the time/money to make your own company (which is a RISKY endeavor, and always has been) does not entitle you to free money.
I don't see how any of these relate to being a slave. Or even a minority/woman 100 years ago in the US. They didn't even have the option to work most places, let alone start up a business. homes would deny them for not being white or not having a man to backup expenditures. Still a step up from slavery, but still very much restricted because of who they are, not due to life factors they want to maintain (they had few to begin with).
So no, I don't see the slavery metaphor here as a valid one to make. There is more than one type of slavery, but we're in an american website. so you would basically need to very specifically frame your form of "slavery" if you're going outside what people commonly associate it with.
Yes, most of the things you listed are actual choices. Should I stay inside all cozy and eating ice cream or go outside and exercise? That’s also a choice to prioritize near-term comfort over long-term gain.
> You’re not compelled to offer your services to any particular employer.
But if you do not participate in the system of employment, you will either be left to the mercy of others or die of starvation. Even if you own land which you farm and make all of your own stuff, hunt your own food - you will still have to work for someone else by selling them stuff you farmed, made or hunted yourself so that you can pay property taxes.
Modern capitalism is a world-encroaching system of slavery, made necessary by scarcity (mostly of land).
Slavery is perhaps not the right word, but prisoner could be. That’s why they are called “golden” handcuffs. Very few people escape this prison, but it is indeed possible and doesn’t require going out into the woods and becoming a hermit.
To continue the analogy, isn’t the jailer/warden also a prisoner? He too is stuck in the prison, perhaps for different reasons but stuck nonetheless.
Just like you are not a slave the warden is not a prisoner since he can go home every day, and can choose to stop working there if he doesn’t like the place.
Choice is what prisoners and slaves don’t have, and we have plenty of both.
More like a walled garden. You have duties to uphold, but you have plenty of freedom to leave. but you know the outside world will be difficult until you find the next oasis to give your duties to.
Here's what modern day slavery looks like: "Harassed, insulted and raped – that is everyday for thousands of women working in tomato and strawberry fields of Spain, Italy and Morocco. The vegetables and fruits they harvest are sold in German supermarkets and all over Europe".
What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment
Being forced to live in expensive cities … and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
In your attempt to throw everything against a wall to see what sticks you’ve contradicted yourself. Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment.
You want to work from home—own that instead of trying to pretend you are fighting for some great moral cause.
Comparing one group of people that live in a dense area, and can take a bus to/from work and other places, versus another group of people that each drive a separate car over a much longer distance to/from work and other places. Not to mention the efficiency of heating one large building over lots of small buildings and things like that. I don't think this is much of a contested thing.
I bet it'd be more of a contested thing if there were more environmentalist intellectuals living in the countryside seeking to justify their lifestyles. How far does each population's food travel? How often does the average person in either location travel by plane? What is the lifecycle cost of treating water in a concentrated location versus local wells? What are the positive effects of human activity on the environment in either local?
There are a lot of factors to consider when making that comparison, and if you're going to criticise upstream commentators for handwaving justifications of their own lifestyles, it seems important to consider more the availability of public transit.
To the contrary, I prefer to work for employers who are kind to the environment and I'm quite sure my entire generation feels the same. In fact, I long for the day when the last business harmful to the environment shuts its doors.
> I'm quite sure my entire generation feels the same.
they may agree, but may not have the fortune of choice. Not everyone is being well compensated in a cushy office space. Google people certainly are, but that's a small slice of an industry that's a slice of an entire society.
it seem that "completely subservient slave" caused some controversy. it wasn't my intention to demean real slavery, like the factory workers sub-contracted by google and apple.
perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)
"I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily"
Disagree, I think this leads to poor productivity, generally speaking. When I'm in the office, I'm honestly amazed anything gets done at all. There are so many disruptions, side conversations, etc. that I treat it as a "week off" on my schedule any time I have to go into the office. Once back in my home office, I can get back to writing code.
That said, it likely depends greatly on the job, but this is tech, and coders and engineers need a lot of uninterrupted time to think. It doesn't mean there can't be collaborative time, and in fact it can be helpful when scheduled appropriately, but I think productivity is better when you have a way to turn off interruptions when needed.
>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
wut?
2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody within 1min.
The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time. They’re specifying their preference for in-person communication even though it may affect individual productivity.
I 100% agree with them.
I’m more productive as a remote employee, my coworkers seem to greatly prefer remote work, and there is a 0% chance the next job I pursue will be at a remote company.
Same. I can't speak for personal productivity, because I think i'm waaay less productive, but I don't like remote at all. The hard part these days is finding interesting potential employers who aren't trying to lure me in with the remote hook, because it doesn't appeal to me. I was happy with the old norm of on-site, but with the ability to WFH on one-off days if something came up, like expecting a big delivery or something. I didn't like open plan offices, but I liked being in the office.
I'm the kind of person who simply doesn't have a social life if i'm not already out in town at the end of the working day; I just can't overcome the inertia of being at home. So for me, working remotely has made me the most depressed, and physically unfit, I've ever been.
> So for me, working remotely has made me the most depressed, and physically unfit, I've ever been.
This was the state I was in and I tried medication for anxiety/depression for the first time in my life. It didn’t work well for me, but it gave me the impetus to change something.
I ended up going WeWork and it’s been great for me. Gives me people to talk to (all the staff there are friendly and some of the other people there like to chat) and a reason to get out of the house. I run/bike commute to get there so I’ve been much more active since I started going.
Good luck, and I hope you find something that makes it better for you. I know how rough it is!
>> The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time.
I think you just hit the nail on the head right there.
There are a few things that I've realized make the difference between remote work and in person. When you are needing to talk to a team mate, working remotely you can just message them and get a response quickly, but this has the effect of interrupting them (or you), which can derail their train of thought. Sure, your still interrupting them when in person, but you can see that they are actively working on something and wait a minute or two for them to notice. They may also see you out of their pariferal vision, which alerts them without really interrupting them, so they can continue their thought before moving on to yours. It's possible to delay replying to a message, but for me personally this means I might take longer to reply to the message than I should because I forget to come back to it (also I swear Slack doesn't always play the notification sound).
The other thing I've noticed is that the lack of interruption can actually negatively affect me. Seeing others getting up for a break can trigger me to also take a break, which can prevent me from getting too lost down a tangent (or spending too much time on Reddit). Since it's in the preiphery though, this allows you to continue with your train of thought while still also being able to see it as a reminder. This allows you to better choose when (or if) to respond.
I think what message apps need, is to slowly fade in alerts, instead of harsh instant alerts. So you notice them, but aren't interrupted. This won't necessarily help with the tangent (or Reddit) problem, but it will help with the interruption of teammates.
> When you are needing to talk to a team mate, working remotely you can just message them and get a response quickly, but this has the effect of interrupting them (or you), which can derail their train of thought. Sure, your still interrupting them when in person, but you can see that they are actively working on something and wait a minute or two for them to notice
You're wrong. When I need to stay focused on something I may ignore messages and be 100% productive. However when I'm at the office most people don't care if I'm working on something with my headphones on, clearly in the zone. They'll just approach me about the most benign matters most of which can wait for days even.
Maybe they're right, for themselves. Most of the comments in this thread are just a remote-vs-onsite flamewar with everyone trading anecdotes about why one option is better than the other.
There are plenty of people who say they don't go to work to make friends, they go to do their job, and any kind of interruption not directly related to the work they're doing is unwelcome. Plenty of others who will go to great lengths to stay out of any conversation and work as independently as possible because "they're just there to write code" or whatever.
If it's not so wrong to say you want to go to work and be completely left alone, why is it wrong to say you actually go because you prefer the dynamics of office life and find it less disruptive than a remote equivalent?
Do you think your attitude has any effect on the people you work with? When you think of their job as easier and taking less focus than your own — despite knowing little about the challenges of their work — do you ever wonder if they’re making the same assumptions about your work?
>I think the poster has an issue with their company that they are projected onto the industry.
Couldn't the same be said of you? I don't think anyone is asserting that one system is the best. If an entire team/company is able to be happy and productive in a remote-work situation, then more power to them. Its often the case that some people prefer remote, some don't. The ratio varies between companies. Personally, as a manager, I would prioritize overall team happiness and efficiency over placating a few individuals.
It sounds like the OP we're replying to wants a daycare, not a company. There's plenty of them out there (including the original subject of conversation), but I wouldn't call it a preference.
People like this don't want a structured workplace because they prefer it; they want a structured workplace because they need it, because they never figured out how to live by themselves after university.
OP said they prefer to resolve in person rather than Slack/Zoom/etc. They weren't projecting, just expressing a different preference for what they find productive.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity
Aside from all the other advantages of WfH that have already been mentioned in this thread (like no commute, healthier eating, more fresh air and exercise, better work/life balance etc), I really don't think this description of office-life fits my recollection of reality, at all.
In the office it was much more often that wanting to discuss something in person with a couple of colleagues would involve:
1. locating colleague 1
2. going in search of colleague 2 who isn't at their desk
3. disturbing people in the open-office environment asking where colleague 2 is
4. deciding to check again later
5. noticing that colleague 2 is back at their desk
6. looking around and seeing that colleague 1 is not at their desk
7. going over to colleague 2 and asking if they have 5 minutes
8. colleague 2 is deploying, and will be done in 15 minutes
9. ask around and discover that colleague 1 has gone to early lunch
> 1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2
Even better imho, anytime working together with more than 1 person you don't have to awkwardly huddle around the single 22" screen on your desk squinting at the code. Everyone has the shared screen in full view and can even draw on the screen (yay, no more finger smudge marks) to point at what they mean.
I read these and wonder what folks think about all the distributed teams in companies. Is the view that they are just generally less effective?
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person
I think this was more true for me when I was earlier in my career and remote tech really sucked. But now I see it as generally negative to have to sync with someone else to resolve an issue they (or I) am working on. In my experience, in-person bias is a symptom of a team that does not communicate well in writing (emails, Slacks, Jira, etc.).
> where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity
There is literally decades of published research that refutes this for knowledge work. IIRC the first studies were done in the 1950s or thereabouts, and I am not aware of any big studies that have come since that concluded differently. (IIRC Microsoft's campus was originally designed to give every engineer a solo office because Gates read _Peopleware.)
I will admit that working in interrupt-driven style does produce the feeling of getting more work done, whether or not that is actually true.
It really depends how you measure productivity. Does it make the team close their JIRA tickets faster and pump out more lines of code? Probably. But I wouldn't be surprised if it also resulted in more defects, worse designs, more tech debt, and more failed projects.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop someone from writing code.
Yes, I _personally_ believe distributed teams are less effective.
As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It measures a controlled thing, but certainly nothing I would use to extrapolate that software engineering teams work less efficiently when people can interrupt each other with questions easily.
If you have any studies that you think are good feel free to link them, I'm open to being wrong.
Curious what makes you think distributed teams are less effective? I've personally been much more effective with my output working remotely than I ever was with the noise and distractions of the office. I've seen excellent productivity from my colleagues as well in remote settings, too.
It's unfortunate that companies and individuals, like yourself, can't respect the fact that others _are_ more effective remote and when they're not getting tapped on the shoulder by random colleagues.
As your GP comment pointed out remote vs in-office productivity likely breaks even. Companies should treat their employees like adults and let them work where they feel most productive and not cater to the preferences of upper-management or a desire to return to the status-quo.
I'm sure these mythical people exist but I never run into them. Every coworker I've met that is more "effective" at home is really just trading team velocity for personal velocity. They feel more productive by getting more of "their stuff" done but it happens at the expense of the overall teams speed.
> just trading team velocity for personal velocity.
The entire team at an in-person org pays a global commuting tax. Employees are not an idealized frictionless surface; if they have to commute to work, that comes out of their productive capacity in some way.
What you are describing here is a team that is not managed well. If I had to guess, that team would exhibit features such as:
- critical information only shared in meetings and not recorded in writing (or recorded in a place the team does not use as habit)
- that same critical information re-discovered in subsequent meetings because it was not written down
- team cadence extremely sensitive to PTO because key knowledge is only accessible by speaking to the relevant person
- team cadence extremely sensitive to staff onboarding/replacement because both of these require hands-on in-person time from existing staff
- etc.
It's worth noting that all of these inefficiencies are experienced as "progress" by the team: "we made a key decision" (that we had decided and not written down a month prior) feels like something positive. "I spent most of today helping X get ramped up" also feels like an accomplishment rather than the more correct "our documentation and process is so opaque that we lost $X of engineering time today when an engineer was required to help another get onboarded."
Essentially, teams that need to be in-person to function typically underutilize the old technology (writing) and because so many teams work that way, most people do not notice how much time they waste.
This is not every team that leans heavily on in-person interaction; obviously there are outliers that are capable of using the technology of the written word while also augmenting with high-bandwidth interactions.
As I indicated, there has been a lot of published research on this specific topic as applied to software engineering teams. I would suggest you start with _Peopleware_ by DeMarco & Lister as a survey.
This research is categorically different from the research on working from home in that:
- it measures a facet of the workplace that is commonplace and standard
- it has been studied for several decades, and the results have held up. (IIRC the first such studies were done in the 1950s or 1960s.)
IMHO those arguing that people have changed enough that now they can better recover from interruptions than their predecessors could 20 or 30 years ago have the burden of proof, not the other way around.
I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works. To what degree it fits/supports peoples’ subjective state of mind is up for argument, but most professions got by just as they did prior to the pandemic. Heck, I’m a trial attorney and I never thought remote work would be feasible. After doing multiple 3+ day trials entirely by WebEx I never want to go back to a courtroom. I can skip security, use multiple monitors, seldom drive, cook my own lunches, pet my dogs on breaks… everything for my job is easier remotely. It’s a dream come true.
> I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works.
It certainly works in the short term, in an emergency situation where everybody in a sector is operating under the same conditions out of necessity.
Whether it has long-term detrimental effects remains to be determined. My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past.
> My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past.
Have you maybe considered that it's actually not your team's fault but rather how the organisation transitioned into and approached remote working?
That or you're an MBA :)
A) I think there's a lot of confounders here (like the global pandemic and such) that make it to difficult to infer anything from correlations
B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input
C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects
Many people end up doing remote work in person anyways at sufficiently large companies where in order to get things done they have to get on video call or phone.
The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.
There’s a big difference between working with other teams in other places and having your own team be remote. Most companies already had offsites and all hands and such before COVID.
Record earnings aren't entirely fake news (people are spending more time online post-pandemic, and that's not going to roll back even if things go fully "back to normal" [1]) but the stock appreciation has a lot to do with the fake-news-ification of the dollar. The CPI has always undercounted inflation, but now the divergence is worsening. Real inflation's probably 11-12% right now.
Wage earners have a couple percent more dollars every year, but the rich have massively more dollars. This is basically clathrate-gun inflation, insofar as while it's true that the rich don't compete for, say, food staples and therefore the illicitly printed money is often considered "harmless"... it goes into investment, which is a different market, we are told... the rich can and given the right circumstances will compete for other things people need, such as housing (see: Blackrock's invasion of residential real estate).
If you look at the S&P denoted in, say, houses... which I've chosen because housing is most people's biggest expense, it's actually been a mediocre market, the past 20 years.
----
[1] There won't actually be "back to normal". Just as 9/11 World didn't really end but blended into GFC World, which blended into Covid World... this one's going to blend into either European War World (if the current situation gets worse) or Climate Change World. The upper class will always need a crisis to hold over our heads (and, of course, several of these represent real crises that the upper classes did not intentionally create) to keep power.
I hate to be the "correlation is not necessarily causation" guy, but come on!
Most of the big tech companies could have laid off 90% of their workers over the past 2 years and would have had even higher record earnings (and maybe stock prices).
What the big tech companies are concerned about is their continued ability to be productive and stay on top, and the fact that everyone had to move a ton of spending to online over the lockdowns doesn't mean that record profits during that time are sustainable.
I don't understand how you could think the rise in stock price is related to anything specific people at Google did vs massive spending increases by companies in google ads since it was one of the only ways to advertise with the lock-downs.
Two years is a short sample for "all society". We've all been in emergency mode. Let's see how it shakes out for a generation.
There are pros and cons to remote work, and I wish more people were honest about the cons. I think a lot of people hand-wave it away because they like the idea of living where they want.
Have you ever walked between buildings to catch a meeting? I remember this from my Google days and I hated it. Ironically at some point they were cool with video calling in from another building!!
I hated it because it took 5-10 minutes. I’d rather use that time working, or meditating, or doing anything else of my choice than having to walk. It’s also pretty messed up when it rains, or is cold, or I have a disability or a foot in a cast. Etc etc.
Having to do things not essential to a purpose is better to make them optional.
If I like working, I can walk around while on the remote meeting
Fair enough with wanting to work rather than walk, but feeling aggrieved at not being able to meditate due to having to walk seems like such an odd problem to me. I can't imagine being able to get more out of meditating at work (even in a quiet dark area) than in getting some exercise and enjoying the breeze. Nothing against meditating, but it can't beat exercise as a break from sitting/standing at a desk for hours on end.
The options are not "must walk to this place at this specific time" and "never do any exercise or take a break during your day". This type of dichotomy is drawn in so much of the back-to-office discussion. Mandating something that happens to involve, in part, something that could be beneficial, is not in itself an argument for the mandate when you can take that part by itself anyway. Like, even if it's a zoom meeting you could, at that same exact time right before the meeting, take a walk for five minutes. The mandate isn't helping you out in that respect.
I meant that meditating for 5 minutes before or after a meeting is a better use of time for me. I didn’t mean that walking displaced meditating, I was giving examples of how there are better uses of time than unnecessary walking.
I love walking and think it’s great for creativity and other purposes. I’m not against walking. I’m against having to walk just to get to and from a meeting.
I love whistling and singing. I would be against a requirement to whistle for 30 seconds before every meeting starts.
Maybe workplaces should explore other campus styles, to replace the necessity of walking moderate distances. Maybe a campus built around a small lake, and employees can swim/row/kayak to their morning standup? Or some kind of giant multi-story climbing wall to replace elevators or stairs. I know I'd move across the country for a job where I could zipline down to the cafeteria.
There may be a few ADA and liability issues with these ideas... ski lifts would be a fairly accessible fun option.
“Team, I’ve got some bad news to share. I’m afraid Bob is no longer an employee of Big Corp. I know this may come as a shock to you, but he just wasn’t able to keep his head above water. Making waves is all well and good, but at the end of the day, Bob’s little venture has left us all dead in the water. Well, actually, just Bob really. What I’m trying to say is that Bob drowned on his way over to this morning’s standup.”
If a meeting is a 10 minute walk and must be attended in person, then attendees are forced to walk 10 minutes. This seems like a waste to me.
At the same time, I think walking is great. It’s good exercise and good for the brain. But it has nothing to do with being a requirement for a successful meeting.
the best 1:1s I had with managers were typically walking around campus, although with the construction going on near shoreline (if it's not done) that became less enjoyable, and eventually, they moved my entire department to an outpost in Sunnyvale that wasn't very nice to walk around.
I worked in Plymouth, and had regular meetings with folks in Crittenden. That was a ~10 minute bike ride. When I had time, I loved biking over there and back, maybe catching a meal at a cafe far from my office. It was the perfect mid-day break.
laughs in New York City at getting lost in stairwells of the original 111 8th Ave building or Chelsea market building, and soon (not) going between Chelsea and Hudson Square.
Yeah NYC-8th is hilarious. The number of times I remember having to wait 6-7 minutes for a meeting to start because somebody had back-to-backs and needed to take some convoluted path to go up or down five floors was too high to count.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.
You do understand that "I personally prefer" and "actually works better" and "better for everybody involved" are three different things, do you?
We were told for years that it's an established fact that remote work is inefficient and untenable. We have proven - with an experiment that we wouldn't rather go through, but we had no choice - that this is false. That doesn't mean it is for everybody - but it doesn't also mean that the thing you prefer is for everybody. So why it's ok to force one of these things onto everybody? That's what the managers should be able to answer.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack
That works for companies with less than 100 engineers. Everyone seems to have forgotten the good ol days where you had in person meetings and had to dial in half the team from Europe or include Fred who is working from home.
It doesn't matter how many engineers there are as long as the teams are colocated. Yes you will need to have zoom meetings with other teams but interaction within the team can be almost fully in person.
The actual time to get feedback in an office is between four hours and two days. Managers are almost never at their desks because they are attending meetings all day. Same for senior engineers. If you need a quick response IM is your best option.
Your whole team of engineers will almost never be in the same place. Someone will be in a meeting, somewhere. Or hiding trying to get work done. You might get lucky and the person you need to talk to is at their desk, but they will be busy trying to catch up before or after a meeting.
In office communication is already asynchronous. Every day you will run into these problems. The idea of (especially open) offices fostering communication is a complete fantasy.
Email and chat are the way actual communication is done in corporate America. Synchronous communication isn’t feasible.
Sure, as long as $impossible is true, it works well. You can have a front end Javascript team all stuck in Portland, but that falls apart for any advanced skill set. Try convincing the worlds 20 leading experts in X to live in one city.
My experience of returning to the office a few times already? The same old thing.
People eating at their desks - we have a kitchen.
People having meetings and "quick chats" around their desk - we have many, many, meeting rooms.
People with other annoying habits (which I almost certainly have too) that make me sound OCD but... sniffing, throat clearing, drowning themselves in aftershave or perfume and so on.
Same awful 60min+ commute on a train.
Versus my home office with just me, quiet background music, and exactly zero distractions.
I'm glad all the multi-million salaried bosses that live a few minutes walk and have their own private offices want every one back...
Note: just an typical enterprise dev take, not in the Bay Area/part of the FAAMNG environment
A big part of the equation (for some) will be what kind of office they are being asked to return to? At the office my company used to have before it was acquired in 2019 everyone had a cube, not big by any means and not with full walls, but enough space to have a few pics of family, maybe a plant, personal nick-nacks, whatever, a sense of some sort of boundary to it. I could have easily been persuaded to return to that environment 3 days a week, because I did enjoy being around my peers. The acquiring company however, had plans underway to bring us into long elbow-to-elbow tables before work from home happened in March 2020. What would you call a food trough to work at instead of eat at, a "productivity trough"? I am open to tolerating that one day a week for cross team meetings (some have started trickling in already), anymore than that and I am out.
Our office is 100% hoteling now no fixed seats. No personal stuff unless you want to carry it in everyday you go in. Been a few months since I went in.
That's one of the issues with the idea of flexibility/choice/etc. If most people have different preferences, your's are not necessarily really an option.
At work, it's hybrid, (remote up to 3 days/weeks) and each teams (we are 15 in my team) must vote on a common on-prem day and I get to keep my private office full of legos!
But this arrangement is only available to peoples who don't interact with the students, so it create some resentment. The workers who don't have that privilege have started to call us: la gagne de laptops, a derisive way to says the laptops class/cast.
"Allowing remote work has been proven to be better."
Because it increases the supply of candidates. I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.
I get that I'm leaving as an exercise for the reader "how to implement hybrid teams" and "how to fairly evaluate employees who are remote and not."
I've spent roughly a thousand hours of time with my family since quarantine began, that I otherwise would have spent commuting to work. I can hardly tell you how valuable that is.
Let me just glance real quick at how profitable my company has been over the last two years... oh, hmm, yeah, it seems like it can take the theoretic productivity hit from being forced to use IM to solve problems.
> I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.
100%. Email and Slack are great for DEIA. In person meetings end up dominated by whoever is loudest/most aggressive. I know a woman who just left and in-person company for a fully remote position because of issues in person. She would tell me stories about a taller man who would purposely stand over people to intimidate them.
If companies are truly serious about inclusion and diversity, then embracing remote is a must! In just a few weeks of the initial pandemic lockdowns, I was really taken aback by how meeting dynamics changed - people less comfortable speaking up in crowded rooms or taking on challenging discussion suddenly found their voice. They were speaking up on video conferencing, in the meeting chats, raising hands and sending emoji reactions.
In person interactions literally stifled some of our team members. It’s going to be a challenge to keep this going, but we must - we owe all of our coworkers a voice. These interactions also drove meaningful productivity. I bet we more than offset losses from other lack of in person collaboration.
I have found working remotely 98% of the time during covid has MASSIVELY improved my output.
1) I can start work 2 hours before i normally do. I can skip all the "getting up from bed and get ready". I literally work until noon in my underwear. Then i usually go for a 30min run and get a shower and lunch. I also save 2 hours per day commuting. I save a shitton of money on expensive lunches too.
2) The "can you check this, or could i have a list of that" annoyances have all but vanished. People (usually manager kinds) have actually had to dig up their own stuff and do some work themselves.
3) As i work MORE effective hours from home i sometimes take fridays off and just do my thing. I'm always way ahead of schedule.
I firmly believe the "in office nine-to-five" kind of work is in the past. It's a legacy way of working and it has proven to be very unproductive compared to remote work.
(PS. As most of you guys i'm in the software industry, so i cant speak of other fields of work. My points are purely my own discoveries and strictly related to software development)
Yeah well, i don't want to be interrupted by a guy who thinks he can just come over tap me on the shoulder and I have to give him the attention he wants because he's too self-absorbed to understand other people might have a different way of working and have to accommodate to that guy's needs before their own.
"We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it."
No, that's not about it. We've also proven they're able to have record profits. Whether they would have even higher profits if it was fully office, it's another story, but saying all that is proven is that they won't crash is false and just shows you're emotionally invested in having people back in the office because you want them to.
I had a collegue who would literary tap me on the shoulder. It was a loud open office so I had noise cancelling headphones.
It was insanely annoying. And when I told him to please stop, he started to wave his hand in my peripheral vision.
I pretty much gave up trying to make him behave. I mean those headphones are not that good you can just speak ...
Just the risk of such things makes it hard for me to concentrate. They need not have to happen, just that they could is enough.
I think it is the walking up behind me on row desks that is the problem. I have a private office now with my side to the door and in no way I feel the same.
A useful tactic in this situation is to not reward the colleague for interrupting you like that.
e.g. you could answer, but state you are in the middle of something, can't focus now, and please send you an email. If you are politely obstinate enough they will soon learn they are wasting their time with the interruptions and will be trained to send an email straight away instead.
> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
Well said. At these point, anyone who suggests one is superior to the other without discussing the pros and cons of each is probably too biased to have an honest discussion.
Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.
One thing I’m certain about, though, is that a lot of people who want remote work don’t necessarily do better when remote. I recruited, hired, and managed remote teams for a long time. The number of people who insisted they focused better at home but then couldn’t get anything done without constant performance management or nagging was surprisingly high. This even included several people who later transitioned to our office and did substantially better. A lot of people struggle to stay focused and productive when left alone at home to themselves. Going into the office can be the context shift they need to get productive.
> Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.
I think a lot of the difference is that the people who prefer remote are just asking that they be given the choice to go remote. However, many of the people who prefer in-person are also expecting everyone else to go in-person. I recognize pros and cons to both remote and in-person, and believe what is right for me might not be right for others. If you give a team of 10 the option, and 9 of them choose remote, should the 1 person who likes in-person be able to make everyone else go in-person, so he has that "in-person experience"?
I know from my perspective preferring all remote all the time, I often feel like I have to advocate and sell remote work at every opportunity, not because I feel that it is best for everyone but because I feel it is not the default, and that the group that is more in favor of it is the executive and management cast which have more influence over these decisions. So I oversell remote work sometimes because I feel that it is constantly at risk of being taken away from me if I don't advocate for it to the best of my ability. In contrast those that want back in office seem like the deck is stacked in their favor.
For me, I'm just not comfortable sitting in an office. It's cold, the air is dry, the windows are tinted a horrible deep blue and don't let in any natural light. Everybody else is fine with these conditions, but I'm not. There is just no way to have the exact same conditions fit everyone, which is one of the problems with offices - everyone stuck together in the same room with little to no power over their surroundings.
Additionally, I can't push myself to be productive for 8 hours straight. My productivity has gone way up now that I can have a good long break in the middle of the day. You can't really go and have a 3 hour break in the office and even if you did, what would you do? - at most you can sit in the cold kitchenette and stare at the wall, at which point I'm literally wasting my life.
The only people really comfortable in offices are the ones who are in it for the politics. Ditto everything you have said here including the taking a break. I learnt to code in bedroom 20yrs ago, and now im an architect at a global company working fully remote. our company has fully committed with Work Life Balance and now that means fully flexible - if u want to be an office, be in it, if u want to WFH, WFH. We are remote first, so there is always a video call for any meeting.
I actually think offices/the rat is a large part of our sickness we have as humanity. People are "forced" todo what they dont want, and therefor, they are less empathetic to others plights. If "i have to, they should". "i need to goto work, slug it out, they should do. they shouldnt leech of the state. they shouldnt take our jobs. they shouldnt.". It feels like the root cause of so much conflict.
Atleast thats how it played out in my immigrant family. They came to this country, dedicated there lives to work, made money, and died before they could appreciate it. Ive now had an education, and realised that their way of life, back on an island, is more satisfying for the soul. So im trying to bring both of those concepts together and live the dream they had for me. Instead of how their parents slugged it out 12hrs a day, and never spent quality time with them... Which resulted in little growth of grow social/parental skills, talked to everyone like they were a client, and were easily manipulated by conservative media because they never had any time to understand world events for themselves.
No longer does remote mean isolation. I have better relationships with my neighbours and community. I have internet access at the level of any city folk. I have less worries, i can take breaks in my workday that are meaningful for me, and therefor i give more of myself to my job. Thats how being FLEXIBLE to your employees brings about efficencies. Much more complex then a simple commute.
I'm in a similar situation: the pandemic destroyed my ability to be comfortable in the office.
I like keeping the windows in my flat open, and two years of working from home made me extremely uncomfortable breathing the bad air of an hermetically sealed office.
Some people also don't consider their day job to be their life mission and don't care if an issue is resolved in 5 minutes or 30 minutes if it means saving 1 hour of commute and spending more time with their family / hobbies / life in general.
It leads to me wanting to kill myself more often and needing to invest more time in therapy, commutes, and recovery. And over half the engineers I've spoken with, who drop their facade, feel the same.
Being stuck in a chair all day with people watching you is not a good life.
Being forced to adhere to arbitrary social convention instead of speaking sincerely and expressing yourself is not a good life.
Choosing to lay in bed, work in the sun, recline on the couch, say hi to your cat, be your most authentic self, is a better life. Personally not dealing with the anxiety and body pain makes me more productive. But maybe everyone is right and we can get more productivity out of people by gutting their personalities and self-appreciation; but if that's the cost, I sincerely do not care. I'd rather everyone enjoy their short lives than spend them colorlessly and regret their choices on their deathbeds.
Some people feel exactly the opposite and are happier working in an office than remotely - even if they believe remote work is more productive!
Iirc it's very roughly like 20-30% want full remote, 50-60% want some type of hybrid (where there's a wide spectrum of hybrid models, from rarely-in-office to usually-in-office), and 10-20% prefer always or almost-always in office.
The ideal situation IMO is to have all options available: some teams are remote, some teams are in-office. The proportion over time should hopefully work out such that everyone can get what they want.
Personally, I'm happier and healthier with a hybrid model (where people work in office the same days) than full remote. And like you, I also know I'm not alone because of people I know who are very unhappy right now due to forced remote during COVID. I sincerely hope we soon enter a future where everyone has options that best suit them.
>I sincerely hope we soon enter a future where everyone has options that best suit them.
I'd like that too.
I am curious, why do you like going into the office? Does it give you something that you need, or does being remote too long make you uncomfortable because of something your mind is doing to you, which you have to escape?
I enjoy the structure it adds to the day, the built-in activity I get commuting, the ease of adding other activities onto my day before or after work since I work in Manhattan, the office amenities that give me one less thing to worry about (e.g. food), the stronger team bonding and socialization I get from working with people in person, the ease of working through certain nitty gritty problems together and with a whiteboard, and the ease of forming more informal friendships/acquaintanceships with others in the office.
I'd also add that I've always had and prioritized a short commute, and I like where I live and wouldn't want to move, so the cons are minimal for me. (The one thing I prefer about remote work is being able to take a 2hr mid-day break those days my brain is just fried; much easier at home, and I can then be more productive after that break.)
Work "friendships" are almost always a facade. It's because we *have* to work with them on a day to day basis, to get the work done. Being nice to each other is easier than being indifferent or hostile.
But, when work ends (quit, layoffs, terminated), those work "friendships" almost always dissolve into nothingness whence they came. When there's no more 40h/week together forced time, they dissolve. The after-work drinks are directly related to work. No common work? No common drinks. No more forced socialization means that fakeness is made apparent.
The real key: focus on not-work. Focus on clubs. Focus on get-togethers. Or parties. Or hell, hookups. Focus on things that don't use the "work" glue to force together. Those things will last when your job changes, or gets bought out, or whatever.
I have made good friends through work, including people I keep in touch with after changing jobs. Even if we don't keep in touch, I appreciate the transitory friendship for what it was. It's not like I keep up with most people from college either, but they were still my friends.
I could do those other things you say, but none nearly for as much time as the time I spend at work, so work friends come quite easily and naturally by comparison. Proximity has a big effect on making friends[0]. And I could do those activities you suggest in addition to getting to know people at work, because those other things happen off work hours. (Though realistically, I'm too old for parties and not single enough for hookups :))
Though, club thing has actually never worked for me. Those acquaintances end up feeling the most distant because we meet too infrequently. Probably requires a hobby you're really into so that you get more frequent exposure to one another (IIUC this makes CrossFit a good way to make friends).
Work "friendships" are almost always a facade. It's because we *have* to work with them on a day to day basis, to get the work done. Being nice to each other is easier than being indifferent or hostile.
I can't really disagree more with this comment.
Some of the people most important and amazing friendships I've ever made have been created in an office. So many people ex-colleagues are still great friends and over time, our friendships have even grown over the years, even after not working together anymore. Like seriously, I've made friends with incredible people living in cities and working in offices which I don't imagine will ever be replicated with online working.
I now work for a 100% remote, I love it and while I do make friends, there's no way the bonds are even sightly as strong as those I formed hanging out with people, in-person. Since working remote, I've had to make new friends to hang out with and what's funny is, those friendships seem way more lucid and difficult to maintain because it's usually just based around hobbies and the friendships can be soured by the slightest bit of annoyance / jealously or whatever because there's no real consequence to treating each other poorly.
When it comes to my peers that I've worked with face to face, we had to trust each other, share hardships and work through problems and that made us become closer.
What I believe will happen is there will be people who work in offices together, and they will have more leverage over the "remotes" because they'll be a core group of people who share closer ties. Eventually this socializing is what will bring people back to cities and offices, that's where the power will be.
If you could say your school friends were "real friends", you can say your work friends are real friends. Modulo some child-like naivety, you were only friends with your schoolmates because you had to be at school with them. Hell, say you're homeschooled, and you're friends with kids in your neighborhood; you're only friends with them because you have to live around them. You can always make this argument for all except purely Internet friends you plucked from the æther of some Discord server.
No-strings-attached friends are different from school/geographic/work friends, in terms of quality of life threat and the social strategy that should govern your interactions, but I don't think you can't say they're all friends.
I feel like you're speaking anecdotally, but at least in my experience some of my best friends were people that I met in previous companies. We still get together for weekly D&D sessions. But I make a concerted effort to maintain my friendships that I've developed even if we no longer work together, and that may be the key difference.
In my earlier 20-something days of office work, the social interactions were important. After work drinks were incredibly good times, as were group lunches and office banter. Sometimes people meet their partners at work, or make good friends, or just have consistently good conversations. This stuff matters when you want it to matter.
Now I know that isn't always guaranteed wherever you work, or wanted at all stages of your life/career. But I understand if people do crave those things.
+1 after talking to a lot of people about this I have come away with the impression that it's mostly a stage-of-life thing. I had a blast in the office in my early/mid-20s with bunch of coworkers around the same age. Met my now-wife at the office. However, in my 30s, I have zero desire to return to any office even if it's a hybrid scenario. The good thing is that there do seem to be lots of viable fully remote opportunities now.
How does not being around other people make you your "most authentic" self? We are only human through others. Every word you've ever spoken, every thought you've ever had, is codified in a language that was created over hundreds of thousands of years by people attempting to communicate. Are you anything without that language? It is a description of how you think.
I wish it wasn't so popular for people in tech with mental issues to project them onto everyone else, instead of looking at the early family life that made them. Your parents failed if you are so afraid of the other. It is not everyone else's fault that they don't hate people.
Putting on clothing with collars and buttons is a huge hit to my sense of "authenticity", to start. You feel pressured to to put on airs, deal with smalltalk, etc.
But it's only putting on airs and small talk to you. Why is your perception normal and the regular one "fake"? I grew up thinking like you did, in a household of people like this, and there couldn't be anything further from the truth. It's a projection of an insecurity around being unable to control the people around you.
I've no interest in controlling the people around me. I'm interested in controlling myself, which I'm not allowed to do at work due to the need to survive. Your choices are determined by your options; you do not pick your options at work, your employer does.
Those who it's fake for are not allowed to throw it off.
I get my socialization in groups I choose to be a part of where I don't have to curtail my every thought to avoid political retaliation that affects my livelihood.
And get a PhD before you start throwing around words like "mental issues" for things you disagree with.
There are no firm answers. Consider health effects.
Some of my colleagues struggled to maintain their health without their daily walks to the train, or just overworked themselves adapting to remote meetings and tools. Others are physically and mentally much healthier after substituting extra sleep, exercise, or preparation of healthy meals for the commute time.
Going to the office meant a baseline of 7,000 steps a day, plus quite a few flights of stairs. Plus it was easy to go to salsa and gym after work (because I was already out of the house, so it was easier to to talk myself into going).
I struggle to do any of those things when i'm remote. I know perfectly well that I physically can, but that psychological inertia is extremely powerful.
I get paired programming is cool, but honestly you can do it perfectly on zoom thanks to screen sharing with multiple participants. Its easier to have their screen on your screen right next to your screen thats on their screen than to huddle together clumsily with two laptops. Sometimes I'll have "office hours" on zoom, where I will just sit in my zoom room and work on my stuff and if people want to hop in and 'tap me on the shoulder' so to speak they can do it, or I could go and hop to someone elses or send a message and see if they are free.
In my experience I find pair programming with collaborative tools like VSCode's "Liveshare" [], paired with audio-only call (Slack huddle, Google meet, what have you), far superior than in person pair programming.
I executed an entire project which was pretty much non-stop pair programming over Zoom and Teamviewer. Was the most productive I've ever been on that particular system, and trying to physically be in the same room would've only been a negative.
No. I honestly experience relief, because I don't have to care about how my face looks like while being on meeting. I can sit comfortably. I walk around the room. Sometimes I do few push ups or squats. I make myself a coffee.
Zoom meetings are less tiring, because I dont have to care about how I look like. I can focus on content ... or not. I can make myself comfortable.
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
Seriously, what’s the difference between this and instant messaging?
I would argue that the ability to defer interruptions is enough to rely on IM, instead of physical interaction.
I certainly like being able to roll out of bed and put on a coffee 10 minutes before starting work, but if I'm being honest with myself, the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.
And maybe I'm just crazy but it seems like software even from the big companies has gotten worse through the pandemic. Which wouldn't surprise me that it's hard to keep everyone working together and on the same page through online calls and chats. I personally feel like I'm not quite as engaged being at home, surrounded by distractions compared to being in an office where my brain goes into work mode.
> the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.
I find the idea that all your regular human interaction comes from people you work with infinitely more dreadful.
People spend over 1/3 of their day working. It's the only regular social interaction a lot of people get outside of their household. They get a lot more irregular social interaction from other things, but nothing quite as regular.
>idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.
Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary. What you're describing sounds like a low performance interrupt driven nightmare.
This has been the reality for many of us for many years already.
I used to commute 1 hour every single day to an office building downtown, and my nearest colleague was in another office some 200km away in an entirely different city. Half of the team isn't even in the same time zone as I. Sure I did have other people hired by the same company sitting at desks around me, but we worked with entirely different projects so we never interacted beyond the daily "Morning!" and "Aight I'mma leave, see y'all tomorrow!"
Even my manager was located in the other office some 200km away, so I had no one to report to (be observed by!). My work was and is entirely measured by my contribution to the team, and not by where I happen to be located.
Remote working isn't a new thing that has never been tested before. It's just that you do remote working from home instead of from an office.
> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote suddenly and unexpectedly, without specific preparations, planning or training for that scenario, with employees in an especially stressing and taxing situation (pandemic uncertainty, childcare issues that wouldn't exist outside of a pandemic, with some people needing to work and care for children at the same time) and still be productive.
I'd say that's a rather strong result for remote work. Not proof that it's universally "better", because obviously things are complicated and the answer is always "it depends", but at least I'd take it as proof that it should probably be taken as the (or a) default option rather than an exotic alternative.
My company is going hybrid in the spring (2 days in office, 3 days WFH), which I think is a good approach. There is definitely something to be gained from face to face time with co-workers. There is also something to be said of the improved productivity of working at home and not dealing with a long commute or random distractions.
>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
I found that actually opposite was true in my case. Less distractions ,less interruptions and we cleared A LOT of our backlog. It turns out a lot of those "urgent taps" turned to be not so urgent, or other person being just lazy(it was faster to walk 1min than to do a 5min read on our internal docs, or just google it)
Do you literally want to be tapped on the shoulder? Because this seems to be an extremely common figure of speech, but literally, I would not enjoy that.
Like...one time I was deep in the mental flow, headphones on playing some nice orchestrated video game music. Totally entranced. Someone came up and tapped me on my shoulder and I damn near shit myself.
I mean people normally wave in your line of sight then actually touch you but yes.... It's a super quick way to resolve an issue and get everyone back on track. Especially as I've gotten more and more senior over my career and a lot of your work output is making sure the rest of the team can function effectively.
Only when I was really junior did heads down code all day happen.
I just don't understand why it's physical rather than verbal. You have to talk to solve the problem anyways right? Isn't that the point of being colocated?
And I prefer never going into a loud open office again where I am constantly interrupted. I traveled to my departments headquarters for an internal conference and I stayed two days after. The first half day I went into the office before the meeting, I could get nothing done because of all of the noise.
The second day I just worked from the hotel.
Switching cost from constant interruptions is a real phenomenon.
> "I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity"
First of all, not everyone is in same building or on same floor, or in same country of a large organization. Google account managers, for example, don't tap tech support people on the shoulder.
Secondly, a related anecdote: An overly friendly project manager in a previous job used to physically tap/slap me on shoulder on a regular basis. I politely asked him to stop doing it. He kept doing it, and my polite request became an awkwardly agitated request in front of colleagues. I am male, and his unwanted physical contact had nothing to do with harassment or intent to irritate me. He was "just that kinda guy". I want to be tolerant of people's different ways as much as anyone, but please keep your hands to yourself.
I am happier and more productive working from home, away from the awkward grey areas of personal interactions and distractions at work.
>>> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
And that's what is wrong about being in office, especially as a software developer I hate having my focus interrupted because someone can't send an email
For me the mixed model works best, some days at the office, some at home.
I am infinitely more productive when it comes to coding working from home. The constant office interruptions made it impossible to concentrate for any length of time.
On the other hand, any in person meeting felt equally more productive than the zoom ones. Same goes for discussing issues, explaining them out loud to other people etc. without having to set a meeting.
So, for me, the _preparation_ for work is best done in an on site environment, the actual work I do better from home (where I actually also have the much better setup and equipment than at the office)
That "individual preference" has a massive effect on the team just one remote person is a massive drain on efficiency. You can't frame it as "individual" when work is an inherently collaborative process.
Yes, I feel confident saying by and large they are. I've noticed a massive drop of collaboration with our switch to remote during this time. Sure there will be exceptions, mostly from in person companies being very bad about it, but there are fundamental limits with remote that don't exist in person for collaboration.
"Natural selection" in companies is so noisy I don't think we will ever see a clear trend in this case.
Covid showed that as a lower limit remote wont wreck companies atleast. I am convinced remote is a little bit better for the company (unless hardware/machine/industry centric) and alot better for many employees, especially in hard commute places.
Depending on how the rest of the team prefers to work, they can be, in the same way that two in-person workers at a predominantly remote company could be less collaborative if they do most of their conversing/deciding in person instead of on Slack/Chat/Email/etc
I'll be frank. I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers. They need to make friends outside of work if they need socialization time. I may socialize with people from work, but will do it on my own terms. The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency, it's just the polite way of saying they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.
> I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers.
Okay, sounds like you prefer remote work then? I don't see what's wrong with someone else preferring in-person work.
> The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency,
Disagree, there's definitely conversations that are much easier to have in-person. Both just "locally" for individual conversations, but also in terms team bonding and trust that allow other kinds of conversations to happen at all.
That said, I think it is _also_ about socializing.
> they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.
You cannot get around needing others to fulfill social needs, that's what social means.
In what way is this "forcing" in a way that's different than how other social interactions work?
If the decision to colocated or remote is made at the team/org level, then enough teams should choose to be remote that there will be many options for you, just as there will be many options for people that want a colocated team. These days there's no shortage of remote roles so it's already happening. What's wrong with that model?
Just like you don't want to be forced to socialize, others may not want to be forced to work on a remote team, and a team that has a free-for-all remote policy is effectively a remote team (as others have noted). If the decision is made at a group level, most everyone can get what they want.
If a free-for-all remote policy effectively means remote team, then maybe that tells you something about the value being provided by the "in office" people. If physical presence was providing good value to coworkers, more of them would want to be co-located.
No, that doesn't really follow. Just because something happened doesn't mean it's optimal. There are many examples in game theory, like the prisoner's dilemma, that showcase this effect. As others have explained in this thread, even a minority of the team choosing to be remote requires others to work in a remote fashion.
You can address this with some level of coordination, hence why making this a team or org decision is win-win for everyone IMO. You will never have to take a job that doesn't align with what you want, nor will most anybody else. Seems like a great outcome to me.
Ultimately, the market will come to a conclusion at some point, and perhaps that will show what the comparative value of in-office vs remote is :)
> a team that has a free-for-all remote policy is effectively a remote team (as others have noted)
I don't think this is true in the sense that you (or possibly the original commenter) mean. I think what happens is that if, e.g., 1/3 of a team is remote, the rest of the team has to choose between either excluding them by doing most interactions in-person, or leaning heavily on remote even though 2/3 of the team is in-office.
I don't get why in person types camt just use a co-working facility. Obviously not an option during the pandemic and that was rough gor them but so was going to the office for years for everyone else.
I think a coworking facility addresses like 10-20% of what a lot of people are looking for from an office. It’s not about being around random people, it’s about being around the people you’re working with.
This obvious libertarian slant is drawing a really really really long bow. Silicon Valley big tech employees are furthest away from being “forced” to do anything. There are people at Google who are tasked with making calls relating to worker productivity, and evidently this is one of those calls. Where does this ideology end? What if they tell you what language or tooling to use? If you don’t like your employer telling you what to do, employment probably isn’t for you?
Having worked in large buildings in fortune 500 companies, I love the ability to be able to find a bathroom stall that is unoccupied without having to walk around for 40 minutes.
In my experience productivity is up and people get their work done. What I do see is a lot of extrovert getting depressed because they no longer have access to the smorgasbord of interactions at the office. Certain managers also seem worried by this move to remote, since it has become harder for them to "play the game" of office politics.
My own opinion is let the people decide what to do. Once a week, everyday, once a month, only when needed... Let people and teams decide.
I’ve onboarded around a couple of companies remotely and it can be done really well, if people put thought and a process into remote onboarding it works really well.
Some things:
- make sure your laptop setup is documented (install x, y, z: setup like this)
- document where all resources are, confluence, repos, dashboards, everything and how to access
- setup virtual meetings with peers, in team and across company - one place suggested you reach out to 5 random people for a 10 minute chat - you could reach out to the lowest or highest person and the people being reached out to expected that random people would do it and it was fine - this really helped
- setup virtual calls with managers, their managers, their managers - just ten minutes to introduce yourself to each other
I’ve had better remote onboarding that starting onsite and twiddling my thumbs for over a week not knowing anyone or doing anything - I’ve suggested I leave places if there isn’t anything for me to do or any way for me to work before.
But is a job just an exchange of labor for payment? I view it as so much more. Even if we look at it from a job perspective, its also an opportunity to build personal connections between team members; "I owe you one" - goes a long way. Yes you can absolutely build these personal connections online, and it may be easier for introverted people, but I would say for most people a handshake or a smile passing down the hallway or a 'cool jacket', or someone fixing a bug and rushing to tell their co-workers, and other organic interactions are very hard to replicate online.
My friend, 95% of my coworkers have very little understanding what I do to the point where I could ghost for a week and there’d be probably 80% chance no one would be the wiser. Lots of jobs are like that. Deadline are generally floating, a project can take 30min or 30 days, and micromanaging doesn’t help much if at all. I keep track of what I’m doing on GitHub, make sure my backups are good, and do my thing. They don’t need me there and when I am in the office, very few people need to talk to me lol
I say this as a very social person. I like having colleagues. But the fact is I just don’t need to be in there most days, and they don’t understand what I do beyond “video,” so they don’t offer a lot of opportunity beyond that if we are being very utilitarian about it (which I generally don’t).
Many people have family and friends they'd much rather be around than the people they're forced to be around at work, even if those people are nice and their friends, so they don't need their job to substitute that socialization for them.
They are not a substitute for family or friends. I enjoy my co-workers' company and our little chats and social interactions provide a lot of value to me personally. I don't know why you feel forced to choose between your family and your co-workers. Seems like you've experienced some toxic/bad workplace environments.
I can only speak for myself. I won't get the same thing because we wont be sharing common goals, and/or celebrating little wins, or pulling in favors from other departments, etc, etc.
I totally get the idea, but when a company can easily fire you for no good reason it's hard to develop any real attachment to a job so that it is something beyond just an exchange of labor for payment.
Most employment contracts in the US (sorry for the US centric bias, I don't know where you're from!) are at-will, which means either party can walk away at any time for any reason. That doesn't stop us from forming deep friendships and relationships. Its the human condition.
So don't replicate it online. Having a different venue beyond a job is also an option.
That's the real part highlighted by the pandemic: people are extremely reliant on their jobs for social interaction. With all the problems that come with it. We're practically raised to be dependent on jobs for way too many things.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack.
Have you only ever worked for companies small enough to be co-located in a single office? This wasn't true at big corps even when we were all in the office.
Hey, the team that owns this is in Boston, 3 time zones from the West Cost. Oh, wait, that piece of software was transferred to the Zurich team, 9 time zones away, so they'll respond tomorrow at the earliest because there's no workday overlap. Bob might know about it, though, he's on the other side of campus - you can get there in 30 minutes on the campus shuttle.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
On the flip side, there are people that prefer a company where everyone is remote. They want to be able to resolve any issues quickly over voice calls or slack, and do not want to feel at a disadvantage because they are isolated from in person discussions that could have just as easily happened over VC.
It's not about the tech-companies, it's about their employees: many of them simply don't want to come back to the office!
What if many of them switch to companies that allow fully remote working? Google will lose out on a lot of talent and will eventually suffer in the quality of its products.
I personally believe there's no difference in the volume of work produced by people working remotely, providing they don't have small children at home. All these drawbacks are made-up by managers fearing to lose their jobs if workers keep working remotely.
I do wonder what the critical percentage of people refusing to return to the office is for companies to offer remote as standard? I quit my old job over a return to the office policy and fully intend to never return because I deeply despise commuting, open offices, the interruption-driven culture of in-person work, and urban existence in general. I realise I'm probably a bit of an extremist in this respect though, I'd love to see a breakdown of what employees attitudes are globally.
I don't think it needs to be a percentage. Every company has earmarked certain employees as "critical" to their day-to-day functioning. If these start leaving in droves, even if it's only a few, management might turn around pretty quickly.
Companies have been operating remotely and/or distributed for much longer than 2 years. Pretty much every company I worked for from 2010 onwards had at least half the team separate from the "sales office" that owned the relationship. Most often this was having dev teams in South America or Eastern Europe, but pretty frequently we just had multiple offices in the US working together. And frequently with clients that were in a third location. Slack, Zoom, JIRA. That's all you need.
