Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
Many of us were remote, and now many of us are being asked to come back? Knowing office workers all work with remote people in other offices, and there’s not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago, what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the office? Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.
I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health.
All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life.
I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.
I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life. But no, I had a remote job.
I got a new job that's supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office. And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.
I've been thinking about getting a new career, going into the trades. Anything that would allow me to have consistent interaction with other people.
I've become anti-technology, anti-society. I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.
I think you're the most honest pro-office person here. Everyone else is making justifications that dance around this idea that they need the office for the human connection. What you describe is very real and I understand that it hurts.
I think what's happening is that we're in the shaking out phase where companies are deciding whether they'll be remote/hybrid/office. Each company will make that decision based on the preferences of the people with the most influence, and because opinions vary so widely there will be lots of diversity in outcomes.
And that's a really good thing. It's unfair that those of us who can't stand being in an office were made to go into the office to satisfy the social needs of other people who aren't getting enough socialization in their personal life. But it's also not right for people like you to feel like you have no choice but to be isolated.
What we need is for people to not feel trapped in a job that has the wrong balance of remote and in-person. If you are the only one of your coworkers who feels the way that you do, maybe the answer is to find a company where the majority of employees share your desire for in-person work. I know that sounds overwhelming right now, but once you've made the leap once you won't be stuck in the wrong alignment again.
One of the other issues is that I don't hate the office in principle.
However open plan, sales folks yelling on a phone, demands that I don't wear headphones to drown it out, is all so draining.
I remember the lead up to Christmas 2019, some fucking idiots decided that what we really needed in the open plan office, where I'm already positioned near the café, was removal of mini-meeting rooms, and 2 hours of carollers.
I don't want to listen to some people singing their echoing Christmas songs in a "jazzy" way. I still had to do calls and support other teams who I couldn't hear over the noise.
If working from the office actually meant having a small closed off space for my team so we could collaborate, have meetings, design sessions and planning it would be great.
If going to the office meant having other teams available to whiteboard their problems in an available meeting room, come up with a plan and roadmap the improvements it would be great.
However they got rid of offices for teams, they got rid of cubicles so that other people's calls would at least be muffled, they got rid of partitions between people's breakout spaces and the rest of the floor so I have to listen to inane conversations at other people standups.
If this kid wants an office because he needs social interaction, that's fine. We can do a hacking session once a week. We can go to the office to plan and design fortnightly. I've done paired programming, problem investigation, where we have just an open call between two people and a screenshare so that you aren't alone and we can talk it through.
In principle the office is a social space with productivity possibilities. In practice, most companies appear to want to make the office the most unpleasant location to be.
To paraphrase a coworker, they demand productivity... but then manage to make the office the most unpleasant, unproductive environment available.
An uncomfortable desk and ancient HP monitors, none of which I can upgrade or change; loud coworkers; tons of unrelated teams, for whom sharing space is unnecessary; and calls with people, most of whom aren't even in the same city (or timezone). Meanwhile I can do all of that at home, more effectively, with far more flexibility.
Yup, my home office has 2x 27" monitors, my camera is just right, as is the mic, I've got a deep, 2m wide real wood sit-stand electric desk, a Aeron chair, all my stuff is right here, it's quiet (though I can always play music loud if I want) and lighting is just right.
I'm within 2 minutes walk of a shop and take-away.
No office I've ever worked at came close, the closest I've had was having dual monitors, as for shops, most offices took longer to get to the front door, never mind actually reach anywhere!
Like you, I appreciated his comment. It was honest, and I have been there. We are in the shaking-out phase of this change. The bigger problem is management isn't across-the-board good at determining productivity in-person or remote. Good managers are rare, and staring over someone's shoulder to make sure the work is getting done correctly is harder in remote work. The systems to provide this checking and oversight are still maturing - I don't mean employee surveillance.
I've been at the other end of the spectrum where I don't get work done in the office. I get involved in crosstalk between coworkers too much. We go to far too many pointless meetings. Everyone wants to share about their family while I'm working. I feel over-socialized and it affects my work and my ability to disconnect at the end of my day. This is a job. I get paid money for the work I do. I should not feel indebted to people who parody themselves as my friends (coworkers) who need this last-minute thing done by me at the end of the day. I'm off the clock and I want to disconnect. How many times have I worked through lunch? How many times have people called my personal number for non-emergency needs? The workplace infringes on my work-life balance, and remote work gave a large part of that back to me.
If we care about both groups of people (those over-socialized, and those isolated), we should give the worker the option. A good supervisor should be learning how to engage with the employee in the way they wish to communicate, as long as the work is getting done.
> I've been at the other end of the spectrum where I don't get work done in the office.
Open offices are what destroyed the experience of going to work.
When I had a private office (the first 17 years of my career) I loved going to the office. I had all the silence and privacy to get work done, but at the same time I could step out of the office 2-3 times a day and hang out with the team, chitchat about work, projects, life, hobbies and have a real human connection. When it was time to get back to work, could go back into the private office.
But open herd rooms these days broke everything. No concentration, no privacy, no in-the-zone ever, just forcefully being distracted all day. So now I just hate all these people around me making noise all day. Thankfully the pandemic put an end to that so I can concentrate on work away from the office. But I miss the human connection we had then everyone had private offices.
I'd go back to an office enthusiastically 5 days a week if I had a private office. But if you force me into an open office, I will never again want to go in person.
As a 49-year old software developer that had the real-office experience early in my career: same.
And the crazy thing is some companies are pushing for even worse than open-office plans and have moved on to "hot desking", all the same problems of an open office except you also don't even have your own desk space, just nomad your ass around the office and hope you find a spot to slap your laptop down.
The fact that some companies have mandated return to office and also have adopted a system where you literally have no space of your own at said office just seems insane to me and makes me wonder when the bunk capsule style hot desking is coming.
Just think of the office rent savings if we stack them 2 or 3 high! Nevermind the fact that the company thrived for 2+ years with almost nobody in the office at all.
I had an office at my first position that I shared with one other person, and after that a cube, and that was mostly fine as it removed the majority of the noise.
I don't need necessarily a personal office. But I need them to be reasonable.
A closed off space for just the 6 folks in the team would be fine, and a separate small space for someone to go to for a call or a 1:1.
I didn't put this together until I read your comment, but I resonate strongly with what you say here. it's been so long since I had an actual office that I had forgotten and, looking at it through this lens, it's true: what I like about working at home isn't so much the working at home part, but that I now have an office.
Put yourself in the executives shoes for a second, they're not stupid people, they know how large the risk of blowback is and how many employees they might disenfranchise or lose. They're that confident that remote work is a bigger threat to their long-term performance and they don't want to get lapped by the companies with an in-office culture
This argument is an appeal to authority that I just can't buy. You don't have to be a stupid person to succumb to your own biases, you just have to be human, and plenty of executives make irrational decisions based on their subjective feelings.
FWIW, I read GP's comment as more an elaboration of incentive structures rather than an appeal to authority.
You're still right that plenty of people make irrational decisions under whatever incentive structure they're in, but I think that the steelman version of GP's argument would probably go something like:
If we see a large % of companies going full-RTO, then maybe there's something to be said for the bet that RTO is a long-term competitive advantage.
...or, they might all just be lemmings, too. It's hard to say just yet, but I think it'll be interesting to see if there's an effect on stock performance over the next 10 years based on what companies decide now. (I feel like that's probably how long it'll take for the full impact on company culture to play out.)
Not like you are providing any cogent argument. Execs sure have their own biases but they do have a lot of data to make important decisions like RTO policy. If you disagree with them, maybe it says more about your ignorance, blind spots and biases?
I was talking to a CTO at a mid-sized startup (200 people or so; private company; I think ex-YC but not 100%); been there for a decade type concern.
Person flatly said no one works in WFH. I am also a manager and responded my team busted their balls the whole time, and delivered results. My personal opinion is my team did 120% of their productivity. I also acknowledge that some people are not built for it and their productivity may fall. I believe a manager can deal with this (either creating the right task-incentive structure, or getting the person off the bus). After my impassioned argument, the person said ..nope .. people just don't work during WFH. This was a social event, just the two of us talking, so I am quite sure this guy was being honest.
I also ran into a different person in a leadership position (just not very high; more like technical leadership; ex-professor; stints at Google). He was convinced the real reason FAANG hired so crazily was because productivity per employee had dropped dramatically. His belief was no one worked during WFH. Again, my impassioned arguments and personal anecdotes did not really move this person.
TL;DR: if there is no data, decision makers are going to stick to what they know best. And what current execs / c-suite knows best is in-office. They haven't learned management techniques for fully-remote yet.
> Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than workers with no ability to shift their schedule, according to a just-announced report from Future Forum. But do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office?
> Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” This lack of trust in worker productivity has led to what Microsoft researchers termed productivity paranoia: “where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”
So workers are more productive with remote flexibility, working more hours and managers and execs still want more.
There is a bit of a leap of faith between "Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity" to "workers are more productive". Everything else being equal, I would trust the managers more than the employees' self-assessment.
> Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.”
nothing about this figure from managers says employees are more or less productive, just that managers having a feeling workers are less productive, they can't trust them etc.
sounds like the managers are just projecting their feelings onto employees.
Yep, they are uncomfortable because they can’t fall back to idiotic / superficial metrics ie. “butts in seats” and it will require more work/introspection etc. to find actual better metrics and use them
You are making the dangerous assumption that these people know what they are doing. Time and again, winners and losers emerge of this and many of the top level executives turns out to be dead wrong.
Intelligence aside, do we/they have proper data on the topic to make an objective and sound decision in the first place? It’s not really something that can be just “thought out” like a step in a game of chess.
In my opinion and experience, coworker’s performance vary greatly in and of itself and we can hardly ever correctly measure a single person’s “productivity” in a non-faulty way. Many companies’ simply fall back on more-or-less subjective, textual analysis of their workers and base basically every decision on that.
> do we/they have proper data on the topic to make an objective and sound decision in the first place?
Let's assume none of us have any data to make an informed decision. Then what is our "default path"? In-office arrangement is something that has been tried out for decades if not more. The decision makers, who are typically C-suite or execs, are specifically the ones who progressed and thrived in that system. Guess what they are going to choose when there is a lot of uncertainty? Obviously an in-office setup, with maybe some concessions to working from home 1-2 days a week because that's comfortable even for them.
The only exception would be young founders who haven't learned any setting yet, and in fact who would like the allure of a "digital nomad" lifestyle more to embrace fully-remote.
I've known math wizards, PhD mega-thinkers who would be terrible at leading organizations and pushing projects.
Lots of mgmt is incompetent, and there is a bell curve there just as bell-y and curve-y as other employee ranks. Like, basically by definition 50% are below average like anywhere else.
The missing piece is that plenty of these < 50th percentile can get jobs, often high level ones in respected companies. It's often who you know, how you make people feel, and what sort of connections and optics you bring to the table.
I’m not making that assumption, it would be as dangerous. I’m making the statement to not assume their intelligence based on their position (high level c-exec)
Execs know that they have no idea how to measure performance so they can't risk someone taking a paycheck and doing no work, because they can't detect that.
We used to have diversity in work environments in the US and then allowed everything to become monopolized by a handful of big corps who demanded hyper normalization at the office.
I agree with what you said at the end though, but would add OP needs to do the work of building a life outside of their job. Doing so is “work” in a physical science, vanilla dictionary sense. What we do to play Society: The Game is a job and coworkers have lives that do not revolve around other coworkers. Adult life is going to suck for OP if they don’t build a social network or even just general social skills outside of the office space.
I agree with your statement about him being the most honest person here. The most I can give him credit for is that you're already out and it keeps you from going back to your house.
Everytime I read that "humans are social creatures" it's a dog whistle for "i want to see people miserable and pressured to do it"
Working in person isn't the issue here -- not having friends is the issue.
People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it should never be your primary place of making friends. (Friends and family won't lay you off like a job might. Having a network outside of work is critical if that ever happens.)
Asking your coworkers to come into the office just so you can get some needed face time with other people doesn't seem fair to them. They have social lives outside of work and aren't being paid to be someone's social outlet.
Once working, you spend 8h a day with a group of people.
It's by far the easiest way to make friends since the needed repetition of making contact (a minimum requirement for friendship) is already solved by going to work together.
Making friends as an adult is hard. Work is the easiest shortcut in establishing meaningful relationships with strangers.
Edit: addressing some of the comments below.
Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who will maintain a connection with you no matter the circumstance (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)
I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.
Friend just means someone you have established a platonic relationship with right here right now. You may drift apart in the future, but what's important is that the connection and relationship is genuine and real.
Ummm, no! Maybe some people get their social life from work but many don't.
I have 1 friend I've made during my entire career that stayed with me after the job ended. The others I've lived with, or went to school with, or met following other interests.
If you just mean socialising with colleagues, sure, I do that. But they aren't my good friends.
No, we're really not. People still live together, people still go to school together, people still have interests out of work, people still go to bars and clubs.
The office may have been a good place to make friends for some young people, but certainly not all.
I was quite lonely in my early twenties. I had moved away from home and university and all the people I knew. It's quite normal. And nobody worked remotely.
More and more people are staying with their parents because they can't afford to move out.
>people still go to school together
More and more people are doing online/remote learning. During the pandemic, all learning went remote and it ruined childrens' social skills.
>people still have interests out of work
Less and less of these out-of-work interests involve regular, face-to-face social interaction and community building.
>people still go to bars and clubs
People are definitely going to pubs less - this is an issue that has been in the media for a decade and a half. When people do go to pubs, clubs and bars they're less likely to talk to people they don't know. People are certainly less likely to chat up a member of the opposite sex at a bar in 2023 compared to even 2013.
The Covid related ones are not dismantling the places young people meet, that was a public health emergency that will not continue forever.
If people are choosing not to meet in person now, that is also not dismantling the places people meet. That is a choice.
I know that the isolation of Covid has had a terrible effect on young people's mental health and I do not want to diminish that. But it isn't a dismantling of the places they could meet for the main part.
>If people are choosing not to meet in person now, that is also not dismantling the places people meet. That is a choice.
We are seeing a whole generation miss out on social connections, reporting mass loneliness and depression. You can't just hand wave that away "they made a choice". If an individual does something, its a choice, if an entire generation does something, its the environment that changed.
Ok, something has changed then. But it does not appear to me to be the result of dismantling the places where people could meet in person. I'm not trying to handwave it away.
Maybe the internet and social media is encouraging people to forge remote connections rather than physical ones?
I agree with you that it's not a deliberate dismantling, but (as much as it pains me to say this) Gigachad's right that there's at least a decay of sorts.
Call it network effects working in reverse, or a change in incentives, but there really are less serendipitous encounters in young peoples' lives.
Digital nomad here. I like being one. For me making friends, the best places are: Tinder (it took a lot of effort) and just giving compliments to people on the street (it took some effort to learn).
Regarding complimenting people on the street and potentially turning it into a conversation, it takes some practice. 10 years ago when I did some solo traveling (before uni even) for the first time, I had the choice to stay inside and feel even more agony or to go out and experience social anxiety and pain. I've experienced a lot of social anxiety and pain (initially). It feels better than feeling lonely.
There are courses on how to make friends (and influence people :P, see "How to make friends and influence people", it's a book, I haven't read it though). If you really want to, you can consciously make an effort on bettering social skills and meet anyone everywhere and maintaining it.
A good channel (a bit too broad though) is Charisma on Command [1].
I'm a silly goose, haha. I didn't think in terms of "like/dislike" when I read your comment.
With that said, I realize now that I over-interpreted the word "bizarro". I gave that quite some tone in my mind. I now realize there are a few wildly different tones you can give to that word.
Why is my statement any different to what a person on the street would say when a random stranger tries to interact with them? People on the street always WANT something from you. It is rarely ever for the benefit of the recipient.
Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends. Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
> People on the street always WANT something from you.
One can learn to spot the difference. This is not always the case. Also, this mentality doesn't help. I see where you're coming from, but when you do what I do, this mentality doesn't help.
> Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends.
Only true for the first 2 minutes, in my experience. And yea, you can't make friends with everyone. The first 2 minutes people live on autopilot. Approaching them is tricky and needs to be done precisely because you're not talking to the real person (IMO). You're talking to the person who has a whole program in their head that they need to execute and the chance they see you as something that once to sell something is high. It takes a bit of time for most people to understand that you're really just there as another human being. For some people it takes 0 seconds though, for others it takes longer. I personally have noticed it takes less long for guys (being a guy myself), because they're not afraid I'm secretly trying to hit on them.
> Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
I mentioned in my comment that I didn't read him either.
> These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
That's because for me they are. Like I tried to mention: this is my preferred alternative. I'm living this. It's a different perspective that I'm offering.
It's a hard perspective to offer as it's a "show don't tell" type of thing. I've showed many friends, they were all amazed and all bestowed magical abilities upon me of how amazing I was socially. They couldn't explain it away as training. I'm not a naturally social person. I consciously trained it.
They didn't believe it. So I trained a few of my friends to do the same. They see it. They're surprised. It takes a while to train, depending on the person. Though, as far as meeting people and making friends is concerned, 20 hours per week for max 3 months ought to definitely do the trick. So that's 240 hours of training to fix one of the biggest issues in people their lives: making sure they can consciously always build a social life.
It's not natural to me but trained :) Trained a long time ago, so maybe natural now? Trained nonetheless.
The biggest thing I've learned in this regard are a few things:
1. Be positive / optimistic (read Seligman's stuff on learned optimism)
2. Be playful with people (aka not too serious, see creative interpretations in things, roleplay. Doing improv workshops helps a lot)
3. When starting to talk to people, you can:
A. Comment on the situation "This train is going so slow"
B. Give them a compliment "Excuse me, (they look up at you now you have their attention) I just wanted to mention that I like your whole vibe. The guitar, the clothing style reminds me a bit of a hippie actually, haha (they nod in agreement). Yea, just wanted to say it's cool is all."
In most cases the conversations don't go anywhere for me. That's fine. I'm just there to chill and have fun, no need to prolong what can't be prolonged. In one out of 10 cases it goes somewhere interesting.
This is very easy advice to give and oft repeated, but I’m deeply skeptical that this is something that works for most people (unless we substitute friends with acquaintances).
Isn't that the case for 'work friends' too? The people we never see or hear from again the moment they get a good offer at some other company or we ourselves move on to other roles? There will be exceptions of course, people you meet at work who you actually form real meaningful connections with, but there will also be exceptions for the people you meet while volunteering, or while playing a sport. Either way, most of the people in our lives are strangers or acquaintances.
Maybe the more interesting question is what does it take for this to work?
I’m just going anecdotal here from college friends that have dispersed across the US.
Warm intros, so to speak, help. If you join a running group attended by a friend of a friend it seems to stick better than joining when you know absolutely no one.
Public transit helps. It’s hard to be consistent when going to the activity requires slogging through traffic.
And lastly, an activity that encourages repeated regular attendance. Hiking is an activity that is super flaky attendance compared to say training for a triathlon with a specific event day.
In my experience the reason board games work great is because you are forced to interact, understand the people, you play better when you figure out how they think etc. It forces you to create a rapport. You inevitably find out when you have chemistry with someone and want to play more with them.
Most people meeting over other activities I believe have similar stories. Dancing for example, or other group sports.
Shared experiences are key. If you've ever been on a tour with randos you'll know. You will form friendships with all kinds of people you never would have expected to back home.
I've made some very good friends since leaving university. The simplest thing to do is to start with something YOU enjoy. Food, sports, music, pottery, knitting, boardgames even coding (gasp but that's our work).
If you have a passion and you want to be there, and so do the other people - the odds are in your favour that you'll get along.
Have you tried it? In my experience you are much more likely to make friends who voluntarily get together for a shared recreational experience than at a workplace where you are required to be. Try joining a bowling team. You'd be amazed at how much hanging out with the same group of people for four hours a week, every week, and having a few beers and laughs with them while you bowl can be to striking up a friendship (or three).
So what happens when you have no interests, no hobbies, no cause? And for those that do, but lack the time or financial resources to persue them? What then?
If you lack the time, then your problem is one of not having proper work/life balance. If you lack the financial resources to come up with enough money to go bowling once a week then your problems are deeper then not having friends.
if you lack financial resources, that's the problem to tackle. Making friends and having leisure activities will be secondary until your financials become stable and good.
Once you have the financial resources, _then_ you tackle the problem of no interest/hobbies/causes issue - which, i say is relatively easy to tackle as long as you have money; try different things until something sticks!
Slight miscommunication here. I'm talking about someone that genuinely has absolutely no interests whatsoever. Even after trying skiing, bowling, hiking, just about every time sport, reading, music in all forms, performance arts, painting, board games, table top games, video games, travel, etc. And everything is dull, boring, uninteresting, and unejoyable.