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily
That's bonkers. When people message you on slack you can prioritize and respond without breaking pace and train of productive thought. In person, if someome is talking to you and I also prefer to chat up, I will delay the conversation indefinetly or book a time wasting meeting that clutters your schedule. If you need someone else to comment and they're on a meeting you might schedule another meeting instead of asking them questions they can answer while listening in on the current meeting.
I could put in a good effort to be lazy and unproductive at home and I would still be more productive overall than in the office. I disliked wfh after covid for a while because I was so busy all the time. No more chatting with extroverts and walking to/from meeting rooms half of the work day (at best!) and I use to leave my pc off or at the office before, now I constantly work before and after shifts, on weekends,etc...
It makes me feel like my job is at risk because I don't have enough time to show desired output/kpi at the office. At least now I overwork and have better assurances of stability. They pay me well enough to where I don't worry about taken advantage of.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
It's too easy to make such statements without measuring anything. Are issues really resolved quicker, or they /feel/ like that? Is overall productivity higher? Let's measure that?
All of your concerns die away in a hybrid enviroment.
And I disagree with your "tap on the shoulder" problem. That is easily resolved with a one line email/message which can be answered equally quickly with a one line answer without all the social BS ... if it needs more than that then it is interfering with productivity at that moment and a short or appropriate meeting can be scheduled to elaborate. Anything else and ... sorry, you don't value good work.
The past two years has not been real remote work. When you work remote for real you get together in the office every month or so and your relationships stay high bandwidth. The past two years has been forced separation. Forced virtual, and NOT remote work.
Any assessment looking at remote productivity during a pandemic vs. remote productivity with periodic in-person meetings and considerate, purposeful norms will get wildly different data.
Personally I'll never go back to the office except for the occasional meeting. The benefit I get to my health and well being from not commuting, is far too great. I also think that offices are just a power trip by the company leaders. They get off by walking through an office full of people. Its just another crappy part of being an employee, suffering through the command and control structure of business.
How can you say they're wrong when that is their experience. I certainly do think working remote has been better for me and for my teams. It is proven in the productivity and happiness of those that I work with.
We've proven that companies/organizations can go fully remote and thrive.
If you like working on site, good for you. Many don't like it, and are less productive working on site.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack
If you mean this literally (i.e. walk over to someone's desk/office the moment you have an issue to resolve), this is highly disruptive and partially the reason why some people hate going into the office, particularly engineers.
I understand some people prefer to meet in person but it's not an absolute necessity.
I have worked at a couple of FAANG. When I wanted to get things done, I would hide in a meeting room, or I would work from home.
The office is the most unproductive environment (at least for me). People will interrupt you all the time, for random things, chit chat, coffee and what not. Having head phones all the time did not make any difference.
You're living in the past. The places where people tapped shoulders were the disruptive inefficient places I've worked at. Slack and Zoom have worked great remotely. The only thing I miss is in-room whiteboards, but I'm in the minority. Maybe you haven't worked for well-managed remote companies, and maybe Alphabet isn't one.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person
Many things at a big company like Google require working with people in different timezones. I would say more often than not, if requires working with someone in a building far enough away that you have to do a video conference anyway.
In software Engineering there is no evidence that working from home is less productive. Personally it is quite the opposite with open offices still being the norm in most companies.
However, it is important to adapt your company to a remote working culture. You can't simply replace your physical meetings with Zoom meetings. In order to ensure a good team spirit, it is also important to organise regular meet ups between all your remote staff at least once a quarter.
And regarding your approach to "quickly" resolve things, I shall refrain from repeating the words that software engineers use for people like you. You are assuming that your issue is the highest priority issue that needs to be resolved immediately. This can be highly disruptive for Software Engineers, especially when multiple business stakeholders tend to do the same.
It's not that common IME for there to actually be a real debate but rather simply some sort of power play/expression of desire for personal benefit.
If you expect that literally every business going forward is going to be happy with WFH then you're taking an unreasonable stance. The same is true in the opposite direction - as much as I'd like it to be the case, not everyone is going back to the office, structural changes have taken place that would make that difficult even if it were desired.
It follows then that some people will have to switch companies. This really isn't a big deal, the entire point of having a job market is that people should be continuously doing this otherwise the market isn't efficient.
You can see it in the rhetoric here - "forced to go in". There is no force involved.
as a board member or shareholder I think I would ask the inverse question.
Okay, we have two years of data. PROVE to me that you need to spend $Xm per year on office space for this company to work. Prove to me that you have to pay top of market SV salaries
I think the time is now to reframe what needs to be proven...its a business not a social experiment. Coming in costs more money, prove to me its money worth spending on a case by case basis. If you don't run a handson manufacturing line what evidence supports paying for a building where everyone has a space? We've already ditched offices for cubicles and cubicles for open plan offices just to save space (i.e., cost). At this point the burden of proof isn't on 'work from home is okay' just from a financial perspective.
Your last paragraph sounds a lot like "any problem I may have now or in the future by definition is always more important than whatever the other person is doing at that particular point in time." That may be unintentional, so it's just an observation.
Just don't be surprised when your colleagues leave for more flexible companies that don't feel the need to control their employees like they're in kindergarden
Survival is enough. I think living is more important than working. Working exists so that you don't die. We should do the work necessary that everyone thrives, otherwise our choices should maximize living.
It's like every study that "proves" that 4 day weeks are better.
They never seem to extend any further than the initial honeymoon period before the novelty wears off
My company implemented 36hr weeks (done at noon Friday) about 6mo ago and it continues to be super popular/effective. It’s consistently the benefit we discuss/list as a favorite and our company is onboarding more users than ever (important for our growth).
Obviously it’d be ridiculous to say it helped our business grow outright, but it’s clearly not a hindrance and 6mo in there’s been no discussion of ending it. Hell our CEO has discussed canceling Friday entirely.
I am the complete opposite. My work productivity has went way up because I do not have people tapping me on the shoulder. I agree that working remotely isn't for everyone.
I think these generally framed studies don't prove anything, there are so many variables that may vary between projects and individuals; However they like to come up with some number and claim that it is the gospel truth.
What I know: the industry likes to emulate google, for example they like to emulate the google job interview process and google coding style guidelines. Now my question: does this decision imply that most places will start to work strictly from the office?
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
This comment right here made me angry and for reasons totally different from the discussion. Its about people who thinks they they are entitled to interrupt my workflow to solve their issues.
Reminds me of feature flags. They seem sub optimal at a code level but highly beneficial at the System level.
But why force people one way or the other ? Let them make their choices. Why not give optionality and then optimize.
I don’t know much about SV traffic but in Bangalore people were routinely spending 4-5 hours in traffic everyday pre covid. I don’t see how this can be beneficial for anyone at an individual level and for the company as a whole.
Hasn't basically every bit of the industry seen massive growth and profits since the start of COVID?
I think the situation has proven quite a bit more than "the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn". Can't say the degree to which it has impacted business without studying it. It could have been great, not great, or a drag but to say "crash and burn" or nothing seems a bit touched.
There's virtually impossible to refactor big corporations into real remote organizations - they're "remote bolt-on". For them, to remote is only to cope with COVID, other than that it's mostly a liability.
We probably need to wait for another half-decade to see it unfold - to see if there could be any "remote native" company that can disrupt the market and challenge big corporations.
I can tell you that remote work sucks. Not for me, personally, because I like it, but: managing team remotely is very difficult. Over the course of 2 years I had at least two people who were clearly fraud - their work performance was abysmal, probably because they were working two jobs at once. It's hard do motivate, and to control people if you never even met them.
If they’ve got Google amenities I can see it but have you seen the side by side desks in open spaces sharing floors with salespeople that reflects most programmers work environments? Some places won’t even provide an ergonomic setup, and they have to compete against a setup developed at home over 2 years that works out much much better.
Yes and other things haven't been proven either...
Its been shown by example, this distinction doesn't change the fact that money and productivity go hand in hand.
Counter examples are counter examples and certainly they exist, but several large scale examples of it not being sustainable prove the risks are indeed real if it's mismanaged...
Yes! You are hinting at something fairly important which is, the whole != sum(parts).
Most of these studies show individual productivity is higher when remote. That doesn't mean overall productivity is.
Individual productivity only matters in the big picture, if everyone is 100% aligned and focused.
Which, will never happen.
I was in the camp of remote is always better even after being aware of 'never say never' and 'no silver bullet'.
Within the first six months, I realized there is no single answer that works for everyone. It really depends on the ability to institute async communication, self-regulate and whole lot of other factors IMHO.
Not crashing and burning has a lot to do with development momentum from before the pandemic. It will take all of 22 and ‘23 to be able to compare the output of pre pandemic versions of big tech. This is especially true for hardware companies and products that have annual release cadence.
>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.
me too. however, the reality is that I haven't worked in a company where everybody is in the same location in over 15 years. under that circumstances, fully remote is the better choice and I will not be forced back into an office.
Most of the studies I've seen that evaluate productivity are based on surveys given directly to the employees. I imagine workers have a lot of bias when asked to evaluate their own productivity, especially when there are significant personal benefits from working at home.
When someone tapped my shoulder in the office, they often started to whine about their problem without providing any actionable information, wasted a lot of my time this way, then I tell them to send me an email with a description of the problem - that ends up actionable.
If you work at Google, even if everyone is "on-site", they're not at your site, and you still need to treat them as if they're remote. Once a company reaches a certain size, and has offices in multiple locations (and timezones, and potentially multiple countries), it's necessary to treat most people as if they're remote, because effectively, they are.
Yes, your team may be fully in one office, but it's pretty rare to work in a team where 100% of your work in handled in-team. If your meetings include other teams, they're probably going to involve video conferencing, at which point, it's actually worse to use a meeting room, because it means that some people are going to have audio/video problems.
I also like working in an office, but I also understand that real life means that being remote-first is the best approach.
I know that corporate meeting room A/V is often an issue, but Google has pretty much solved that in their own offices. Their internal deployment of Meet works very well.
My teams are spread around the world and I’ve seen much better collaboration since Teams and the camera-on-culture became standard. I guess in-person is nice but it geo-restricts your network.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
This has been one of my main complaints about the full time WFH during covid. If we were all in the office I could turn around in my chair and ask whoever I needed to a question. With WFH I have had to sometimes wait 24 hours or more for a response. So I was stuck spinning my wheels for hours because I was blocked without knowing which esoterically name database table to query.
Remote is neither better nor worse. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt if it is timed wrong.
We need to have better productivity tools. No one has leveraged text to speech well in work communication, but somehow YouTube and TikTok can transcribe any video via AI... No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection... I'm not saying any of that could or should happen first, but nothing has really changed about workspaces, yet leadership is still expecting new results without further lockdown to make them feel better about paying ridiculous fees for their massively uninhabited work campuses.
The Pandemic created a situation in which very very basic (and in many cases dated) tech was foisted upon us for over 2 years as "new innovation", but it's simply not. The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 is the absolute scammiest most overly-abstract pyramid scheme ever foisted on our grandparents since Amway as well...
We are simply not innovating any more and there is a major ruse over that fact pulled by the entire IT industry) driven of course by the constant need to drive investment hype... And we're putting everything behind paywalls now so much that most of it is becoming pure clickbait, even on well known news sites.
We're praising people for marginally recycling old ideas now more than ever. We're also all paying way too much for the underwhelming mediocrity of it all. Take a look at how every year most of the latest tech advancement going on with mobile and other software-driven devices is the ability for major corps to better track and harvest data on everyone. Data mining, subscription services, and embedded advertisements are nowhere near as profitable as true innovation, but somehow most companies are even stuck on even rehashing those old ideas and calling them "winning".
If we could just fix all that s*it and get back to true innovation and listening to, funding, and hiring people that truly deliver real innovative results, the working world would be better in remote work mode, and it would connect us all better as if we were in an office with less risks and without another lockdown to no sort of accountability from decision makers again.
I have been fully remote my entire career (several decades), in fact in 30+ years have never been on site anywhere for more than 2 weeks total. Wouldn't have it any other way.
But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own. I have had coworkers literally disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time, constantly miss deadlines etc - and as a manager, that is very hard to manage underperformers with a remote work force.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
> I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own. I have had coworkers literally disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time, constantly miss deadlines etc - and as a manager, that is very hard to manage underperformers with a remote work force.
Please also keep in mind that we didn't just shift from in-person to remote work. Among other things, many parents completely lost child care in March 2020. It was slow to return. Where I live, it wasn't until August 2021 that the public schools were back to (almost) normal from a child care perspective: students there for the full school day every day, and at-school after care programs available. Speaking from personal experience, 2020 was horrible for my productivity, and I noped out of the workforce in early 2021 and am finally looking for a job now. I don't feel it was due to the shift to remote work.
I think it's true that some people will "try to get away with absolutely everything they can", but I'm not sure about "an awful lot of people". There are other reasons that productivity and availability tanked.
edit: and let's imagine that I didn't have the finances to quit despite other demands preventing me from putting in a full workday (and me not feeling up to one anyway). I probably would have kept plugging along, sort of working, as best as I could. We could debate the morality of that, and maybe remote work makes it more possible to get away with that, but I wouldn't say remote work is the underlying reason people aren't putting in a full day's work. Maybe for many, "get away absolutely everything they can" should read "get away with absolutely everything they have to" or "do only what they can".
You're right that there are many reasons people might seem to be underperforming in remote work, but unfortunately it doesn't really improve the situation for managers or coworkers. If many employees are spending their time in childcare instead of their job, it increases the burden on other employees who have to work extra hard to pick up the slack. It's a miserable situation, and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.
> and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.
Depends on who you mean by "others". When I was working and struggling, I was grateful to Google, my coworkers, and my managers for their patience with me at work. I was also angry with our society: voters and politicians who prioritized reopening @#!$@#ing bars over schools, even though my understanding was science was saying (still is saying, AFAIK) spread through the schools is relatively little and the difference to kids' learning is huge. And on parents, which is important but not as important as the impact on kids.
Our society as a whole doesn't care about young families, and it's never been so clear. There is someone to blame.
btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
Yes, politicians and teachers' unions share most of the blame. It's unconscionable how long they insisted on keeping schools closed, despite the massive impact on families and students and the minimal danger posed to kids. I feel sympathy for parents who are trying their best to survive while teachers have taken this as an excuse to work even less.
> btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
Yes, if you can objectively prove that a parent isn't working then they wouldn't be protected. This is very obvious and easily quantifiable in an in-office environment, but with remote knowledge work it's much harder to prove—especially since the result would look like you're suddenly targeting parents for "not working hard enough." Most companies are risk-averse and simply prefer to tolerate underperformance.
> Yes, politicians and teachers' unions share most of the blame. It's unconscionable how long they insisted on keeping schools closed, despite the massive impact on families and students and the minimal danger posed to kids. I feel sympathy for parents who are trying their best to survive while teachers have taken this as an excuse to work even less.
I don't know what to make of the teachers' unions. My personal experience with individual teachers is that they work plenty, and what I saw during remote school was no exception. (Being a kindergarten teacher over Zoom is hard!) And I never heard a particular teacher in my area advocate for closed or remote schools.
But school administrators blamed the teachers' unions a fair bit for being slow to reopen. In general I suspect school administrators were looking to blame someone else for their own leadership failings, but there still might be some truth in it. I could see how the unions might have adopted the position of the most risk-adverse (and/or laziest) of the teachers.
> My personal experience with individual teachers is that they work plenty, and what I saw during remote school was no exception.
Yes, there are definitely some individual teachers who care about student learning and work hard to go back to in-person.
Unfortunately, the unions adopt the most risk-averse/lazy possible regarding remote learning. Even in 2022 there are unions pushing hard for effectively indefinite remote learning.[0]
Teachers’ unions often have skewed incentives that don’t match the desires of working teachers, because the primary goal of the union is to perpetuate itself, over and above any benefits to teachers themselves.
I have negotiated teacher union contracts, from the non-teacher side - the easiest way to get the union to agree to layoffs was to offer a slight bump in pay to the most senior teachers - i.e. the ones most connected with the union - worked every time. The senior/older teachers were always more than happy to lay off the younger/newer staff, as long as they got even a slight bump in their own pay - i.e. I don't care if class sizes go up, and we have to layoff 10 of the most recent hires - as long as I get a 4% raise instead of 3%.
There is nothing about teachers unions priorities that align in anyway with students & parents priorities.
Schools owe students an education. As you can see from this thread, it's controversial whether adults in tech can work productively remotely. Elementary school kids by and large don't learn well remotely. Unless that changes, it's a moot point whether childcare is just a bonus or something that is owed.
As for the "pandemic" part: I agreed with the closures of schools, preschools, and day cares at the very beginning of the pandemic. It seemed reasonable at first to believe kids spread COVID-19 as much as they seem to spread colds and flus. But it was't long before there was evidence that spread through schools is modest [1], especially with reasonable precautions (e.g. masks). And it was painfully obvious education was suffering. Schools should have reopened a full year sooner than they actually did in my area (and many other areas are worse). Society has a risk budget, and this should have been the priority for spending it, not bars or travel or indulging mask/vaccine denial.
Who's saying otherwise? I'm assuming childcare workers moved on or stuck it out since you can't remotely take care of a kid. But teachers can still do their jobs remotely (as painful as it is to wrange a few dozen kids on a screen where the internet is 2 clicks away).
We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.
Citation needed. There's a ton of evidence that learning has dropped dramatically with remote school. Especially for elementary students, I suspect it is near-zero.
> We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Whether teachers like it or not, a significant part of their job is childcare. Society would not fund schools at anywhere near their current rate if they didn't also provide childcare.
I think lots of knowledge workers—particularly ones without kids—have gotten a very good deal the last few years. Teachers have also had dramatically lowered expectations and still refuse to go back to the classroom.
> and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.
There's a reason it's protected. You can't just expect business as usual when the entire support chain of society falls over. Everyone and everything has to adapt - people, businesses, etc.
Oh, these people never did useful work on-site either. When staring at a screen means work maybe their bosses thought they did. Real contributors do well remote too.
In the UK a lot of people during the pandemic suddenly found themselves having to look after their children full time because the schools were closed and there was no childcare, while also having to work, possibly coming down with Covid, and during the first lockdown at least having to queue for hours every time they went to the supermarket. Even when the lockdowns we're relaxes my colleagues with kids would frequently find themselves back working from home because their children were sent home because one if their classmates had Covid, which immediately reduces productivity. A lot of people also didn't have suitable places to work at home. Lots of my colleagues were working on their kitchen tables next to their partners and children, or sat on their beds. It's easy to be smug about remote working and critical if those who suddenly found themselves having to do it at no notice if you're already set up for it, have no caring responsibilities, have space, and aren't in the middle if a pandemic. Less so if the above applies.
So over 800k people over the age of 50 have died from covid in the US.
Are you saying that it's "dishonest" to estimate that at least 1% of them are grandparents involved in childcare? By napkin math this more than works out; I'll also hint that if you spend even a minute researching, the stats on how many of these people are likely to be grandparents, and how many grandparents are child carers, are readily findable. If you care to engage in an honest discussion.
I imagine their point is that, given the number of deaths, the number is probably considerably higher than one would expect from just "thousands".
The bigger point being that childcare expectations were thoroughly disrupted and folk were thrust into it, rather than planning. Coupled with the "will they won't they" come back to work dates, it's made it not super incentivizing for those of us who could afford to figure out better long term options chose not to. Ex. If you knew it was going to be two years before you were expected back in office, moving closer to family might have made sense. Or setting up a home office. Or any number of things to better our home productivity.
There's no evidence to show that families' childcare providers (aka grandparents) have died in the thousands, leaving people without childcare. The parent commenter is assuming because there was a disease that disproportionately affected elderly folks, that it must be correlated with that.
If there is a disease that has caused a large number of older people to die, and many of those older people are grandparents, and many grandparents help out with childcare, and having to work with less help than previously re childcare is likely to cause a problem for a lot of people, I'm not seeing the problem with assuming a correlation given that argument and its conclusion. Which premises are you disputing?
The weekly average just for the US last time I checked was over 1,000 deaths per day. I don’t even have to calculate age distribution to know that thousands of grandparents in a childcare role have been among those deaths.
Yeah the last time I checked happened to be today, mainly because I only look when I see obviously bad policy around it. I rounded way down because there’s no imaginable scenario where fewer than thousands of grandparents performing childcare have died, and it’s such an absurd challenge that giving it the most favorable interpretation of the facts still shows it’s absurd.
> But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office
My suspicion is those people probably don't do anything while at the office either but they are good at making themselves very visible and appearing to be productive when in an office situation.
Yeh exactly. Same thing happened in office, seems easier to hide with lots of water cooler chat. Covid provided the cover for slackers to get even slacker.
My company was very empathetic to covid needs including reinstating forced leave due to sickness/family reasons.
> disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time
How is this not an immediately fireable offense? At least at the point of reestablishing contact where a doctor’s note or equivalent excuse can’t be furnished…
I absolutely agree - and if it was upto me, they would be gone already - but when the manager is also one of those 'do as little as I can' types of people, they don't really want to open that particular can of worms.
Not everyone has the temperament to slack. I don't enjoy "phoning it in" and will work on things (including overworking) to accomplish results, even if others aren't carrying their weight.
If you build an org like this, the inevitable outcome is all the top performers leave (as they're tired of covering for low performers) and eventually nothing gets done at all.
Indeed. A single unsatisfied employee will break an entire company's morale over time. It's beneficial for companies to ensure that everyone is well-paid, unstressed, and isn't on the path to burnout. Most companies don't see it.
seriously. If I'm not even messaging a manager for over 24 hours to say hi, it better be because I got hit by a bus and am in a coma. Participation is the bare bones minimum if someone is paying you to do work.
Speaking for myself, I need the structure and am currently getting very little done. A lot of us aren’t trying to scam the remote work system, we’re just hanging on by our fingernails until the office opens back up.
How does going back to the office help with structure?
Here's an example from my life:
I'm having a terrible time getting myself to the gym. Two options come to mind to fix this:
1) Use discipline (very hard) and shift my mindset so that going to the gym is not optional (also hard).
2) Apply a structure to my day to where I leave the house by default (not that hard) and have to go to the gym before going home (not nearly as hard as going out of my house specifically to work out).
Premack’s principle. Putting something you are less likely to do on its own (going to the gym, X%) before something that you are more likely (basically 100% for going home at some point) to do. Smart.
Yep. I use the executive function capacity that I have and I work to increase that capacity over time. But pushing too far past that capacity leads to, you guessed it, burn out.
+1 to the preachiness. You have done zero to help me or anyone else with your comment, GP. But it probably made you feel good to sneer at me.
I hope you get to work 100% remote for the rest of your career though.
edit: for those interested in the empirical science available around discipline, willpower, executive function, I point you to Dr. Huberman who has an INCREDIBLE podcast about these subjects: https://youtu.be/vA50EK70whE
It's one of the hardest problems in a person's life, sustaining good habits over very long periods of time.
-Exactly, which is why you try to tackle the problem every day. Not every day is successful, but a handful of days are better then absolute zero.
It goes above normalcy, it's extraordinary, proven by the fact that most people can't do it.
- You have to live through each and every second of your life, if you don't set yourself up for success, you'll only have a harder time developing good habits. Life is 100% about developing coping mechanisms. I walk on a treadmill for daily standup, I'm out the office/desk at 4pm and spend time with family/the dog/ a good book. The book thing is key because I've found it levels out my mental state and makes it less erratic.
This is a good comment. Much better than your previous one. Thanks.
> which is why you try to tackle the problem every day
Yes, every day I tackle some of my problems. Many days the effort I spend on a problem is to think about how I can develop habits using less executive function.
Today I plan to check out the gym around the corner, because it's closer than the one I've been going to downtown. So close that I could walk there in <5 minutes. This will be easier than any of a 25 minute walk, a 10 minute bike ride (on streets that people drive recklessly on), or a 5 minute drive (that has a lot of friction, especially parking).
None of these are excuses for not going to the gym, but rather than forcing myself through a high friction process, I'm spending those "discipline points" creatively acting to reduce the friction (while managing the rest of my life).
You should pick a gym half way between work and home on the same route. You may not feel like going, but hey you're going by any way. Or just move you gym time to your lunch hour and be specific on what you do. I like this and it is easy to add or cut based on time, but still make progress, because it will remind you. https://stronglifts.com/5x5/ Nice app too.
(throwaway cause I'd rather people who know me personally not know this)
I'll just add one more anecdote to this. I'm also far less healthy during forced-remote COVID time. Try as I might, I just can't get myself to be active and eat healthier.
In the office, I biked to and from work which started me off well, and the structure of the day kept me more on top of everything too. During WFH, I don't exercise - I should, but I just can't make the habit stick. I sleep in cause it's easy - I shouldn't, but I can't seem to stop myself. Making and keeping friendships is harder than it used to be, giving me less reason to go out too. Everything spirals from there. Doing things has become hard.
I've tried habit-forming tricks to try to make it work. I've tried different routines to see if one sticks better than others: different times of the day, different exercises, different types of breaks. I've gone to a psychiatrist and therapist to help improve that "even little things are hard" feeling. I've tried medications like anti-depressants, which I never needed before. Ultimately nothing has worked, and I've spent almost 2 years now at a personal low for mental and physical well-being.
I very much wish I could be like the other people who thrive working remotely. But it's just incompatible with me on a level I can't really explain, and seems silly from the outside. If the tech industry goes full remote, I'll probably consider a career switch, because this isn't sustainable for me. And to be clear, there's only an issue when remote work is involved: I've spent time unintentionally unemployed, and was very happy and healthy. It's really working remotely in particular that does me in. Working in general is hard and stressful, and I need the positives of working in person to counteract that enough that I'm still happy and healthy.
I'm very happy for the people who've found happiness in remote work, and am happy many more people who want it will have that option going forward. But it really isn't for me, as much as I'd like it to be.
This resonates. I am a die-hard full-time remote worker for life but it definitely has an impact on my mental health. I'm always a few steps away from my workspace and that leads to working longer hours. However, for me, the upsides outweighs the downsides (assuming I can retire early, per plan).
I've somewhat recently started socializing with folks outside of work. That's helped as it gets me away from my computer for a while. I can only do a few hours at a time and at most twice a week before I get stressed out, but it's something.
TBH my biggest issue with working in an office was the commute. If I could get to work in a reasonable amount of time (10 minutes, no more) then I would be pretty happy to work in an office again. I'd put up with the interruptions at my desk, kitchen stink, and more interruptions if it meant I could have lunch with my peers and leave my work at work.
Unfortunately, a reasonable commute isn't in the cards for me. I could get there if I switched careers, which I might do when I retire from this one.
It’s tough to introspect on exactly why, but I was certainly more productive and less fucked in the head when I was going into the office every day.
Maybe it was general mental health, partly. I live alone, so getting out of the house daily and seeing other people is good for me. I had office friends who it’s hard to keep in touch with.
Structure was another part. I had to get dressed and leave the house at a certain hour, then I had to get my stuff done by 5, when I came back home.
And general peer pressure. I had an open office desk, and I hated that, but in hindsight, it did help me stay on task. Which is kind of hilarious, because the open office floor plan was so distracting that I was terribly inefficient at my desk, so I hid away in corners most of the time to get real work done.
There were tons of negatives to being in the office (god I hate the open office floor plans), but for whatever reasons, I was more productive before the pandemic than I have been during.
If you're the type of person to smoke weed all day, I'm not sure that being at work would stop it. It's simple enough to sneak an edible or hit a vape somewhere outdoors and private. Who is to say it's not an ecig, especially if you're not doing it in anyone's face?
I think peer pressure, visibility, and lack of non-work distractions are probably the bigger thing, though. Not just in terms of playing video games instead of working but you don't have the option to get up and do the dishes, or take breaks as frequently to read, or any number of other things that are less "slacker" and more "ADD brain".
You think if folks did that on a regular basis, there would have been a noticeable contribution reduction. At that point, it becomes a person management issue and either the situation should be corrected or the person be let go.
And that sounds bad, but there's another argument that gets thrown around: "why should I greatly invest myself in this business, when to the business I'm just a number".
"Being managed" could also be called "outsourcing executive function"--make your manager think about what you're supposed to be doing.
Reserve that executive function for what you love, your escape plan, or whatever.
Oh -- FWIW I didn't mean for "more easily managed" to have some negative implication.
I dunno. On some grander level, I know companies mostly just see us as numbers, but (and perhaps I've been lucky) most of the managers I've had have been basically nice folks, some have even given good career development device (some of which seemed much more beneficial to me than the company).
I guess I view it as something where both parties contribute -- the manager does some managing, people are to some extent independent, it is all about figuring out what mix works. It looks like "being managed" has some negative connotation but I didn't mean to put it there!
I cannot speak for OP but as a working manager, COVID was hard to really keep forward progress.
I had people that were rockstars in the office that just didnt do work at home.
Maybe its the removal of distractions (no TV, I may walk by, etc). But even for things that were totally fine remote (ie: Ticket Queues) i noticed very quickly if my status showed "in" they were on it. If my status for any reason showed away, tickets would straight up get ignored. Mentioning this would enact change for a day or two, but ultimately it would return back to status quo. What did happen is that those that were self motivated were quicker/starting to burn out. I had to get with them and intervene and encourage them to take time off, encourage them to let the queue go for their teammates to pick it up etc.
I had other colleagues asking my ops teams to check in on their direct reports and I often had to have meetings telling them thats not a IT/Tech issue and they need to deal with it, just like I am having to..
Frankly i had a mouse shaker on a side box not for MY Managers, but for my direct reports...
As we transitioned back to the office a lot of these issues mostly disappeared. EXCEPT for those with weak/timid managers. A lot of those guys are still slacking, but they were slacking before and the manager just didnt want to handle it.
But my teams....most of them are mostly back to normal. We all have burnout to deal with, myself included and I have had to manage to balance pushing them and encouraging them to do things that dont cause burnout, front structuring your workday, to taking mental health days etc. But ultimately the return to the office was a relief for me, and a lot of that just went away.
I personally think its the removal of distractions coupled with the "threat" of someone walking up that doesnt exist at home. And its worth saying, I'm not one of those old school butts in chairs kinda guy. In fact im pretty laid back, and have been told so by peers and reports alike, and in many cases I have been asked how I am able to be so laid back and still have productivity like I do, but covid made it harder.
And thats beyond the fact that I have colleagues in other divisions that i KNOW are using their WFH days to be out fishing, playing golf, hiking whatever. Personally for me thats an ethics issue, i take days off for that. But I work in a small sector, im not going to tattle tail on someone i may cross paths with down the line, karma will catch them anyhow.
It seems that being able to work remotely is just a skill unto itself, and one that takes time and patience to cultivate. A lot of it is good written communication, especially when it comes to reading other people's communication, and a lot of it is just being good enough at your job to do the work without feeling like someone is watching you. Makes sense that these things would be hard for people.
If you look at OSS maintainers, a lot of times their written communication is excellent, and they obviously manage their time really well. These are people who by the very nature of what they maintain are distributed.
A lot of OSS software is also of excellent quality, because they don't have the luxury of being able to be in an offer, fire people, etc...
I would argue to the people who complain about not getting stuff done or that they need structure... don't take those feelings as a sign that you need to automatically return to what you know. You can also take it as a sign that you have an opportunity to grow, but it's just hard... which is totally ok and normal. If you can overcome this, you will become an excellent engineer as a result.
> Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce
In my experience, a majority of the workforce requires some degree of regular supervision or things will go off the rails quickly. Hell, I am full-time remote (pre-covid) and I don't think I should be left alone on something for more than 2 weeks.
> I have been fully remote my entire career (several decades), in fact in 30+ years have never been on site anywhere for more than 2 weeks total. Wouldn't have it any other way.
Same, I've been remote for 10 years with another decade+ on-site prior to that as a SE.
I have no issues with remote work. When I need people I can easily schedule calls, send them an instant message, email them, etc.
Every single thing I do is timestamped and logged in a database somewhere at some point. If anyone wants to know what I was working on at 2:13 in the afternoon they can query for it. Reports can be run on what issues I've resolved, what code I've checked in against them, who I was on a meeting with, when I connected to remote machines, what time I started/ended at, etc. at any given time.
I have not noticed any productivity declines, but have noticed huge QoL improvements.
You SHOULD be putting the smallest amount of effort/time into work and try to get away with as much as possible. Worshiping the line going up and to the right so an executive/founder can write themselves a bigger bonus is fruitless. Putting any of your personality/self worth into work is a personal fault you should improve on as well.
I applaud all shirkers, they are the winners in your story.
I completely agree with you. Unfortunately I’ve seen a decent amount of adverse selection in the people I work with who’ve chosen to try to go fully remote (more in the try to hide from work than the people who would be just as/more successful being remote).
I have feeling that in 5 years companies will mostly revert back to only hiring new employees on site but grandfather in previously remote employees who have proven to be able to handle it. In 10 years, it will be almost entirely back to how it was before the pandemic. Not saying this to be a contrarian, and I think there will always be a place for fully remote teams/companies or exceptions in large companies (just as there was in the before times). But it’s really hard to see someone be unproductive or not work much and not attribute that to them being remote - and being remote will be even more likely to be blamed when a large portion of employees aren’t remote already.
Do you really think in 10 years it will be like it was 5 years ago? REALLY? We still aint past the GFC, 14yrs later. In my lifetime, i doubt i will see 7% again. Definately not the 30% that my parents payed.
As much as life is cyclic, in 10yrs time we AR/VR will be worked out and there will be even less reason to be in a physical space with someone.
> But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
Same experience here.
Of course, management shares some of the blame. People will push the boundaries of remote and flex time until someone tells them they’ve gone too far. If nobody in management is doing anything about the abuse, or if someone is openly breaking the rules without any consequences, the bad behavior will only get worse.
I don't know about disappearing for days and weeks, but as a manager I can say that in practice, performance problems are often subtle and hard to detect.
I don't subscribe to the idea that you have to be at your desk to get work done, and I do my own best work usually hiding away somewhere quiet. However, with the middle- to low-performers, I admit it's disquieting to suspect that some people are working only an hour a day, but I have no way to confirm.
Well, I did say "middle- to low-performers" above.
But regardless, I disagree with your premise. Software engineering, as a profession, is based largely on trust. This isn't a factory where you have to solder a set number of devices to meet your target numbers. This isn't an animation studio where you have to animate a certain number of director-approved frames ("footage") a week in order to meet your performance expectations.
In our field, the engineer largely decides on their own how much time a task should take, and the manager hopefully trusts their estimate. The *assumption* (and it's not spelled out in your employment contract because we're supposed to be professionals) is that a day of effort means a "full day" of 7-9 hours (or whatever, the precise number isn't the point).
So if I, as a manager, ask you, the developer, how long this feature will take to build out, and you tell me "5 days", well I think it's fair for me to expect you meant 5 "full" days. And because I trust you, I'm not going to look over your shoulder or try to pre-solve the problem you're working on -- I will ideally just trust that it takes you 5 days. And because I think highly of you, I will trust that the work takes a dedicated and fast-working developer 5 days to finish, and that's that.
If I find out that all along, you really were working only an hour a day, then I think it's fair for me to say: "What the actual fuck, you tell me these tasks require a week of effort but they really could have been done in one day, and the project could have been moving 5x faster than it has been."
But... the other option, I suppose, is for managers to decide by themselves how long each feature and bugfix should take, and not ask the developers or take their feedback, and then the manager can evaluate the developers' performance based on that. As a manager, I'll look at a task and say "I want this done in 1 day" and when you tell me "That's not possible, it will take at least a week" I'll just say "Too bad -- get to work". We don't want that.... do we?
>This isn't a factory where you have to solder a set number of devices to meet your target numbers. This isn't an animation studio where you have to animate a certain number of director-approved frames ("footage") a week in order to meet your performance expectations.
I agree... the number of people truly slacking off is vanishingly small.
And no, I can't tell if someone is "actually working" just by being in the office. I have no interest in standing behind them at their desk all day.
On the other hand, I had one case where someone on my team had like zero committed code in weeks, and was WFH'ing several days a week (pre-pandemic) as an arrangement he'd made with his previous manager. When we had "the talk" about his low performance, one of the things I asked him was to stop with the WFH except for emergencies. That did, in fact, help keep him more accountable for his time, and being physically present helped him interact with the rest of the team and spend time whiteboarding, etc. And performance overall improved.
Is there a lesson there to generalize? Maybe, not sure. It's all very context- and individual- dependent.
Even if what you're saying is true, I don't see the problem with everyone working less in the remote world. If everyone secretly wants to work less maybe we should all just work less. If we collectively need an excuse like remote work to do what we all actually want to do, then so be it. Everyone wins...
I was at the office yesterday and was shocked by how little got done. Hanging out, grabbing snacks, going for lunch, commute. I got much less long stretches of time of freedom where I do most of my productive work. Everyone sees that you were there doing stuff so I also felt less pressure than wfh where I felt bad if I didn’t get what I talked about in the standup done
> But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
It happens if your company, originally on site, suddenly become remote. Nobody knows how to do remote works.
My manager is one of them. I am slacking because there is literally no tasks (no tasks given from him). Also same when in the office, but he has a habit of initiating small talk and assign / proceed tasks there, which isn't possible in remote world.
Changing at how you work remote is crucial at maintaining productivity.
I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own.
It's not that they're trying to "get away with absolutely anything". It's that their survival incentive is not to get fired, and they've been operating in that mode for years if not decades. The less you do, the less likely you are to inadvertently piss someone off and lose your job. Overperformers get fired faster than underperformers, who can usually kick around in the system for years.
Take a risk and win, and your boss makes more money. Take a risk and lose, and your income drops by 100%. The incentive structure rewards doing as little as possible, and that's not even necessarily a bad thing, because there are organizational situations in which it's better for people to be underutilized than overtaxed and therefore unpredictable.
Capitalism is an abusive system, but there's no escape because the legal system is on the abuser's side. How do you survive an abuser, if you can't get away? You become meek, reactive, and passive.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
They weren't getting much done in the office, either. In fact, in the office regime, the problem employees were interfering with other people's productivity. In the WFH world, they do less damage.
I promise you, there's lots of people out there that used to be great co-workers in the office that are now struggling and not getting much done remotely.
Maybe they're in a blind spot for you, but I guarantee you they exist, and they're probably the majority.
The environment that you work in has an effect on how well you can do the work.
I’ve been mostly remote for my entire career, about 20 years. I don’t think I’ve seen significant productivity issues with newly remote colleagues. I’ve just seen and felt a whole lot more stress. Not all because of being remote, a lot of it has come from mismanagement. In my experience people are mostly doing as well as you could expect given a dreadful situation. I don’t expect they’ll perform better under arbitrary scrutiny.
> I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated
Why does that matter? We should probably start asking how much does it actually correlate with productivity, before assigning it importance.
I have a hunch that even if there even is such a thing as self-motivation, and even if there is a correlation with production, the effect size is probably not high and is conflated with other factors which explain a much higher proportion of the variability.
An employer which cares about their workers will (a) grant them the freedom to work from home, and (b) provide them with the structure to do so effectively. In the absence of such structure I can see how motivation could replace it and make up the productivity, however that should not be the worker’s responsibility. The loss in productivity is 100% on management for failing to provide to structure to keep the workers productivity while remote.
self motivation seems to me to be a poor excuse to shift the responsibility of management to the worker.
I don't believe you are describing even 5% of remote software engineers. And those 5% would find ways to not do anything even in the office, but then they could also distract others so they are better off at home.
an interesting phrase is working as little as possible. This is an organizational issue more so than a motivation one. I work remote and am assigned all my work on a monday that is due by the end of the day friday. If I don't do it, there will be questions asked. Because of the way our company is organized, working as little as possible means working exactly as expected.
You have an interesting setup, where both tasks and time allocation are given to you ("implement X, you have 5 days"). Do you have any say in how long something is supposed to take?
I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot.
But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk. Also, I worked on teams that had people worked out in many offices, mostly not Mountain View. I was surrounded by Googlers in an open-plan office, but it was often lonely. I ate alone sometimes. It was often not worth the commute.
I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.
Lonely is an incredibly accurate way to describe working at Google. Everyone says the office perks are there to trick you to stay, but our work area was quieter than a library and no one hung around. If people were talking they'd legit catch themselves and be like, we should grab a conference room. Incredibly polite but also an uncomfortably quiet environment.
I think a lot of people just wanted to put in their hours and get home to their families. I love pool but never played with anyone on the table one floor down because it just wasn't a make-friends environment. I think I shot the shit with someone when I got into work a handful of times in the more-than-a-year that I worked there. Huge reason I left.
This isn't even coming from a social person. I prefer WFH. I don't particularly like going out. However, if I'm gonna be forced to be around people I'd at least like it to be pleasant.
That sounds amazing, I dearly wish for "library rules" on the floor. The office has plenty of social and collaborative spaces that aren't where my keyboard/monitor/charger are, and switching to one of those spaces when you're going to have a conversation is a good norm.
That’s how it’s been at my office (even pre-pandemic). The open office is relatively quiet, there are several areas good for quiet conversation, and lots to conference and phone rooms. It’s great for those days I need to get out of the house, and just as productive.
I've attended the weddings of multiple friends from my first job. I'm still in touch with 4-5 people from my second job. I haven't spoken to anyone from my team at Google since the day I left. I had good, cordial relationships with all of them, but it was also incredibly impersonal. I don't even recall learning anything about anyone's spouse, for instance.
Is it possible that in general we have more attachment with our colleagues in our earlier jobs than the later ones?
I remember when I got my first job I was extremely social and would try to make friends with anyone. But now that I'm on my nth job I don't feel the need to socialize as much and would prefer to put in my work hours and move on with my life.
This is somewhat true. Definitely at the start of your career you are more gregarious.
I don't think it's a good thing though. Middle aged men especially, I think, generally could do with a wider circle of acquaintances.
I try to keep in touch with a lot of my ex coworkers every 6 months.
Some of them are actually very keen to catch up, years after the job.
I'm friends with people who I was not very friendly with on the job 18 months after I've left the place, after sending them a text message saying "how's it going."
At Microsoft there were a lot of discussion lists for niche passions like paintballing (we drove out to the boonies and just pulled into the woods where some people had built bunkers). It was also my first job out of college, so my cohorts were all looking for friendships.
At Facebook I was part of a startup acquisition. Those members were battle buddies. Facebook also had a cultural value that you should bring your authentic self to work, which I think led to people bonding better. That or it’s because Facebook threw lots of parties with inappropriate amounts of alcohol
Did you work at FB before Google? I wonder if age and family is a confounding factor here. I've lost touch with several friends I made when I was younger as they've prioritized parenting above friendship. I have no kids so I am basically persona non grata (except for the occasional IM). That's a fine choice for them, of course, but it definitely contributed to a reduction in events held outside of work hours.
Depends heavily on team. Almost all of my teams have been quite social, with a lot of office banter and regular lunches and social activities together. I was in today, with about half of my team, and we had plenty of non-work conversations and a nice lunch break at Backyard Barbecue (now open as of this week!).
This may be because I'm a middling-social person; I'm an introvert by nature, and don't mind long stretches of alone time, but I can also hold a conversation about non-work topics. All it really takes is two extroverts (or at least reasonably friendly people) on the team to change the dynamic.
The irony, of course, that working conditions at Google, of all places, are truly atrocious. For years our desks were in hallways (KIR-C, KIR-D). When I left big G, there were desks literally in staircases (KIR-D). I have no idea how they passed fire inspections.
I worked at Google in KIR for the past 5 years. You calling the working conditions "atrocious" is hilarious. This is why people call Googlers entitled.
The OP is talking about tech people, obviously. I don't think we need to discuss that a table in a stair case is still awesome compared to working in a coal mine. But these conditions would be borderline even for a small company on the countryside.
Disclaimer: Just going from your two comments, never saw Google's offices.
LOL... reminds me of the time I went down to Overture's office in Pasadena. We were supposed to meet some senior engineering guy there. We got out of the elevator, and there was a sea of long tables in that giant floor, wall to wall, with people sitting elbow to elbow.
"Wow, this looks like a call center; I'm glad I'm not in customer support", I thought to myself.
And then one of guys sitting at those big tables stood up, extending his hand: "Hi, I'm ...., glad to meet you guys". It was that senior engineer. Yikes!
My first two jobs had (nice) cubicles, since then I have been stuck with this open office, elbow to elbow nonsense. Cubicles used to be the butt of many jokes, but now it’s desirable. :/
As someone who watched KIR-D get constructed from his desk and later worked right next to the infamous desks-in-the-stairwell spot (and made it a point to detour around so as not to disturb the poor souls seated there), I find this thread wonderfully nostalgic.
Makes me want to drop by and crank that giant net up and down a few times just so everyone in the south wing can hear that soothing creaking sound again.
That said, let me know if you find yourself again stuck in KIR-D and want to escape while still working on the eastside.
Supposedly it is better now given all the people who have decided to WFH. They actually have nice comfy common areas again. This is what I heard during our VC lunch today, I've never been to the office myself (technically my desk was there, but I started during the pandemic).
> I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.
This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.
First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility ("Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said. Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.") But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
> it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
Why would that be true? Trust your staff to behave like adults, and trust your team leadership. This feels like a cop out from leaders who don't understand how to manage uncertainty, as opposed to an actual requirement.
It's a wonder cities don't just fall apart and stop functioning completely without someone taking an attendance headcount everyday and peaking over their shoulders to make sure they are doing their job.
Cities don’t have a particular mission statement, so that kind of comparison isn’t apt.
My point was that in a city people are semi anonymous and others don’t keep tabs in you and know whether you’re a slacker, a thief, the town millionaire, the job producer or not. In a small town folks know to some degree who is vandalizing, doing the graffiti, stealing the cattle, helping farmer John with the fences, bringing food to the widow, etc.
There’s a distributed system of loosely coupled organizations in charge of making cities work. They coordinate by a price system for many urgent voluntary transactions and by bureaucratic organizations with supervision for others. In neither case do they rely on people just doing their jobs because it is the god and honorable thing to do.
Was Yahoo! incredibly more productive and efficient after Marissa fired all these slackers ? That doesn't seem to be the story we've seen unfolding from there.
It's a fairness thing at scale. In a small org, when you trust people to behave as adults they will generally fall within some band of normal that everyone sees as "reasonable". In a large org, you get outliers that do things someone else would consider unacceptable, and then they set the tone for the organization ("if they can do it, why can't I?"), and soon it's a race to the bottom in behavior.
The "cities" metaphor is actually pretty apt. In small towns everybody polices each other, and you don't behave badly because your life will become pretty difficult if you do. In a big city, you either have lots of rules in the form of municipal codes, or people start behaving badly along some dimension, eg. crime in SF or zoning in Houston.
Yes, there is a great deal of flexibility and patience. I worked from home a couple days a week.
In the old days, they drew the line at going full-remote. When the Atlanta office closed, everyone there had to either move somewhere else or, eventually, leave. I guess that's changed.
2010.
Google was very different then, and was honestly somewhat immature about location strategy. It is no longer like that, in large part as a response to Atlanta back then.
We are opening a new larger space (in the next few months), and have over a thousand people here now.
Engineering offices need an exec to serve as site lead. Whoever was there left or moved, and I guess they couldn't find a replacement. There is now an engineering office there again, so someone must have wanted (or been willing) to move there.
That would be me. I'm the tech site lead for Atlanta.
The first part was certainly true many years ago (Bruce left). However, that was actually a driver for change way back in 2010 because nobody thought that was a good result
> This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.
This reads like an argument against single management for large organizations. If you need to fit thousands of square pegs into holes, perhaps it's not the best approach in the first place.
Central allows the majority to rule the minority. Distributed allows the majority to rule the minority but also allows groups to move to a jurisdiction where they can be the majority, or at least have a more friendly government while central does not.
Central is certainly easier for the rulers though and they have much more power and resources.
> But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk.
This is a solid point; I work for a company that had four key buildings in two cities at the start of the pandemic; in reality, we were a "remote company" who were just rubbish at remote practises. The pandemic forced us to be remote-first, which fed back into being better organised for day-to-day.
I suspect most companies have this sort of mixed-model, and are just shitty at remote work.
(I will also note, as always, that there is a rich irony that big tech firms who push cloud-everything, remote collaboration tools and so on, won't eat their own dogfood. How much of Google watching Zoom walk away with the video calling market was due to their intransigence on this?)
> I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot.
I do pair programming very frequently with my coworkers remotely. We share a VNC connection to a Linux host. It works great.
Indeed - I pair program for much of the day with different people on the same team, and there is only (recently) one city which has two people in it. The notion that pairing need take place physically in the same room is just not correct.
I'd argue pairing is BETTER remote where you both have comfortable access to all your screens. While one person is writing production code, the other can be googling/writing repl style experiments/whatever and in easy communcation while they have the person writing code up on a second screen or at least a background window easily brought back to the foreground.
I worked on a Silicon Valley campus in 1999 and it was just the same: most of the people I interacted with _were_ on campus but it was seldom worth schlepping to whatever building they were in so we mostly used netnews and email.
I tried pairing in an open office environment, and I'd go work at McDonald's for minimum wage before returning to that environment again. It was pure hell for me.
I've never tried it but I feel the same way. If people saw the sort of work I did to test/PoC ideas I think they'd either a) flip their shit or b) stop me in my tracks so they could do it their way.
It sounds like an absolutely terrible way to learn and grow as a developer.
When you work at a startup, VC means venture capital: the lifeblood ever-requisite next-stage of your constant struggle to survive and grow as an early business.
When you work at Google, it means technology for avoiding a walk.
I doubt that this is something everyone has to follow. More likely they'll just keep the option for everyone to apply for approval and then they'll negotiate that with the employees they think don't have leverage. People who have options would quit if forced to be back in office, you can boomerang at Google so it's not like they risk much.
I work for a large tech company based on the east coast. My partner works for another large tech company. We are both mid-level managers at companies that seem to be taking a pretty dramatically different approach.
My company:
- Started with a strong in-office culture
- Communicated to managers that all employees now have a choice between being fully remote, hybrid, or in-office; there’s never a mandate to be in person
- All new roles can be based anywhere in the country of the roles’ origin
- All salaries are being standardized to one city per country (NYC for the US.)
By contrast, my partner’s company:
- Mandated return to work date 3 days/week minimum unless you’ve transitioned to remote (and they don’t seem to be making that easy for existing employees)
- Significant, growing attrition problem causing serious concern among leadership
- Growing pushback from employees asking great questions… for example, why they should be required to sit on zoom at an office, conferencing with their remote colleagues
If I had to put money on which company will thrive and which one will seriously regret it’s decision a year from now… the answer seems very clear.
>Mandated return to work date 3 days/week minimum unless you’ve transitioned to remote
This is what bugs me about the hybrid set up. If the company onboarded a lot of permanent remotes and also doesn't have people sync up the in office days, then there is no point of going into the office. It's the worst of both worlds.
Speaking only for myself, if I had a company office in my city I would go to it three-four days a week — even if my colleagues were all working elsewhere. (Assuming I can define my hours and commute by public transit or cheap taxi.)
I was remote for 13 years and I definitely missed the option of the office, though not the mandate of it.
So in my biased opinion the hybrid model is to keep people like me happy. And my bet is these will eventually become the new senior management, comfortable with remote but happy in the office, just like the current managers who set up the hybrid thing for similar reasons for themselves.
Doesn’t help people like me who can’t do the jobs they want in the cities they want without being remote, but I think we’re a pretty small minority.
Eh, it's really not that hard. It basically means for most weeks you work remote Mon and Fri, while just about everyone is in the office Tues-Thurs. Bay area already feels like most people work remote on Fridays anyways.
Yes there's variance but it's being left intentionally vague for teams to set their own cadences.
I think you’re right, because many employees prefer wfh. But I think for companies and esp startups wfh is a big loss, so that losing some employees is worth it. And if the bubble pops things will change.
There's definitely room for a hybrid where teams (or whatever org-unit) are able to determine which days will be in-office and what hours people are expected to be physically available for during those days. I don't really need to go into the office 40 hours (plus the 5-8 hours of commute time), but I'd have no objection with 3-5 hours, 2 days a week to facilitate meetings, teambuilding, etc.