In that case, this person might actually have a medical condition of some sort. Humans tend to be curious and that curiosity is manifested as an interest in something.
Either they have not tried everything, or they have imbalances or an illness that makes them feel this way. If this is true, there should be no shame in visiting a doctor or therapist of some sort. Otherwise, depression would set in sooner or later and get worse.
I have done all of these things and cannot recall making a friend from any of them.
Perhaps my definition of "friend" is stricter than others. I differentiate between friends and acquaintances and a lot of people don't seem to.
But I think the more obvious answer is just that some people, like me, have a lot of difficulty connecting to other people. No amount of going to a gym will help that.
As someone who organized two very large social groups on Meetup in NYC, let's delve into your suggestions a bit more.
> Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running / reading / trivia / sports groups.
It is very hard to pick up a new hobby as an adult.
By 30, most adults (in the US; earlier outside of the US) will have real full-time job responsibilities, a significant other and a few children. Since the children will be young and will need almost all of your time and attention, that leaves little time for anything else.
Families with access to parenting groups will likely be living in bigger cities with high-enough density to support that. This also assumes that you have enough free time/money to participate in these activities (unlikely if you just spent most of your free capital on the house that you just bought because houses are at an all-time high now...).
Many new families are living in HOA-run communities that are wholly designed to be traveled by car, in towns that are also designed to be traveled by car, because you'll likely be commuting to work and back...by car.
Taking your kids on a walk to the grocery store that's 15 minutes away and seeing lots of people on your path isn't possible in these towns. Instead, you're driving four minutes to a huge supermarket where you'll run into families who are also rushing to pick up their groceries because time is scarce, and then driving right back.
Can you interact with neighbors and enjoy community in this environment? Sure! If you like your two or four neighbors in your surrounding area, and if they aren't filthy renters like me who aren't in it for the short-term. (Rentals are also increasing...because houses are at an all-time high and life happens...)
If you're childfree and live in a large city, then, sure, tons of opportunities to make new friends. Unless you're a lawyer working 100+ hrs/week or a SWE grinding at a startup that just hit PMF and is hyperscaling. Or you suck at breaking through cliques. (Lots of people suck at this; myself included. Don't feel bad! Most people make most of their lifelong friends in grade school or church, as a youth, so most times, you're trying to shoehorn yourself into a group that has developed decades of direct and indirect ways of communicating and interacting with each other.).
> Take a class.
> Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm, shelter, political office..
This is actually good advice, but, again, time is scarce for many people.
This is more or less like saying "wanna lose weight? just eat less!" Not invalid, but also not helpful and very dismissive of people needing different things.
> Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends. The friends are a byproduct.
...of being in an enclosed environment with other humans for eight hours a day, doing things they might or might not want to do. Kind of like work actually...
Let's be clear. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make friends as an adult. I've done it, and I've met tons of people that have done it!
I'm just saying that it's significantly easier to make friends at work.
More importantly, it is a lot easier to foster a culture and a work community in the office.
We tend to make friends early in life at school or church, but those friendships are because there's a very wide pool of individuals in a single location. Literally everyone in a geographic area who is your age. That inherently tends to include people of similar economic status and cultural background. You have this huge group of people and can pick your preferred subset from them.
Walking into a job, literally the only thing you have in common with these people is an employer. While time spent together is an important component of building relationships, it lacks the other substantially important pieces of relationships: Common interests, similar backgrounds, similar worldviews, etc. (Though it doesn't mean they're inherently absent)
If you are working in the same position then surely you share quite a lot of shared interests, likely have the same degree even. I had plenty of great conversations about different topics of CS with my coworkers (even though I’m way more “academically inclined” then most of them are) at every workplace. Sure, not everyone is interested in their own field of work, but imo that’s then the greater problem, one really shouldn’t waste half of his/her waking life on something they entirely dislike.
But I generally have nothing in common with the people I work with.
I'm friends with people who share my world outlook, my moral and philosophical and aesthetic views, and there's no correlation between that and working with people.
> Friend just means someone you have established a platonic relationship with right here right now.
NO, that's not friend, FFS! That's an acquaintance or a coworker.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a very sociable guy, I love hanging out with people, but I only have a few actual _friends_.
> Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who will maintain a connection with you no matter the circumstance (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)
> I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.
I'm sorry, but if you leave a job and lose all your connection with someone, _you were never friends._
I moved to a new continent in 2016 and I'm still in touch with my small group of actual friends, and I even made two more here.
I played WoW for a good 8 years everyday through high school and college, became great friends with some of the people I played the game with.
When I finished school, I hung up my WoW character and said good bye to my friends in the game.
Although I no longer keep in touch with any of them, those were some of the best 8 years of my life and I am truly fond of the memories I made playing the game and working together.
+1. I have a group chat with my wow friends and we have been mostly connected (with some brief periods after Cataclysm where everyone stopped playing) for almost 15 years now. We’ve had in-person meetups and I have a solid conversation with them at least once a week on voice.
No. In the workplace, you have to accomplish stuff every day of suffer serious consequences. You spend 8 hours a day with your coworkers, sure, but that time is not spent socializing. You're under the gun to produce.
In a game (or other recreational activity), none of that is true. They are inherently social activities. You can get to know each other, you are at play. It's a very, very different thing.
> It's by far the easiest way to make friends since the needed repetition of making contact (a minimum requirement for friendship) is already solved by going to work together.
I disagree as the workplace isn’t a good locus of interest for personal relationships. I’m not interested in my coworkers hobbies. I have developed friendships with co-workers but they are rare.
Some of my happiest times at work are when I worked with friends. But they were friends before work and I worked with them because they are friends, I didn’t become friends because of work.
I also think it’s valuable to have checks and balances in life and having my personal life wrapped up with work, although great for my employer, puts too much risk in losing my job.
Add to this, that my workplace was distributed and I switched from driving into work to get in video calls with people in different locations to doing that from my home office.
If someone doesn’t see humans for days when working from home, that is an individual problem to solve and there are many options to solve that. Work is not efficient for solving that problem.
Join a gym, get a dog and walk it, join a grocery/csa co-op, use meetup, join a church, volunteer, visit seniors in your area, tutor kids, join a book club, do yoga/tai chi. The list going on and on and all those are more likely to result in human connection and friendships than going into work.
As a rule, I don't make "close" friends with people I work with. Falling out with people is a real thing, and getting judged for things that are in my private life (whatever they may be) is not something I want to deal with 40+ hours a week.
With normal friends, I can at least avoid them. Co-workers? Not so much.
I'm nice, I'll socialize, but I won't share or divulge any detail of my private life.
Work is the worst place to make friends. You don't get to choose the people you work with. If you change jobs or get sacked, your social circle is vaporized. Work is a place to make money. I work remotely, don't miss the socialization because many of my co-workers are sucky people. I have friends I've made through hobbies, veterans groups etc.
The best friend I've made as an adult was met through work. Then he took another job, and I moved across the country when I went remote. We still keep in touch and occasionally travel to visit each other.
Most work “friendships” are transactional. Always exceptions of course, like in your case, but it’s important to be clear eyed going in.
A lot of people in my life have had their feelings hurt when their “work friend” stopped talking to them after leaving the company, because they failed to understand this important truth.
The kind of person who can't make and keep friends unless they are forced to work in the same office won't. It that person could keeping touch and would pick friends able to keep in touch, they would keep.in touch with whoever they studied with or was in their hometown.
But, we are talking about someone who need coercion to make friends. And they can be nice super ethical person, but there is that skill they don't have.
At any point in life I keep in touch regularly with about 40-50 people.
Most of them are from outside work. Because "but you spend 8 hours with them every day" is not true for most people. I now work with completely different people than I those I worked 3-4-10 years ago. I have friendships significantly longer than that, and I didn't have to work with them side by side all this time.
If you've become friends, you stay in touch. It's that simple. I've worked in three places since graduating , and I keep in touch with probably a dozen people from those jobs. I've been to their house parties, met their pets, gone on hikes with them, started and introduced them to new hobbies.
I keep in touch with a friend after having only worked together for a year and he even left the country.
You can absolutely make friends at a company, you literally spend half of your awake time there. It is more time then what you spent with your school mates back then.
> Friend just means someone you have established a platonic relationship with right here right now.
Ahhh, that makes more sense now. You're using "friend" to mean what I would call an "acquaintance".
I think the workplace is one of the hardest places to find true friends, because the relationship is dependent on the job. And, can you really be truly open and vulnerable to workplace friends? Can you safely talk smack about your boss, or your cube neighbor, or the company? Can you show up on their doorstep in crisis at 3am and have it not affect things at work?
I'm happily married, children, dog, several distinct groups of friends, great job at a great company, lovely house in a nice village, etc, etc, etc.
I worked from home for about 4 years as a freelancer and found it incredibly isolating (but lucrative, so endured it) but finally had enough and get a permanent job back in an office. This was 5 weeks before what would be the first of several COVID lockdowns and roughly 3 years later there's still no realistic "office culture" where I work.
Last year was incredibly tough for me. Incredibly dark. Despite everything that I ostensibly had going for me I was suddenly crushingly lonely, anxious, probably depressed. 8-10 hours per day of constantly interacting on Zoom calls doesn't just cut it. It's not the same.
I don't think the answer is to necessarily "return to the office" as a 100% arrangement. I don't think that's possible in reality. But something has to change; undeniable dilemma.
I started a new job during the pandemic (well, 2...). What sucks for me is that my boss has been like "Yeah, you can go back to the office." But both him and my direct coworker have said that they will never go back to the office. Pretty sure I will never physically meet them before I inevitably try to find some other job.
And what is more isolating than being home alone? Well, working completely alone in an office building meant to hold like 300 employees that was last updated in the 80s.
My basic idea about all of this is to restructure where people work. Take all the employees that want to come into the office on a regular basis and put them in the same building on the same floor.
You could … ask your boss for an in person 1:1. I did. My boss lives halfway across the country. We made it work. I am a long time remote worker (12+ years)
We have weekly group meetings and no one ever really has anything to say, and I've tried steering the conversation to anything interesting or getting to know them and it goes nowhere. The boss is the first one to bail once hes bored of the conversation. There are bi-weekly group meetings with the director where its a forced conversation that he doesn't actually know how to lead ("alright everyone, find something to talk about").
Like, my whole issue could be entirely down to the job. I'm getting weird vibes from this place and these people (yelling in meetings about various things that aren't important at all).
I think what I'm finding out is that having great coworkers in my previous in person jobs either hid or overrode my new found hatred of system administration. If I liked what I did then maybe all of my comments would be different here.
I guess after 8 years of being a DBA/SysAdmin have taught me to stop applying for these jobs.
Edit: Like, I'm married. I have friends far away I see monthly and game with weekly. I'm not dying here. I just want the 8 hours of work to not be as lonely. My jobs won't get my best performance this way because I'm mentally so disconnected from what I'm doing since I'll never meet who I'm doing it for.
You have to go back to the office. All my friends and coworkers who have tried it haven’t gone back to remote work. People weren’t meant to sit alone all day.
So how does the office solve that exactly? I worked in an office in the before times. It was me sitting alone all day. Sure I was surrounded by other people technically but I was working on my own stuff and didn't interact. There was more annoyance than anything: constant chatter, super bright fluorescent overhead lighting, sickness spreading, etc
I am very happy not going back to the office. Perhaps I'm a sociopath, I don't know, but I would rather retire than return, and my boss is well aware. My company is on "mandatory" 2-days-a-week in the office, but I haven't been asked to return, and still sit in my shed. Which is awesome.
I don’t know where you live, but have you considered finding a “third place” to work from or frequent at lunch or after work?
I’ve found that working from a local cafe, in my little suburban “village” centre has been really fantastic for this. I work, I bump into people I know, I meet new people and get to know my neighbours. It’s great.
Given their ubiquity, local libraries might be good to advertise meeting facilities for remote workers during the day. Before anyone complains about the noise and distractions from other workers - it's probably better than an open office layout.
Was listening to radio the other day. Was some writer that used to sit at her local café to work but during covid she stopped because it got too crowded and now she can't go back again.
I've worked from home for more than 10 years and after covid I signed up for a co-working space to go a couple of days a week, work and hang out. Since everyone is doing different things than what I do, I love it. Designers, sales, photographers, lawyer and other IT peeps.
Always someone to chat with when taking a break and getting a coffee.
I’ve got friends but you can’t fill 100% of your social interactions with meeting friends. Unless you have a very large number of them, you won’t be able to see them daily, and even if you do, you end up consuming all of your free time with socialising and having no personal time left.
Remote work left me choosing between fulfilling social interaction or personal time after work, either option leaving me unsatisfied. I can’t wait to get back to the office, those were the best years of my life.
>I can’t wait to get back to the office, those were the best years of my life.
Huh. It's wild how different two people's experiences of the same thing can be. I hated the office. I hated commuting. I hated meeting in stuffy rooms. While I like (most) of my coworkers, and enjoy the occasional drinks with them, I could also never see like 99% of them ever again and never even think about it. I vastly, vastly prefer WFH and would trade those "relationships" away in a heart beat in order to have it.
It's hard for me to wrap my head around the "best years" of someone's life being those where they're surrounded by people who think of them so little that the flexibility of doing laundry during the day beats ever seeing them again.
This thread has a healthy mix of both camps, which is pretty surprising to me.
> surrounded by people who think of them so little that the flexibility of doing laundry during the day beats ever seeing them again.
My coworkers have all gone back to the office part time, they go out and do stuff in the city almost every week after work, they go to huge javascript meetups, go to the pubs and clubs, and I'm here sitting alone doing very little because my city doesn't have a large tech scene. Remote work has given me the ability to work senior level jobs which just don't exist here, but it's not enough.
I've decided, I'm packing my stuff and moving state this year primarily so I can work in the office with everyone.
I'd say the living situation at home makes a big difference. You may have a good living situation and good social interactions with family at home. The camp that likes the physical office may be a lot more isolated if they had to work from home. It's also the same reason a lot of folks like going to coffeeshops and other public places to feel less isolated while working.
Sure, friends are part of it -- family is the other part of it.
If you don't have either -- filling that void by spending all day in an office sounds even more depressing. I'd focus more on making friends and finding a committed relationship.
There are lots of solutions here outside of working in-person: Find roommates. Start playing sports. Date more. Find an in-person hobby. Volunteer.
What I know is that those first few years of my career in office were the best years of my life. I’ve been scrambling around trying everything to fill the gap left by remote work, I go to meetups, I have family and friends, none of it is as significant as working together with people for the majority of your day.
I’m going back to the office and I won’t take another job that has most people remote.
> What I know is that those first few years of my career in office
In that particular office.
Ive had spells of time like that. Mine were at universities working together in labs.
Ive worked software jobs in companies and startups where the developers sat in the same room all day and didn't speak. Completely unsociable. I found that much more soul destroying than remote working.
And that is waaay better then toxic environment. I will take a social, it is manageable. But seeing someone humiliate or verbally abuse or whatever other on daily basis sux. And it sux even when it is mild, it sux when the place is run by cliques and what not.
> Remote work left me choosing between fulfilling social interaction or personal time after work, either option leaving me unsatisfied.
Congratulations, you're an extrovert. To me, that sounds like the PERFECT arrangement. 0 pressure to interact with people, but in case everyone is feeling like it, we meet up with friends over the weekend.
I like having personal time to work on personal projects 3-4 days a week. I'm also fine with only 2-4 hours of face to face interaction per week.
> People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it should never be your primary place of making friends.
Yeah... good luck with that.
Not to say that people don't make friends outside work, but there are many variables involved with that.
But just use Meetup.com, right? Sure, if you want to spend a few hours with people of retirement age, not if there's anything wrong with that.
Not having friends is just the surface level of the issue. If all you want is friends and friends alone, then that really isn't that hard to arrange.
If the use of "friends", however, is those who are in your age cohort as well as romantic possibilities, that's an entirely different beast that can be ironically difficult to conquer once college life has been long since left in the dust.
For many, if not most, the office was the deciding factor as to whom you would associate with in adulthood. Plenty of people have met long time friends as well as their husbands and wives at the office. With remote work, this is extremely difficult to pull off. I've been fortunate to have made one or two good friends through my years of remote work, but I had 100x more social opportunities back when I worked in a physical office. I miss the fact that I could have a best work friend kind of like how I usually had a best school friend as a child. But it's usually impractical to make such connections when all you have is Slack and Zoom, neither of which are good for shared 1-on-1 experiences. There's no chance to say "Hey, wanna run to Starbucks with me?"
I wouldn't give up remote work entirely, but I'm finding there's a lot left to be desired that would be met in an office. The office is the missing variable that gets people to spend sufficient amount of time together on shared goals. That's not easily going to be replicated by introducing yourself to random people in town.
Completely understand your point of view. In my case, growing up I was interested in computers, and back then (late 90’ early 00’) kids my age were not into that. So after school I would roam forums. I would some times exchange IM with people I shared interests with, and chat with them every day. Most of them were adults and young adults, I didn’t know where they lived, how they looked, or their names. However I never felt the need to meet them in person. And my interactions felt as real (or even more) than interactions in the physical world.
Fast forwarding to now, I find myself mentally fine when working from home. Of course things are different since I have family to interact with at home, but for me, not engaging with colleagues about non-work related things is what makes remote work not as fun as the olden times. This is also harder to arrange because my colleagues would rather go out or do something else rather that keep chatting with me about something else.
Meetup works great in many cities and plenty of young people use it. If you’re joining a tricot or bingo group though don’t be surprised at finding yourself surrounded with “retirement age” members.
In some cities it’s unused though. When I lived in Athens it was terrible, just crypto groups used it.
That has not been my experience in the LA region for many years. Some get some RSVPs, but be prepared for everyone to drop out the very last minute or not show up. Long ago, it was pretty great.
I'm sorry to hear that. FWIW I've also seen a decline in quality post-COVID (especially of events), but Meetup has remained an incredible source of friendships, social events, and great intros in Belgium.
I have had very good luck with that, thank you. That doesn't work for you -- you find friendships in the workplace. That's great, too. Clearly, neither approach is the right one for everybody.
I make friends with parents of my kids classmates, neighbors, people of similar interests that I run into at the cafe. I started a new job and I’m not bummed that I don’t have any “friends” there yet.
You are confusing between friends at work and the employer itself. Layoffs are irrelevant: your friends (including those at work) will support you if you are laid off, unlike your employer.
Also, once you make a friend at work you can meet outside the workplace, or communicate with non-work communication channels.
But you won't because the reason why you spent time together was someone paid you to. How many people are you still hanging out with the company you worked 10 or 5 years ago? Very few if any..
For n=1: Most of my friends, and definitely my closest friends. That said I made more close, long-term friends as hire #11 at a startup than I did as hire #111 at a midsize tech company.
Depends on the person. I still text a guy that I worked with 5 years ago and we still play games together online from time to time. I don't keep in touch with my old boomer manager though because we don't have any mutual interests.
All the friendships I’ve ever had have been, like, do something together for a few hours every couple of weekends. The only thing remotely on the scale of office life is a family.
I hear you and doubt nothing about your plight, but frankly that feels like a you problem. I can sympathize while also rejecting the idea that I should have to come into the office so your not lonely.
Have you considered a co-working space? It seems like that could get you what your looking for. Beyond that I'd look to get creative around finding ways to get social outside work. A martial arts or social dance class for example. Frankly I think it's much healthier if your coworkers aren't the core of your social life.
FWIW I too had this problem at the start of the pandemic. My solution was to build a gym and workout with my friends 3x a week. Obviously this isn't a solution for your plight in a new city.
You should look at the bigger picture. People usually find friends as a byproduct of of some activity, such as work, studies, hobbies, or activism. If you remove the activity people spend a third of their waking hours on from the list, the result is a massive reduction in the number of friends people have. And it's going to hit the people who can't easily make friends the hardest.
This is not an individual problem. It's an issue that affects the entire society. Social isolation feeds many undesirable things, such as political polarization and extremism. If a society wants to survive, it has to deal with the issue somehow.
> This is not an individual problem. It's an issue that affects the entire society. Social isolation feeds many undesirable things, such as political polarization and extremism. If a society wants to survive, it has to deal with the issue somehow.
Agreed, and I think the best way is for people to realize that "the people I chat with at the water-cooler" are not my friends, and take action based on that. Job loss and retirement are often terribly isolating events for people for exactly the reason your specify. Work is 1/2 of their waking life and they rely on it too heavily for their social needs.
Forcing the majority who prefer work from home to work from the office because a minority of people will feel lonely does not "benefit society". It hides a real problem that some people have while sacrificing the rest of us to do so. If the majority of us wanted to work in the office this would be a non-issue. GP would've simply gone to the office, found the majority of their co-workers there and been perfectly happy, while those of us who wanted WFH were happily home. Better to tackle the problem head on than sweep it under the rug.