The first one is HubSpot for anyone wondering (and yes we are hiring).
I do think that companies that allow remote are going to see an influx of workers as people leave other companies with in-office mandates. So many people have adjusted to remote working that it seems somewhat crazy to me to try and walk that back. There’s a clear preference based on what we’ve seen for some level of remote work among existing in-office workers who probably aren’t going to put up with a shift back, especially when tech jobs are in such high demand.
These two companies sound the same... Your company allows remote, hybrid or fulltime in-office. Partner's company allows hybrid (3 days minimum), fulltime (people going above the minimum) or "transitioned to remote".
My company allows whatever you want. Partners company allows hybrid, not full remote unless that was something you negotiated at the start or got them to change. Those are two very different things.
> If I had to put money on which company will thrive and which one will seriously regret it’s decision a year from now… the answer seems very clear
Well don't I look stupid for initially being skeptical... surely your company, with "no management or oversight" over its employees, is clearly set up for enormous success!
"Bad" company: Growing pushback from employees asking great questions… for example, why they should be required to sit on zoom at an office, conferencing with their remote colleagues
Why wouldn't this occur, in even greater magnitude, at a company with zero accountability regarding the whereabouts of the employees? Where an employee can wake up any morning and just decide not to come in? Where nobody can say with any certainty who will attend a meeting, or be in the building, or available to be on a call, at any time? Where nobody has any responsibility to ensure co-workers schedules line up, or that the person responsible for Task A completes it within a timeframe to allow the Task B person to meet his/her deadline?
You are conflating showing up at a physical office with being accountable and doing your work. True, my employer doesn’t care about my whereabouts, but they do care that I’m contributing, available to my colleagues, and adhering to reasonable schedules/deadlines. The reality is that for knowledge workers, none of this requires regular physical presence in an office with Zoom, Slack, and a calendar. This is a fact that’s been proven and accepted in my workplace for years now and there’s no reason to go back.
I once flew in to the Bay Area from Europe for several meetings, but the most important one was with a team at Google. We were trying to finalize a deal and they really needed to be on board.
I arrived, checked in and was shown to a meeting room. A few minutes after the meeting was supposed to start the receptionist came scurrying in and connected me to the meeting via that cube looking meeting machine they had in every office. Everyone appeared on the screen from various different offices, some at home, and one person in the same building as me.
When I worked as contractor I was flown out to an office in London. They paid for all the tickets and hotels for two weeks. They said it was critical to have us in the office. After the first 1 hour introduction meeting I never saw them again. Massive waste of money on their end but I had a great time experiencing a new country and even took a weekend trip to Brussels which was awesome.
When we had an acquisition of a major European company we had multiple people from our team flying to Paris, Budapest, and some city in Switzerland multiple times per month for the better part of a year. What a time to be alive.
I was the only person in the SF office for an eBay team in Portland. The other CA people didn't bother coming into the office.
That was the loneliest job I've ever had. I was alone in a bank of desks, basically every day. The nearest group of people had nothing to do with my team.
I worked from home on that job for weeks at a time and no one said anything. The funny thing was that when I was at the office, anytime I needed to speak w/ anyone, I had to leave my desk and find a quiet place. It was inane. The only upside was the free Diet Dr. Pepper.
You should've budgeted some time to see the sights on the weekend, at least! My company is usually fine with letting me stay somewhere over a weekend or two on business trips.
this is only for those who have opted to not be fully remote.
those folks have a reserved physical desk / office space at which they will be required to go 3 days per week starting apr 4th. They may switch to fully remote but cannot keep a dedicated physical spot if they do so.
Microsoft is doing something similar where you can choose hybrid work or fully remote. Personally, I think, with hybrid work, fully remote workers will go back to being second class citizens at those companies if most people choose to go back to the office (even part time).
This is totally unproven. We have no idea how the market as a whole is going to react. Most companies are going to follow the leaders on this one, and Microsoft and Google taking a clear stance will heavily influence the rest of the market.
That's one way to evaluate things. Another way is to consider diversity in working methods a goal in and of itself, even if it doesn't further capitalist positive outcomes.
I'm curious, though, why that would make you think that racial discrimination is happening? It could just as easily mean that racial discrimination is not happening and that Asian candidates are equally over-represented in the underlying qualifications (e.g. university degrees, prior experience -- both of which are indeed the case).
Also, at a level removed from tech, what criteria do you use to determine whether some system which does not equally represent the general population is discriminatory or not? It seems like the numbers alone here aren't sufficient, but I reckon you've probably given this a lot of thought, so I'd love to hear your mental model there.
The mental model is simple. Tech has grown. It's no longer a niche domain. It employs a large percentage of the overall population.
The fact that it is not representative of the general population (and I'm not even talking about men vs women, that's another huge can of worms), means that something is wrong somewhere along the pipeline.
Either at university level, or at high school level, or before. Or at company level.
Plus diversity gets worse and worse as the pay grade goes up.
In any case, I think affirmative action works, long term, for the affected minorities. As much as people outside those minorities hate it.
Indeed. Be warned, remote devs. Ideally only be remote on a fully remote team. You don't want to be the one person excluded from the meeting in the hall.
Perhaps even less than half. At my last job, only three of the ten people on my team were going into the office, and yet the rest of us were still perennially out of the loop.
That said, I don't think it has to be that way. Companies and teams do have the ability to choose their cultures and communication styles in an intentional way. It's just that very few actually do. And this is a situation where you absolutely do not want to accept the default configuration.
That's interesting because an outsourced recruiter contacted me recently about a Google role and very clearly needed to confirm that I would be able to return to an office one day a week.
I was confused why 1/5 was so much more powerful than 0/5. I sorta get 3/5 if you have a commitment to in-person culture. Anyway, the 1 per week doesn't at all line up with your more credible 3 per week.
Can you go remote within commute distance of the office and keep your salary? What's the limit?
Living in Pleasanton is cheaper than living in Mountain View, but still commutable. Living in Tracy is cheaper still and people still commute to the Bay Area from there. Living in Fresno or Sacramento is even cheaper and farther but still some people will do that commute daily.
The limit is based on what the Census bureau dictates the metropolitan statistical area to be. Certain MSAs with Google offices correspond to a special rate; otherwise it's based on the state you're in.
If you're in Sacramento, you're definitely not in the same MSA as either San Jose or SF. Pleasanton on the other hand is part of Alameda County, which is part of SF's MSA.
Meanwhile, if you opted to be in Santa Cruz, "just" 32 miles south of San Jose, you'd be SOL.
Interesting. I live in a big MSA (Atlanta, which includes a lot of mostly rural counties). I've considered a role at Google, but currently work in a suburb and live further out from there. 1 hour to Atlanta proper without traffic, but still in the MSA according to the census. And I could move further out and still be in the MSA (like Heard County or Jasper County if you want to look at some examples).
Atlanta is still going to be a significantly lower pay band than premium plus (Bay Area/NYC), though. Tech salaries there aren't as high. The ideal play is to be far out in the boonies of a premium plus MSA, e.g. something like Dutchess County in upstate New York. The cost of living there is quite low but you'll still make the highest salary possible.
Interestingly, Seattle is only in the premium price tier, not the premium price tier. This is because there's no state income tax in Washington, so a lower salary goes a longer way. So it ends up being a wash even factoring in NY/CA state taxes. Because CA taxes are higher than NY (but not NYC taxes), your best bet is living in upstate NY (Long Island is outside of NYC too but it's eliminated because CoL is higher there).
There was an internal tool that simulated your pay change when you move. For example, if your office is in Santa Clara county but you move to Santa Cruz county the pay will drop by a lot. But if you move from Santa Clara county to San Mateo county there's no change at all.
Getting paid less for doing the exact same job, just a few miles away. :) Isn't that wonderful? But at least the corporate real estate market is happy.
Oh no, I would bet some money that the C level execs at these companies own a lot of residential property near their campuses. Likely purchased before they announced building said campus! It's just good business sense.
If the employees move away rent goes down, so does demand for their properties.. so yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
... if they are charging from being in the office from 5 days a week (before times) to 0 days a week (now) rather than 3 days a week in office and 2 from home.
5 -> 0 is a pay cut based on where you live.
5 -> 3 is not a pay cut as you're still working out of the same office.
Ah, OK I thought anybody who lived in Santa Cruz and reported to the office 5 days a week would take a pay cut. This is just if you're fully remote, I guess. Still seems like a slap, Santa Cruz ain't cheap even if it's slightly better than San Mateo or Mountain View.
So I'm a "super commuter"; I can take the Metro North from the end of the line to NYC, although I usually go for Amtrak for several reasons.
If I were to go fully remote, I would take a pay cut ... but it would be almost identical to my commuting costs, once you account for rail fair, parking, vehicle mileage, taxes, snacks, etc.
I don't know how representative my case is, but the pay cut ends up being a non-factor in my decision whether or not to apply for full remote.
The above seems to put the lie to the argument I've often heard that the justification for these cost-of-living adjustments is that in-person employees deliver more value than remote employees.
If this were indeed the reason for the salary adjustment, it wouldn't matter whether an employee was moving to Santa Cruz, San Mateo, or San Salvador. Either way they're remote, and unless one city has markedly different internet bandwidth, the value that a given employee delivers from any remote location should be the same.
Next time I hear someone making this argument, I'm calling BS. It's a bald-faced attempt for the company to capture value which rightfully belongs to the employee.
> The above seems to put the lie to the argument I've often heard that the justification for these cost-of-living adjustments is that in-person employees deliver more value than remote employees.
Only the horribly uninformed would ever make such a bad faith argument. You've never been paid based on your "value" but rather what it takes to keep you as an employee. The company only wants to pay you enough to keep you and if you move some place cheap well they don't need to offer as much.
> The company only wants to pay you enough to keep you and if you move some place cheap well they don't need to offer as much.
I think that depends what your other options are. It might work if everyone in the industry offers you less based on where you live, which is almost collusion in my opinion.
Not true. If it were based on cost of living, then Google would pay more for you to work from Hawaii than from Alabama. (Spoilers: it doesn't, they're both in the same salary band.)
It's slightly more true that it's based on the local cost of labor, but even more so that it's just based on the state, with carveouts for MSAs (which are defined based on county) surrounding certain offices commanding higher salaries.
You'd make just as much working remotely in Matamoras, PA as you would working out of the NYC office in Manhattan.
You would think that Mountain View based Google, being registered as a Delaware Corp, would understand the benefits of legal residence being different than practical residence.
And it's not fraud for an employer to arbitrarily control pay based on someones location? Is their revenue similarly confined by that employees contributions because of location?
If company can pick arbitrary locations around the world to be their HQ, or Trump can use Mar-a-Lago as his residence, then so too can every other citizen following the law and paying their taxes.
One is legal the other isn't.... This isn't hard you would be committing fraud no questions. Also depending on how you've lied you'd also be on the hook for tax issues to the government rather then just and issue with your company.
For criminal fraud to happen, there has to be a defrauded party. If I follow my local tax laws and negotiate a better salary with a corporation based on Location A, while potentially living elsewhere at Location B/C/D for prolong periods of time with lower costs of living, that is not fraud.
Getting the company to enter into a contract under false pretenses is fraud. "intent to deceive" is alone enough. This isn't some kind of gotcha where your technically ok if you do X and Y. Intent matters!
Two parties entered a contract with the understand you would live in location A if you don't that's fraud objectively.
No, it's not tax fraud. Tax is between you and the government, not you and your employer. The U.S. even allows you to ask your employer not to deduct tax so you can deal with it personally.
If you follow whatever local and state laws apply to your situation, you're perfectly in your right.
I didn't bring up taxes, I'm just responding to it.
The topic is whether a global corporation with access to a global workforce should be allowed arbitrary salary negation privileges because of the circumstances of a candidates geographical circumstances, while robbing the candidate of the same privilege.
Just sounds like another way to exploit labor at a time of record profit windfalls for corporations.
A dev in Mountain View has many more high-paying opportunities than the same guy in Weed, CA (pop. 2,862). Google pays him more because that’s what it takes to retain him.
Someday if most employers switch to remote-first, this won’t matter and salaries will be equal everywhere (a lot lower than we’ve seen in tight labor markets, and probably the first world in general).
People do that with car insurance and jobs with residency requirements.
I used to drink with a bunch of fireman who lived about 300 miles away - they had to live in the city or adjacent county. They’d have a flophouse in the hood shared by like 20 guys and crash there once in awhile when they pulled overtime as well as get mail.
Travel scams are similar too. If a company will reimburse travel if you’re 50 miles from home, people will “move” so they can bill the mileage tolls.
It works great until it doesn’t. If you want to give up your cushy Google gig for a few thousand bucks, good luck.
Well for starters you're gonna have all applicable state and local taxes withheld from wherever you're fraudulently claiming to be living, as that is going to be where you are ACTUALLY living as far as all relevant taxation authorities are concerned.
I think a more non-fraud tactic would be to find the cheapest area in a high cost of living area and minmax on that dimension. Especially if it’s by county, then there are likely unfavorable areas within that county.
But if there is anywhere in the county that has escaped full IT gentrification because of poor commuter access, those prices are going to explode if they haven't already. Since median house price is a huge fraction of CoL calculations (and a frequent complaint among some economists), staying in county gets you a raise, if your friends do it too.
Yeah, last time I looked at rents in my hometown, the cheapest options there were comparable to the cheapest options in San Francisco. They're probably a bit ahead of the curve; most the empty land around is either federal or LADWP, so there's limited room for new development, but it's a major shot up from pre-pandemic prices where renting a full house was cheaper than an SF bedroom.
Not at Google. When you go remote you're paid based the same as if you were onsite at the nearest office to your residence, limits are roughly CSA (combined statistical area) in the US—not cost of living.
I don't know the boundary of the SF Bay Area region. It is based on some US designation. Once you leave the region around an office you become a part of some general state-wide designation.
This has some failure cases, with some weird places being included in regions like NYC while some other places where people really do commute to NYC (though it is extremely far) are excluded. I don't actually know anybody who has been impacted by this, but clever Googlers made a pretty compete map of all of counties in the US and their pay region once the tool for getting salary information for proposed moves was available.
It is a bit ridiculous to base these things off location when the location would reduce the taxes the company pays for you.
I'd like to understand how these market values are calculated. It can't be supply and demand, because if you move to a place with 0 supply you do not maximize your value.
I should be able to say to them "hey, I create $x for you now and I cost $y, but if I move I will make the same $x for you for $(y-z), and it will make no impact on means or ends since I'm entirely remote."
You are not paid the value you create. The value you create has nothing to do with your salary(other than whether you get fired if value < salary). Your salary is the least your employer thinks they can pay to get an acceptable candidate. As they expand the pool of applicants they figure they can find people willing to work for less.
From what I’ve been told it’s been pretty easy for some to negotiate no salary adjustment when going remote. It’s against HR “policy” but I know deals happened when someone was deemed a crucial contributor.
im planning on moving out of state in a few months from high cost area. what i've been told is that my salary wont change but I will be at "top of band" in the new area.
Complete manipulative nonsense if they ever use "top of the band" as reason to change their relationship with you imo. A Ferrari doesn't stop being Ferrari just because it's parked amongst Priuses.
If you're worth paying $x for $y, you're worth paying $x for $y minus the reduction in taxes they'll pay; your moving to an area with less taxes is them getting you on sale.
I'd prefer to work an environment where I can't get interrupted synchronously by someone wanting their problem resolved that moment.
Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
But ultimately, I have no desire to waste an extra 5 to 10 hours of my life just driving back and forth to sit at a different computer.
I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
> I'd prefer to work an environment where I can't get interrupted synchronously by someone wanting their problem resolved that moment.
FWIW, I found synchronous interruptions to be more of a problem when remote. Too many people used Slack messages or video calls for everything because it was only a click away, as opposed to having to get up and walk over to someone’s desk
> Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting…
Slack is terrible for documenting. It needs to be reserved for ephemeral communication.
Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
Someone messaging on Slack can be ignored quite easily, without it being rude. If someone is starting a video call with you without arranging a time with you first then I agree you need to get in physical proximity with that person, but only to smack them.
Slack is not usefully searchable, true, but its purpose for documentation is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. If you have a link to the conversation you have the whole conversation; that can be useful to share context. Likewise meetings; being able to record them is HUGE. But either way, you mention Slack should only be used for ephemeral communication...all in person communication is ephemeral. Slack at least has it saved, even if it's a pain to find; in person does not. I can share a Slack link; if you missed it, forgot it, or disagree about what was said, you're out of luck with in person.
I was a freelancer and it was my first gig in the industry. The parent company eventually fired him and in doing so, everyone lost their jobs. True story.
If you don't answer a Slack message immediately, how to you remember to answer it later? It's not like email where you can archive threads that are done. Instead chats (i.e. channels, private messages or threads) with unanswered questions look exactly like other chats.
This assumes some messages are urgent and some are not, and that you can't know which is which until you open the chat and thus mark it as read.
You either mark it as unread if you are going to get to it as soon as you wrap you what you're currently doing, or you click "More actions" and select a "Remind me about this" option.
"Mark as unread" just makes it look like an unread message. I want to read every message as it comes in, in case it's urgent. "Mark as unread" would either obscure new incoming messages from the same sender, or cause me to unnecessarily triage the same message several times.
"Remind me" is time based, which is too arbitrary. I want to instantly see everything unanswered, not have it trickle in at random intervals. Using the "Save" button as "Move to inbox" as nthj suggested makes more sense. It's also easier to click.
Slack has saved messages. I use this as an inbox/todo list. Any message that takes longer than two minutes to reply to, I move to my actual todo list and un-save the message.
Especially once you get big enough to require a retention policy and have to delete your years of knowledge repository! Better off documenting separately from the start.
>>Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
>Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
The OP was comparing it with someone walking over to his desk to tell him something, which if you are busy and eager to get back to what you were doing, is easy to forget. At least Slack has a record while vibrations in the air have none. He also said Slack or tickets, so you weren't even attempting to refute his actual argument.
Treat your slack messages as a queue, something asynchronous you respond to when you are free. If management forces you to immediately respond to every slack message, then you have a dysfunctional culture that will of course clash with WFH. They should be using something like pagerduty if it's urgent.
It's way more than just interruptions, travel, etc.
I recently found /r/overemployed [1] on VC Twitter, and a lot of folks are using this setup to work two (or more) jobs. They know that they'll only need to dedicate 4 hours a day to any given job and as long as they can schedule non-overlapping meetings, they can get away with it.
It's got me thinking though - this might be an opportunity for startups to knowingly hire less than full time employed engineering staff at a reduced comp rate with low stress / low pressure work. Say, 10-20 hours a week, choose your own hours. You might be able to grab a few MANGA/FAANG folks and get them to work on your project instead of their "110% time" pet project at the giantcorp. It might be an operational advantage.
Plenty of people work more than one job. As long as someone does the work that's expected of them and performs their job duties well, it isn't any employer's business what someone does in their time off.
Actually, most tech companies have employment agreements that prevent exactly this sort of behavior. When you are dealing with IP, you don’t want this leaking to a competitor. And when you are a big tech company, almost any other tech company is potentially a competitor.
If companies don't want IP leaking, then society provides them plenty of avenues and incentives to prevent that from happening, from NDAs to fines and prison time.
If companies don't want employees working for anyone else, then they should compensate those employees for that privilege. They don't own anyone's free time unless they pay for that privilege.
In general they do pay for your time outside of work and you agree by taking the job.
Let's say you work strict hours 9am to 5pm M-F. On Thursday at 8:47pm you happen to think of a solution to a problem you're having at work. Are you suggesting the company should pay you more because the idea occurred outside of your strict hours?
In general, companies pay white collar workers / knowledge workers, for their knowledge. That happens regardless of when that knowledge is acquired. It seems pretty common sense and there are also plenty of laws to it up. Any other arrangement would seem full of issues.
Most companies have requirements on the handling of IP and conflicts of interest. Using separate workstations and working in two different industries solves this problem. Remember, most only require that IP relevant to their company and industry are owned by them.
I don't get why they would pick Netflix over Microsoft. And if they are using Meta instead of Facebook, surely it should be Alphabet instead of Google.
> I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
I feel the same way.
I have been remote for over 10 years but prior to that, it was another 10 in an office.
That included an hour commute each way, random downtime and interruptions.
I honestly have no doubt I am more productive now, given that was "leave at 7 AM get home at 7 PM".
There is no way in any given day I am getting less work done in 12 hours than I was then.
I will never again go back to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the expressway again, even if we end up in a race-to-the-bottom on salaries. QoL is more important to me now.
>Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
Not exactly.
Some organizations have limits to how long historical chats are stored.
Yep, that's fair. However at that point I'd say anything of note like that should really be recorded somewhere with a more long-term/permanent record, like in a wiki or similar, rather than ephemerally.
From my visits to Google's offices in Manhattan, I don't expect many who reside within the city, to resist this change. People will accept leaving their small city apartments and visiting the vast offices, with a plethora of services available as a welcome alternative after two years. It's those who've moved on from that lifestyle, and may have physically relocated, who will resist this change. They will be inclined to make an argument for working remotely, or work elsewhere, whatever works.
It is vastly different in the bay area where public transit is a horrible mess and the freeways are all at 300% capacity. A friend who is a Googler is looking at a 30 minute commute to a GBus stop for a 90 minute ride each way. Going to the office is cutting productivity basically in half.
I know what a Google (engineering) salary is, and even if you're paying half of a tech salary to rent, the other half is still a hell of a lot to have leftover for your average American.
To rephrase this: For the most junior (engineering) employees, a starting salary allows you to spend under the recommended maximum of 25-30% of your salary on rent to live in a decent 1BR apartment minutes from your office. You then receive significant bonus and stock on top of this. It's...not a problem.
L3 salary is $140k (from levels.fy). 30% of $140k allows for rent of $3.5k/m which is not actually all that generous. You're lucky to get a studio for that these days in Manhattan.
I personally am really happy to go back to the office, but people who have physically relocated have an easy option to simply apply for permanent remote work. It's really not a big argument that needs to be made—the process is very simple.
"Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added."
"Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said."
I'm not aware of any engineering org that bans it, except smaller groups within orgs that are working on hardware. Where is your 20% number coming from?
Those aren’t temporary exceptions. Fully remote in this context means you don’t have an assigned desk in any Google office and thus aren’t subject to any mandate about returning to offices when a particular office opens back up
Made my move to permanent remote last Fall, when it was becoming pretty clear that return to office was on the horizon. Sure enough, we're going back company wide starting this week. Really glad I did it while I could. I will never go back to a 9-5 daily commute ever again.
I would hesitate to make such sweeping statements. As work returns to the office my prediction is that you'll end up with pockets of high functioning teams that are physically colocated and distributed teams will inevitably be at a disadvantage which will lead to them being relegated to "tolerate" despite the talent on those teams.
It's not to say that distributed teams can't be high funtioning it just takes 3x the effort from a management perspective. Good management is in even higher demand than SWE skills. A good manager will gravitate towards teams that are colocated because they know they can be more effective for less effort.
To level the playing field it has to be all colocated or all remote. Talent currently holds the cards because of demand but talent+colocation will always win in a contest.
I think you are overstating the importance of 'management'. In the modern world (i.e. not a factory or otherwise rote work) real business (and indeed societal) value is created due to the web of relationships between people who have at least some idea of what they are doing.
>To level the playing field it has to be all colocated or all remote.
Completely agreed. The way I see my situation playing out is that all of the employees who went remote during COVID will be tolerated, but that the company culture will revert to in-office first. That will eventually lead to the remote cohort slowly being relegated to irrelevance and passed for promotion until they disappear (including myself) through attrition. When that happens I will start looking for 100% remote companies. But for now I really don't care though, as long as they are paying me a Bay Area salary to live in the midwest.
My company was all in office culture until they could no longer hire or only hire really fresh/average workers in the local market. Ive been remotely for 4yrs (precovid), and promoted 3 times in that period. But im a SWE not a csuite or in hr or marketing.
Your job is what you make of it. I personally see WFH as the progression brought about by the internet; not covid. Covid just sped up the transition that was already happening. Covid brought about collective PSTD which forced peoples hand like any other trauma in ones life. It was the reason people stopped putting off there happiness, for the dream of success.
I would like to point out that you also appear to be making sweeping statements.
I don’t agree with you that colocated teams have an inherent advantage, or that they require more management to be productive than a remote team on average.
And as far as Google is concerned, that's always been true.
I knew someone who worked and lived in a houseboat. She showed up to the office for meetings, but her job was sales so she didn't have much use for a desk anyway.
My job location literally says US-REMOTE-MY_STATE. I signed a new contract and everything. Yes, this could change if the CEO decides to ban remote work but there is no evidence that this would happen any time soon. "Big mean Google does mean thing" is an attractive headline for media outlets.
I work for a large company, and my team has changed so much since before covid.
Before Covid:
5 people in the same New York office, 1 remote in Europe
Today:
2 in New York, 2 in California, 1 in Ohio, 1 in Europe
There is no single office to return to. Though we could meet up with other coworkers on different teams and projects. But in essence we've become a remote team.
Has anyone else's teams become geographically distributed since covid?
Absolutely. I'm at a mid-size startup based in SF and we went from a few remote engineers outside of the country to over half our team remote internationally and many of our longest-tenured US-based engineers moving to places like Oregon, Texas and Colorado. I moved to NYC. There will be no significant engineering presence in SF when our office finally reopens.
All of our Eng was in the Portland (OR) office pre-pandemic but now people have started spreading. Seattle, Bend (which at 3+ hours is not commutable to Portland), and I even moved to Hawaii. No going back for us.
Yes, something similar happened with my team, although there was a consideration to allow some work to be remote before Covid, once it started that sealed the deal.
It is strange to walk around an office and see a bunch of workstations, desks and PC's that are all setup to do work in person, but only the PC is being used remotely and the only other people in the building are a security guard or janitor.
Is that turnover or did people move to a better-for-them location and they're waiting to see if anyone calls their bluff?