The friends you meet at work are no different from the friends you meet at dance/martial arts class. They are tied to an activity, and if you quit the activity, you are likely to lose most of them.
The core problem is that remote work can easily mean 8 hours/day of social isolation. Especially because those are the hours people have the most energy to try new things. If people spend that time avoiding social contacts, they are obviously not going to make many friends.
Historically, neighbors were a key source of friends, because they were the community you lived in. 20th century changed that. Today neighbors are simply people who happen to sleep near you temporarily. They are probably away from home during the day, their jobs are unrelated to yours, and they will likely relocate sooner or later.
Who will form the community you will spend your time with by default, if it's no longer your neighbors or coworkers?
There is no default. There never was. This is exactly the idea I am saying we need to combat. Building lasting relationships takes time and reciprocated effort. The people who want to WFH aren't going to become "friend candidates" because they are forced into the office. The are either already "friend candidates" prepared to reciprocate advances, or they aren't interested. Remote isn't the barrier here. Physical proximity just has the potential to give someone the illusion of a connection that hasn't actually been formed. Once someone realizes this and learns to put effort into their social connections, they are far less likely to end up isolated than just hoping showing up at work will make the difference.
And that is where dance/martial arts class is different. Everyone there has decided to show up. Your also a lot less likely to get laid off from book club than your job.
If people want to work together in the same space 8 hours a day more power too them! Go have a good time in the office and let us WFH folks be. But if there aren't enough who want to be in the office to satisfy the office dwellers it doesn't become the WFH folk's responsibility to keep them company. If we are open to friendship, we already were.
Defaults matter, because people take the easy default choice most of the time. If people don't meet other people by default, they will have fewer casual acquaintances and they are less likely to meet the ones who will become good friends. Then there will be fewer friends overall.
> Once someone realizes this and learns to put effort into their social connections, they are far less likely to end up isolated than just hoping showing up at work will make the difference.
This is fundamentally the "communism would work, if" argument. Individual people can choose to make the non-default choice. People on the average don't do that.
This is part of the idea I'm contesting. Remember, "65" has an office they can go to, their problem is no one else wants to. Unless you are asserting that you are a better judge of what is good for 65's co-workers then they themselves are, presumably "on average" they have found sufficient social interaction to satisfy themselves outside of the office. And if you are asserting that you know better than them and they should be forced into the office for their own good, I soundly reject that notion.
Just "going with the default" of spending time with co-workers and is exactly how people end up isolated late in life or after losing their jobs. People who are struggling with isolation now should introspect on why they are struggling to make friends and address that instead of attempting to force others into being around them. That's not how friends treat friends.
Again, communism would work if everyone behaved like a good communist. They don't, because the default is acting in the interests of yourself and people near you rather than in the interests of the wider society. If you insist on communism, the whole society suffers, because most people take the default choice and do what's good for them.
If social isolation during work is the default, people will have fewer friends, because making friends takes more effort. They may be satisfied with their situation, because they contrast the outcomes of having more friends with the effort needed to make them. But the entire society may be worse off than a society where people have more friends because working with other people is the default.
Fundamentally, everything based on the idea that people should make different choices is doomed to fail. To make the society better, you must work on structural level and change the defaults.
There is a certain irony to stating "Fundamentally, everything based on the idea that people should make different choices is doomed to fail." in an argument that everyone choosing WFH should either make different choices or be forced to.
> If social isolation during work is the default, people will have fewer friends, because making friends takes more effort.
I disagree. If these people were making friends by just being at work, they wouldn't be feeling so lonely right now. They would already have plenty of social connections that would not just evaporate because your not in the office anymore. Even those just entering the workforce should have these friends from school. Instead constantly being around people at work makes people "feel" less lonely, hiding the fact that they haven't actually made a deeper connection. Shoving people back in the office will just hide it again, it won't fix the problem. It'll just decrease the quality of life of everyone who happier right now. On the other hand leaving things as they are and instead supporting those feeling isolated in finding other outlets lets the majority of people keep doing what's working for them, and the rest are likely have motivation to fix the problem.
> I disagree. If these people were making friends by just being at work, they wouldn't be feeling so lonely right now. They would already have plenty of social connections that would not just evaporate because your not in the office anymore.
The issue is finding friends after relocating to a new area. That's easier for some and harder for others. With coworkers, you already have a pool of people to spend time with. Through them, you can meet other people and learn about activities that are available in the area.
I firmly reject the idea that I must go back to having a commute and give up all the QoL improvements of work from home just so I can sit around the office awaiting the day we hire someone from out of town, so that I can serve as tour guide and social matchmaker.
Furthermore a read through the comments on this thread make it pretty unambiguous that the problem is not restricted to people new to the area.
This is much more than a one person's problem, but it's a general issue that many older people with well-established lives don't sympathize with unfortunately. As much as others can deny, work is source of most people's friendships, relationships, mentorships, and other social interactions. There's hardly a substitute for that outside.
100% agree, that was poor phrasing on my part, it was meant to communicate where the responsibility for fixing the problem lies, not claim the problem was isolated to a single, or even small number of people.
> There's hardly a substitute for that outside.
Strongly, 100% disagree. Work friendships tend to be fleeting, causing job loss or retirement to be isolating events. Yes lasting friendships can and do form in the workplace (I've formed some even while working remotely!), but getting laid off is a great way to discover just how many of those work friendships were of convenience.
Meanwhile there are tons of ways to meet people outside of work. Dance classes, workshops, exercise classes, book clubs, beekeeping clubs, etc. I submit that a person who can't form friendships outside of work is unlikely to form the lasting kind at work, and is better off in the long run examining why that is, rather than papering over it with a temporary bandaide.
I think the university system is pretty hamstrung by the number of students it can accept. A lot of grad programs are coming online (I used to work at 2U which does this) and this is good both for students and the school as more students get an education and the school gets more income. Whether or not I want it to happen (I think it's probably an important part of reforming the university system) it seems like it's happening anyway.
> School?
I think most studies show this is pretty bad, so no.
> Let's all wake up in our pijamas, hop on a zoom
Probably twice a week I get through the whole work day in my PJs and I'm great at my job, so that sounds fine.
> live most of our lives like that?
Nah I'll go to the grocery store in the AM for supplies in my PJs but that's the extent of it.
Oh I'm not saying that, I'm saying this is HN and most people posting here have the ability to take a step back from work and build a social life for the sake of their mental health. Working yourself literally to death isn't cool.
I also think it's fair to say that a lot of people are happy going to work and a lot of people really aren't. I feel like all of these threads are super passionate with one side trying to convince the (super unconvince-able) other side, which is why my responses are something like "get a situation together that works for you". "Convince millions of other people they're wrong and you're right about something they care about deeply" is a steeper climb.
> As much as others can deny, work is source of most people's friendships, relationships, mentorships, and other social interactions.
And other commenters assert that most people don't get those things at work.
I think it's easy to mistake our own experiences as being similar to "most people". We should probably try to avoid ascribing our own preferences as being the same as the majority's.
Also, in the case of something as personal as friendships, it doesn't actually matter what "most people" do.
Me three. I happen to have a strong friend group, but being single and living alone, the first few months of the pandemic were miserable from a solitary confinement standpoint. Even in recent years if I have to WFH for any reason, it's just the worst thing. Plus I'm just not productive when I'm working home alone.
I'm extremely thankful that my company is mostly comprised of people who prefer and thrive working in our one office. And no, I'm not using my coworkers as my friend group. Despite loving some of my work friends, my strongest friends are all outside the office. But the office environment and the people in it give me life.
When it comes time to look for a next job (if ever), the biggest requirement by far will be a working environment that's mostly, if not entirely, in office.
I'm 27 for reference, but I've felt this way ever since the start of my career.
It's funny how people (in this thread and in general when the topic comes) find infuriating the idea of making friends or just socialize at work, when most friendships starts because some people happen to spend 8h/day at the same school/university
> It's funny how people (in this thread and in general when the topic comes) find infuriating the idea of making friends or just socialize at work
I have yet to see someone find this idea "infuriating". What people find infuriating is people who want to drag everyone else back to the office so they can pretend we are friends.
> most friendships starts because some people happen to spend 8h/day at the same school/university.
"Most" feels very strong here. I have exactly 2 friends I am still in touch with from high school, unless you count social media connections. None from college, but admittedly, that was a pretty isolating time in my life due to the combined demands of work and school. Anecdata, but looking at my friend group, I'd say this is pretty representative. Which is a perfect example of why I advocate strongly for finding friends outside work. Turns out "we were forced into the same building" just isn't the basis for a lasting relationship people hope it is, and these often dry up when the constraint is removed.
I did find it annoying. The most annoying thing is I seen people doing then being treated as some kind of hard worker - but they were not. They did not produced more or anything. They just spent s lot of time socializing. And if you want to compete, you then have to stay late and move your socialization to work too.
Which has obvious impact on spouse kids and genuine friendships outside of work.
I would not mind it, if people socializing in work would not pretended their socialization is work.
I don’t see people finding the fact infuriating. People are upset because they feel like people are asking them to come in to the office because someone else wants to socialise.
Enforced socialisation doesn’t seem reasonable any more than denying that some people like to socialise at work. Two sets of people, two different needs.
I don't agree with the first sentence but it's just the feeling I have when reading some posts
I agree with the rest though, now that people had a taste of WFH, you can't force them to come to office just for the sake of socialization. My point was to acknowledge the issue that some people used to see work as a place to socialize just like high-school or university, and this way of socializing has been suddenly taken away from them with WFH, and there is nothing weird in that
Anecdata, but my friends in the 22 - 26 range don't feel this way. _But_, they have an active social life (football club together) and go out together every weekend or every other weekend. And they don't mind remote work. So I don't think it's an age issue, but more a socializing issue?
It probably would have been better if I hadn’t moved out of my parents house. For a brief moment I was living the dream in the city with a 5 minute walk to work, then I found myself remote working sitting on a Monday thinking about the dinner party with friends I’ve planned for Saturday for the weekly social interaction.
Your username is “gigachad” and you never considered the option of going to a gym on weekdays? Not going to say I have made lifetime friends at the gym but I have nice conversations with other regulars fairly often, it’s a good serotonin top-up.
Even works for finding romantic partners as well if you’re not creepy about it, in fact two regulars at my gym just got married.
There’s always the bar as well but of course alcohol-based socializing is not quite so healthy.
Yes I’ve spent significant time at the gym. It doesn’t fill the void of spending 8 hours working alone.
I have so many great memories of work from 6-3 years ago, but 3 to now is just a void, sitting at home on Teams calls. What makes things worse is my city has the oldest population in the country so there is hardly anything going on outside of work as well. I've made the decision to move to a bigger city where I can work in office with everyone along with every other benefit of a larger population.
That’s why I do classes, there’s usually way more social interaction, not to mention access to coaching (which I strongly believe many solo lifters would benefit from)
Not true of my friend and coworker group. You should think carefully of confounding factors before taking anecdotal data and extrapolating to something that applies to a much larger group.
100%, I'm sure there is far more than two of you. As mentioned I had the problem at the start of the pandemic and had to reflect on why work was the majority of my social life, and I think that reflection led me to a better place.
That turn of phrase was to meant to mean it's your problem to find a solution too, I should not have to change my behavior to accommodate you wishing for a bustling office. It was not meant to imply that you are alone in feeling that way and I apologize if it was taken that way. Anyone having a hard time with remote is in good company.
Again if they are available in your area I'd recommend checking out co-working spaces. They are great ways to work around others who feel the same as you, and, as a bonus won't come and go with the job. Part of the reason I feel so strongly that your core socialization shouldn't be work is because so many of those connections, even the ones you thought were close, will disappear with the job.
Was a me problem as well, I joined a local coworking space, started grad school, and joined a local community focused CrossFit.
I used to love the office, but I never see anyone there. Once is started focusing on local community activities things got better. I’d suggest adjusting your hours such that 5-8 pm are free for social activities. I usually start work at 10, break for dinner, and then do an hour or two before bed.
I can second the GP’s testimony, even though I’m not new to my city / have a decent social life outside work.
The only thing that fixed up was moving to a company that was mostly in-office, with a few people hybrid/remote. Being able to interact in person with people working on the same project as me was rejuvenating, and that might be understating it.
Same and same. Also, I hate how these days it's somehow shameful to even think about making friends at the workplace, that somehow work friends are work friends and can never be your "real friends". Looking at my parents' generation, most of their current friendships are people they met at work. In fact my parents met each other at work.
We go to school and make friends with other people at school. Why is it wild that you'd want to go to work and make friends with other people at work?
I've made plenty of real, meaningful, long-term friendships at work. But I also have solid friend groups of people I've met outside work. I value all of them, but I'm not going to give up the opportunity to have more flexible working arrangements because some people seem to think they can only make friends at work.
> We go to school and make friends with other people at school. Why is it wild that you'd want to go to work and make friends with other people at work?
"Want" and "need" aren't the same thing. We made friends at school because we had no choice. We were required to go to school, so of course the result is that we'd end up making friends there. But even as children, we had other opportunities to make friends: recreational sports leagues, boy/girl scouts, church groups (if that was your family's thing), volunteering, etc. Sure, I'm not saying those sorts of things could replace socialization at school.
But in the adult world, we've already been socialized, and we should be able to meet people outside of required, structured activities. It's a shame that some people perhaps didn't learn that as well as others, but I don't think that's a problem best solved by requiring unrelated people to come to an office, when remote work offers so much more flexibility and many more possibilities.
This is exactly the attitude that I'm protesting against. I don't agree that you can make even close to the same depth of friendship with someone who you see 2 hours a week, vs someone you see 8 hours a day 5 days a week for months. Work or school are really the only places where you can spend that much time with someone.
Then again, part of the problem is that people have forgotten what real friendships are like. "Friends" these days are just people you go to restaurants/clubs/concerts/vacations/hiking/camping with so that you don't have to go alone. That's not friendship. That's just people you hang out with.
It might cure the itch for a real friendship, but don't confuse it for one.
Look, I have plenty of close friends of many years who I see every single day. My home is essentially a community gathering spot at this point. My social calendar is as packed, if not more packed, than my work calendar. And for me personally there’s no overlap between the two. I am friendly with all of my colleagues, but I would not call them friends.
Forcing me to come into an office would not change that; I completely understand that those in a new city without a strong group of friends would benefit from going to the office— and at most jobs they’re already free to go in if they choose, to work alongside people who also _choose_ to go into the office.
Choose is the key word here. Work for me is a job first, and I’m not looking to make a best friend at work, so don’t force me to come in for that reason alone.
> I don't agree that you can make even close to the same depth of friendship with someone who you see 2 hours a week, vs someone you see 8 hours a day 5 days a week for months.
With the exception of fast food, I have never, ever spent this kind of time with a co-worker. I don't deny jobs like this exist, but it would certainly be the exception for all the tech jobs I've worked.
You’re assuming your feelings about how other people make meaningful relationships are universal. It can be true for you yet untrue for others. It seems a bit much to state it as fact.
Establishing a common goalpost is critical to even discussing this topic. I agree that "meaningful" is personal and subjective, but it's also incorrect to take the lowest common denominator definition of friendship as the valid one.
Work friends can 100% be real friends. There is nothing shameful about making these at work. There's also nothing about remote that makes it impossible. I know, I've done it.
That said I would be very, very careful about assuming your work friends are real friends. People are often surprised to discover which connections vanish when you quit working together. Hence why I strongly advocate for finding friends outside of work. Makes it much less likely you get laid off or leave your job one day and suddenly find yourself lonely.
Yeah, some of the people I work with I’ve known for 20 years! For me it’s weird to imagine spending a large chunk of your life with these people and not forming some sort of personal connection.
You go to school to learn so you can earn not make friends. You are paying tens of thousands a year to be taught by the best and you think it's for socializing. Think of all the people who cannot afford school is there no way for them to make friends.
“I was working all day.” Are you getting paid to work 16 hour days? If not then stop giving your employer free work. You’re devaluing your skill.
Go for a walk outside. Say hello to a stranger.
Volunteer at the library e.g. helping illiterate adults learn to read, or helping English as a second language speakers by chatting with them.
Go to a game store. They usually have open board/card/rpg games you can join. Some bars also have this.
Look online for activity groups in your area e.g. a photography group that walks around the city together. A gardening group. A sewing group. A painting group. Some of these might be advertised at your local library. Some might even meet there. Can’t find one your interested in? Make your own.
Look at public events in your city. Some of these are run by non-profits that would love if you volunteered to assist. Be careful about what you volunteer for though. Since you are looking for human interactions do not offer to help with their website, for example, since that is solitary work. These events need plenty of on-hand help.
same to your argument, why is it my problem that you live far away from work, that you need to hassle and lose hours of your day commuting? live right next to work. It's not our problem that it's a hassle to you. Same if you have kids .. etc. It's not our problem. It's comfortable for YOU to work remotely but it's more comfortable to ME to work from office. Comfort here is always subjective to the choice you prefer.
So we should all go through the hassle of relocating closer to work each time we switch jobs just because it makes it more comfortable for office minded people? You can try to swing the argument the other way but there's no getting around that the opposite side of yours doesn't involve other people doing extra things for other people's comfort-- requiring the office adds extra things to EVERYONE while allowing remote allows savings for the people who care to.
I don't want to relocate myself to be next to some office. I work on a computer specifically because I can do it from wherever feels right to me.
You're right that it isn't your problem that it's a hassle for me: because that mindset is making it MY problem when I don't want it to be. That argument is an incredibly selfish one.
One is you _forcing_ me to do something (come into the office). The other is me not forcing you to do anything. The company is the one making you stay at home.
Sure, we all go back to work in an office. Hurray! Is the company going to force everyone there to be best buddies with you as well? What if nobody in the office likes you? Is it now company policy to be friends with everyone?
Gen Z and A are going to have serious problems. Work and School are biggest sources of friends. The two things they missed out on. I doubt many friends were made in the chat box of an online class.
School goes on until you're 18 or so (and even later if you go to university). Two-ish years of online schooling certainly hurt a bit, but is a small percentage of available childhood socialization time.
It’s so many small things chipping away at young people’s social lives, car dependant design, remote schooling, remote work, the loss of public spaces and facilities, social media, etc. We can see the trend, young people are constantly getting more lonely and isolated, but we only make changes that make it worse.
Actually I’ve seen kids share Roblox usernames through zoom chat boxes and then socialize via zoom calls while they play an online game on their iPads… it is totally possible to socialize, it just starts online now
I don't know you; maybe you don't desire interaction as much, or maybe you just didn't take the time to really digest what the parent said.
For many people, it is really hard to be new in a city. Some people have _no idea_ how to make friends out of college. With remote work this becomes so much harder.
This doesn't necessarily mean that _you_ should be forced to go to the office as a solution. I'm just saying that this can be a really big problem, especially if your team is full of people in a new city.
Not the OP on this thread. It looks like they were just sharing their feelings/experiences without proposing any policy changes. I don't see a reason for anyone to adopt a tone.
Relating to this a lot. I've barely had much in person social interaction since 2020, where college for me ended up remote for the pandemic. Was a relief when classes went back in person a year later, but too little too late for me to build up any meaningful social interactions there, and now I'm in a remote job to the opposite end of the country (and other parts of the world with even more disparate timezones), so I'm pretty much in a similar boat of no meaningful in person interaction.
I like technology as an auxiliary means of communicating with people, but having pretty much 95-100% of my interactions occur over texting and calling (people don't even usually bother to turn on their cameras) has been a personal hell, and honestly has soured my opinion of the entire internet. Beyond just work, what few personal relationships I do have at this point are usually also remote, so actually spending real life time with people is this far distant tertiary form of interacting, when it's the natural bloody thing we're evolved to do as a species.
Now you have companies like Meta investing in the metaverse "future" where we sit in VR headsets, trade crypto for fake digital goods, have romantic relationships with virtual avatars, and sit in virtual offices so our twenty-poly character models can discuss around a fake whiteboard. I just want to be around people again.
I have every sympathy for you--social contact is a basic human need. But I see this argument here and there and I feel like I have to point out that this is an argument for you to get social contact, not to make millions of people commute to/from work every day.
Getting on the social on-ramp is hard, especially if you live in a culture where overwork is praised and normalized. I had that problem too (I moved from the US to the Netherlands and this was one of the major reasons why). I super suggest taking a step back from work--it's clearly keeping you from doing other things that are critical for your mental health--and then using that time to invest in other parts of your life.
The problem is that the solution is entirely within your grasp, but you've decided that the only way to solve your problem is through in-office socialization.
Find co-workers who are local and suggest meeting for lunch or dinner on occasion. Hopefully you've developed some level of rapport through video calls and chats so this won't feel weird to you. Your company/team should be organizing regular get-togethers anyway. If not, they are failing at doing remote work. I hesitate to say "find a new company where they are better at this", but that's better than "require everyone to come into an office to fix your social life".