I recall someone pointing out that a Sun Microsystems office in Colorado existed because someone you might call a Staff or Principal Engineer today said, "I'm moving to Colorado. If you want to open an office there I'll keep working for you, but I'm moving to Colorado".
This happened at my last job before I left. We had ~50 employees working at an office in Seattle.
The pandemic hit, we went remote, and there was basically a mass exodus out of Seattle. I think only about 20 people were still in Seattle by the time I left (for another job that's 100% remote with people scattered throughout the globe). It took the company almost two years to start adjusting salaries...
COVID definitely helped push my recommendation that our small team move to full-remote, and start to transition to more asynchronous work. It's great being able to hire outside of our local market (especially for SWE talent), and we won't be renewing the lease on our albeit small office this year (moving to grant coworking or at-home furniture/equipment reimbursement).
Yes, similar situation at the startup I work for (which has also more than doubled in headcount since Covid started). The distributedness genie can’t be put back in the bottle now, which has significant pros and cons. It does make a lot of things less efficient, but on the other hand, it also lets us hire good people who don’t necessarily want to relocate to NYC.
Do you believe remote work is less efficient because your organization hasn’t adapted to remote work, or do you believe something about remote work somehow makes it inherently less efficient?
The latter, with the caveat that it makes some things less efficient, not all. As an example, having face-to-face conversations can allow you to hash things out much more quickly and easily than over Slack or Zoom.
Mine was before COVID. Still is now. I doubt I’ll return to the office unless mandated. Either way, I’m in Zoom all day. Going to office doesn’t mean face-to-face work for me. I might go in once a week or so just for lunch with friends.
I'm full remote with teammates in various states across the US. We have no problems to speak of related to our locations.
I refuse to ever work in an office again assuming my role doesn't require me to physically be at a location for reasons other than 'we want you to be'.
Google is a giant legacy company that has been around for decades now. All its executives have set their lives up around the idea of commanding a fiefdom of underlings, in person, in the Bay Area. Google execs have the ability to totally ignore the rational pull of a much cheaper distributed talent market, because Google is a Monopoly minting Monopoly-level profits.
"Monopoly does what it wants" is not interesting, nor is it big news to me.
What's more interesting is all the companies that are never going back, and all the companies started in the last 2 years that will be remote-native going forward. Given the tight market for talent right now, and falling stock prices for growth companies, I'm already pulling out the popcorn now.
Google executives have never had to think seriously about silly things like "cost-structure" before. In this next market cycle where Growth takes a back seat, it will be very fun to watch decisions like these pile up to eventually bite them in the rear 5-10 years from now.
I can see it now, investors tanking their stock price in 2026, wondering why an old company that hasn't innovated in 10 years is paying 50,000 engineers half a $million a year to sit inside the most expensive real estate on earth and do nothing.
That's good to be back in the office. For me it's only a week to start feeling bad. Loneliness, the same walls I live with family, no colleagues around to talk to. That's not for me. Sometimes I prefer to work from home, because I need to run some errands, from home I have better control. Everybody should have an option, or possibility to work from home some days in a week. But nothing replace morning coffee in the kitchen with colleagues!
This is actually a major red flag if I'm an employee. There's no half way with remote work. Either everyone, including execs, works remote, or no one does. I've been in hybrid situations and it's complete hell. My suggestion is pick what works best for you, and then find a company that's committed all the way to either one.
For me, there's no amount of money that doesn't start with billion that could convince me to work in an office. I understand some other people are different, and they should find companies that support forced-commute co-located working.
This is why the Google hybrid week seems to strike a good balance. It sets 3 days a week to be in the office and that gets set by your Project Area (Maps, Youtube, etc.). This way, EVERYONE is in the office on say Tu-Th and so work doesn't grind to a halt/get disrupted the same way.
After two years of not being in the office, I don't see how anyone can justify going into the office without putting themselves into a quagmire of hypocrisy and contradiction.
If I was working at Google I'd want to be in the office just for the experience. Know someone who did work at Google for a few years and he said he would often bump in to incredible people in the rec areas and get to talk to all kinds of interesting figures like the creator of Vim or some of the top brains of ML. It's a bit different when you are just pumping out some generic SaaS product and can do fine in isolation at home.
I worked as well in the Zurich office where Bram was working, and it was amazing experience until they took out the walls and made open offices. I would never go back to an open office.
Just go to a conference once a year if that's what you feel you're missing. To sacrifice a good portion of your life commuting, just for the chance of bumping into an idol figure seems like a net loss.
Walking or biking to work is quite nice for me when I live close enough to work. A good friend of mine loves her walks home from work, as she's told me many times.
When I've lived train distance, a 20min commute has been quite fine. I'd say neutral, which is sufficient to make the point.
I live near one of the subway stops in Boston (10 minute walk) and I absolutely miss my commute. Before the pandemic I would typically walk 7 miles a day, now I have to force myself to walk 3 miles.
Most of my hobbies would be in the city as well (meetups, concerts, board games, dating). All that has took a massive hit but the city is slowly coming back.
My current team prefers working remote and TBH I don't like it. I want to be in an office with others. It's nice having a clear separation of work and home. I don't like how companies are able to subsidize business costs (electricity, rent, maintenance, food, internet) through my home. They aren't reimbursing me for this, nor would I expect it.
I buy I might be in the minority but I like my commute a lot, I'm in NYC, it's a great 15-30 min buffer/bookend for my day, and I've started biking to work which I enjoy a lot.
I wonder how much of these remote vs. office convos are effected by the maybe unstated fact that commuting in the Bay is maybe especially bad?
I think almost the entire office vs wfh argument is based around commute quality. When I lived an hour drive from the office I hated going in and WFH was a blessing. Then I moved to the city and lived a 10 minute walk from the office and ended up going in half the time just because it was no bother to go in.
Being in a "quagmire of hypocrisy and contradiction" has never been a problem for large corporations (or even small companies) in my entire career.
Never once have I pointed out an obviously ridiculous contradiction in practices "but won't this actually hurt our customers?" and had the response be anything near "oh no! you're right, better fix that!"
Remote work is a great example: long before pandemic most C-level execs and other important personal were almost never in the office, always attend meeting remotely (sometimes even just by phone), and yet love to talk about how work can't happen without everyone being in the office. Trust me if you can manage the entire company from your Florida vacation home, I'm sure we can get these models deployed to production from my home office.
I don't see why opinions have to be extreme and any mixed or nuanced takes have to be labeled as contradictory. It's possible to like aspects about WFH/remote work, and like aspects about on-site work (at least from before the pandemic). For example, I like not having to commute, but I miss being able to ask questions face-to-face.
I hope everyone gets to choose their option, but I find it really tiring to be told by either side that I *WILL* be more productive or be happier one way or another. I'm perfectly capable of figuring out that myself.
Strongly suggest a co-working space nearby if that’s the situation at home. It would suck to have to pay for something that other folks don’t have to pay for, but if that’s the reality you find yourself in…
Obviously upgrading to a place with a dedicated office would probably be comparable, but that makes some assumptions on my part that might not be accurate or reasonable.
A lot of companies will pay for stuff like a coworking space. It's a legit business expense. I specifically made sure to ask about that before I started at my current gig.
I believe they mean from the perspective of the employer. If a team has been able to fully function these past two years and the employees prefer working from home, there's little — if any — justification the employer can make for the return to office.
It honestly really depends. I'm a Googler and work in a team/org that was already heavily distributed all over the world. I am located in Japan, work with people in Europe, US (both coasts), Australia, Taiwan. While me being in the office means I get to talk in person with some people that are in my team (but which I'm not directly working with because my projects are with people located elsewhere anyway), and it's a nice social environment, work-wise it makes no difference for me because the people I have meetings with, I exchange emails, IMs, send code reviews, etc are spread all over the world anyway.
I personally prefer working from home, I have my test devices here, I set up my own home office, I don't need to waste time commuting, I have more time to take care of things around my house and/or my family if needs be, and I actually find myself working more focused and wasting less time than I did when I was in the office. I know this is not for everyone but the fact that my other team members might or might not be in the office has pretty much 0 effect on my work performance because I wouldn't even know nor care about.
I do think there's something to be said for the long term culture effects remote work has. Maybe the current employees who used to work in the office are more efficient remote, but is the same true for new remote workers? What about in a few years when a large percentage of the employees may have never worked in the office at Google?
It's kinda crazy how different perspectives are... From what I hear:
Average employee: "I am just as productive (or even more productive) working from home than when I was at the office. This is totally sustainable."
Average Manager: "I've noticed a huge drop in productivity from my employees since they have been working from home. This is entirely unsustainable."
This is what I hear from friends in other occupations, not just software, but also from my friends in software too.
Of course, both can be true if just a small percentage of employees drop productivity immensely while everyone else's remains the same... But it's probably more likely that the employees are... not great at judging their personal productivity.
I just find the dichotomy fascinating. - I don't have a race in the horse as I never went remote.
> it's probably more likely that the employees are... not great at judging their productivity
At my company "let's get everyone stuffed back into the office asap because productivity" was mgmts slogan, but that position became pretty much indefensible after they announced that 2021 was literally the best year ever (highest revenue, highest revenue rise yoy absolute and %, largest increase in headcount, highest number of projects shipped, highest number of new projects etc.)
$GOOG stock has pretty much doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, meaning the company has been having absolutely no trouble whatsoever doing its job with a fully remote workforce for 2 years now. They don't "need" employees to come back to the office.
I don't think the stock price reflects that too much. You can't attribute the doubling to workers being at home. If it dipped when workers went back to the office.. that also would not mean much.
Using the stock price of a technology company to judge the productivity of it's workers? Surely that's a component of stock price, but man this seems like a huge leap to make such a claim
Maybe argue the inverse-- that most of their employees aren't actually productive? They're at over 150k FTEs and probably well over 100k temps/contractors, how many of them are doing things that materially impact revenue versus steady state or just looking busy? Every refresh of the golden goose Adwords makes it easier to just plug in a credit card and blindly spend without ever hearing from an account rep who manages 100's of other SMB accounts. Once they have so much inertia on their yellow page 2.0 search & video ad monopoly, where else will advertisers turn?
I don't think I agree. But I'm curious, in your opinion, how long is long enough to be able to say if WFH has had an impact on the company's bottom line?
We've just done a survey at work to talk about about attitudes to returning to work. The results were basically that 95% of people are happy with work from home but want more social gatherings. Most people would be happy with visiting the office once every two weeks.
I expected a small fraction to be extremely pro return to office but actually these didn't appear at all in our survey. What we did have is a couple of people who said they'd resign before returning to the office on a regular basis.
I wonder how different attitudes are at Google or if this is more of a top down push?
Top down entirely. It's based entirely on propaganda that Google has the best perks and that serendipitous hallway conversations lead to innovation. Zero evidence that that is the case. And other companies have the same, if not better, perks.
It's been years since I worked there, but I gotta say nothing compares to the Google NYC office in my opinion, as far as offices go. If you know a better office let me know :)
I still know people there, several of whom started going in again as soon as they brought back the big perks like cafes even though it was fully optional.
(The companies I've worked at since then seem to have fewer people going in during this optional period, though still some.)
Yes - this is a component of offices that I think people are skipping. Google and some other companies have world class offices and really cater to their employees quite nicely.
I think many here think of an office as an open office with 500 desks crammed together and nothing else. I know those offices - I've worked at plenty. I do not want to go back to that. I've seen what my current work has done for their "renovations". It's soul draining and will be a terrible office environment. Needless to say - I'm looking for a new job because I do want some office time but I don't want a soul sucking office like the ones we currently have at many companies. Google's isn't perfect (and it is huge YMMV - I've seen some that are fantastic and some that are horrific!) but it's usually far better than others. At least there's an option to enjoy some nice perks and office culture! Many places don't have any of that. No activities - no team building - no peer bonding - no anything!
Amazing if you hate people - horrible if you love interacting with new folks.
That seems like a high number. Different external surveys I've seen tend to show about 20% wanting to come in five days with a permanent desk, about the same (or a bit more) fully remote, and the rest 2 or 3 days. That's not just developers though.
Do you have data backing that? I definitely agree about super-commuters, but OTOH in NYC: with small apartments and convenient transit commutes, there are some extra reasons to want to go back to the office.
I'm willing to bet the super commuter effect is stronger, but I'd be surprised if it were strong enough to change it to 5%. E.g. almost all my coworkers live close to the office here in NYC.
I don't have data and it probably depends on various factors. Google in Chicago made a definite choice to locate itself 1.4 miles from the commuter train and a 1.2 miles from the main city train lines. But they have a gorgeous office with great cafeteria food and they pay more than anyone else with similar job security and work hours. They also have a shuttle bus, I think.
If they paid average Chicago tech wages and didn't have free healthy meals then they would have had a hard time recruiting to that office location choice even before COVID.
2. Your entire team is at the office as well and you can collaborate with them face to face.
I imagine 1 is not a concern for most people who have adapted to the situation over the last two years. And 2 requires that most of your team is local and agrees to come in as well, which I can't see being too likely.
For me personally going back to the office and still sitting in video calls all day with a geographically distributed team makes zero sense. It is a lot more comfortable to do it from home.
For me personally going back to the office and still sitting in video calls all day with a geographically distributed team makes zero sense. It is a lot more comfortable to do it from home.
It's worse since we have an open office, so to do a video call you need to book one of the conference rooms that are in high demand, even the smallest rooms were perpetually booked even prior to the pandemic.
At least when working from home, I can do a video call any time without having to find a room. And I think people have forgotten about commutes and lunch. Now meetings are booked anytime from 8am-6pm and assume people will be available anytime from home. But since some people commute earlier and some people commute later to miss traffic, if everyone's back in the office, the only safe window to book a meeting is 10am-12pm and 1pm-4pm
> I imagine 1 is not a concern for most people who have adapted to the situation over the last two years
I doubt most people have completely adapted to this. Speaking for myself, I only have one spare room that is a dedicated office (and it's also our guest room), and my spouse and I have to switch off when we need it for work. Most people don't have a spare unused room or two for remote work.
I've been working remotely for most of the past 8 years, and this year switched to a new role where I am expected to be in the office most of the time. Most of my team is in the office, but the company is geographically distributed (across something like 7 timezones) so I do regularly need to collaborate with people working remotely, on a daily basis. It works for me, and although I have a longer commute (20 minutes vs 20 seconds) I don't see it being an issue.
Although I have no issues motivating myself to get work done on my own (of course I have off days when I struggle - in the office it actually seems easier to get away with that without feeling guilty), one thing I always found hard was work life balance. You see it's 5pm but you are knee deep fixing a bug, so you power on with it, and before you know it, it's 6:30pm. In an office when you see everyone else leave you know it's time for you to as well - the bug can wait, no big deal.
I think what doesn't help is that I've never had a dedicated office room at home, I've had a cramped office corner of my bedroom, but it's not quite the same. I'm guessing Google's employees in SF, NYC and London are also in a similar position, so I don't really see there being much push back.
If someone moved from NYC to some remote part of PA they can apply to work remotely, and if Google says no, there are plenty of other companies who will take them. At the same time, there will be plenty of people who want to live in NYC and work for Google. There may be a higher turnover this year, but long term I don't see it being an issue.
I recently took part in a scrum planning meeting where the company mandated everyone to do it on site. The chaos was a stark contrast to anything we'd had virtually before that...
People suddenly forgot they could look things up on their computers, stopped using established business vocabulary, and even small things like speaking one at a time were lost on them.
During the meeting, someone decided to doodle on the paper board in the meeting room (vs. using the usual C4 format we have been using on Miro boards), creating confusion regarding what "this" and "that" block represents. There were no meeting minutes, and none of the conceptual decisions from the meeting ended up on the wiki...
Of course, many of these can be resolved with better discipline, but it really feels like the medium invites chaos. That same team works very effectively in virtual meetings, with the ability to supplement the discussion with well-thought messages via Slack or Wiki comments. Meeting recordings and audio transcripts help for better meeting notes and recording the meeting conclusions and outputs in a way that's transparent and searchable.
Also ... gifies, how can anyone stand a 1h meeting without emojis and gifies is beyond me :).
I've been going back in to work 1-2 days a week and find it's been insanely productive and had allowed me to reconnect with coworkers in a more effective manner. I was previously sold on 100% WFH but now I understand the importance of some face time. That said, I will never voluntarily come back 5 days a week. For me, the office is for discussions, socializing, and working out problems in real time. Home is where I get actual work done. That would be different if I had an actual office at work, but I don't.
Another factor to consider in the rush back to the office: gas prices may dramatically spike depending on the situation in the Ukraine. It will likely be a significant driver of inflation (and stagflation) and may keep folks from willingly commuting at pre pandemic levels.
I don’t think any of this has to due with productivity, collaboration, or whatever corporate says.
Google (and Apple, and Facebook, and no doubt many others) have spent literally billions of dollars on real estate right before the pandemic. If people don’t fill those buildings, they’re going to look foolish.
That’s it.
It reminds me of when corporate says they need special employee shuttles instead of lowering costs by a shared shuttle. “We encourage collaborative conversations on the shuttles.” I’ve ridden them. No one speaks. It’s also not due to secrecy, otherwise they wouldn’t want employees to work on public transit.
I have a friend in facilities at a BigCo and it does sound like their team is pushing to end remote work mostly because they signed long leases and remote work makes facilities jobs unnecessary.
For whatever it's worth, even with the salary cut remote employees are facing, the paybands for FAANG employees in (relatively) affordable cities are still top-of-market.
For example, remote GOOG employees in Atlanta take a 10-20% salary cut compared to the Bay Area salaries. But the net takehome is still higher (on average) than the takehome for the in-office Bay Area engineers. And the overall compensation is better than >80% of existing Atlanta metro SWE compensation.
That's part of the reason why there has been such a huge influx of people to metros like Atlanta, Charlotte, Detroit, etc.
In my experience, offices have simply been judgemental, time wasting, lacking in proper equipment/tooling, and quite frankly just uncomfortable. Granted, it's been a lot of mid-size enterprise/corporate places, but it's been backed up by a lot of middle/upper management that don't bother to think through why such criticism would come their way.
I'm all in favor of a GOOD office to come to, but until then I'm spending no more time on the property than required. Our white-collar culture and urban areas are too dysfunctional for hybrid and remote options to not be normalized. (In the US) If we're going to be "right-to-work", then give us the right to be remote.
I had a thrilling but ultimately abortive courtship with Google last fall, and at the time, the messaging on this subject was remarkably consistent: the plan was to go to a part-time model where people would go into the office 3 days a week, and they were hoping to be executing on that plan by the 2nd quarter of 2022.
So to see now that they are going to having people in the office 3 days a week in the 2nd quarter of 2022 is certainly no surprise to me. I would guess that that also means it's no surprise to any current Googlers who've been paying attention? And also that this says nothing about Google's own level of success with fully remote work, because, at least as far as I'm aware, leadership never seriously considered it as anything other than a temporary business continuity measure in order to get through the pandemic, anyway.
Why do so many assume that there are only 3 options:
- 100% remote.
- 100% office.
- Some rigid hybrid scheme of n days per week in the office every week where n = 3 +/-1.
Why not "mainly remote but be in the office when it makes sense to be in the office"? This is how my team has been operating since last July - remote first but every 1-2 months we'll do a week onsite somewhere. Now we're getting pressure to start being in the office a few days per week every week starting later this month (and since we're dispersed that means going to the office to be on video calls all day).
There may be some highly specific scheme that could make hybrid work, but in every situation where I've encountered hybrid it's been riddled with problems:
- Decisions made in the office, remote employees input ignored
- Manager sees others in the office, remote employees ignored for promotions
- Remote employees given the green light to work remote, others who don't work remote resent the remote employee for having that privilege
- In-person workers dictate working schedules, remote person's preference for async is ignored, remote person has to work a set schedule based on arbitrary availability of in person workers
This would make sense if it wasn't for the fact that Google (at least my org) is already spread around several offices and project work already happens across different timezones and locations. We have regular meetings with people joining in remotely. I work mostly with people from the other side of the world (despite my immediate team sharing the same city as me), this is because my actual projects don't reflect necessarily my local team composition. We make it work, we've been making it work for the past 2 years and even before the pandemic we had people working remotely. My previous team was split across Europe and NYC and it worked just fine. Honestly, hybrid work with some people being permanently remote and some people working in the office would have very little effect on our already-existing working culture. Just my experience at least.
> shouldn't all the employees be generally available between 9 am to 5 pm?
For me that's a resounding "fuck no". For what purpose? If you're a software engineer why would you have to be working when someone else is? Collaboration can and should happen async.
Unless you're working on some highly life-critical real-time piece of software that's invariably complex, I see no reason why software engineers need to be on the same schedules.
In fact, much of why remote and even in-person work is a vast hellscape is because of these old traditions that we think we have to continue living by. The 40 hour work week, full-time all the time, real-time collaboration, set schedules, etc. It's all bullshit. You can build a highly scalable and successful business without following any of these "rules".
I’m not mixing anything. I’m challenging the status quo. I genuinely believe and am currently attempting to build a highly successful software business entirely remotely and async.
> Which billion dollar company has done it without following these rules?
Success to me isn’t about being a billion dollar company, but to answer the question, GitLab comes to mind.
Working from home and, working using flexible hours are two different things.
> GitLab comes to mind.
Which got acquired by a billion dollar company. Do you think Gitlab was not successful in remaining independent because the rules which you want are not scalable?
> Working from home and, working using flexible hours are two different things.
Sure, if we want to make a distinction between WFH and Remote that's fine. WFH is essentially the same as office work, just without the commute. Remote should have no expectations of a set schedule imo.
> Why not "mainly remote but be in the office when it makes sense to be in the office"?
Depends on the space utilization. The company paying for real estate that "might" be used isn't very efficient. If they have a temporary work area system, it's different. Then they can down scale their real estate footprint and accommodate ad hoc visitors, by reservation, or the occasional "group meeting". But if they're dedicating space to someone who isn't there, it's a bit of a waste.
It's a valid point, but most companies went the first year and a half of the pandemic without using their real estate at all and the last 6 months barely using it. Smart companies should have optimized their real estate footprints by now.
My opinion is that for a couple of years companies were able to coast on the retained employee knowledge while remote.
However as people leave the company or new people join, it is pretty difficult to ramp people up to be as effective as their replacements. I don’t work at Google so maybe everyone who works there is a genius, but I’ve noticed this at my work where it takes quite a long time for people to be 100% effective and it’s mostly because people have meetings and other obligations that make it challenging to bring ppl up to speed.
Anecdotal. My best friend, about 5 - 6 years ago was doing manual labor, hauling plastics around town basically. He had a break and found a tech support job. Progressed to level 1 then 2, then he started working (pre-COVID) as a sys admin. During COVID, he changed his job once to also sys admin, and just recently, he managed to land a DevOps job. He's now working with new people, new technologies, new infrastructures, new everything, and is praised for his onboarding speed; which I can attest to.
Why did I write this entire story? I think it's about people more than institutional knowledge. I know my friend is smart and driven, and no matter what you'll throw at him, he'll somehow find a way to adapt and improve. There's also an argument against stale institutional knowledge. Ultimately, I think being agile as a company is a greater advantage than institutional knowledge, so I'm biased.
After two years of mostly WFH, I think I'm ready to go back into the office. For me in particular, in the last six months, "work from home" has started to turn into "living at work". Work cadences are no longer meshing well with home cadences. I've gone in a few times a week in recent weeks and the structure of the day, including the quietude of driving home, is a relief. The only issue with returning to the office I'm running into is that drivers on the highways are considerably more aggressive now vs. pre-COVID.
I do a simulated commute after a day of WFH to combat this. When my 8 hours is up I put on some podcasts and do chores, or go for a walk. Then after my commute time is over I can change into pajamas, flop on the couch, or whatever other unimportant thing I was excited to do and my brain is fully disconnected from work.
I seem to be the minority, but this makes me sad.
Personally, I find it much less productive to work in an office, with all of the background chatter, interruptions, distractions, meetings. It's my fourth year of full remote work and I don't miss the office one bit. I really enjoy being able to prepare healthier/fresh lunches, and I probably work too much overtime either way.
You're actually the majority, the people wanting to go back to the office are the minority. You'll see in the fine print Google allowed certain employee's the ability to go remote. Basically, the high performers and talent they can't afford to lose to their competition.
People have had a taste of not having to spend time getting ready in the morning, can take their kids to school, and forget an hour commute. You would be hard pressed to find many banging on the door to go back to the office. I know of one person in my circle out of about 30 who want to go back. His reason is lack of boundaries with his family about when he's at work.
I personally would never go back to an office, it's not worth my finite time.
I work for an extremely famous hospital in a small city in Minnesota, and we've gone 100% remote forever in large part because then the hospital doesn't have to pay for heating/lighting/internet/etc for all of the buildings that used to be full of us. Eventually they'll probably sell the offices entirely. I'm not sure why Google thinks it's economically worth it to have people come back in, I'd imagine the savings must be even more immense for them than it is for us.
I must be about the only person who is more productive remote. I suspect people who perform well in office are not doing work that requires deep concentration for long periods of time- programmers or otherwise.
What I like about remote work:
1. No commute (4 hours a week saved!)
2. No idle chatter.
3. No shoulder tap interruptions.
4. Lunch, dinner, and snacks at fingertips
5. Midday exercise.
6. Flexible hours.
7. Better coffee.
I want to work, not warm a seat or flirt with my workwife
Personally, I'm 100% down with a hybrid work week. However, I'd like to see companies introduce "remote weeks", i.e. just like ensuring people have vacation days, the company should enable, perhaps 8 weeks per year of remote/offsite work.
I'd be a much happier worker knowing I had multiple opportunities to visit distant family for more than a long weekend, travel internationally, do some adventures, etc, as long as I logged in and worked. Usually when I'm doing those things anyway I have downtime that I tend to spend on things that are, at least, work-adjacent.
Could be even nicer if they're prescribed all-at-once for all employees, now that I think about it. Similar to how a global reset day is nicer in some ways than an extra day of PTO.
Follow someone else's prescribed schedule? Wouldn't you rather visit relatives on their birthdays? Take a ski trip in January, instead of someone telling you the first off-week will be late March? What if you and your spouse/partner's companies define different weeks?