Beyond that, don't center your social life around work. Go to meetups dedicated to topics and activities you're interested in. Just get out and walk!
> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life.
That seems to be a problem you've created for yourself, and it's a bit selfish to want to require everyone else to go to an office in order to make your choices work for you.
Stop working all day. Set boundaries with your employer. If the maker space really closes by 5pm, negotiate a more flexible work schedule where you get to take a 2-hour break (or something) around lunch or in the afternoon so you can go to the maker space, but then you work later into the evening, or get up earlier in the morning to start work. Also, I'm not sure how any of this would have changed if you were working in an office: the maker space would still close early, and you still would be working all the time and be unable to get there during their open hours.
If you want to people-watch, take a 30-minute walk in the morning and in the evening, to replace what a commute would be like.
> I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.
This is a bit much, frankly. If you really truly are so inflexible that you can't imagine a good life without an office job, find a new job that has an office you can go to! This isn't rocket science. These jobs exist. Stop advocating making life worse for all of the people whose lives have been markedly improved by the extra opportunities for remote work, just because you can't figure out your own life.
My story is very similar to yours. Used to be ok with remote work but then I had a break up last year and need to get back to the office. Unfortunately all the tech jobs are in other cities of Australia so I can only get remote jobs.
Made the decision this month to pack up everything and move to Melbourne so I can work in the office among other things.
I'm from Adelaide. PT is effectively non existent and urban sprawl is worse. Melbourne is like a utopian society to me. I'm quite happy to live in an apartment near the CBD and take the train in. It blows my mind they come every 5 minutes, I'm used to trains coming every 30 minutes or just not running at all half the time.
Reading about your struggles made me reflect on my twenties in tech and what a day to day looked like. Most mornings would start on a tube commuting into central london, getting to see how people dress, was anyone attractive on my route? what music should I listen to on the way? Then getting into the office, I worked with with engineer that was a developer at roscosmos and escaped the soviet union. We would walk the streets of london and discuss what problems we were going to solve that day and have a morning espresso while doing it. The city was always buzzing with traders and office workers. Work was tough but I had a lunch outside to look forward to with my team. If it was thursday or friday most of us would head to a pub for a late boozy lunch or end up at bricklane for a curry and the night just went on and on.
Amazing time and when I compare that to the last few years of remote work it cant even come close to the interactions and experiences I gained during that time. My day to day has been wakeup, grab a coffee, walk into my office and start responding to emails. I then try to squeeze in time to walk my dog and then get back to continue more meetings and zoom calls. Once the day ends I'm pretty exhausted and try to get outside to ride my bike or go to the gym. I physically interact with less than 2 people a day. My wife and the barista at the local coffee shop.
Are you me? Jesus
I took a regular job in January 2020 because I was over being a contract developer working at home. No luck now..
I agree fully with you. I'm in my 30s though everything else the same. I would definitely feel oppositely if I had a partner and kids (like my brother) but I don't.
People saying it's a "you" problem are missing the big picture. For a lot of people, the workplace is a primary context in their life.
I'm in my early twenties and still studying, but working as well, for around 15hours a week. Fully remote. Much worse, the only human interaction I have during this time is a weekly 30min team meeting.
It's two days a week for me. Mostly alone, just sitting in my bedroom and working on my own tiny project.
I'm lucky because I do have social interaction in the university, but I feel just how much of any job-related motivation this kills. If I would be full time amployed, this would be driving me into a depression as well.
I'm sure that you will be able to find some nice people to hang out with and talk to.
This is actually a symptom of a much larger problem with our society as it exists today, which is that we've systematically dismantled all our communities and support systems outside of work and the (immediate) family.
Humans are social creatures, and for the vast majority of human history, we've existed in communities of various shapes. Evolutionarily, psychologically, and even physiologically, it's not healthy for us to be going to work for 8 hours—with or without people—then retreating to a home with just our immediate families 5 days a week, (nearly) 52 weeks a year.
The shift in zoning after WWII to heavily prioritize hard separation between residential and commercial areas (motivated, in no small part, by racism) is a major culprit in the creation of this new lifestyle, and disruption of previous forms of order. (Though I believe the first big shift was probably the Industrial Revolution.)
I don't have much of a solution to offer in the short term, because it's not a short-term kind of problem. However, I do know that there's a movement called Intentional Communities[0] that's supposed to be working on counteracting it; perhaps you could look them up and see if there's anything in your area.
Blaming the fact that you don’t have any friends or romantic partners or a “life in this city” on remote working is absolutely absurd. Relying on a corporate office to bring you those things is most likely going to end in disappointment. Get a job that doesn’t demand your entire wakeful life on this earth and find some hobbies you can share with people where you’re not constrained by the weirdness of office politics and culture.
Your feelings are shared by many others our age. Friends at work are important, especially if you're living alone. I live alone in a city with friends within reach, but only having friends outside of work is not enough social interaction for me.
Consider how much social time there is in high school and college. There was barely a moment to be alone. Classes are full of discussion, meals are eaten together, and shooting the shit with siblings or roommates fills in all the other time. If you forego social interaction during work hours, I don't see how the math adds up to get back to the baseline from high school and college.
It sounds like you have an office to go to even though your team doesn't come in often. This is the case for me too, but luckily I'm at a big enough company where there are people my age on other teams. At first, barely anyone came in, but someone has to break the deadlock so I kept coming in every day regardless. Fast forward a year and there is a group of 20-somethings that come in every day. I've formed some of the best friendships of my life here. I recommend going into the office every day even if it's going to be empty. It's a good routine anyway to get out of the house.
While I don't have any personally, I'd also recommend housemates. A lot of my friends from work have housemates and I feel like it's an easy way to build a large friend group since you can share each other's friends. It especially seems to help those who are new to the city and don't have a friend group yet. Your housemates can also easily become your friends!
I really sympathize with your situation. You're simply asking for what used to be normal to return. Don't lose hope - there are so many of us like you and we just need to find each other.
Just wanted to say I relate completely. Moved a year before pandemic to a completely new place straight out of school and struggled making friends. COVID ruined what little social circle I had started to form.
If you (or anyone else reading this) are in the SF Bay Area in a similar situation and are looking for potential friends, hit me up at my profile email
I've been thinking the same, for me, it's also the work hours were to get ahead I have to do 60 hours on the business side AND homework to get more skills. Even just a part-time job or something to have a mental reset, money would be tight but every angle I see it could be easier to be happier.
I have no opinion on whether or not remote is good (I work alone, at home, and I'm fine with it, but I also understand the draw of office life).
I would strongly suggest volunteer work, as a way to socialize. Geeks have extremely valuable skills, and can give a great deal, to most volunteer efforts.
In my case, I have been involved in a fellowship, for my entire adult life, and it richly satisfies my socialization needs. I also do a great deal of tech volunteer work for it.
I wish you luck, but I'm not sure that returning to the office would fix things.
I was a remote worker for an earlier part of my 20s as a consultant.
What you have to do is you have to be proactive about your social activities and find a thing that allows you to do that. I ended up starting my own social group off of reddit. That helped a lot and taught me a lot about groups.
Couchsurfing was great for the social aspect. Another thing to note: Just because you are around coworkers it doesn't mean you'll relate to them well. Some have a tendancy to stab you in the back.
I just moved a thousand miles from school to a new state. I live near work, which is about 30 miles from the nearest city (no public transit to speak of). If there's any spots for young people to socialize nearby, I haven't been able to find them.
My long-term girlfriend has a career near where we went to school, so many weekends I'm traveling there, or she is here. Both of which are great, but neither of which are conducive to making friends in this new place.
I'm really excited about the job, and I'm a late sleeper. I tend to work 11am to around 9pm.
I've had some roommates, but they've been pretty uninterested.
Luckily, work is fully in-person, and it's a very young office. The first few months were rough, but I've finally made friends with people, I had a barbecue, we went skiing, went to see a co-workers band perform.
My personal situation could be a lot worse, but it could have also been a lot better. Compared to the last year of my Masters program, the adjustment period was very painful, and I think not having human interaction would have made it worse.
-- Though, (and I'm just realizing it now), if the job were remote, I could have just stayed in the part of the country where I had many friends. Sadly, I work with hardware, so that's probably not going to happen.
I feel ya, try being a remote area drillers offsider. Week after week, in the dark on night shift. No radio to even hear another humans voice because there isn't any reception in the middle of nowhere. No one to talk to. Hella wrecks your mental health.
Makes you appreciate the jebus out of f2f hands on trades. Stuff where your actually involved with people and the results of your work aren't a constant reminder of how detached from society you truly are.
Similar happening to me as well. I thought remote work will bring me freedom of time and place but spending 2 years at home without any interaction with outside people made me a negative and depressed person for a few months.
But I somehow found the balance by going to a co-working space, going to the gym and playing any physical sport.
PS: I live with 6 people but it still happened to me.
From the employers PoV imagine a world where you have an influx of junior employees and interns. They need a higher level of structure and need the social outlet of work. If you're trying to build up this talent, it seems easier to do in the structure of an office. Imagine a junior employee even potentially moving somewhere for a job?
Currently, the economy is not aggressively hiring at the junior level. But this could change. What does that world look like when junior employees go into a fully isolated and remote setup? Either we need a structured central place for supporting those employees or society needs to solve these social and economic problems in a completely different way.
Remote work is easier for senior employees with families or a more established life. I think many here probably fit into this category. After even 4-5 years of life in an office, you probably lose the need to regularly see employees. But being junior / early on, it's a VERY tough road to be fully remote.
I too would like some in-person time with colleagues, but I also know that with an open plan office it can be so noisy that I know that nothing will get done.
Prior to 2019 a well used phrase was "I need to work from home so that I can get stuff done" and we all understood it. A lot of actions have been taken over the years to ensure that we know who the boss is, Taylorism is the cause and the boss gets an office. We have had decades of research showing that open plan offices increase sick days by 30%, and reduce productivity.
Unfortunately you are right at this inflection point where those of us who have suffered the worst of it are fed up and want change. The best we can do is work from home.
Have you told other members of your team this? I don't need to see my friends every day to know they are my friends, but would once a week or fortnight help, even if it was to pair with one other person?
> Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.
You expect to find a girlfriend on the job? I don't mean it as a snark. But in office means that work and communiting takes even more of your life. Unless she comes from the job, which is unlikely in male dominated profession, being with team won't get you girlfriend.
I've been in the same place you are now. I completely agree with the need for a healthy routine to be able to keep depression at bay and not having a environment to socialize robs you of key experiences we all need to have in our youths in order to be well adjusted later in life.
Having said that, you're in a great place to make a few key changes that might help! I moved to another country and learnt a new language and a whole new culture when I was in the same place as you!
Perhaps that's not a option for you, but maybe you could travel to a new city for a week or two! Trial out a few places and see what fits you. It takes a bit of effort and persistence, at the cost of routine, but having a fresh start might be the thing that gets you out of this.
Edit: You might want to look up Croissant to go and meet other remote co workers, there's a fair few of us around the world ;)
I am there 100% too. And yet every time I bring it up somewhere like reddit I get responses like “just deal with it, I’m not coming into the office just because you are lonely.” Chances are that these are not the people that I would miss in an office environment in general. I probably wasn’t having fun office conversations with them.
I need my habits and routines, and I just don’t make myself stick to the routines when I stay home. Less of a reason to shower at the same time or at all, less of a reason to take walking breaks during work hours.
It has come down to me being able to handle a bullshit job when I like the people I work with and see them often enough to where we are inbetween work friends and real friends. But a bullshit job where my coworkers aren’t even interesting or nice to talk to? I’m just not gonna want to work with them ever again.
> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day.
Benefit of remote work is generally that its flexible and you can schedule time in the day to get out and do things than otherwise the usual office grind would prevent.
Your employer shouldn't care that you're out at noon but working at 7pm instead as long as the work is getting done.
Sounds like you also have boundary issues where you're working all the time and killing yourself, quite voluntarily, for your job. You should consider just stopping doing that. You probably won't fall behind.
If you have remote work and a rigid schedule like you're constantly oncall and dying because of the work, then find better and more human remote work.
I'm the exact opposite way - I want a remote job but I can't find one. I'd be happiest in an office of my own making with the hours of my own choosing, and I'm very good at creating boundaries between work and life at home. I loath having to sit in a cube, with people that might stop by and break my flow of concentration with small talk (What even is small talk? How's the weather? How about them dodgers? What?)
But I don't know anyone who would hire me to do remote work. Nor how to find one reliably. I'm getting depressed at the thought that I might have to go work in a physical box again.
I left the tech sector because of the same issue, although I have a family and friends. I'm poorer and my situation is quite unstable. But I no longer have to endure this depressing loneliness during work hours.
As someone that has worked in the office and now from home I wouldn't consider making "friends" at the office to be a substitute for making friends outside of work.
Check some of the event type apps such as meetup, they usually have quite a few fun things on there with cool people to meet doing all sorts of hobbies.
Then again, it is true that tech can be quite lonely and solitary work, so as you mentioned a career shift may be in order.
It isn't just you, but also consider that this kind of situation is somewhat common now and probably won't last
> And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.
If you spending time alone is torture, is it torture because of the loneliness or is it torture because you aren't at peace with yourself?
I get that connection is needed, but if you're in a situation where it's inconvenient or hard to find you shouldn't be attacking yourself because of this
I think this is a transitional phase. If remote work takes over, there will be a rise of co working spaces for mates to work in together. Young people will use them to find friends and partners, and young parents will use them to share babysitting shifts with other young parents.
That will actually be better for social life, because people won't need to lose touch when they change jobs.
People were stuck at home by the pandemic, not by remote work.
> Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office.
This may sounds crazy but I actually like to go to the office when I'm team isn't there! The place is lively and there are other people who aren't in my team, and I prefer to interact with them (perhaps it's less stressful as we're less likely to talk about ongoing team work, or they won't require my assistance).
As a lifetime introvert that doesn't really care for human interaction I have never really thought about this perspective before. I have worked remote for years and commuting all the way to another building just to do the same thing I was already doing at home would feel like a pointless hoop to jump through at this point. I wonder how many people demanding that everyone return to the office are just lonely?
Thanks for your very honest comment. At my office we’re hybrid and people oscillate between the home and in-office for the same reasons as you - sometimes it’s just nice to hang out with people, even if you’re working.
I would hope you wouldn’t have to abandon your career and maybe a little job hopping is in order. I don’t think the world will go full remote, even if that’s personally the way I enjoy it.
While my reaction isn't the same as yours, I'm in roughly the same position. You didn't mention it so I wanted to ask, have you tried going to coworking spaces? That seems like a solution for the "let the people who want to work at home work at home, let people who want company have company" issue... I haven't myself yet so I'm curious.
Maybe try switching to another field in engineering - software development is certainly the most remote friendly discipline. Mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, there are lots of great on-site careers and they are a much better use of your existing skills
From those of us with kids, many just want to do our jobs and get a paycheck. Work lets us live, we do not live to work. We are not looking for some third place or a dating situation.
Go to a climbing gym or get a dog or something if you want to meet people.
I'm self-employed in eCommerce but what you said was 100% true. Best thing for my mental health over the past year was getting a dedicated office space and a couple of staff members. Just no longer feel alone when doing my job.
> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day.
This is the problem in my opinion. Not the fact that you were working all day, but generally that our work now bleeds into personal lives or leaves no time for it.
Your priorities are all wrong if you live to work. You need to make a life unconnected to work as you might be fired any day. People I work with are coworkers, nothing more.
Why get paid while your socialising with people in a work environment when you can isolate yourself at home and talk to randoms on the street or join clubs at your own expense and time. Friends can be made anywhere BUT work now apparently.
Why do kids need to go back to school? They can sit at a desk at home. They can make friends elsewhere and they don't need to go to school for physical activity. They can do that in any club, group meet, sport, hobby whatever. Schools for learning after all, not making friends.
I tried office work and enjoyed meeting coworkers. Made some friends there. I'm working from home and like it so much though. I somehow live my best life alone during the day for work and see people several times in the week outside work, but I personally think that's a great way to both avoid commute time. I live in a city where I have a lot of friends, and it was always clear to me that remote work would work for me only if I could meet people regularly. I also practice piano, and I am in a choir with a hundred people that allows me to constantly meet people. I need to see people and would not like spending days without seeing anybody.
You can't bet only on work for meeting people. It can work by luck, but an ex coworker of mine recently left my ex-company and the city, because he was only seeing coworkers and didn't manage to meet people in the city, they ended up feeling lonely, aka work from the office didn't fix their loneliness. It's also a matter of social skills, and joining groups, and stuff like this if you don't have an established social group yet.
I also think remote work is not for everybody, and preferences might evolve during someone's life. I guess there will be office-first companies for people who prefer being at the office, remote-first companies for us preferring remote work, and hybrid ones if they manage to pull if off. That's very hard but somehow my current company is very successful in this, but you will need to have remote-first habits in such an hybrid setting, like using the chat / mail / whatever even between people at the office at the same time for many things.
So I have four pieces of advice for you, each one can suffice:
- move to a city where you already have friends - make sure it allows you to meet new people too.
- join clubs, do stuff outside work. Work is a mean to have a good life, don't spend all of your life at work, that's nonsense, unless it's absolutely what you love and you are happy, but that's not your case
- join an office-first or hybrid company. You don't need to stay at a remote company if you don't like it
- you can still be at a remote company, but go to a coworking space. Try it out! I have a coworker who does this. You can have a routine, meet the same people everyday and have breaks / eat lunch with them, etc exactly like coworkers, just that you don't work on the same things. Not the same thing as working at the same place with people who you work with but I guess that can be enriching / rewarding too in its own way.
Finding a coworking space was my plan B if I figured I didn't like working from home in the end. My company would be willing to pay for it. Hasn't happened yet but I personally think that's a great way to both avoid commute time, see people during the day, address the loneliness of remote work, and not be limited by the choice of whatever companies are near you.
Good luck, I hope you will find a solution that works out for you!
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
In the before times, good remote companies would be intentional about having regular company meetings in a single location. That is a good alternative. But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?
Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020. Now I’m not an SM and largely work independently, but I love being able to walk to the office every day (30 minute commute). I used to do hybrid but now I’m really enjoying the separation and am loathe to work from home, except on weekends.
I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
"There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes."
I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that directly leads to any of the productivity gain that the anti-remote crowd would like you to believe.
I scored most (if not all) of my career-defining opportunities from hallway convos after a meeting, or chatting while waiting for coffee to brew, so YMMV.
So we should require that everyone be in an office, so that people like you can get their career-defining opportunities? Maybe many of us would be fine making that trade-off: fewer opportunities for career-defining opportunities in exchange for the elimination of a commute, more-comfortable working arrangements, and a much more flexible work schedule.
Not everything in life is about career advancement.
I think people who wants to work from home should be able to. I'm doing hybrid personally as well now, it's great for keeping my chronic pain under control. And I enjoy coming in couple days a week to a quieter office (as lots are doing hybrid/mixed wfh as well).
Internet has conditioned us to think that people can only have extreme beliefs, and any disagreement means their opinion must be the polar extreme opposite of mine. I can simultaneously appreciate opportunities I've got from socializing with people in a fully-WFO setting while also appreciating benefits of WFH ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why go off one example and pretend it's the whole topic? They were just saying it's easily possible to have meaningful conversations, as a counter to the previous comment.
The problem is that for all these alleged career-defining opportunities to happen, you need a bunch of people in an office. That means that people need to be required to go to an office.
I explicitly did not say "everyone should work from home", using words like "many of us", so right, "that's not what [I] said", and you're just making up an argument where none exists.
Yes, and when people going to the office get more opportunities, more advancement and higher compensation, he/she will be complaining for making "less money for the same work". Or they will start complaining about how unfair is that those opportunities only arise in the office and demand that there will be "procedures" for them to be available remotely.
Long ago I accepted that if I want better work-life balance and more flexible arrangements, there would be consequences. In my post above I explicitly called it out as a trade-off: I am totally fine with lower pay and fewer promotions if it means I get to live more of my life outside work.
If you're not ok with that, that's your choice to make: find jobs that give you those opportunities, and tilt your work-life balance toward work. Hell, you should be happy that I have more flexibility in my working arrangements and can make this trade-off: less competition for you to get what you want.
I commend you for having this approach. I'm biased from my experience from colleagues that got annoyed when they realized they couldn't have their cake and eat it too.
Not speaking for GP, but as far as I’m concerned I’m happy to stay far far far away from office politics games and getting paid less than those who do while having half or a quarter of their workloads.
> Not everything in life is about career advancement.
But you see, all the decision makers about the RTO are the sort of people who would be obsessed with career development. So they would be very biased against this sentiment. In an employer's market, they have all the power now.
This seems wild to me. It seems like the company and managers are doing something wrong if all your advancement is coming from random unofficial chats.
Beyond a certain level, career advancement happens only by doing work which is much more than just delivering technical projects. That level is typically attained in 4-6 years by a competent software engineer.
(Yes, I am aware of a few exceptions who attain "fellow" or equivalent levels, but they are the exceptions to my observation and such positions are anyway <1% of the technical workforce; not everyone can be a fellow).
If you’re not just a code monkey than those chats are great for coming up with new ideas and fleshing them out over time. But hey you can also just be a code monkey that completes projects assigned to them. To each their own I guess.
Maybe what you describe works at some places or for specific people. Many companies will ignore your ideas. Your title is code monkey and that's all you do - shut up and listen to us important people. Some managers are very threatened by their subordinates, or are unimaginative. The business side generally wants what they want. God forbid you suggest some new approach.
I think you're missing the point, this is not about the split between management and engineering. Code monkey is here somebody who accepts assignment and produces code, without having a lot of understanding for the larger whole.
And that's mostly what you get with this attitude that doesn't value any meetings / communication which doesn't relate directly to one's work.
But the organizations don't want to have code monkeys (typically), because to produce value, people can't just churn out code to complete assignments, they need to also understand the context, be able to identify made up problems, be able to design the most minimal solution covering the business needs etc. That requires understanding, certain alignment, communication.
I don't see anyone arguing that communication isn't a critical part of working.
> And that's mostly what you get with this attitude that doesn't value any meetings / communication which doesn't relate directly to one's work.
But all the things you've listed in the following paragraph are totally communications that relate directly to one's work. What is the case that unrelated communications are also essential?
Technical folks simply cannot do their jobs without solid working relationships, and those are not as well formed digitally.
Remote work will continue to reduce over the next couple of years. If you don’t have a real reason for being at home during the work day, expect to be back in the office soon.
"Technical folks simply cannot do their jobs without solid working relationships, and those are not as well formed digitally."
Any real data on this? All the data our company has shows increased performance during WFH, such as an increase in deliveries and decrease in cycle time. So even if it's not as well formed, it seems it's formed sufficiently.
I think you focusing on delivery and cycle time is kind of emblematic of my point; none of that matters if you ship the wrong thing, and don’t correct over time, but to you that’s where the conversation ends.
That’s not where it actually ends, however. How do you know what to work on? How do you know if you built a profitable thing? Being remote lets you ignore those things in ways that are harder to do in person.
Hybrid is probably here to stay, but “remote first” was a pandemic only thing.
"I think you focusing on delivery and cycle time is kind of emblematic of my point; none of that matters if you ship the wrong thing, and don’t correct over time, but to you that’s where the conversation ends."
Lol don't tell me what I think. Those are the metrics that our management uses. That's their focus, and are pervasive in the industry. Sure, you can talk about shipping the wrong thing. What's the metric called for that, or would it fall under rework? Our rework has not gone up. There's no noticeable increase in failed projects either.
"Being remote lets you ignore those things in ways that are harder to do in person."
No, it really doesn't. These same ritual and due diligence conversations take place remotely. Or maybe your org doesn't have good procedures?
If you don’t know why or how your management figures out what to build or if what you’re building is what they need, and don’t see how that’s related to remote work, there’s not much I can do to help you.
What are you even going on about? Discussing what to build isn't what we are talking about here. Mor to mention, my management doesn't talk about that. The business side does. And this topic is covered via meeting. Whether those meeting are remote or not do not matter. Now please stop trolling this topic.
Not trolling, I just know in difficult conversations it’s sometimes helpful to restate what the other person is saying to try and figure out the disconnect.
I mean sure, but there’s no real way of knowing what you’ve left on the table by working remotely.
And I say this as someone who was also working remotely before the pandemic. I’m always wary of people who refuse to acknowledge the downsides of ideas they support…
There's not, but I do know what's on my table: a career doing things I find reasonably stimulating that provides me more material comfort than I know what to do with. I am doubtful these hallway conversations I keep hearing about could provide me anything else that I would want, and I'm definitely not willing to give up my freedom and flexibility just to find out.
It's not really yours to give up, is my point. You're not looking at this from the employer's perspective, and it's making it hard for you to understand that what you want is only part of the equation.
It’s not some solvable, technocratic equation, it’s a conflict between labor and management. I don’t look at it from my employers’ perspectives because I don’t care about their outcomes.
If I expect my employer to care about my outcomes, 9 times out of 10 I'll be disappointed, no matter what I'm doing or how much I'm caring about theirs.
You may have had a better experience. If so, then, with all sincerity, I congratulate you on your luck; I bear no ill will to those who happen to find genuinely good employers.
Just don't take your experiences as typical and use them to argue that the rest of us should act as if our experiences either didn't happen, or aren't common.
Tell me again how long have you been working? For as long as human society has existed, advancements came from in-person connections which were fostered by these random unofficial chats.
If you expect anything else, you might expect humans to not be like humans.
Norwich Union (Aviva) the insurance company have a system called The Wall iirc (been over decade).
Its a free for all for asking questions, sending messages, making unofficial FYI notes, its an attempt to document those conversations that would have otherwise taken place between individuals. Everyone from the top down has read/write access. Main objective to document those conversations, so nothing gets missed, like people being otherwise engaged in meetings/phone calls. Self Censorship takes place because everyone can view it, reduces staff harassment problems.
Management doesn't have it together, but they do make suggestions about taking on certain projects etc that are good for your career and at least talk about plans to getting to the next level (sometimes).
How much of your working life was in person vs remote?
I agree most of my 'big breaks' were face to face, that was due to the point I was in my career at that time. I've still had some great progression during remote working times - sometimes you just need to make these things happen - contacting someone just for a chat if that is what you need, turning up to online meetings early to spend a little time chatting before the proper meeting, or asking specific people if they have time to stay on.
I really think half the problem is that we aren't yet used to the new rules of engagement, and are still figuring out what feels right. But opportunity is still there.
Not really. I'm very introverted and not good with strangers, actually in the process of getting an autism diagnosis right now.
But I really enjoy socializing with folks with similar interests (e.g., tech), and I work with a lot of neurodivergent colleagues which puts less of a strain on my social battery as I don't have to be "normal"---we're all weird and it's fine.
Still, my social battery drains quickly nonetheless, I tend to have to leave after hanging out for an hour or two.
Moreover, personally I'd prefer it stays this way. When I take a break and go to the kitchen to get a coffee, it is also a part of mental hygiene - I need to clear my mind as it needs some rest, too. So the last thing I want is someone bothering me about a merge request or some planned feature. A weekend trip, on the other hand, is perfectly fine.
Hear hear. I worked at a place that pair programmed all the time (I liked it that way—it's why I joined the company) but it meant that I always had to eat lunch at my desk. To me it's crazy to be talking all morning then talk all through lunch then talk all afternoon! But to each their own.
Completely disagree. I probably have 3 or 4 of these spontaneous conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen a day when I’m in the office. It might start with ‘what are you working on’ and branch off from there, it’s not just small talk.
I have a ton of informal conversations with people I don't have formal meetings with, just because we happen to go to the coffee machine at the same time or happen to go eat lunch at the same time. Some of those conversations are non-job-related (which is valuable, since strong social connections with colleagues are valuable), but a lot end up being on job stuff. I end up just informally talking with sales people, customer service people, managers, etc, and hearing about stuff from their perspective or the stuff that's on their minds is incredibly useful.
I would probably say that 95% of my creative problem solving type work happened in unstructured conversations like hallway conversations. A lot of value was definitely lost there.
Some of my best ideas that ended up being company changing started as a conversation walking to lunch with colleagues.
Initially these ideas were just undeveloped thoughts and I would never dream about booking a meeting to present them. Having a chance to develop them in a casual conversation might have been the difference between successfully building the thing and not doing it at all.
I love working from home but miss the unstructured collaboration.
> Initially these ideas were just undeveloped thoughts and I would never dream about booking a meeting to present them.
Your company doesn't have informal communications channels for this sort of thing? Team/Slack/whatever? In every place I've worked for the last 15-20 years (it was different before that), such informal "watercooler" talks have never happened in person, whether everyone was in the office or not. It was always over electronic communications.
The reason for this is that it's less disruptive to other productive work.
I have had a lot of interesting conversations with colleagues from other teams while grabbing a coffee. Sometimes it's just meaningless small talk about the weekend but sometimes we talk about work and help each other find solutions to problems, or realize we should collaborate. And even if it's just small talk, making those kinds of connections can make it a lot easier to get in touch with them in the future.
What? This is a crazy anecdote. I believe you but understand that's not the norm. I have had many and know if others having many as well.
Companies that are all remote will survive but they won't thrive and in a competitive market will lose to those that are in person.
I say that after running a company that was one or the other at various times. The periods when we were all in person (constantly, not as a special event) is when real innovative progress was made.
> I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry
Exactly, and how many of those conversations are wasted on nothing? Sure, there's a social element to it, so how about we highlight that aspect and not some "lightbulb" moment that derives from small talk.
there’s no point adding 2+ hours of commuting to my day for what could be a video call.
I don’t really understand why many commenters here are expressing a sentiment that you can’t get to know someone digitally. Some of the best people in my life were met online, both personally and professionally.
You don't get coincidental conversations between people of different department with no set agenda through a zoom meeting.
I'm not saying it's worth 2+ hours of commuting. And honestly, I think it's bullshit that employers expect commuting time to be unpaid; if having people in the office is something they consider valuable, they should be paying for that commute time. But I reject the idea that those conversations have no value.
I accept the idea that those conversations have value. I reject the idea that they can only happen in person. I have no data on this, just my own personal experience and observations over the years.
The problem is that it is obvious how useless and misconfigured our entire corporate management structures are with remote work so the easiest solution is to go back to the office.
The pandemic was a fun exercise in forced, real efficiency but we need to get back to the Dilbert cartoon version of life because the Dilbert cartoon characters call the shots and put a ton of time into becoming those characters.
The most meaningful collaborations I have seen in my 20+ years of work involved a small group of 3 to 5 people huddled around a whiteboard. I can make a list of top 10 collaborations I recollect and none of them were remote interactions. In-person somehow made the collaboration easier.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.
What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?
I have seen "meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen", and I do find Zoom calls kind of irritating. I think the real issue is that this tech has exposed the fact that urban planning in the US is awful unless you're in New York City or something similar.
People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense.
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
Looking back though, I think the important thing is not physical proximity, it's conversation without an agenda. If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk: grousing about frustrations, daydreaming about improvements, comparing notes, etc. I think these things are important (not to everyone, I get that some people despise small talk, but to some people). If you only communicate in formal meetings, you can end up with 6 people independently realizing Greg's data lake proposal is doomed to fail, but not speaking up because they each feel like everyone else is on board.
And it hadn't occurred to me before this moment, but the way to get this back without returning to an office seems obvious: pairing and mobbing. That's the only time since I started WFHing that I've had or seen others having these kind of un-directed conversations with coworkers: during downtime in a mob. I need to think about this a bit more...
> If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk
Whats stopping people from scheduling “shoot the shit” of coffee calls though? That’s what I’ve seen many do since the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you describe: people vent, talk about what happened during meetings, etc.
I hate online coffee chats and love workplace conversation. Coffee chats have an overloaded amount of assumptions — conversation should start off personal, last for x minutes, make you feel closer to a teammate.
This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that can be about anything. It can differ based on the person and your relationship.
Our director started scheduling a big group video meeting with all the people that started since 2020 just as a chat room. But he did absolutely 0 planning or conversation guiding or anything outside of "so who wants to talk about something?" and we would just sit there in silence.
It completely feels like the scene from Arrested Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".
Yeah I'm not keen on the organized chats. We did those pre pandemic and I got nothing from them. Casual conversation has to be adhoc, whether it's in person or by call.
Why does it require a lot of planning? I do this, usually it's "bored, coffee break?" "Yep" or I ask a question on slack and the other party says "call?"
My team kept a Webex room open at the start of every morning for just turning up and chatting in; it would generally stay open in the background until everyone had left for meetings. It certainly worked well for us. Sometimes people just worked silently through it, but usually there was lots of chat.
We don't have something like this (except for the bullshitting that usually occurs in the last few minutes of standup) but I'm thinking we should try it.
Not at all the same. Most people will just go back to their own stuff behind the camera. Also, Zoom is EXHAUSTING for a lot of people. You're talking at a monitor, not a person!
If you're allowed the "exhaustion" excuse, then I'm certainly allowed the same excuse for not going into the office! In-person interaction is EXHAUSTING for a lot of people. You're trying to absorb dozens more nonverbal cues at once!
An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether you're in the meeting or at home.
I am a lot more open in honest in person than I am on Slack, because I know everything I say on Slack is logged and can bite me in the ass years down the line.
We have a very strict Slack retention policy, both DM's and messages in user created private channels self destruct in 7 days with no possibility of retrieval. Public channels and designated private channels can have a longer lifetime. And they really are gone, a VP tried to retrieve some 2 week old messages and was unable to.
So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private channel during the week that the messages are alive -- probably less than the chance of the person you're talking about standing around the corner.
I am just the opposite. On slack, I can think through what I want to say to make sure I'm conveying what I intend to convey. In person, I can't do that at all.
How would you know? The very nature of that communication is that it’s private.
How would I know that these conversations happen over Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's or small private channels. And this was commonplace well before the pandemic and WFH started.
Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
It's hard to have a private in-person conversation outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people that you don't want to hear them.
I find it hard to have any conversations at all in an open office setup, just like it's hard to get work done in that environment. Open office setups amplify all of the downsides of working in an office.
> example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
The failure there is that the person is afraid to tell that in the meeting. He or she has to rely on backchannel.
Depends on the environment. If your team is open to casual conversations and comfortable going off topics, then this likely isn't an issue. But, if your team is very metrics focused, you may not see levels of casual conversation that build rapport and build on ideas that come up on conversation. Sometimes a casual conversation is all it needs to hook a random thought into successful action.
I like having casual talks about nothing in particular without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for growth in many aspects.
I’m a Sr. Director. There is nothing but non sense in any claims that say random shout outs as people are breezing between one unnecessary meeting and another are useful. It just doesn’t happen.
The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly.
Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company that can do it should be and any that isn’t should go the way of the dodo.
Probably depends on what kind of problems you're working on. If your problem to solve is "Raise this KPI X percent until Y", then probably yeah, wouldn't matter too much.
But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.
One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their offices in order to facilitate random meetings between people:
> However, almost as many fruitful interactions described in the book can be traced to architectural features. Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate the building were included intentionally, so that chance encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:
> In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to investigate the effects of inter-office communication. They convinced their employees to where sociometric badges for the duration of the experiment and identified three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by about $200 million.
I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way, companies definitely should play around and see what works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.
If I was working in Bell Labs, I promise I'll be in office before the janitor. Thing is most us don't work in Bell Labs.
Ultimately, only the social aspect (building relationships, small talk with coworkers) remains. This should not be completely discounted, but everyone should do an analysis of what they are willing to go through to be in office. A 20-30 minute commute or a slightly longer public transit ride where you are assured of a seat? Sure, office will be worth it. 1+ hour each way in bumper-to-bumper traffic? Might as well WFH.
Where are you a senior director? I just want to know where to never apply for a job.
That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.
And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably invisible to you because you don’t take the time to get to build a relationship with your fellow workers.
Remote work is here to stay. I don’t agree that there is nothing that comes out of casual interactions at a physical workspace. This is where relationship building happens. I firmly believe that it is possible to build strong relationships in a remote or hybrid workplace. It just needs to be done intentionally. And naturally, it takes a different form than casual hallways conversation.
I feel like with a lot of the hardcore anti return to the office people the arguments are disingenuous. People have built their lives (and in some cases moved entirely) based on being able to work remotely 99% of the time, and they refuse to accept there are any disadvantages. I saw Sam Altman say the other day that he didn’t think any of the important companies in the next period of time will be fully remote, and I would agree.
I’ve found that folks who are attached to parts of the business that are focused on growing the business want to be in person more than parts of the business that “punch in/punch out” and don’t take full ownership of their role in the bigger picture.
I’m betting you can imagine who is helpful and who is less so, and further I bet it’s pretty obvious in most cases, which makes the folks who are on the bad end of it defensive.
You are completely detached from reality. Almost all of my conversations happen by running into someone in the hallway, or seeing them in their office with their door open and asking if they have a couple minutes.
I’m honestly curious about where you work that that doesn’t happen.
I spend 8-10 hours with them every work day. More than with anyone else - my partner, kids or "actual friends". I've known them for years - I know how their kids are doing, how they feel on a wide variety of topics, we joke, discuss, brainstorm, even fight. We've solved so many challenges together, I've helped them move, and they helped me fix my garage. We have breakfast and lunch together. We go to each other's birthday parties. We've celebrated childbirths and consoled after deaths of loved ones. Our goals in work, and often in life, are shared.
Why on Earth would I not want any of that, and spend all that time out of my life with people who are not also my friends? What a sad way to look at life.
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work.
If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres more to life (and business) than that.
Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and depressing.
It’s interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways, and it makes life better to know them a little bit.
I've made many lifelong friends from the workplace, but most of those were not made through the course of day-to-day work, but through hanging out after work. Sure, being at an office during the day facilitates that (easy to gather a group of people at the end of the workday to go out for a drink), but that's by no means the only way of doing it.
Personally I find the negatives to required office work far worse than the positive of social opportunities in the office. Maybe I'm too biased to have an objective opinion on this (I'm in my early 40s and already made my office friends after years of being required to be in an office), but I would much rather have the flexibility of remote work, which still allows me to meet up with co-workers after work if we choose to do so. I absolutely agree that there's much more friction and inertia that would make those sort of meetups less frequent. But for me, that's a worthwhile trade-off.
I think businesses that are embracing remote work should still maintain a (smaller) office where employees can come in when they want to or need to, for whatever reason. Sure, this doesn't work when people are geographically distributed all over the place. But that can also be a choice when looking for a job: just as I might look for an employer that's remote-first, others can look for employers with office cultures.
"Revenue driving" is one metric. Another one is, "cost reduction", and still another on is overall zeal for the work.
A good conversation can hit any and all these metrics. And it all adds right up too.
I care about coworkers. When people are able to make it OK, it shows! Tons of small things happen, people helping one another out, feeding off one anothers overall energy, and more really matter!
There needs to be laughter, fun, and the good vibes that come from a group of people who understand one another well enough to appreciate the time they spend together.
A group like that will have plenty of the business conversations too. First and foremost, they will be comfortable enough around one another to have those chats with few worries.
Another thing to keep an eye out on is fear, blame and shame.
Much better to boil it down to choices and outcomes.
Did we make a bad call? Ok, great. The outcome sacked, so how do we avoid that in the future? Easy conversation that should not worry anyone.
Making failure into learning opportunities is another big one. People need to be able to try it whatever it is. And when they can share the experiences and draw own their more seasoned peers, they improve rapidly and feel good about the whole process.
I could go on here, but there are just a ton of human dynamics well worth the bit of time and attention needed to insure everyone is able to participate without having fear, blame and shame front and center.
I'm one of those people who likes to enjoy work--ie, I don't think of work as "just work"--and I want to get to know the people I work with and maybe even make a real friend or two. And yet, I don't ever want to go back to an office. Zoom/Tuple calls are more than sufficient for me for shooting the shit for a bit while on the clock. Otherwise, I prefer to get together outside of office hours if I really want to spend social time with coworkers. I mostly despise forced social interaction on the clock. I do miss whiteboards, but that's about it.
I totally respect people who prefer the office life, I was just trying to offer a perspective as someone who is, like, half-aligned with you :)
Relationships are really important for getting stuff done at work. An irrelevant water cooler conversation that clicks can make someone your future ally. Having a better idea of someone's interests and priorities can make it easier to persuade them when the time comes.
Simply smiling at someone nicely over the coffeepot a few times can make them disposed to help you later. A three minute chat about nothing, and now you have a contact in IT/purchasing/payroll...
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've implemented in companies comes from employees having beers together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things should be".
I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and another person who wasn't really in the conversation overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.
As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire buildings were built with this in mind.
Every element you mention as being part of an in-office experience has been completely absent from my career.
Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddling from management.
Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.
If so, it's far from just him. I've never personally observed any of that, either. You have "work friends", but those relationships are work relationships and don't translate to outside of work.
I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.
It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.
I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.
I don’t mean this as a slight against you because there’s a place in the world for every type of developer, but your description of work and collaboration is very cynical. You could be the most unlucky person in the world and thus you’ve never met anyone worth collaborating with, or, more likely, you’ve not attracted those people in your workplaces.
I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.
The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.
your description of work and collaboration is very cynical.
One man's cynic is another man's realist.
In my opinion, OP's description of office life is idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus.
I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with.