Before the pandemic I would have firmly placed my self on the 'introvert' side of the spectrum, and if asked about the ability to work remote or from home would have said that would be my dream.
Through the last two years I have realized that I am closer to the middle of the spectrum, and enjoy (and in a way need) the thoughtful company of my peers much more than I realized.
However I also enjoy immensely the ability to work from home when I need to focus without meeting and distraction.
And here is my realization (which really isn't very profound); most offices, even those who are "designed" to be nice for the workers, are awful places for focus work. They are however fantastic for the exploratory phase of work, where bouncing ideas happens and the boundaries and limitation of the work haven't been discovered yet.
My dream now is the ability to work 2-3 days remote and the rest in the office. Thankfully the old money financial institution I work for allows this.
Aren't we still recording among the highest rates of covid deaths since the start of the pandemic, and it's still coming and going in waves? Hospital systems are still run on the brink of overload as they usually are. What's changed?
Vaccines have been widely available and used for about a year though. What I'm asking is what has changed so recently as to make April 2022 okay to mandate a return to work while November 2021 for example was not.
Mid-terms are getting close and people are sick of COVID. Either that, or science changes as you cross the border between red and blue states. Nobody wants to admit it, but company policies directly reflect the chosen party of it's leaders/HR/location. They will follow whatever the politicians do.
I was assured by the foremost self-proclaimed experts and Science™ Disciples that these are not political decisions. Therefore you are a science-denier if you think it might have been political.
Not sure how to answer your question, but US Covid 7-day average deaths is currently higher than at almost any point since the start of 2020. So nothing suddenly "changed" there, that I can see.
Seems like people are eager to frame this as "see?! I told you remote would never last!" But when you look at the details, it's actually the opposite.
Every Googler I know who wanted to go full-time remote was allowed to do so.
Those who didn't choose to do that STILL don't have to be in the office every day; just a few days a week. Which I think is the right balance for most people.
The only people who should be unhappy here are the ones who wanted everyone in the office 5 days a week. It's a win for everyone else.
There are rather authoritative studies in Singapore and the US that show remote work is associated with a significant productivity boost. But when software engineers evaluate technology it is all about the feels? Why is that?
I've been working remotely since I graduated college in 2013. It's a competitive advantage that Silicon Valley likes to ignore. If I'm another FAANG I'm frothing at the mouth now. I can poach all of these Google workers who have no interest in archaic working conditions.
A few months back I was talking to a manager at [huge established software company]. He was making the case that obviously anyone who has moved away from the Bay Area should have their pay cut. He personally has not been in the office for a single day since spring 2020, but since he telecommutes from Berkeley rather than Omaha, he sees no reason to cut his own pay.
Later that same day I spoke to someone who's managing at [online payment processing company]. Shortly after bragging that he frequently spends only 2 hours a day actually working, he expressed that full-time remote work will never work out because you can't tell if someone is actually contributing. I refrained from pointing out that ICs actually have targets to meet and code to produce, and that you can put them on a PIP if they fail to meet expectations, while he's busy proving that management can apparently get by just phoning in to the occasional meeting.
edit: company names changed because it feels a little weird to call them out like that, I dunno
Both engineers and managers at big tech companies can get by working 2 hours a day. And remote vs on-site doesn't affect that. This has been true since well before WFH.
As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much.
I get a bit annoyed hearing about the 2 hour a day folks. They are probably forcing their peers or managers to take on more work than is their fair share.
I'm in management now .. as an engineer, I most certainly used to work over 8 hours a day (probably 12 hours, counting all the time I spent studying to keep up). Now, in management, the hours have actually gone up .. I now have to worry about things my team is doing 24/7, have to deal with a ton of human, infra and organizational issues, being open to meetings at any hour of the day, in addition to staying technical (my direct code contributions have gone down but my engagement with codebase and overall non-code issues has skyrocketed). I am in a large company and do AI research (so work and what I enjoy are the same, and doing cutting edge research is pretty much as hard as it gets).
Point is .. when people boast how little work they do, it makes me wonder who is the poor slob who gets to do extra. We are software professionals, and professionals need to act by a certain creed and abide by an unspoken ethic. Maybe this is my immigrant roots showing .. as I grew up, my folks always taught me to make sure I'm worth the salt I'm paid. I certainly have had periods where I was in a funk (especially early on in my career) but when a job just didn't gel, I left and tried to find something more engaging.
I certainly don't feel I can coast for a few months. Who the heck are these companies that are so relaxed. Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers). It could be certain areas of a large company, and it could be for some short period where people can get away with coasting. I don't think this is really sustainable with how competitive today's software landscape is.
Maybe you need to challenge where your values come from and who they benefit. There is nothing so urgent that people need to work 12 hours a day. There is (for most people) nothing that you will value from your time of working hard for a tech company in the future, except perhaps money. If you turn your argument around, people who want a good work-life balance hate people like you because you are willing to die for your corporate master and contribute to the dog-eat-dog mentality that wrecks people. There is something reasonable between 2 hours a day and 12.
I get a bit annoyed hearing about the 2 hour a day folks. They are probably forcing their peers or managers to take on more work than is their fair share.
Maybe not. In the corporate world, 90% of work is work that was generated by other work. Some people are really good at not causing work for other people.
Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers).
They spend a lot of hours but they don't really accomplish that much. The thing about FAANGs is that above the $250k line, it's all politics. If you're any good at the game, you figure out that you'll always do better using political position to take credit for someone else's work than taking the chance of your own labor (how much can one person do?) being appreciated.
Always get a team if you can: it diversifies your apparent contribution to the company.
I think you're reading the 2 hour a day thing the wrong way. It typically refers to actual work time, meaning...doing something. The length of your work day minus all the collaboration.
It's common for office workers to have at least 3-4 meetings a day which basically destroys the day already. You'll have only tiny snippets of productive time left, which are then again interrupted by email and chat. It would actually be a challenge to come to 2 hours of productive time in such a day.
It used to be that only managers were stuck in meetings and email all day long but now the same applies to office workers that actually need to produce something. A meeting is not a product, your customers didn't order a meeting and you can't ship a meeting.
Anyway, thanks for picking up the slack. I'm back to playing flappy bird now.
> I get a bit annoyed hearing about the 2 hour a day folks. They are probably forcing their peers or managers to take on more work than is their fair share.
It's either this, or they have some unrealistically narrow view of what constitutes work.
I've worked with engineers who were concerned they only "worked" 4 hours per day because they only counted time spent writing code in the code editor. Had to remind a lot of people that communication, meetings, and other job-related activities are also work.
But there are also a lot of people who do the 2 hour per day thing by shifting as much work as possible to other people. They might do bursts of intense work when they know other people are watching, but it's back to the minimum as soon as they're not being closely observed any more.
The other half of that equation is to change jobs frequently. It can take a year or longer for some managers or companies to catch on to employees who aren't really doing much work, at which point the person can easily move on to the next job and start the process again.
If you are constantly working 24/7 despite not getting adequately compensated for it, that's on you. Why blame your colleagues and not upper management?
I will say it. FANG/MANG is as easy as it gets. These companies hire people so their competitors don't, not that the people hired are expected to generate tons and tons of value. It is easy to put these companies on a pedestal, but the more you look into it the more you learn that these companies are HUGE and that finding a team that only requires you to work 2 hours a day is pretty normal. This at least has been my experience and the experience of many friends as senior+ in FANGMA
The people from Bangalore only got the job because they are willing to work for that wage and be a cost cutting center. You think executives offshore to the 3rd world because that's where the quality is?
> As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much.
That's not just either, even if people didn't complain about it. Sometimes it takes a bad thing happening to someone for them to realize injustice that existed before. I would hope anyone against location-based paycuts within the US is also now against international location-based paycuts.
If someone is truly in favor of comp reform and thinks that everyone at the company should get paid based on their value rather than where they are located, are they going to be okay with accepting a salary adjustment that is ~50% of the way between Silicon Valley and India wages?
I don't believe this scenario (a reduction in wages) is likely. Here's my reasoning.
If a company was paying SV wages to someone, that must be because their labor is worth > that amount to the company. Salaries within SV, not hitting a profitability cap, exist on a supply / demand curve. Companies are rational actors, so they have no reason to be paying their SV employees any more than is necessary.
The current pay dynamic for all companies (that I know of) is location-based pay. Either they only hire in one location (so are trivially location-based), or they pay US employees more than overseas employees. Maybe they, like Google, are moving to a more granular within-US system.
Now, for the leveling. What mechanism would force a company to pay non-SV / non-US employees the same as SV employees? Possibly a law, maybe a union at a specific company, or simply social pressure from employees of the company.
So the facts are: 1) the company can afford SV salaries, 2) that company pays less than SV salaries for workers outside SV, and 3) we assume a leveling event that changes that.
Now a company has (roughly) two actions when this happens: bring SV employees down, or everyone else up.
In the first scenario: you're an SV employee. You're being paid market rate for SV, and the company announces they're bringing your salary down. You'd quit, right? Other companies aren't doing this, and since your salary was market rate, you can simply hop over to another company in SV that's paying your old, higher salary. There's a coordination problem for the companies here: if they all made this change at once, nobody would move and the SV salary would reduce (at least in the short term). But that would be illegal (see the Apple/Google recruiter ban lawsuits). So instead, they would quickly attrite all their programmer talent to companies who haven't made this move, until they are solely employing non-SV programmers who are happy with whatever the below-SV-market-rate salary is. Which may be fine! Many companies locate outside SV and pay less in comp as a result. But the most successful American tech companies locate in SV (or similar CoL areas, like Seattle), so they must see something to hiring those programmers, even if they're more expensive.
In the second scenario: the company brings up the salaries of non-SV employees. This has no effect on you as an SV employee, except perhaps making it easier to get a job in the area, since companies have less incentive to outsource.
Now here's a major caveat: companies often outsource easier work to lower-CoL areas, but I think this is a broken / honestly somewhat offensive practice. I think it's OK to pay, say, someone who's main skillset is banging out internal apps using low-code tools less than a senior full-stack engineer with deep performance / kernel tuning experience. People able to do the former are more common than the latter! But companies, falsely and offensively, assume the former = non-US, the latter = SV, and then assign their pay in that way. But why shouldn't someone in SV trying to break into programming be able to earn $40k doing the internal apps? And, conversely, why should a high-skilled engineer in, say, India be forced to move to the US to earn wages at American companies that are equal to their skill? (sans timezone issues, etc., if that's important for the role, which is a separate discussion).
If Google can pay an L4 280k in SV, they can afford to pay an L4 in Minnesota, or India, or anywhere the same amount. They wouldn't pay an L4 that much in SV if they weren't worth that much (and, realistically, they're worth much more).
Conversely, if Google wants to hire a contractor for cheap, that's fine! That job just shouldn't be tied to location either. Why shouldn't someone in the US be able to take that job, if they want it?
At my first fulltime job my boss and a colleague constantly made jokes that I work too much. Really depends on the company but if it's a corporate it's kind of normal and you might not get any upside unless you work significantly more than on the contract
Prices for a lot of things are regional dependent though, not just salaries. Produce and dinners out costs more in the bay area than Omaha too. Same for salaries in Vietnam vs Omaha. I get that in a sense it doesn't seem fair for the same work and person to get paid differently solely based on where they live, but the market and costs are different too so if you pay everyone the same that also has issues. Besides, if everyone is paid the same why would it be valley salaries not Omaha salaries for everyone?
Just speculating but I would guess that's a reason for asking people back in the office. If you're getting paid the same amount as an engineer in the Bay Area but living South Dakota, I'm sure this causes some alarm for the company. We can't force a pay cut but what if we require physical presence a few times a week.
I'm still living in the Bay Area due to family but that's one of the reasons why we haven't looked seriously about moving. I felt like the WFH train was going to stop eventually.
Despite not making any sense, cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward. If you contribute the same work, it seems that it shouldn't matter where you are located, but companies are sociopathic by nature and will reduce costs anywhere they can get away with it. This opens the door to the next step of having salaries match the lowest common denominator - if you can get good enough devs at a quarter of the cost, the salary will be that rate no matter where you live.
Regarding not being able to tell whether someone is contributing if they aren't in person - this manager is just plain dumb, as they aren't measuring the right criteria.
> cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward.
I disagree. Buyers of labor (or buyers of anything) will continue doing what they always have, offer the least amount of money that they think sellers of labor will accept.
“Cost of living adjustment” is just fluffy language to hide the underlying bet by the buyer of labor that the seller of labor residing in a particular area will not be able to find a buyer offering a higher price.
I don't think that's guaranteed. I work remotely and I just exclude companies that do cost-of-living adjustments. Those companies might end up paying less, but they also have fewer applicants to choose from. You tend to get what you pay for in life. Hiring is really difficult right now, it's not wise to make it more difficult by driving away applicants.
As I grew more experienced at my job, I submitted fewer and fewer CLs, with fewer lines. Eventually, I was just making config changes. You probably would have thought I wasn't very effective but the reality is the small number of changes I made were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. I've seen other folks who are commit fiends and a lot of their code just didn't stand the test of time, or lacked good tests, or failed at scale, or were just copies of something elsewhere with the class names changed.
I reserve my greatest praise for those who delete code without visible regressions or increased complexity.
Personally, I agree with you. I work somewhat differently, but am highly effective.
I managed a team of very high-functioning C++ programmers, for one of the top imaging companies in the world, for 25 years. I kept employees for decades, and that’s no secret. I mention it frequently, here, and my entire career is an open book. I've been an active software engineer for over 35 years, and shipping software, that entire time.
There's a [vanishingly small, I know] chance that I used a couple more techniques than simply counting CIs.
Yeah no. I've had to do a lot of investigative, hacky "PoC" work with lots of debugging, design, coordinating work (whiteboarding, email threads, etc) for the last ~5 or so months. I'm a software engineer but if you looked at my actual commit logs for the last quarter or so, it'd seem like I haven't done much. Some people work differently and have different workload, I've been shifting to some more active work now (and I'm glad because I enjoy coding way more) and my commit log "landscape" will probably be very different in the next few months, but if you just looked at the last few months it'd look like I didn't work a single day.
I really hope people don't base productivity just on commit logs, seriously.
> Despite not making any sense, cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward
It's not a trend we're heading toward, but it's well established practice in the economy. People working in Asia or Eastern Europe, for USA companies, make less, and they do the same job.
Fact that it's going to be applied to people working remotely, not at the office, is just an implementation detail.
Have you heard of supply and demand? Suppliers have a price point at which their willing to supply a good. That price point is dependent on the input costs of producing the good. For knowledge workers, the input cost is your cost of living. It’s not so much that it “makes sense” to lower the salary of people in low cost of living areas, but it’s very likely the supply curve has shifted.
Paying employees more or less depending on where they live is an instance of price discrimination, in a sense. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it does mean that it’s not inevitable. Laws against certain forms of price discrimination already exist.
The typical use of price discrimination (or price segmentation) is when a seller of goods or services sells the same goods/services to entities that can afford to pay more at a higher price than to entities that can only afford to pay a lower price.
The objective is to maximize sales by getting more money from people who want to spend more money, while also getting some money from people who want to spend less money.
Offering people less money because you think they will accept less money because they are not likely to get a higher offer due to where they live is more accurately described as arbitrage.
No, it’s not more accurately described as arbitrage. Arbitrage involves buying something and then selling it for a higher price in a different market. That might describe something like a temp agency, which buys labor from employees and then essentially sells it to other companies. It does not describe most businesses, which directly use the labor provided by their employees rather than reselling it.
I agree that “price discrimination” isn’t quite right; it’s more of a metaphor. It works if you imagine that companies are selling money that is bought for the price of labor. In different markets, people will accept more or less money for the same labor, or equivalently spend less or more labor for the same money, which allows for price discrimination.
I think the eventual outcome will be that each company will have N+1 salary scales where N is the number of locations in which they have offices. Each office location will have a pay scale for jobs that the company requires be done in that location, and there will be one pay scale for all remote workers.
You remember complaints about the busses in San Francisco?
There are lots of areas that are having difficulty with gentrification and the associated difficulty of actually being able to hire people to work the service jobs in those areas.
A company that is paying significantly more than exacerbates the inequities in those areas. A big tech company having remote workers living like royalty in places as the cost of housing there goes beyond what the regular person who lives there makes can become a PR nightmare.
If you are shopping for a used car do you expect the price to be the same across the entire country?
No. Each region will have its own supply and demand that affect prices.
Employees are no different. If Google can find enough qualified people in Ohio for 80% of the salary, that’s the cost of an employee in Ohio. Just because it’s more in CA doesn’t change that.
The reason car prices differ based on location is because it's resource intensive to buy a cheaper car from a distant location, so you only compete with locals on price. This is not the case with developers. Once a worker is remote, there is not much difference if they are 80 miles away or 3000 miles away. The reason for the salary difference is because the company can get away with it, rather than a factor of the local market.
There can certainly be frictions with hiring in different locales. 3,000 miles away can mean a 3-4 hr time difference.
But regardless, there are plenty of engineers in the mid-west willing (and happy!) to work for 50% of what a FAANG is paid in the Bay Area. So it's win-win, the employer gets a cheaper employee and the employee gets a better salary than before.
> if you can get good enough devs at a quarter of the cost, the salary will be that rate no matter where you live.
If full remote stays around or gets bigger then this is the end state. Everyone arguing against COL based pay seems to think they'd get to keep there high salary rather then everyone getting payed less.
Yeah, and in the long term it has the potential to depress wages really, really low, because someone in, say, Costa Rica is willing to do the job for $30,000/year without benefits.
At the start of my career, 16 years ago, I spent some time abroad in a small country with some very distant family. When the topic of my career came up in conversation I remember multiple people saying that software engineer simply didn't exist as a profession in that country because there were no software jobs available there.
Why should companies subsidize landlords in Bay Area? The Bay Area has manipulated zoning and land use for a century for profiteering as well as race exclusion.
Location is one factor in cost of living, but there are a lot of others too: the type of car you drive (if you drive a car), the quality of food you buy/coffee you drink/restaurants you frequent, the number of kids you have, the schools they go to, etc.
Should companies adjust compensation according to these variables too, or just city?
Not that I’m advocating for location based comp for remote workers—I think it’s a complex issue and don’t feel especially confident leaning either way—but assessing cost of living based on location is more of an assessment of potential cost not actual. It would be more analogous to include the price of available goods/services, not which ones are consumed. The idea behind cost of living comp adjustments is to compensate relative to the value of money, not relative to how one uses that value.
you know why. Only hire in blue cities so that socialist authoritarian (so called democrat) party can keep control of tech companies that gather data on everybody for the party.
Location is only not a personal choice because of the location-based pay!
It's funny, because that logic means that location-based-pay becomes its own justification. The city I live in is normally a personal choice. But by paying based on location, the city I live in no longer becomes a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city.
But the moment that my company discriminates pay based on anything that has an associated cost, it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies that pay differential.
If part of my pay was tied to wearing an expensive suit, then my clothes would no longer be a personal choice, thus justifying the extra pay for the suit.
If part of my pay was tied to me driving a fancy car, then my car would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for the fancy car.
If part of my pay was tied to enrolling my kids in a particular school, then enrolling in that school would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for that, and so on...
> The city I live in is normally a personal choice. But by paying based on location, the city I live in no longer becomes a personal choice
You still have the personal choice to live in the city of your choice, either by not working for a particular company because they don't offer you the ability to work from your preferred city, or working for the wage they are willing to pay you to work from there.
> it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city.
I don't think "justification" enters the consideration for extra pay for living in city X or less pay or no job for living in city Y. You are offered a set of terms of employment working from a given place. There is nothing stopping you from attempting to negotiate different terms. Maybe you can improve on those terms. Some people have enough leverage to work from anywhere they want without any pay decrease. Not me, but maybe you!
Sorry, I think this is a pretty pedantic distinction. It's along the lines of argument that your employer can't make anything mandatory, because you can always quit and work for another company.
But anyway, if you follow the logic of the thread, it was: (A) location-based pay is justified because of location-based cost of living --> (B) then is car-based pay justified because of car-based cost of living? --> (C) no, cars are a personal choice --> (D) your car is as much a personal choice as your location; it's only not a personal choice to the extent that your employer pays you to choose in a particular way, so using that reasoning to justify location-based pay is begging the question --> (E) your reply, that location is a personal choice, which is a counter to the claim (C), not to my response (D).
As far as negotiation goes, you might be amazed the extent to which companies are willing to shoot themselves in the foot to stand by their non-negotiable policy. I've seen it. And the calculus is this: you might be so skilled that you're a bargain even at $1 million, but if they pay you that much, it increases the market value of other skilled workers in your area. And if the market discovers this information, that might cost the employer a lot, even though it has nothing to do with you. So they'll tell you you can have the $X you want, but only if you move to a city where other skilled workers are already being paid that much, even though they don't actually care what office you're at, or even if you work remote full-time anyway.
> (A) location-based pay is justified because of location-based cost of living
Cost of living doesn't justify location based pay. It happens to correlate, but if a company could offer you an less pay in a high COL area without you declining the offer, then they might. They could even move their entire operation to an area with 1/4 the labor rates, like the Philippines, but there are big reasons they don't.
> then is car-based pay justified
Car based pay doesn't exist AFAIK, so what's the point? Companies pay what they have to pay to hire/retain the employees they want. There are a myriad of factors affecting any labor market, including all sorts of day to day personal costs like housing and transportation, but those are distilled through the personal choice of the employee. The main input to what employers pay is what other employees pay - it's a feedback loop at an unstable local equilibrium.
That said, if a major company or three decided to move to globally uniform compensation (the same pay in Czechia as Chicago), well that would be an interesting experiment to watch, though I wouldn't want to work there.
To an extent. But this is a terrific reminder to me that the life I’ve been able to live would have been impossible if I didn’t have the right combination of timely luck and dangerously stubborn determination to escape my home town when I did.
I got called into an onsite meeting today because supposedly the brainstorming would be more productive (even though this project has been launched successfully fully remote). But the meeting room they booked only seats 5 (strict seating restrictions) so a couple of people are going to Zoom in and will obviously be left out of the physical whiteboarding. So, not only onsite is not adding anything of value, it is excluding people that otherwise would have been fully involved.
Looking at the comments here, i forsee an Onion headline "Ex convicts want to go back to prison because they can't make friends in regular society or miss the "structure" set by Warden."
There's two extremes of employee behavior I've seen, with most folks somewhere in the middle:
- My co-workers are friends. We hang out, we go out drinking after work. We do activities on the weekend together outside of work. Early stage start-ups often are like this, most of the time not by intentional design, but due to the hours and intimacy of working closely with peers.
- My co-workers are colleagues. We're professionals, but our interaction stops there. I don't particularly care to get to know my colleagues on a deeply personal level.
Your preference for working remotely seems very closely tied to which camp you more strongly identify with.
Employers need to think of more incentives for those who have to go back to the office, especially full-time. Here's an easy one: get rid of open offices, give people their own offices. Or at least set up cubicles or cubes so people have more privacy. Basically anything to chip away at the antemorbum state of work layouts.
It’s like 10x worse than before the pandemic too. One side of the street is a permanent homeless encampment / shooting up spot and I get more second hand meth smoke than vape juice walking down it these days.
One of the benefits of remote engineering teams, is that there's wag more pressure on their "hygene" practices like a well structured backlog and good documentation. As someone with a fully remote career, it always shocks me how onsite teams tend to let this stuff lapse in favor of implicit brainshare.
I wonder, then, if the last two years will improve these kinds of project practices in onsite teams. Or maybe "hope" is a better word.
Just like everything else, this is just another way to determine which companies I want to work for. For folks like me who are 100% on-board with remote work, I won't work for Google because it's a dealbreaker for me. (They probably wouldn't have me!)
For others, it's not.
That said, at this point I'd almost go as far as to say that city centre-based offices will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history. Who thought the idea that spending 2 hours a day travelling to and from a physical location (and having to pay for it!) to generate larger profits for shareholders was a legitimate or sensible use of human time and capital?
My health, both physical and mental are immeasurably higher as a remote worker. The biggest argument I hear is "But you don't get to socialise anymore!" but of course I do. I socialise with my colleagues both remotely and in-person and more importantly, I socialise with those I _want_ to socialise with. Members of my community, friends, family, people I choose. Not people who passed the same interview as me.
I'm pro-remote, but I worked from home years prior to COVID. I also never have even considered working for a Google or the like, forgoing whatever benefits that incurs. When they were hired, they knew what the expectations were. If after experiencing an alternative they decide that's the lifestyle they want, there are plenty of options.
Do Googlers mind working in the office much? They get plenty of free meals/snacks/beverages, great equipment, and great salary allowing them to live close to the office and pay for childcare if needed. I can't see the rest of the industry moving in the direction of returning to the office, because they don't have these things.
If you want my opinion, open space sucks and I can buy my own snacks. After one day at the office, I feel my head is about to explode. Constant noise, bright artificial lights...
The only good thing is that I can have informal meetings with my colleagues, talk around the white board and so on... this is very valuable.
It feels very different when you have to pay for your own snacks. I definitely substantially moderated my consumption during remote work (and it's not like the amount they were spending on snacks gets paid to you either). It definitely improved my eating habits but I also miss free Diet Coke and protein shakes.
If I was getting paid the snack amount in cash then I'd probably be ok but as is free breakfast+lunch+snacks saves me on the order of $500/mo. And as someone who is pretty mediocre at cooking the quality of food is better as well.
I used to get a cold around every 6 weeks from working with people and being in the office with freezing airconditioning all year round. Since working from home I haven't been sick in two years.
- I love my teammates and it is so unbelievably rewarding getting to see them in person and share a space with them. We're social primates and it's soothing at some deep primal level to get to be around my tribe.
- The food is excellent. Not having to cook and wash fucking dishes again is god-damned divine. After two years of eating almost every meal at home, I fantastize about burning my entire kitchen to the ground.
- Just getting out of the house and having a change of scenery is really nice. Being in an office with other people working helps me switch into "Google employee" mode.