I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful professional relationships, but despite having made many work friends, as stated previously none of them have led to career development (OP's mention of networking).
Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with
One thing I got out of mentorship is that it’s one thing being correct, and and entirely other thing having people actually want to listen to you. It happens often enough that you have one and not the other. Until you have both, you won’t have impact and will grovel about others.
Not every person works in a company organized this way, even IT people. In all my working years and all companies, I always had managers that were technically inferior to me (not bragging, most were not technical people at all, some had some basic tech skills). My only mentoring was for management skills, not guidance in any technical matter.
I’ve not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my career. I would say I’ve made connections, but my experience was very much just “you’re in charge of this team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management course! I don’t get it!”. And the same for being a manager. People are very complimentary about me when I’m just doing programming because I don’t need any help, but as soon as I get into a situation I’m not very good at, it’s criticism all the way. I would bet this is pretty normal since many managers don’t seem happy being managers, and that only a minority get significant career development value from managers/leads.
Yes, especially from clients/customers. Most manager feedback, though, is of the form “you need to/should do X.” If you press them on HOW to do X, they often don’t really know, especially when it comes to soft skills issues or personality clashes. They see their role as providing the feedback, and it’s your job to figure out how to fix it. It feels like criticism because you’re left with the critical part and no clear path forwards. Of course knowing the problem exists provides SOME value, but I wouldn’t call it mentorship, guidance, or even constructive.
> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on.
Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.
What about remote work prevents "being generous and helpful to others"? Or, put differently, what about being in an office makes it easier to be generous and helpful?
And before you reply: how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you? Keep in mind that a lot of people in tech (myself included) are literally digital natives who learned to socialize on the internet before adapting to doing it in person.
> What about remote work prevents "being generous and helpful to others"?
When you spend multiple hours together with someone day after day, you develop a bond. That leads to being generous and helpful and this connection is sorely missing in a fully remote world.
> how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you?
No setup will work for every single person. But for most of the humans, in-person interaction helps create better bonds. Here are some research papers[1][2]. Yes, there will be a few outliers who do not like meeting people IRL, but that ultra-small minority should not be dictating policies which go counter to human nature.
[1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/s41598-021-045... - "In‑person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in
autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative
experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion."
Ah. I think you and I must have interpreted OP's statement very differently. I interpreted it to mean that being physically present in an office never directly contributed to making a connection, not that they literally never had anyone help them out later on.
That's on you only if the people you made friends with later advanced to positions of power that can make hiring decisions. I don't think I have to tell you how incredibly lucky that is.
Otherwise, they probably just moved on to be another cog in the machine that has no say over hiring.
No, you're short-sighted. You don't have to be friends with any of these people. You can be generous and helpful to anyone, people above and below you (or even people you don't work with!), it has nothing to do with "being friends."
And if you are under 40 (probably under 60), yes, some of your coworkers will advance to positions of power. Nothing to do with luck, it's just numbers. But you can certainly increase your own opportunities by directing your helpfulness, generosity and competency towards as many people as possible.
The exact story of my career and many people I worked with. There's one guy I know who's had companies fighting over him because he was so great to work with.
>You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others.
In my experience all my valuable connections have come from me working really hard on the same team as them and being goals oriented and meeting those goals; not wasting time dilly dallying in the hallways. Making meaningful connections in the hallway sounds like a middle manager thing.
Working really hard and meeting goals == helpful and generous. I'm sure at some point you had a roadblock on a piece of code and a co-worker helped you overcome it, or vice versa. Or you covered for someone that one day when his kid was sick so the team didn't fall behind it's timeline.
Being sociable and taking an interest in other people via hallway convos is also a good way to build connections and/or friendships, but that has nothing to do with my earlier comment.
I've used my network for the last decade+ of work. I cofounded a startup because I developed a relationship with my cofounder in the break room at a former employer. We were in different orgs, we'd have never had the chance to develop our relationship in a Zoom-first world. And I say this as someone who's been part time remote since 2014, full time since 2016, and started freelancing remotely back in 2010. I love remote work but, IMO, there's a huge discrepancy between what can happen in-person vs. Zoom.
Man I feel ya. I hear all these idealic work life experiences and I'm like...man my first job I did 18 hour days and got essentially bullied by the 2nd in command. Next job, spent the entire time w seniors throwing spanners, yelling abuse, threatening to lock me in toolboxes and leave them in the sun (mine workers hate uni students it seems). 3rd job, forced to work w asbestos w zero health gear. Called worksafe basically got laughed at. Walked out of that one.
My first decade of employment had zero mentoring and was basically just a gauntlet of abuse and unsafe work practices. Only time it got good was working w big blue, no abuse there. Idealic tbh. After that back into the slums of normie business. Got fired for upholding security standards lol.
Business/work isn't as kind to some of us as it is to others it would seem.
> Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.
It's no different. American corporate culture has assimilated FAANG 100%. The only thing remaining is the free food and fancy offices (but not for long).
If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).
There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.
Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.
So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares, remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire them.
> If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).
I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.
> There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
I think, this could potentially help, but we seem to be still very far from it technologically. It's still impossible to achieve a realistic eye contact. Audio in calls is still tragically bad - it's actually somewhat shocking that nobody was able to figure this out yet, it feels like there was hardly any progress in the last 15 years.
Personally, participating in a remote meeting is very noticeably more demanding for me than an in-person meeting.
> Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet.
Might work in theory, but in my experience not in practice. My company tried to organize some socializing remotely, but the attendance was dramatically lower than in the in person events.
> > If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).
> I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.
So what? Just because something is different, it doesn't mean you can't get useful benefits from it.
No, you're not going to have a random hallway meeting and conversation on on a chat platform. But the barrier to just saying hello to someone or asking them a question drops to near-zero when you have those chat platforms. Yes, it does mean you need to be more deliberate about making interactions happen, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
The "remote renaissance" is still very new. (And it started during a time that was not ideal for methodically exploring and learning a new paradigm.) It'll take many more years before people adjust and really find out how communication works best.
> So what? Just because something is different, it doesn't mean you can't get useful benefits from it.
You've missed the point. It's wasn't that there are no benefits from it. It's that there are specific benefits from conversations that won't happen on a wiki.
This is a great example of how people can miss the point if you don't go round the houses with conversation and say something in multiple ways, so they can't misunderstand.
Discord, rich shared 3d spaces, GitHub Issues, wikis... Lol. Some people (most, I'd say) prefer going to lunch or to Starbucks with other people, leaving all the technology behind briefly, and simply talking. I think it's also more effective in getting a point across than any virtual medium.
More effective how? You may have a higher bandwidth interface but the difference between a video chat audio call and in-person is not as big as people think it is. Also eye contact is coming soon to VR devices.
It's nice to be able to meet in person sometimes and going out is more fun. But it absolutely is not important for effective communication. Unless they literally have poor writing skills and/or poor reading comprehension.
Email and text (and surely Slack as well) are notorious for miscommunication as a result of missing emotion, lack of visual cues, not recognizing sarcasm/joking, etc. Dozens of studies and millions of personal experiences confirm this.
Sorry but this sounds really bad (and frankly, a bit entitled). Not everyone can afford to live 15 minutes walk to work w/ Bay Area, Seattle, etc housing prices. Not everyone wants to spend 30 minutes or more each way in a car just to get to an office that has a demonstrably worse setup than what they have at home. I have a healthy separation between work and home, it’s called closing the laptop lid and walking away.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I’ve literally never seen this. I’ve seen people sit around and gossip about coworkers or talk about the latest TV shows or movies or sports, though. (And nothing wrong with that. We can’t think about work for 8 hours straight.)
> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on
That’s the exact opposite of my experience. The first few months were awkward because it was slightly new and assumptions were made that we’d be back in the office in a few weeks. But as time went on, everyone became much more productive. But that’s just my office, not everyone else’s.
> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.
> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Or you can just turn off your work computer and do something else to create that space, like hang with your family or friends.
I don’t think the “bad for younger/junior people” thing is speculation. My team had an intern who was toiling away at something for two+ weeks that I resolved for him in 10 minutes the one day I went to the office for that month. It was slightly mentioned in stand ups and even meetings, but remote work doesn’t mean less meetings and frankly people (myself included) have even more divided attention during remote meetings because it’s easier to multitask and tune out things that aren’t immediately relevant to your work. That happened a bit before, but it happens much more often in the remote era.
I think remote is better for personal focus, but at a small cost to team focus.
Sounds like a management failure, why wasn’t anyone checking in with the intern and diving deep to see what the problem was? Did the intern have an assigned mentor? Where were they?
>> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
> That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.
These are not the same thing, although you aren’t the only one in this (frankly depressing) thread making this mistake. You don’t have to be completely best buds with your mentor, including outside of work.
Spontaneous discussions and networking don’t work as well online because it requires more intent to talk to the other person. That spontaneous networking is more important for junior rather than senior people.
Being “in the kitchen” is a sign someone is probably not really working on something at that moment, and therefore may be open to conversation about something other than work. That signal is almost always missing online, and therefore doesn’t happen.
> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life
Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.
For the sake of balance I'd just like to say that I agree with the GP on this.
I miss my ~30 minute commute (by bike) from my old job. It provided good delineation between home and work, and 1h of good cardio a day meant I didn't need to do any of that at the gym. I didn't have a need for that time to myself to choose what to do because I liked that choice being taken away for these relatively short periods and me being "forced" into doing a nice chunk of exercise. It also allowed me to ramp up to work thoughts on the way in, and to slowly dump my work thoughts as I went home.
Maybe this is also just me who, now working fully remotely, struggles to regularly schedule in a similar amount of exercise despite having more time available with no commute. Since it's no longer strictly required I'm less likely to do it.
But discussing this with other colleagues and we worked out that, as a generalisation, which side of the fence you are on these types of things comes down to whether or not you have children.
If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30 minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this time to yourself. If you don't have kids you've no idea why you would crave this time.
The problem here is that you've decided that because you liked your commute, and that it had benefits for you, everyone else should be forced to do the same, and inevitably it will often be in much less comfortable and useful ways than you've been able to do it.
Allowing remote work increases possibilities, and you've presented a false dichotomy. There's nothing that says an employer can't still maintain a (smaller) office for people who want to come in (either every day, or a smaller part of the week). Employers could also provide a stipend so people like yourself could rent a desk in a co-working space (assuming they still exist post-pandemic). And at the most basic, assuming you really did have to work from home, there's nothing stopping you from taking a break and going on a 30-minute bike ride. You could even "simulate" your commute by taking that ride once in the morning and once at the end of the day.
Requiring people to come to the office reduces possibilities, and requires that everyone conform to the same mold. I totally get that you liked going to an office. But it's selfish to require everyone else do that just because you want to. And you don't need to require that in order to get what you want, too.
> If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30 minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this time to yourself.
This is completely unrelated. Please don't suggest that everyone else should have to go to an office every day because you somehow can't negotiate a 30-minute break from your kids with your partner. That's your problem to fix, not mine.
I definitely go through phases where I need a lot more structure in order to make things happen. Having an office just the right distance away to go to was a good target. I could either run or cycle to/from it. A public transport option was easily available (this is London, so public transport is nigh on amazing) but I was able to resist that lazy option.
I guess what I'm saying is that the freedom of working from home is just too much freedom for me. I'm way more productive and my employer gets way more of my time (not that they demand any extra time from me) but I'm lacking the initial impetus to get out of the house to do my own stuff.
Even something as simple as walking my kid to school (they're old enough now to make their own way) meant that I was out of the house and, on days without any early morning meetings, I'd walk on to the local pool to do a ~1h swim, or I'd run a long route home. Now it's just too easy to be holed up indoors and think "ah, I'll go for a swim/run/ride a bit later" and never do.
I know the motivation/planning/execution will come back eventually. I've successfully trained for various endurance events in the past but I guess my brain hasn't caught up with all of the changes that the pandemic has had influence on, including my working setup.
I work from home, in the shed at the bottom of the garden. If I want/need time alone, I still have that separate space. Mostly though, I just appreciate the extra 20 minutes in bed in the morning, and the extra time in the evening with the family (the kid is at the stage where engineering challenges are still fun for him, so it's fun for me too).
I have already told my manager that despite the official "you must work 2 days in the office per week" policy, if they ever try to apply that to me, I'm out. I'm looking for an excuse for early retirement, but it's just too much of a risk to disturb the status quo at the moment. Perturb the situation at your peril, employer-mine.
I got a seat-assignment earlier in the week (the official line is that they've hired too many people and can't place everyone, so some of us have 'volunteered' to stay at home). I was just about to enquire what was going on in Slack when he got to me first saying it was a group-wide thing and he'd reassign me to a non-desk seat as soon as he could. Which he did; and so I continue to work there...
Actually I implemented this. When I worked in the office, I used to bike to and from work every day. Every week I tried to choose a (slightly) different route. An it was really, really good for my mental health.
For the first 10 minutes or so of the ride I still had some thoughts from work, then gradually they started to disappear, I got intrigued by new shops being opened, some random folks doing crazy stuff on the street etc. In the end, I could feel endorphins coming and finally felt pleasantly tired when arriving home.
Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride whenever I want instead to the office.
> Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride whenever I want instead to the office.
Thank you! I've seen far too many posts where someone is saying "I biked/walked to work and it was great; everyone else should be forced to go to an office so I can keep my nice commute".
How are so many people blind to the idea that, if they are working from home, they can still take a bike ride or go for a walk before and after work? Hell, they might even now have the flexibility to take that ride/walk during lunch, or at other times when they need it.
Me as well. I intentionally chose to live within a 30 min bike ride and biked as much as I can. That’s how I got fit. That said, companies don’t pick their office location based on how close it is to where most people live. In all major cities and especially in the Bay Area, commute is a nightmare you just have to deal with rather than do something with it.
I gasped when I read this sentence. I wish I had a blood pressure monitor to get an idea of the effect. What an incredible perspective. Amazing how we can massage things in our minds into a shape we can accept.
I had such a commute once. I lived in Seattle but worked on the other side of Puget Sound commuting by ferry.
Most people who commute across Puget Sound go the other way. They live on the west side and commute east to Seattle. That direction is a nightmare, with heavy traffic and long waits both in traffic and at the ferry terminals.
Going my way traffic was not too bad even if I went in during rush hour. I usually went in a couple hours or so later though and then it wasn't even noticeable. Similar coming home.
On the ferry I could nap in my car, or read in my car, or go take a nice stroll around the deck enjoying watching the water, or have a meal or a snack at the ferry's cafeteria, or relax in the fairly comfortable passenger seating area. There were newspaper vending machines with the Seattle Times, Seattle PI, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal which provided another way to spend my time on the boat.
Get yourself a short bike commute. I did pre-pandemic and it was amazing. I’ve never had a commute longer than 30 minutes by bike in my professional life. I always much preferred living in the smallest cheapest apartment I could find near a place with a lot of jobs.
Biking 10-15 minutes to work on a protected bike path is an order of magnitude better experience mentally and physically, speaking from personal experience.
I can do that on my own without the need to be compelled by anyone, and in fact I walk to the office every morning (I work remotely, but go to a co-working space), with the difference that I have the freedom to do otherwise at any given moment.
All these commenters are unfairly picking on you. There IS value in personal connections and it is different when you have been in the same physical space with the other person instead of an avatar that can send texts and emails.
Spontaneous conversations happen every once in a while to creates an opportunity for collaboration, or maybe someone is working on a problem that another colleague worked on, so you can connect them etc. IMO, Happy hours in front of the screen are boring and feels like more work.
I don't want to go back to the office on a regular schedule, but I actually miss having stronger connections to my coworkers. I think the regular company meetings in a single location is an excellent alternative
> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
Thank you for mentioning the importance of this. I graduated and entered the job market during the start of the pandemic. Getting a job was super difficult because every company suddenly implemented a hiring freeze. I managed to find a job at the company I interned at because they lost many developers due to the company being in the travel space (they didn't want to find themselves jobless in a pandemic, travel related payments were tanking). They were so desperate for bodies I got waived through because I was an intern one whole year before.
I quickly found myself in an empty office trying to onboard myself through the process, with a handful of tired devs trying to do the work that before had a team of 30. I spent my first few months in panic because nobody could find the time or patience to work with me, and the business logic was quite dense. It was still my first job and I hadn't worked up the courage to ask for help, and it was x10 harder when we worked from home. I could ask my fellow desk-mate because I could judge how busy they were, but it was torture asking people over teams and interrupting their flow.
Now almost 3 years into my job, I can definetly see how my anxiety kept me from progressing and I grew a lot. But WFH as a new person into the workforce, it was difficult until I found my footing and a routine. And a nice mentor. I am not ashamed to admit that it took me quite a while. Now I have more experience and I can work a bit more independently, so I appriciate our 2 wfh days. But most of our collaboration work is done best in the office.
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.
There's more demand than ever before to live in NYC, as evidenced by record high rent prices. Cities don't need to be about offices.
I heard the opposite, but I haven't seen any proof in any direction. What I read is that office space in NYC is still expensive, but occupation rate is lower than ever.
I don't think the person you're replying to is talking about office rents. Residential rents are still high, so clearly people still want to live in NYC, regardless of whether or not they're working in an office or work from home.
The number of people who want to live in cities seems to be pretty similar now to what it was before the pandemic. I don't think urbanism is dying, or, if it is, it's not because of remote work.
I would like to revisit this in 3-5 years, without an office there is less motivation to live in a very expensive city like NYC. As leases expire and companies close even more offices, we'll see where all this goes.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
As an employer it's your job (via delegation) to facilitate how people (can) collaborate with each other. Relying on people doing that for you during their breaks is just lazy and poor leadership.
I'm with you 100% but we're fighting an uphill battle. For the couple of years pre-Covid, I alternated between a 15-mile bike ride (each way) and a walk->train->walk commute. It was wonderful, and great for my mental and physical health. I felt like a part of the city.
At the start of the pandemic we went full-remote and it worked, because we all knew each other well. Yet even then, I felt the loss of informal (sometimes work-related, sometimes not) communication with coworkers.
Time passed and now I'm in a fully-remote job. It's alright, my coworkers are nice, and things get done. But it's not the same. I don't feel like a part of anything. I'm constantly subject to the distractions of being at home -- there's lots of interesting stuff to do here, and my ADHD makes it tough to ignore.
More than likely, I'll retire early rather than finish out a career that's some mix of WFH or going to a nearly-empty office.
> everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
I've personally found mentorship is much easier remote since you can more easily dedicate your entire focus on a person rather than just catching up real quick before meetings.
I had a team member who was really struggling with isolation. Mentioned it to me briefly in chat and I had him give me a call. That turned into regular bi-weekly meetings where we chat about work issues and whatever topics are interesting to us. It's helped us both tremendously.
The only reason for anyone to suffer remotely is deliberate ignorance by senior member of the team.
And because of the more private nature of remote communication, I've found colleagues are much more willing to open up about concerns and frustrations they have about the office.
Sure remote means that if you're a senior member of the team and want to abandon your responsibilities it's easier to hide, but some of my best working relationships have been founded remotely.
For the purpose of enabling more “spontaneous connection” in a remote environment, could managers not simply foster an environment in which bandying around ideas in Slack or Teams is just encouraged?
I can see how employees existing solely in the Slackosphere can be crippling to the sort of shop talk that can spur new ideas, but I see no reason why it has to be that way.
This whole "spontaneous collaboration in a shared space" thing was a myth started by Google to sell the idea of open office layouts, and something the rest of the industry latched on to after that. This is not how software development works.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I can't believe the amount of people here denying this exists or that they've ever seen it. I wonder if they are the type to neglect social dynamics over cold, detached, ultimately flawed and incomplete metrics? They can't even conjecture about unseen forces and subtle influences, a sort of butterfly effect where an off topic conversation about the weekend leads to different technical decisions? Because all that stuff does happen. It can be very hard to quantify or understand.
That's one reason I hate cultures they put too much weight on performance reviews. They think they can measure individual contribution and productivity. They don't get the less obvious things that arise from group settings and informal collaboration.
I understand your point, and I have experienced that on occasion, maybe once or twice a year. However that also requires that people have slack time available to kick things around in conversation.
I've had equal or better success following paths on my own that while being highly tangential/unrelated to my work ultimately provided valuable and relevant insights.
I guess my point is that valuable spontaneous connections require time but they don't require in-person interpersonal interactions.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
Those spontaneous connections yielding noticeable results are probably an urban legend. 25 years in the business and I've never seen this happen. You're talking with people in your team/project anyway in regular meetings, so there is no reason to drag that into the hallway. Talking biz to people from other projects/teams is mostly impossible - would take hours to explain a specific problem to get a meaningful contribution. Never goes beyond basic griping and commiseration.
If you think those meetings are essential for company success you REALLY should examine your process.
> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
I feel like this isn't really true in the SF Bay Area, it's too expensive even for most software engineers. We're not all making L7 @ Meta money.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes
If your business success is predicated on random encounters, then your business success is just pure luck compensating for a lack of planning and communication.
If you actually plan and communicate well across teams & orgs then your business will work equally well in person or remote (or a hybrid).
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I agree, but not with the hallways and kitchenettes part. Sorry, never have I ever seen anything productive done in a hallway.
But I wholeheartedly agree with the "spontaneous communication" part, but *in the office, at the desk*. There are many things that are much easier when you can just come to a desk of your colleague (someone on the team, or your manager, or your direct report) and discuss instantly, then maybe grab another person into this discussion, make a decision, etc. Yes, I see that happening all the time in the office. Just not in a kitchenette indeed.
Now, I agree that maybe not every team needs it. Consider the two extremes. One is when your daily work is mostly "executing tasks”. In this case, whatever is more *comfortable* is the best: for some it would be working from home, for some it may be working from the office. Or, on the other end, if the team is in the early stages of making some important decisions. In this case, I truly believe this team needs to be able to communicate spontaneously. If this team is Okay with Discord - fine. Or if this team prefers being in the same physical place - fine as well.
Bottom line: being in *the office* is *one of the ways* to create an environment for spontaneous communications, which works wonders for making a series of small decisions fast.
P.S. I currently work in a flexible hybrid environment: we just agree with colleagues when we go to the office, if we want to.
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
I can see why you would think that but might I offer another perspective: we are better off without cities being built as commuter hubs for suburbanities.
Cities in the US are often located in very valuable real estate, most of which is used suboptimally for office spaces, which are occupied only during certain time on weekdays. I would like this to change. American cities should build a TON more apartment towers and dense housing in city centers that no longer need so many office buildings. Let the young, the weird and the creatives live in the cities and make them great.
In fact, I am seriously happy about the reduction in traffic to/from suburbs. Every weekday, most American cities turn into traffic severs, mostly commuters getting in/out of the city. This is just madness! And no doubt makes our cities more polluted (air and noise) and less desirable to live/work in.
>There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
It has been certainly be nice distraction, and I definitely knew more people by name but I haven't noticed anything actually profitable for company happening there.
The things that did happen is that I could just catch the few people needed to push things forward, drag one to the other and clear the roadblocks but grabbing a quick call on the communication system of choice isn't that worse.
The brainstorming on problems was better when in person tho, but that might be the mix of tooling and platform company I work for chose (MS Teams, need I say more?)
> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
Yeah, the one remote work experience that has been my benchmark (in startup) had us meet every 2 weeks and just had half-party, half socialising, half-brainstorming thing. I feel like there is heavy underuse of tooling, back then our standard was voice only but screen sharing via ancient methods (screen session) that worked well, editors like IDEA also have very neat "editor sharing" feature that I rarely seen talked about
I’ve never ever ever have had all my team in one place. I’ve worked in two different countries and six different cities. Not one team has had everyone in the same area. Water cooler conversations always ended up isolating and creating in-out group dynamics. We always had to fight to force communication through async global channels as much as we can to make sure people don’t feel left out or lack important context. It is a challenge.
Pandemic changes in work has thrust into the open the challenges with remote. But you ignore it at your own peril or curl up to the familiar return-to-work ass-on-the-seat model and be left behind.
Btw, if you need good ideas, you schedule and organise a brainstorming session or create an idea board org wide. You encourage challenging assumptions and involve your team in decision making. All of this need to happen irrespective of whether your team is local or scattered. Might as well use modern technology when you can and support remote and local discussions.
> P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Clearly you don’t live in the Bay Area. My commute was 2hrs each way. That’s 4hrs a day, just gone.
I think this boils down towards being extrovert and introvert. you seem to cheering lots of "people interaction" and thrive on it while "the remote crowd" can get by just doing work without the need or pressure for in-person interaction.
From the about 1 year i spend in the office about 10 years ago it was mostly annoying to have to "connect" (and the worst thing was force "team building", after 8h spend together in the office). Sometimes we had fun and laugh aut at the end of the day work is just work. everything beyond that is some weird, twisted invention by the HR and corporate mumbo-jumbo (especially part about "corporate culture") - remember, you don't own anything to the company, you are not a slave and corporation doesn't own you anything (which was shown by the recent lay-offs)..
I remember when I first started my career, my boss told me "Don't miss meetings, don't miss deadlines. Otherwise, I don't care when you're here."
I thought it sounded great. Spent most of my time out of the office for the first 3 weeks. Quickly felt the downsides and got back in the office for the remainder of my next 2 jobs. Networking alone was more valuable for my career personally than anything that we actually accomplished in the office by being there together.
I don't know that the company benefited, but I felt like I did.
At the larger company though (business telecom), it was a lot easier for them to secure the network by controlling all of the devices and endpoints in the office, including camera access and building access. Dealing with all those employees on remote devices over a VPN would have been a huge security headache IMO.
> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life
May be true in some small, limited segments of the States. The vast majority commute by car. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death. Very pleasant!
"for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc"
To be fair, most of this doesn't happen in the office either. I don't see any real mentorship going on in my 10 years at the company. Comany culture is a joke in my experience. Management doesn't really care about the culture as long as it facilitates getting work done and keeping people in line. Networking might be easier in person, at least for some people. I personally think networking is toxic since it effectively means that outgroups remain outsiders and potentially promotes cronyism.
I've absolutely managed to have non-structured zoom meetings which have been productive. Often its just a spillover of standup where me and a coworker take over the end of the meeting and basically let everyone else drop off (or not) and we start bitching about something horrible to fix. Sometimes it resulted in something meaningful, sometimes it was just a bitching session. I did this mostly with other coworkers because I'm an introvert. If you're aggressive about hopping on zooms with other people then they can happen with external people. I've gotten dragged into zooms with customers, via the customer services team airdropping me into some horrible customer issue, which later solidified the direction the architecture should go based on the obvious struggles the customer was having. My coworker at prior job was better about inserting himself into those kinds of virtual discussions.
And there's a major advantage to being able to operate that way since you don't have to be geolocated with your customer or your customer services folks and you don't need plane tickets and you can get it done with an hour or three virtually rather than having to take days out of your schedule to do an onsite.
Do you have tips on how to approach coworkers about "odd" topics via private messages? The "hallway" principle as I understand it is that it is low-key, low-risk, you can immediately read the others' reactions, and you (usually) won't be blamed for odd thoughts, nor does the other side need to feel pressured to handle your question well.
Good question, I completely overlooked that aspect of online interaction.
I guess more real-time digital communication such as video or call (video taking priority given that it contains additional sensory information) could come close, but none of these are 'memory-less' as physical interaction.
I wonder if I myself have blown through professional relationships in this way...I like to think that the cultures I'm in aren't so risk averse towards the first impressions they make.
> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
I think there's some value in actually meeting one's teammates, but I've found that the collaboration I have works just fine if they know they can IM me to talk when they're having issues. I have lots of people from many different departments who just know what kind of things to IM me for. I don't always have answers for them, but I can usually point them to someone who does.
When I hung around in person, we'd chat with them about totally random stuff. You can learn from that, but it's not nearly as business-centric as intentionally talking to people about work stuff.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I call bullshit.
This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality.
In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to ask. And guess what? In 2023, that happens over Slack.
I don't know what you do but I've solved problems and saved companies millions by overhearing a conversation in the office that would have been a Slack DM remote.
At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate business units were all competing for the same tender, they were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3 separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender #tender_response_customer and #project_unicorn_tender not one single person was in more than one of those channels.
Now all this goes away if your company only uses public channels and has regular discourse in them. But unless the company was built remote first, I've never seen this in my 25 years of professional experience.
And all of this is without counting the fact that most enterprises use Teams not Slack, and Teams hides information from everyone.
Don't get me wrong, remote companies can work, and some people do not work well in offices. But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.
This goes away, if they have better management and coordination. They’d be in the same mess even if they were physically conference rooms. Unless you somehow think that people spontaneously drop by meetings they’re not invited to
I should add - now that I've googled you - you and I work in very different areas of 'IT'. The problems I imagine you deal with need a lot of quiet dedicated focus time; while my problems need me to be able to wrangle a dozen cats into something like a coherent strategy that sometimes involves whiteboards, sometimes coffee and sometimes vodka. That's a people problem that requires people solutions, not technology products marketed as people solutions.
But I've been in your shoes too. (ok, not that smart, but I sat next to an ML guy for six months once troubleshooting his Kafka woes). I don't every intend to imply that there is one perfect answer for everyone.
You'd be amazed what people say in open plan offices thinking they can't be heard.
But you are correct; however again in 25 years, the number of those years working for a company that had perfectly working leadership, management, communication and coordination is very very low.
I doubt it. It's the culture of using public channels instead of private DMs that needs to change. The UX of Teams makes channels much higher friction than group messages.
> In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter.
This sounds so horrible as to be unbelievable to me.
I've worked remote since I was 19 years old, managing remote teams and/or entire companies most of that time. I have advocated for remote work since before it was a thing, so I guess I'm a remote work Hipster.
That said, some of my largest accomplishments started out via a chance in-person encounter. I can't understand how anyone would see unrealized opportunity in any other way? It'd have been realized if so.
Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add up.
I understand this definitely depends on your role but I'm absolutely stunned that someone could have 25 years of experience in an office setting and never have had a serendipitous unscripted moment.
> Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add u
Developers rarely get to lunches with customers even before covid
This. I think of this every time I hear the "spontaneous connection" argument. Decades ago, this was true, but it hasn't been true anywhere I've worked for at least 15 years.
Now, even when people are all in the office, very nearly 100% of the communications are done via chat programs (even to the person next to you) or email. For good reason, really. It minimizes the risk of interrupting someone deep in the flow.
I've talked about this topic with many people and it seldom matches the opinions of many people here in hacker news. I wonder if hacker news is biased towards a specific type of people that is less social / more family oriented / etc? (Of course, the people I meet in real life could be the more biased sample)
I noticed that very technically focused people tend to underestimate the importance of communication. They dislike daily standups, coordination meetings, don't really value informal exchange. All these things take their time out of what they want to do - deep work on solving technical problems.
There's often the hidden assumption that "solving technical problems" equals "creating value", but that's not always so. Lack of communication often leads to solving the wrong problems, solving more general/complex problems than needed, overengineering the solution over actual needs etc. To avoid this, it's a good practice to talk about stuff you work on and getting feedback from other people, including questions you yourself did not think of.
I used to prioritize communication and collaboration because I’m better at it than most engineers I work with. A problem emerged where I noticed that come review and promotion time, I was always coming up short due to concerns about lacking technical seriousness. My interview performance was also suffering due to not spending enough time in the codebase.
I deprioritized collaboration as a result and now I get much better results. It’s not an issue because I am happy to explain the trade off up-front to anyone who asks. My job title is “software engineer” and my job role is to ship code. If you want me to be a staff+ engineer, engineering manager, or PM, happy to chat about a role change, but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.
That's an interesting experience. I agree that this advice is probably more valuable to people who are already quite senior technically. Before that, it might be better to simply focus on sharping your technical skills. Reflecting on my experiences, I remember junior-ish people who chose to focus on communication rather than technical skills - without being able to back their communication with hard skills, they seem to kind of drift toward scrum master / project manager role.
But once in a senior position, a person should start thinking "larger" than just their own code, especially if they want to further advance.
> but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.
For sure. I would say from Staff position upwards, the collaboration aspect might take a larger chunk than pure engineering.
> I noticed that very technically focused people tend to underestimate the importance of communication. They dislike daily standups, coordination meetings, don't really value informal exchange. All these things take their time out of what they want to do - deep work on solving technical problems
I’d say you’ be taken the wrong lesson from your observations.
Big formal coordination rituals typically are simply round robin of 1:1 communication. Occasionally 1:3, but never ever 1:n when the speaker isn’t management.
The reason is simple. Tasks are often independent. In that case, there’s no one to coordinate with, beyond updating the person running the status board. Even when there is a take that needs coordination, that coordination is already happening, just not at that place.
Or in other words, people that get the most out of these rituals simultaneously overestimate the average degree of connections in the social network, and underestimate the amount of communication that happens outside of their immediate view. Call it a bias in a local a hub in a network.
I personally enjoy it and generally work remote 2-3 days a week, but it’s awful for the organization. At this point I keep doing it as I expect there will be some incentives offered to come back.
On the productivity side, There’s way too much babysitting and people in certain roles doing errands. On the work relationship side, units with turnover struggle as new hires don’t get assimilated well.
In fact, a counter example: people regularly spawn random threads of conversation like the one you mention in Slack channels. A lot of times nothing comes of it, but some of these threads tag senior executives and managers within the company who have followed insights from threads into new cost improvement or even revenue generating ideas.
These conversations are unlikely to happen in passing hallway conversations and even if they did would likely not develop further than a couple remarks without forcing people to creating meetings to discuss topics that may or may not be important, which quickly gets overwhelming and makes people lose interest in further discussion. Having people sit around all day at an office in case such a conversation spontaneously happens is very inefficient when it can be done online in asynchronous fashion.
The central tenet of your argument is thus unraveled and the conclusion you must come to is that we don’t need offices. Accept it. Office workers aren’t here to serve as NPCs to fill your pretty little cities.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I love reading things like this, because it tickles my hypocritical funny bone.
Where is the evidence for this? Where is the hard data showing that these "hallway conversations" ultimately generate more sustainable long-term revenue for the company? Because at the end of the day, that's the only reason a company should ever mandate anything that employees don't want: because it either generates more revenue, or saves them money. If you can't prove that requiring employees to be in-office accomplishes this, then there's no reason to do so.
Regarding hypocrisy: I recall as an individual contributor all the times I've been required to justify -- with hard data -- things I wanted management to support because I believed it would increase developer happiness and comfort, and thus increase productivity (and reduce costs). It was always hard (or impossible) to do this, especially before the fact, so management would often turn me down. And yet, we have this completely unsupportable statement -- "everyone in-office creates better connections that leads to higher productivity" -- that management is all-in on enforcing.
I think the real reason for "return to office" initiatives is mundane and obvious: ego, power trips, and an unreasonable lack of trust.
> But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?
If you already have an office and expect everyone to be relatively close, you don't have to fly everyone anywhere. You just have "come to the office" days. Depending on the level of remoteness of your workers, that can be as often as once a week, or once a quarter.
> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day
False. You're not taking into account the myriad ways people choose and need to live. I wouldn't do the SF<->south bay commute ever again (used to do that 10+ years ago daily). Are you telling me I'm required to move to take a job that's a 60-minute drive away? That's ridiculous.
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.
Ah, I see. So basically you see "people are leaving cities in droves" and think the solution is "make people come to the office". Another unsupportable statement, and also unreasonable to ask of people. I live in a city, have no intention of leaving, and value the fact that I work from home, even though any job I'd take would also be in the city. I hate sprawl and would never go back to living in a suburb.
Maybe some people don't want to live in cities, though. Your "solution" to this problem is to require people do that (through completely unrelated employment considerations), just to keep cities healthy? How selfish!
fine, i'll come in but you have to rip out all the desks and turn every bit of space in the office into a hallway or a kitchenette to maximize opportunity for collaboration.
Employer here. We had a fancy brick and timber office. It was beautiful and centrally located. I let the lease expire in 2021 after everyone went remote for the pandemic. There has been no sign of any decay in productivity.
It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure.
Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person, so we have periodic “off-site” retreats for a day or two, or we meet at a conference. But most of work is just grinding. That works perfectly well from a home office.
>Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person
Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.
Personally I don't see any difference at all in being in the same building vs on online zoom/video meeting.
I find it very strange that being in a room with someone is somehow different than being on a video call.
You can see the peoples' faces...what are you going to do in person? Touch peoples' naughty bits? Fart so everyone can enjoy? I don't get it. You are there to exchange ideas. Being face-to-face in person allows you to see the person's face and non-verbals. But you get that in a video conference.
Because it helps people bond and so work better as a team. Plus probably not all your colleagues are complete introverts and may actually enjoy the company of others.
In my experience the only thing helping people work better as a team is just working better as a team.
Be patient, kind, and spend an extra minute writing a more detailed email that is helpful to your colleagues. If you're a manager, give them the right tools and empower them.
But this is completely orthogonal to whether the work is in an office or remote.
Part of the in-person experience is the opportunity for people to correct mistakes in communication. Many people are not effective writers, and so pushing for async or writing-heavy communication is difficult at best. Having one-on-ones by voice or video often helps cut down misunderstandings, and in-person is a way to help reduce the barrier to entry for such interactions.
This is just an example of extraverts forcing their way of doing things on others.
If people are bad at writing, they can get better at it, like any other skill. I have a bad memory for voice/video conversations, so my preference is to always have a written email to go back to for reference.
But I'll still attempt to do what my other team members are comfortable with.
I enjoy the company of others, but I can't say I much care for being forced to interact in-person with specific people. It's not that I dislike my coworkers, it's just that there's better ways to spend my time than in an office.
Because while I think the benefits of remote work clearly outweigh the cons, I also concede that face-to-face human interaction provides a host of benefits that cannot be replicated virtually, and meeting my clients and partners in person from time to time is nice (if I worked as an employee, I'd think the same of my teammates and bosses)
I can imagine how one could arrive at such conclusion, but I have seen somewhat useful stuff come out of those.
Some key components for me are:
- don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully some useful ideas might come up
- Bring in relevant people, that actually get work done. The less managers the better.
- Don't be afraid of being negative. The whole point is to complain about shit and see communalities in problems, and perhaps come up with potential solutions.
This is the key point. In the arranged meetings and workshops that everyone likes so much there's constant pressure to be positive and come up with quick solution before deadline. Open ended complaining is far more productive.
I think you're thinking "brainstorming and creative collaboration activities" implies something corporate organized. But it can also refer to actual brainstorming and creative collaboration that happens spontaneously and organically when smart people happen to talk to each other.
I feel the same way. And wasn't there research showing that group brainstorming was the least likely to produce the best ideas? I should go look that up.
Those type of discussions are great. Sounds like you just work at a horrible place where the only brainstorming going on is about super boring/worthless material.
That was the best of both worlds. Headphones on, you're focusing, standing around the coffee machine, you're open to chat. There is really no signal for remote that someone is open for a random chat.
Regarding brainstorming, I was reading “Quiet” recently, and the author quoted a study that indicated that brainstorming worked better on almost all metrics when it was done in isolation, and then the group discussed the ideas afterwards.
I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly speaking that the path of building and managing a remote team successfully is different than in person in that (1) it should be more transactional, less relationship based, and you should be more comfortable and active in routinely cutting the bottom performers. Remote work does genuinely change the labor relation to be a step or two closer to the contractor model (extremely transactional and performance based, not culture/family etc). Remote work gives power to capital/management and it seems like most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT and learned to run teams in a zero interest rate env are not comfortable exercising this power on behalf of the companies they represent. (2) Managers should be hiring in low cost areas, you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things. There are great engineers in Latam. You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12. (3) a lot of senior leaders don’t want to learn a new playbook (remote management). They have a playbook that worked, they used it for 10-15 years, and they want to turn the clock back to that time. Even if 30% of senior leaders at a company feel this way, that’s usually enough to “roll back” to how things were. The remote enthusiasts who haven’t taken on the new management style whole hog don’t have any wins to show, so the revanchist old managers are winning the hearts and minds of CEOs. The companies who mastered remote and learned how to do it right aren’t doing RTO BUT remote done right definitely is not paying a globally average Bay Area engineer locally competitive salaries for globally average work.
Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business.
It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things.
Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”.
Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.
I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
I believe for every person out there like the parent poster there are people like you and I who can hold back that flow. It's incumbent upon us to not give our skills or our time to people who treat us like disposable resources. It's also incumbent upon people like us to build companies and hire people who share those values, and to treat them with dignity and respect.
Exactly this, the two stable equilibria are “the company is the employees, we all work together in office” and “the company employs labor to solve our customers problems, and the company does this in the most cost effective way possible”.
I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this.
Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year?
It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
It's not. The fantasy is thinking anyone outside the US not taking down $300k/yr is untalented.
It's not interesting to discuss outliers. Millions are being made playing this talent/wage arbitrage as we speak. The top 1% of engineers is not interesting to discuss, and certainly is not representative of the average FAANG employee (or salary).
Edit: Direct personal experience during my entire working career. Are there bubbles of super-talent completely out of my reach for such a pleb? Absolutely. But those folks are not interesting to the vast majority of companies needing basic but competent IT talent. Many folks here seem to be under the impression they are in that pool. Time will tell.
Unless you’re a front of the field AI researcher or have other extremely specific domain knowledge in high demand areas then this is reality, get accustomed to it.
> Remote work, where people become part of your team and work with everyone else is quite different and avoids the failure cases you have likely seen.
Thank you. I believe this is the point everyone is missing.