- I don't dig open plan offices at all. The one we're in now is a big empty white fluorescent lit box. It has a lot of windows with an excellent view which is great. But otherwise, it feels like sitting in the middle of an empty grocery store and I find it very hard to focus. More often than not, I grab a laptop and hide away in one of the lounge areas to get actual work done, which feels sort of paradoxical. (I'm probably an outlier in that I prefer to work on a couch with a laptop on my lap instead of at a desk with a big monitor.)
Well, you'd have to be outside of most big cities. Even on a tech salary, living near an office in central London isn't affordable. Not unless you're flat sharing which is basically mutually exclusive with having a family.
A lot of tech industry jobs are also outside of big cities. (As are Google jobs in the Bay Area; the BA is just something of an outlier in that fairly conventional suburbia is still priced higher than just about anyplace else in the country.)
Dallas is pretty fine. For a few years, I lived within a 10-15 minute drive to my office on a $60k salary. Inner-ring suburb and not downtown, but most of the offices here are in the inner-ring suburbs.
(and if that sounds low, don't worry: I now make much more and work for a company that doesn't even have offices in my time zone)
“Great salary allowing them to live close to the office” is an interesting way of phrasing “requiring you to unnecessarily live in ludicrously expensive areas”.
Honestly in my experience the work environment itself is not great - google has cubicle pens with half height walls, it super frustrating to work when people are continually going back and forth around you.
Different people have different priorities. It's usually the younger employees who prioritize free meals and ping pong over flexible work schedules and spending more time with family.
last google office I visited around 2017 sucked ass. Food was no longer cafeteria style. It was a salad cart and a window where you could order a sandwich. Desks were five feet wide ikea type desks that were crammed in to a large open space with no partitions.
Outside the Bay Area you could buy your own perks that are much better than what Google provides and still afford a place to live that's orders of magnitude nicer.
I enjoyed the office. I liked the amenities and eating lunch with people I only sort of knew grew my professional network very well. But it doesn't hold a candle compared to being able to leave in a location that supports my family goals.
Great equipment? I had to wait several months to get a modern computer since my previous 3 year old computer broke. I was stuck on a Chromebook that couldn't even process email. So, no, equipment ain't "great." And I am so sick of hearing "but the food!" Food doesn't mean squat to me over flexibility.
That's why I will continue to work from home. My old office is about 1/2 mile from Google HQ and pre-Covid it was 45-50 minutes each way unless I stayed in the office quite late.
Please read my comment again. My office is 1/2 mile from Google HQ, but I do not live at Google HQ. I'm about 13 miles away, but at peak commute times pre-Covid the roads were parking lots, and public transportation options take about 75 minutes each way.
I guess that's a matter of perspective. I used to drive 45mins one way under light traffic conditions. This was a choice made of keeping a decent paying job and living somewhere with ranked school system. Sometimes, sacrifices are made when thinking of others.
Yeah traffic (or lack thereof) makes a massive difference. 45 min in light traffic... sure. 45 min each way, every day, in heavy, stop and go traffic is soul crushing.
I meant that it was 45 minutes in light traffic. It only got worse if traffic was not light, which it was not more often than it was. I didn't mean for it to be that ambiguous.
I used to complain about my subway commute, but when it stopped I found I missed reading books for 30m twice a day, or alternatively running to work. These activities formed a clear boundary to each workday that I have found hard to replace without a commute.
Note the article says this is 3 days a week. I also imagine there is a ton of flexibility at Google WRT hours so you can try to time it before or after rush hour.
Housing in SF is crazy expensive, commuting takes ages (and we've shown it's a complete waste) and a lot of people probably don't even want to live in California.
Forget snacks, the amount of money you save by not living there and not commuting could pay for an in house chef.
If the last 3 years are any indicator, living in SF and the west coast in general means putting up with 2-3 months of choking, dangerous wild fire smoke every year too. It was a novelty for one summer but is slowly going to poison and cause serious long term harm the more it continues. I don't think people realize how unlivable the west coast is quickly becoming.
This year, the smoke from the California fires was actually much worse in Colorado & Utah than the bay area proper. You can't necessarily escape this by moving.
True, but it's going to be bad some years. This year I expect an outright disaster, considering we've had the driest winter in 150+ years of recorded history. Probably it's going to be unbreathable at certain points.
On rethinking my statement I've realized I should encourage the Californians to stay in California and not spread communism to the rest of the country. So yeah, you can't escape the bad things by moving, stay there.
What I don't understand is that, at least on the surface, companies save money (utilities, rent, etc.) by having employees work from home.
So it seems to me that the only reason companies like Google would mandate the return to offices is because they see a greater cost in having employees work from home. Are they afraid of the cost of lost happenstance collaboration being so high and not trusting in technology (some of which Google built) to bridge that gap, or are they worried that their employees are slacking off?
Personally, slacking off when working from home would not be unimaginable, but more often than not, I may work longer hours from home as I won't have the commute burden or feeling that it's time to finally leave the office, so it's actually easier to get carried away. Admittedly that has other mental health implications, but not ones I would imagine most companies considering the cost of.
Yet again, the desires and needs of workers are trumped by portfolios with commercial real estate and portfolios with companies that rely on commercial real estate.
It’s called Paruresis or Pee Shy which I learned from Reddit. There’s plenty of talk if you know what to search for. It happens to my kids sometimes so I’ve had to coach them through it.
I mean I can only speak for myself, but I don't look at another man going into a bathroom and stall and think "wait a minute.... is he NOT taking a shit?" then start getting my stopwatch out and cross-referencing that with studies of average defecation times.
I think remote work makes more sense the more stable the development pathway is. the more cross function work, the more uncertainty, and maybe the higher the required velocity, the more important it seems to be able to have impromptu discussions. I find I spend a few hours a week just catching up on things I'm missing in the office while working remotely. and when I do go in, I'll learn something that causes a total pivot in my understanding of a business need.
that said, I never have had as much deep focus as when I'm working from home, in particular in the evenings. really important discoveries are made there too. so I think having both is optimal. and above all, having a flexible job is something I've come to expect for work-life harmony.
I kinda like it how we do where I am working now, and we're doing highly exploratory work. We have an ongoing call throughout the day where people kinda join up, and a lot of impromptuu discussion is done in this way. It's not mandatory, but most of us just chill there, mute and webcam on or off, depending on the mood, and kinda work.
It's super natural to just ping someone in chat and if it's the case, you can share the screen and if anyone else is interested they're already there and can just throw an eye. If the discussion is annoying you, you can just mute and focus, but most of the times if it's a longer discussion, we make a split conversation and rejoin main after we do the back and forth.
Really natural way of doing things and I can work from anywhere with people from anywhere, as long as we can get some overlap with the daily calendar group chat, which is very easy to do given its immovable nature.
I remember during the dot-com bubble of the late 90's there was talk of all the malls closing due to online shopping. At the time I thought it was silly, people want to get out, it's not all about just buying stuff online, etc. In the short term I seemed correct. Then eventually the great mall crash happened and concrete ghost towns were everywhere. Though I tend to be biased towards working in an office for my own personal reasons, I can't help but wonder if we're only half a generation away from bigger changes.
I'm not really sure what other people think the long term effect of shifts to remote work will do, but to me it seems like, long term, tech salaries will be lower. It doesn't really make sense to me to pay the same Silicon Valley wages when people can be working from anywhere. Why would I pay an extremely high wage to someone living in the Bay Area when I could instead pay a lower salary to someone in India who speaks perfect English and is willing to work CA timezone hours? In the short term, companies might keep salaries where they are to avoid disruption, but long term I'm not so sure.
Obviously, companies have to compete with other companies from all over the world for tech talent, but the ratio of tech money to tech talent is much higher in certain parts of the U.S. than pretty much anywhere else in the world. As a result, if that money gets to shop for talent around the entire world then the 'price' for that talent seems like it will go down. But maybe there is something I am missing.
And maybe all the people who want to go full time remote are ok with that, but depending on how big the pay cut is, maybe not. Presumably, if companies now see less benefit in having in-office engineers, then everyone including in-office workers will get pay cuts due to the globalized market for talent. So perhaps, selfishly, we should want companies to put a high value on being in person, but I guess we will have to wait and see.
>A gift to Meta recruiters, brought to you by Sundar.
I considered interviewing for Meta recently. Then I realized that these are the people who have access to my conversations with my girlfriend when I was 15 years old, and a complete chronological geotagged history of my exact whereabouts for the last 10 years.
This is a weird logic. They have that data regardless of whether you work at Meta or not. If you are worried about that data, working for Meta would give a better chance (however small it is) to either influence the direction of the company, or see how bad internal controls on the user data is and act on it sooner than not working for Meta. You are not better off by simply not working for Meta.
Meh. It is unclear to me that so many people will want to work fully remote when their company offers a (real) office to work in 3 days a week. The mental benefits of in-person working can be significant.
"3 days a week" is untenable because it requires that you live within an 8-hour drive of your office.
If they want to make a mandatory mix of remote and non-remote work, it should be like oil rigs, where you go to the office to work and live on campus for two consecutive months out of the year, and then you go home for the rest of the year.
Requiring that you be chained to a single metro area for the entire duration of your employment is objectively inferior to a situation where you can live wherever in the world you want (except I guess for countries that have sanctions) and you can even just get rid of your home and spend each week working out of a different city and just have to give 2 months of your life to the company.
> where you can live wherever in the world you want
People fantasize about this, but I don't really understand the need for so much stimulation, and lack of appreciation for continuity, simplicity, familiarity, and "putting roots down".
Then again, I suppose you might want these things, but your roots are in Ohio, and you simultaneously want to work for a Bay Area company.
I have no desire whatsoever for any of those things - the world is interesting and any individual place for more than 6-12 months is boring. I do not understand how people can be satisfied with doing the same thing over and over again, and not lose the will to live. So this misunderstanding goes both ways.
If you want familiarity, “roots” and simplicity, knock yourself out. I don’t want that, and I want you to accept that I don’t want that, nor will I accept it for your convenience.
I’ve been remote for a decade. I will never work in an office again, but if you want to that is fine. I’m not the one asking you to stay remote or leave your “stable” subdivision. Instead, you seem to believe that I should want what you want because you’re happy with it. No.
> you seem to believe that I should want what you want
There's a disconnect there where you're reading a lot into what I said.
Granted, my comment was terse.
Here's more detail of what I was thinking when I wrote that:
"""
People (myself included) fantasize about living all over the place.
But, since I (a person in my late 20s) have learned more about myself, I've started to appreciate simplicity, continuity, and roots (which I had to work really hard to create, after a very complex personal history that I won't get into here).
Because I have experienced this personal shift and really valued it, I've started to think that the desire to live in many different places is mostly mimetic, and that if I pursued this, I would not be able to have the things that I have achieved in the last 5 years.
Therefore I don't understand why this notion is so widespread or how it got into my head (but it's probably through mimesis of the novel).
"""
By all means, you do you. I'm jealous that you have found something that is really working out for you, and my comments are coming from a place of curiousity and the need to work out what I desire. I'm sorry to have failed to come across in any other way.
For work that truly is location-based, it's obvious. I once read that a garbage truck driver in NYC earns as much as 100K. I don't know if that number is true, but it kind of makes sense. It's strictly location based and the driver has to live somewhat close to the inner city.
Google was/is location-based, where being in an ultra high cost environment normally is a downside, so it must have unique upsides to counter this. I guess that would be the local talent pool and ecosystem.
Whilst this factor will not be removed, for sure it will be weakened. In any given team, on any given day, there will be remote workers. The other 2 days of the week. Those with a permanent exception. Those with an extension. Things are going to get more flexible and complex which means your team by definition is hybrid. In practice, a hybrid team is quite similar to a fully remote team if you do it well. You should involve the remote workers in anything of any importance.
If your team is hybrid/virtual by definition, the idea to pay based on location of the individual comes into play. The talented 200K engineer that moved to South Dakota to work fully remotely now is a 100K engineer.
I guess 100K is the talent value, when location is stripped. But location hasn't been stripped yet. There's Europe, India, other places...so ultimately what remains may be 50K. Yes, I'm making up these numbers but you get my point.
Those saying that it's bullshit to pay people based on location and think that this means that they can just keep that 200K and work from a different location are in for a rude awakening. It means you compete on talent only. If you're so top notch that purely on talent you continue to earn that pay, good for you. But be aware that you're in competition for that salary with the entire world now, and that world has armies of people hungry and willing to do anything.
And if you think that downward spiral is unfair...no it isn't. This is how it works in the working class in the west and in every class everywhere else. What you consider low pay in developing countries has been the step up for those developing countries. Whilst the west is largely stagnant, they've been building up a better quality of life. As it should be.
Remote work has many upsides as well as downsides when compared to working in office.
What's interesting to me is, that many of the upsides of home office (which are also the downsides of going onsite) seem to be pretty much inherent and unavoidable.
Companies doing home office can hire from a larger pool, have less expenses for offices and onsite services, no commuting allowances, etc.
Employees working in home office have no commute, less car costs, more food options, are freed of open-plan office distractions, etc.
At the same time, most of the downsides of home office (and thus the upsides of onsite work) do mostly concern communication and organization and should be solvable.
Online Meetings suck, because all video/voice chats are crap.
You can't get in touch as quickly as tapping someone on the shoulder - because messengers are crap.
And so on, and so forth. So basically, all our tools for online-collaboration are not able to adequately replace in-person communication. Something is obviously getting lost.
It's kinda interesting, that Google does not seem interested in figuring out what the problem is, and improving upon their tools. It would seem to me that making Google's online collaboration tools better to overcome those problems and provide a remote work experience that doesn't suffer from all those drawbacks, would be a great business opportunity.
Instead they are basically throwing in the towel and admitting that they are unable to make it work well, right?
There's pressure from cities and states since the economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending. Given that big business (rightly or wrongly) partners with government on policy frequently, this is not surprising.
The days of being able to live on a mountain or in the woods while drawing an SV (or finance for NYC) salary were numbered for the vast majority.
What's problematic is that rents have already spiked and that's before the Big Return.
Managers like it bc they don't do deep work, and do benefit from happenstance + zoom relief. A CEO manages managers, so even more extreme. (And I assume even more so in sales/marketing heavy orgs where folks aren't digital natives.)
We are tiny, and while actively hiring, no intention of getting an office again. Too much to do to waste on management, commute, etc.
I think we agree. There are so many company topologies/contexts/situations that a one-size-fits-all answer does not exist.
That was really the point of my post. Some companies are happy to switch to 3-days in the office, and we should respect them as much as the ones that go full remote.
I like how an MIT CS professor put it to me once: He stays home to work, and goes to work to socialize.
Most people are not digitally native, and as in my original comment, management layers are especially social. So I'd expect deep work orgs to be more remote-friendly: small technical startups like ours are happy fully remote, and it's an advantage. In contrast, most sales/marketing/large orgs are less remote-friendly: 1+ days in office, bad promotion paths for fully remote, ... . Not inherent and always exceptions, but just about what's typical, natural, & easy.
"Mandates" is too strong a word. All employees were given the choice to apply for remote work or transfer. It turned out to be only a small minority of employees who chose it, and almost all of them were approved. So there's been an effective option not to come back in person for folks who prefer it that way.
I'd like to see mankind drop everything it's doing and focus on making portal guns a reality. Once we have the ability to step from our home office into our work office (and back again as many times as we want throughout the day) then we can all happily continue working together on other stuff.
For the time being my company is essentially a hybrid, where people can choose whether or not they go into the office, and I don't know what management thinks, but I love it and I'll be disappointed if they ever tell us we have to start going in.
It seems like the best of both worlds to me. Most days we have maybe 8-12 people in the office, so there's generally enough people to get collaborative office conversations, but not so not so many people that it's constantly noisy. And if the weather is bad, or I wake up late, or I just don't feel like going in, I work from home and I don't have to worry about it.
We're a relatively small team, though, so I don't know how well it scales.
My problem with remote work is that it exacerbates a divide between blue and white collar workers that breeds further resentment, which has already led to all sorts of social ills. I’m not sure the individual benefits outweigh the collective rage.
I agree 100% that the growing divide between winners in the information economy and losers is a major source of societal ills.
We should address it by making the lives of blue collar workers better (higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, high density housing), not by making the lives of white collar workers worse.
it's easy and cost free to make white-collar workers' life worse, where as it costs a lot of capital and money to increase the minimum wage, etc, for the blue-collar workers.
The people who would have to make the sacrifice are the capital holders and high tax payers - they certainly don't want to do this (in aggregate of course - even if some individuals would choose such a sacrifice).
Wow, I never would have pegged Google as the one to go this direction, they used to be such a progressive company, now they’ve thrown in their hats with old fogies JPMorgan, Citibank, and Goldmen Sachs. Is this the part where we start rueing?
Google spent 2 decades raving about the office, its perks, the "slides", how it re-creates the campus environment. Google made the office a huge part of its identity so this shouldn't be surprising.
Anecdotally there is a trend towards entropy and complacency on remote teams within big tech companies.
In Big Tech, there are innumerable hard blockers that exist for reasons that almost all parties would think are stupid. Forward progress typically requires consensus or permission from potentially dozens of teams. In many cases the company doesn't view rocking the boat on a profitable product to be beneficial.
To at least some extent, when you are in the office there is at least some push for folks to find a way forward - while remote there is a strong trend towards the "tune out" option.
Here's my reaction:
If google wants me in the office, then fine, I'll just arrive an hour later and leave an hour earlier ~ the length of the average commute. It's obvious that the company values seat time in the office more than 25% extra productivity. Google chose to put their offices in the least accessible areas of the country and there is a price to pay for that. Either you pay higher salaries or put up with less producitivity.
It just reminds of those articles from the 99s when companies hired people to be in the office right before the dot com bust.
Would be interesting to see what Meta does especially after their latest announcements about focusing on building the Metaverse. Would seem like a contradiction to push people back into the office.
People argue about whether remote work is 'productive' but is 'productive' all we really care about? I understand this is Hacker News so productive is the guiding principle but what about community, friendship? Doesn't working remotely just force us more into our little bubbles? Especially for engineers I think it just reinforces natural tendencies and won't lead to the same sort of growth over time? There is an aspect of getting better socially as you age (hopefully) for example.
I don't think it's so much an issue of productivity, as company loyalty. Working from home you feel more autonomous - and more likely to consider your options.
Many people in comments write about difficulties with onboarding to remote-only companies, with establishing relationships with colleagues at work.
My close friend works remotely at a Finnish company (he is Fin himself), and every Friday at 14:00 they finish working, and have beer drinking session and casual chit-chat over teleconference. Every week. He likes the experience overall.
Of course, not everybody wants nor can drink, but it is some idea to get each other better.
This particular company's main business is spying. It may have been harder to creep on cult members from a distance.
Maybe Google employees are behaving less like "Googlers" at home when priorities shift to family and life. Behavioral changes are harder to enforce remotely when you cannot model cult member's personality by pointing out "ungoogley bahavior" multiple times a day and shaming them in other ways.
I think people need to look at the multiplier FAANG companies provide salary / bonus / RSU wise. My experience is that these companies pay a significant market premium, but expect total control over your life for that margin.
Everyone else I suspect is going to adapt to this work. There are people who want to work in a office. People who don't. We will need to find ways to make both successful.
> but expect total control over your life for that margin.
Data point: I work at Google and the amount of control they have exerted over my life is significantly less than any previous job I've had, including random minimum wage jobs in high school.
FAANG companies want high productivity at fairly intellectually challenging work. You get that by treating people like humans, not machines.
Unfortunately, almost every company expect "total control" [1] over your life during work hours. FAANG companies just pay more.
Also, tech workers probably have way more autonomy on their schedule than most other industries.
Btw, I am just responding to your comment that "FAANG companies own you life"; not making an argument for remote vs in-person. I personally think that a hybrid model is great, and strongly agree with the currently-top comment by librish[2].
> but expect total control over your life for that margin
Today I started work at 11 and ended work at 4 because I slept poorly last night. I'm a staff engineer at Google. This "total control" thing hasn't been my experience at all.
GrubHub's Boston office is also forcing employees to return to the office after 2 years of working from home. I think it's asinine.
One of the few good things to come from this pandemic was showing how much work could be done remotely. I assumed we were going to continue in that direction, but I guess these major tech corps want to go back to the way things were.
Remote works has it's pros and cons. I love being able to be with family, no commute, a fully stocked kitchen with things I prefer to eat and the ability to take a nap when needed. The con for me is that I feel lonely throughout the day sometimes. The loneliness is great when I need to hit a flow state but other times it can be a bit sad.
An entire generation appears unaware of a QDU or delay and its effect on human communication.
If we've re-learned what delay and jitter to tolerate in this last 10 years thats good, but personally I don't like the de-coherence from asymmetric delay with my companions online, and my own in-head foldback PA
Quantified Distortion Unit. It's a telco measure of voice signal quality, from the 64kbps and before days. 1QDU was the maximum tolerated impact on a voice call, and was the goal for line card compression to try and mux voice calls together.
It's not just zoom. All digital av processing ads delay. Some removes av sync. Decoherence of visual lip sync and sound interferes with any perceptual clues you get looking at people and beyond 50ms we start to detect it.
In head bone conducted audio along with your own ear hears things as you say them. So your own speech is instantaneous unless you incur some DSP delay somehow wearing headphones and it then collides with bone conducted sound. Now in any teleconference system you have a visual of apparently local people and an actual of 200+ms of delay, loss of sync, and a confusing outcome.
I do hate zoom. I hate all of it. I also know it's the way of the future.
They learn to cope. They use jargon, and clearly signal end -over and they demand ack, and repeat-back.
tactical radio does probably do some lightweight stuff which works in the RF field they have. If its through LEO, or any kind of centrex, its got delay.
It only works in big tech companies where you don't need to take care of everything. Still, there are some management issues like sharing same philosophy, mentoring, etc that you wouldn't get in remote work. I think apple sensed this first and now it's google's turn
I fail to understand the 3 days a week concept. If a company needs in-office interaction, why not make it 5 or 10 working days a month in office, and then let the team decide when they want to be there?
Some teams might prefer being in office 5 days straight and then 25 days remote in their hometowns.
I would be calling up my manager three days earlier and saying can I come in today or do I have to wait to the 4th, I really want to come in! And then when they said sure come in, I'd yell April Fools!
I don't feel I've been truly appreciated by management, really.
Internet mostly creates confusion. The first phase of brainwashing. Once the mind is confused and looking for answers, you need peer pressure and social reinforcement to create a sense of certainty around the radical new ideas you want to implant.
I bet the middle managers cheered when they heard this news. It's been hard for them to show value when everybody is at home. Hope fully most of the folks over there can choose what works for them. Assuming the work gets done regardless.
Everyone, it was a solid ride but we knew this day was coming. Upper management cannot sleep knowing employees have good work life balance. You need to be on the GRIND or these shares wont go up and you wont get your good equity.
If employees can apply for fully-remote or a closer office to them and, according to the article, about 85% of those applications are approved, then this doesn't seem as ominous as the headline makes it sound.
Cue the mass exodus! Backwards policy that is even worse than it was before (where managers could let people work on their own schedule, as an agreement between the manager and the report).
In other news: Owner of expensive commericial property demands occupants return to expensive commerical property to prevent price of expensive commericial property from falling.
What's so special about April 4? Expedia Group has also mandated a start back at the office from this day... An email announced it to us about a month ago.
Here come the never ending posts on how they(whoever they are) will quit rather than go back to the office. Yes, you can quit but there will be another body that will replace you in no time.
People, keep in mind that 100% at home is both bad for your mental health and career, long term.
I think a compromise of a few days at the office and a few at home is both good for employees and employers.
When the team was still intact -- the people who were WFH were the same people who had been in the office together -- things were mostly fine.
Now there's been significant turnover and it feels like we're imploding. Management has no idea how to onboard people remotely; the team culture is completely gone. Communication is horrible. People who used to be dependable are now half-assing things. A 40 hr/wk job has become one where people are working 55, even 60, because the new people can't see us all physically leave the office after 8 hours to be able to trust that yes, really, it's just 40 hours. All of this is a huge personal tragedy for me; you can even see my profile where I've had a number of comments talking about how positive the working environment has been historically. It's all changing though.
It just feels like a disaster. Everything hummed along fine for the first several months, but as churn has happened something has been lost. We never spent time and effort looking at how to become a remote organization. We simply told everyone to WFH.
I've been reading about some of the downsides of fully remote work for over a decade, and I'm just seeing them in spades now. Even teams who were built to be remote from the ground up have (pre-pandemic) write-ups talking about the challenges of communication, team bonding, trust building, and so on.
What I see in my circles is a bunch of people who say how much they love not having to leave the home. What I don't see is a ton of people arguing that it makes their team better. Let me be clear I'm not discounting the value of being able to be at home; I know it's a huge benefit to many parents, for instance, and I know there are some who used to have a 2 hours commute. I'm just saying I haven't actually heard any arguments supporting the idea that it is a net improvement for the team -- and when the team becomes dysfunctional, people's mental well-being and happiness begin to suffer for other reasons.
These are all obviously just personal anecdotes. I would not be surprised, however, to see companies start walking this back slowly over the next few years, especially the non-tech companies. I think we will see increased inefficiencies show up as churn continues, as well as people with even moderate extroversion getting fed up of the isolation. Further, there is a strong tendency for people to want to work with other people "like them," and so I don't see local/regional companies being open to hiring nationwide for very long. Google hiring nationwide is one thing; Regional Health Insurance Corp, with business 100% focused within a half-state-sized region, is something completely different.
I could be completely wrong. I hope we can sort of collectively settle on some sort of moderate state, one where WFH days are liberal, but you don't have organizations of 1000+ people who never physically see each other. For instance, I feel somewhat stuck at my current position because the thought of trying to grow trust with an entire new team of people over calls and internet chat is horrifying to me.
Google has joined a growing number of technology and financial firms in requiring employees to return to work. While some large employers have made voluntary work-from-home policies permanent, others, such as Google, believe that it is best to prioritise in-person interactions among colleagues.
I personally believe working from office brings more productivity than working from home.
Google has joined a growing number of technology and financial firms in requiring employees to return to work. While some large employers have made voluntary work-from-home policies permanent, others, such as Google, believe that it is best to prioritise in-person interactions among colleagues.
I personally believe working from office brings out more productivity than working from home.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.