And this is new. Giant companies never did this sort of thing really. It was always the low effort outsourcing approaches I was seeing in these markets.
Today I'm now competing with IBM and the ilk in these markets for direct employees. The tides are shifting extremely rapidly and I don't think many in the US even understand what has happened underneath them in the past few years.
Not at all. European lead engineer here with already high salary (USD 112k TC). I would even accept 90k if it is 100% remote and I can travel the world.
> I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here at play. It is a complex and competitive market.
> No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.
I'm sure all the latin american developers are super hyped about this advice not to hire them.
You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?
Peer group: CEOs, VP eng, CTO, directors at seed-series B companies where leadership team is Bay Area based. I think you’re seeing this wrong. Every other locale is a discount to SFBA/NYC. Many companies can and should pay top of market in cheaper locales. That is the winning remote playbook. Maybe the locale is Canada, maybe the locale is Argentina, maybe it’s Portugal. Pick your choice, they’re all 1/2 cost or less of SFBA/NYC, and if you’re all remote locale doesn’t really matter.
I agree with this. The natural conclusion of “I want to work remote” is the equalisation of global wages. This is great for developing countries with highly skilled English speaking people and terrible for entitled software developers earning 2-10x their remote counterparts.
> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12
Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
Employees in the bay and NYC have more opportunities and thus more negotiating leverage. It doesn’t mean they’re better at the work. Hiring in competitive locales does mean more brain space dedicated to “how do I retain this employee” and less brain space dedicated to “how can I make my customers happy and grow my business” which is a losing trade. The winning play is pay top of market rates to labor in low cost locales, and if the people you hire don’t work out then fire them quickly because you’re paying top if market and there is a lot of talent liquidity in that band. It’s the Netflix model, but global. Not really a new playbook.
It’s a very effective playbook, but it’s taking the easy path. More interesting and challenging is building a high perf company that has a better relationship with it’s labor. A cutthroat model will always work, but I think humans are intelligent enough to build high performing groups that succeed while taking care of others. Even the mafia took care of family, in their own perverse way (If you off Tony for talking to the cops, you still take care of his wife and kids).
This is exactly wrong. The people you want to take care of are the top 25% of your team. When you let someone go, it’s often because someone in the top 25% is complaining that they do not trust the low performer and the low performer increases the workload of the high performer. When you have a team of high performers, new high performing candidates recognize that and see that as a huge plus for recruitment. No great candidate wants to join a team with people they see as less good than they are.
Never suggested that you can’t lay people off! Often times it’s not a good fit and it’s best for both to part ways. The goal is doing this with respect and treating them well upon exit, and more generally to my original point, creating a workplace that improves the human condition.
You might laugh, but for some being a builder of a place that treats people well while also being financially successful is important. In any event, it’s a interesting challenge that it seems few care to undertake.
It really shouldn't, but it surprises me every time I interact with these types of people. They behave and speak like their worldview is absolute and they justify their mistreatment of people as a necessary component of running a business. The dire warnings to the rest of us about job security and the ground shifting out from under us are just there to serve their power fantasy, but it provides good insight into the mindset of this class of individual. Good to have a template of what to avoid.
Like I said in a sibling post, the best we can do is: first, don't give our talent or time to these people. Second, start our own companies built on treating human beings with respect.
Yea, that is the role. Don’t let anyone sugarcoat it for you. The point is to return value to shareholders. It’s difficult/impossible to do that while acting maliciously or without having gained trust so no one is trying to hurt people. The c suite in particular is paid to act on behalf of the company and it’s shareholders which leads to outcomes some might consider to be impolite.
> Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
What data do you have to back this up? Top 1% engineers who have all the options? sure.
80% engineers? You will be paying double local market rates already and you will find you can trivially out-talent for the same budget.
Will this change over time? Sure. But reality on the ground is you can hire someone of equivalent talent for half the cost in Europe/LATAM/etc. vs. the US a the moment. In quantity.
The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for.
My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company."
It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.
That's really just a veneer for "transactional and performance based"
Whenever I hear a company say that they are like a family, I run. In a family, you don't lay off family members. As a matter-of-fact, if it is a family run business, and there's a business downturn, they will lay off all workers and leave their actual family members working.
In reality, saying it is "family" is just a machiavellian ploy to pretend a business actually cares about the employees, in order to make them loyal to the company, without the loyalty going the other way. I've read so many stories about how owners were always talking about the company being "family" but when push came to shove, they shoved the employee out the door. But like so many companies, all the ones that are shedding employees, they never seem to fire the C-suite, somehow.
As far as culture goes, all companies want to create a culture that is maximal efficiency for the company. That's all the culture is in a corporate world. It's transactional. No company is going to have a culture of 5 hour picnic lunches every day, followed by an hour foot massage for everyone so that only 2 hours of work get done a day. That would be silly. ALL business cultures exist to maximize shareholder investments. To the extent that cultures are different is just a different way of trying to maximize employee output. Nothing is wrong with it, but it actually is transactional. To the extent people talk about "culture" that is really just trying to polish the turd.
See this is the thing that really confuses me about this whole kerfuffle.
The more we collectively push for remote work, the more likely it becomes that our compensation takes a huge nosedive. Engineers in Brazil or El Salvador will LOVE working at even 30% of total FAANG comp (while enjoying fewer worker's rights and fewer benefits), and they are by and large technically competent.
This whole thread has a very "I got mine" vibe to it.
> ...you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things... There are great engineers in Latam
> ...globally average Bay Area engineer
There are two sides to the kind of broad strokes generalizing you are doing.
It has been my experience, and the experience of everyone else that I know, that the Ivy League US-SF-NY people we work with are far and wide smarter, more productive, nicer, and way fewer problems, fewer emotional problems especially, than others in engineering and management.
Go ahead and run a LATAM team. Nobody really cares. It will not turn out to be the management superpower / huge insight you are making it out to be.
Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.
> Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced.
Plenty C level people know this is the eventual outcome. They just also know that the runway is likely to extend beyond their working career because they control most business decisions for the foreseeable future.
They still operate on a relationship basis with ownership/capital while managing the company on a Netflix performance model for everyone else. Those relationships are likely to stay in place until both sides age out of the industry.
I've worked with a number of C level folks hired into companies from low cost regions and they have all been utterly stellar. This is coming, just not for the current generation of senior execs.
This is correct. Work like a dog and like you have a target on your back, because you do, and you’ll be safe for as long as possible, maybe even until retirement.
They won't because they don't have anywhere near the same access to capital. There is no country even close to the US in this regard, and US salaries in software engineering are the exception, not the norm.
I think the macroeconomic trend is that the work is moving slowly to poorer countries. Makes perfect sense, as in US there is a lot of money, it should mean less desire to work and more to enjoy life, meanwhile in poorer countries people have high appetite for money/work.
For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
Lower taxes? Which countries are you thinking of? (Genuinely interested not a rhetorical question; IME many poorer countries have higher taxes, in percentage terms.)
Yea. It could be! It’s my job to work really hard and have a huge impact so that option seems like a bad idea. I expect to one day be fired or demoted for someone better who can help the company grow more than I can.
I worked at an American company (smallish ad tech) that was fully remote and the CTO was a citizen of a LATAM country while CEO and most engineers (but not all) were USA based. Worked great.
(CTO here, 100m€ public company in the EU, 200-person development organization. Anonymous to let me speak more freely)
1) I don’t care about per-dev productivity. Might well be some teams are more productive fully remote, looking at some numbers I suspect they are. But our biggest problem is not “cranking out lines of code faster” - it’s making sure we are doing the right projects, not wasting time on the wrong things; and dealing well with all the cross-team dependencies. I’m quite consciously making the trade off that I think devs will be more frequently interrupted and get less work done … in return for which they will be much better informed about what the company is doing and we can focus our efforts more effectively.
2) because this development organization works and I want to keep it functional. This is a public company, we have analysts looking over our shoulders and constantly querying our strategy. We have potentially hostile acquisitions always around the corner. If I am running a fully remote organization then I can’t justify a physical office space in the EU and there’s a very clear route to cost-reduction which is “push all the work out to low CoL countries” And honestly it won’t matter whether that is actually feasible or not, the logic looks too compelling and there’s a risk it would be forced on me, which would be a massive headache because I know it won’t work well. On the other hand, if as a dev organization we are mostly back in the office, it is much easier for me to make the argument that offshoring wouldn’t work.
I've worked remote for several years as both a senior engineer and team leader, these are the problems with remote work I haven't yet found good solutions for:
1. I don't know how my employees are doing; many times in my career I've had to tell programmers to "go for a walk" or "time to go home" when they get stuck on a frustrating task or fall in to a flow state far past leaving time. Solutions I've found to this put onus on the employee or create more restrictions that hinder in other areas
2. Brainstorming whiteboard sessions are harder; the issue with remote meetings is that you need each person to finish speaking before the next person can start, which IMO slows down collaboration. Also I still haven't found a great tool to replace the whiteboard, Miro / Figma (Figjam) come close but also are slower at spinning up a flow diagram or sequence diagram or describing a stack.
3. Juniors / Grads need handholding; I've written frameworks to train newer developers in a remote setting but the remote divide creates an invisible barrier between the seniors and juniors for base support. I used to purposefully sit them next to eachother to enable the quick "do I use this or that?" questions or, better, have the senior look over and spontaneously create a learning opportunity related to whatever the junior is doing.
I guess the themes here are speed and spontaneity
(I haven't had my coffee yet so I hope above made sense)
For #2 what you need is just budget $500 to get everyone a podcaster mic and a pair of open-back headphones for calls. It gets rid of the "half duplex" thing, and with the headphones plugged into the mic as a monitor you hear your voice in a different way and don't speak so loudly reducing fatigue a lot.
For #3 I just recommend pair programming. Pairing is already a skill that needs to be learned and remote pairing is a more difficult one. But the tools for it are better than they were a few years ago and are good enough, and it's an excellent venue for naturally exchanging a lot of that sideways knowledge and mindset that makes more experienced engineers so effective.
For #1, 1:1 will help a lot but it will take time as you need to build the relationship enough for them to open up to you.
But I agree with #3. The problem is getting the seniors to RTO just for this express reason. Though having an always-on call for that day would help with adhoc questions from juniors.
> build the relationship enough for them to open up to you
Completely agree, it's also about building that open and honest culture to enable having that kind of conversation with the entire team. But even with this it still doesn't catch many day-to-day frustrations or things you may pick up on that the person wouldn't offer up regardless.
> having an always-on call
The problem with this is you put the onus on the Junior to ask the question, which is hard for someone who's still learning (especially with imposter syndrome being so rife). Also this doesn't allow for the Senior to spontaneously create learning opportunities relevant to whatever they're currently doing, the barrier cuts down a lot of it.
Honestly it depends on the person, I have used this method with some people but with others I've seen them get so hyper focused they've gotten in at 0900, haven't eaten all day, I've gone to the gym and come back at 1830 to get things before going home and they haven't moved. Which is just a recipe for a fast burnout.
Also sometimes people need a sequence break to realise it's home time
Microsoft did a very interesting research about this amongst 60k+ employees. Read it to find out why serendipity is a good thing and hardening already existing relationships is not good for the whole:
“Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information.”
It’s usually the executive class of employees making these decisions, and they want to convey business as usual to the board and others that they report to. They also work differently than almost everyone else. They usually have meeting all day and the topics and decisions being made benefit greatly from the in person dynamics. They also get a lot done by just dropping by other peoples desks and quickly having an impromptu conversation.
They’re pretty removed from the way you work as a non-executive and don’t really care that you can accomplish your job just as easily remotely. In their mind, it’s not best for the company.
They’ve also lived the mandatory WFH days and the whole decision making processes slowed down or they just put a lot of things on hold because it couldn’t fully or appropriately be decided without difficult meeting logistics. These are things you’re unlikely to be aware of as a non-executive.
I think it’s mostly this! And it’s not necessarily malicious - the exec folk have lost sight of the way most people work. To them it’s “obvious” that the office is better, because it IS better for their type of work.
Managers schedule VS makers schedule.
Add to that exec level are usually already rich enough that they don’t have commute or schooling problems to deal with. So they just can’t understand why RTO isn’t popular!
I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is totally in the dark.
I'm working within minutes of waking up, and shower during my lunch break -- taking about 20 minutes total, instead of the hour spent on an office lunch. I take a minute or ten to do chores like laundry, meal prep or dishes, usually no more than twice a day -- in the office, I take similar length breaks and often end up socializing with others. I often find overlooked solutions during my breaks, which are spaced out to prevent eye, neck and wrist strain, or to blow off frustration with a difficult issue. That isn't abusing WFH, it's using time wisely. I can't speak for the people ghosting, but doing chores is not abusing WFH.
"A lot of people are abusing WFH" doesn't mean "all" so ask yourself why you are assuming this internet stranger has unfairly lumped you, personally and specifically, into the "abusing" group and taking offense?
You may be surprised to know that one can do meal prep and pay attention to sprint refinement at the same time. For me, having something to do with my hands while talking helps to keep me focused.
You're supposed to be actively participating in refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and other things of that nature. You can't do that with raw chicken on your hands or while walking to the fridge to get veggies.
The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.
> You're supposed to be actively participating in refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and other things of that nature.
That's a load of context that wasn't clear from your original comment. The jargon "refinement" is not used where I work.
> The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.
That you then need to backfill assumed context is not going to be solved by returning to office. That it's now been clarified in text, in a work situation, could be turned into a resource to be referenced in a future conversation. In the office, the explanation would be ephemeral, and may need frequent repetition until somebody overcomes the hurdle of committing it to text.
I'm not sure how this context is relevant. The point is that you're supposed to be paying attention and I've not yet met a human that can pay attention to two things at once as well as they can to one. I've met a lot that think they can but not any that actually could.
This is why return to office is an attractive option. People are definitely not bringing veggies to chop or laundry to fold to a conference room. And most of them are going to pay attention to a person in their presence talking to them because of basic social niceties. It solves the problem with much less hassle than actually having to identify and cull people who can't handle WFH.
> Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation
That seems odd to me. I can give my full attention to something I am reading, or to listening to what a person is saying in the meeting, but not both at the same time. If I start looking up documentation, I'm going to miss what is being said.
Can... can most people split their attention this way? Am I weird?
I can do a completely mindless manual task while listening to someone speaking (though I struggle to do something manual while reading) - but this doesn't seem to be what is expected here.
Maybe put your condescension away for a second and try to understand a different perspective.
Your refinements work a little different than mine. In mine, the SME or the person who opened the issue (often the same person) reads the story, gives any extra context, answers questions, etc., we assign a point value, and move on. Refinement can be a discussion -- it doesn't always have to be a research session.
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The fact that having a standard of "pay attention in meetings & don't be a ghost" gets you labelled an "irrational micromanaging bully" is exactly why management pushes for a return to office. It's just way less of a hassle for them than having these sorts of battles.
> evaluations of people without knowing their story.
Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding showing up and putting in hours like it was PR.
If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.
Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But, again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately just took longer than expected.
And "results are there" is just hand waving away the problem. Nobody can measure developer results in any sort of systematic fashion. If you've got a way then by all means share with the world.
Time does matter because the agreement between companies and workers is money for time/effort. I'm not giving back salary if my project flops and they're not giving me (much) more money if it makes the company millions.
I'd think so, but either way staring blankly at a screen for six hours a day is way worse than writing code. A much smaller temptation than all the entertainment options in your house and abound.
Yeah I really doubt many people here would be happy about being grilled constantly about their output. I'd rather work in a high trust environment, but this requires actually having trust which is pretty hard remote.
Our solution here to quickly manage out the folks who don’t build trust. Using a simple “yes/maybe/no” framework and have maybe converge with no in a month, you quickly get to a team with high trust.
This is an interesting problem. The counter problem is how do we avoid companies making too much profit? Because that is free money the company got lazily without the shareholders working extra hours.
Expecting people to pay attention during meetings and not be a ghost during a day is crunching developers? Give me a break. We're all highly paid professionals. It's not unreasonable to be expected to act like it.
If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.
Ever read "Thinking fast and slow"? You can more effectively problem-solve when not actively trying to solve them, so it seems completely reasonable to me to distract your conscious mind while pondering a problem.
They are. My former employer briefly had WFH due to COVID. It ended with a small number of people getting fired and the rest coming back 5 days a week. People just weren’t working, and they had some astonishing IT stats that hinted at how bad it was.
Over at Google, there’s an internal study that shows raw code checkins have dropped dramatically since WFH. I’m pretty sure Sundar’s 20% more productivity comment came directly from the numbers in those slides.
It does not surprise me that Zuckerberg and Benioff have gone the length of calling out their employees’ productivity directly. I’m really surprised this comment is this far down, when it’s been painfully obvious at the couple companies I’ve worked at through the pandemic that productivity is the elephant in the room. Some CEOs dress it in corpspeak about collaboration, but if Google, Meta, and Salesforce are all complaining of worker productivity, I think that’s the true reason. I think we’re too afraid to take an honest look at how productive we are, which will ultimately be the demise of WFH we want to defend so badly.
I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a day. The rest of the time they do other personal things but are still available online. They get told they're doing a great job and hit all the important targets.
This person also routinely ignores/mutes as many meetings as possible and frequently multi-tasks in the gym, house chores, etc. Had that person been in the office they'd have had their time wasted on useless all-hands meetings, etc., so now everybody's happy (because that person hasn't had to quit, because life's too short).
Working based on hours doesn't work remote. It should be based on deliverables.
>I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a day.
I'm not sure if people are even doing that. And really if you tack on a couple hours of pointless meetings we're pretty close to 40 hours a week. They're within spitting distance of an expected work week and if they're responsive and hitting targets then who cares. I'm talking about people I think work more like 3-4 hours a week.
You shouldn't need to measure your company's productivity in output based on these things. Are people getting the necessary work done? Your measures are wrong if you feel worried about not being able to tell if people are "actually working". It should be painfully obvious if the necessary work isn't getting done.
Some of my teams were fully remote about eight weeks in 2020, while others have been remote the entire time. I don't believe in full RTO, just hybrid.
1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool team to coordinate their work without a project manager, design, or business analyst if they are in close phyiscal proximity. The struggle is when you distance that team from larger products/project. Even in the minimal case creating visibility for that small team into larger workstreams requires overhead itself. With the macro environment and with leaders being forced to tighten the belt, this is less and less possible. All communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure requires management.
2. I've found about 20% of people have the ability to maintain a professional work environment at home. I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours. I'm all for flexibility, but it becomes a distraction.
3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.
Not that I’m particularly defending RTO. But specifically on the daycare thing. No. They offer you a large salary and let you choose and organise what works for you. Not deciding for you and staffing some daycare as an afterthought on the 3rd floor or whatever :)
IMHO most “perks” are just someone else spending your money for you.
I am sorry, but maybe you didn't understand where I was coming from. I think that having someone else bring up your children because you're forced to be present at an office is absolutely insane. I don't understand how we got to a point where it's considered normal.
I also think that the least that your employer could do is facilitate a place for your child to stay close by and be taken care of, so you can be able to spend your breaks/commute with them, take immediate action if they get sick/hurt, etc.
Why the employer? Because good luck organizing with your co-workers to rent a place suitable for daycare in/close to your office building and hiring personnel to staff it. I wonder what salary should they offer me to make this more feasible than sending a CV to a remote-first company instead...
> 3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.
How often were they mentored by senior engineers? Daily meetings? Weekly?
Who developed the training program? Who wrote the documentation?
I'm an employee and I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic. But occasionally I'll roll into the office when they have free lunch, because I know a bunch of people will be there. And when I do that, I always get a chance to meet up with some coworkers and end up getting a lot done.
And sometimes we have a leadership meeting where I fly into the corporate HQ, as do my coworkers, and we have an all day in-person meeting with no one remote. And it's amazing how much we can get done in a day.
Sometimes it's just a lot easier to discuss a contentious subject where we don't all agree in person, and see body language, and not have to deal with the weird gaps that happen with online meetings.
That being said, I won't ever return to the office full time. The boosts in productivity only happen because it's not a regular occurrence, and it's a huge hassle to get there and back.
But I do see the upside to occasional work in the office.
Also, I used to work at a company that had no remote employees, so we were all in the office every day. That was nice, because if you needed to talk to someone you could just wander over and hash out an issue right then and there, and you could have meaningful hallway conversations, and we were just generally closer as humans. But that only works if you have no remote employees, and I'm not sure that's feasible anymore, at least in software. People got too used to remote work. But if I ever found a company like that where everyone came in every day, and it was close to my home, I'd be willing to do it.
People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.
Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote.
I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.
To whit, open source projects have been run for decades over nothing but email mailing lists. People participating in these projects feel a strong social connection.
And a bunch of conferences like FOSDEM, GUADEC, LinuxConf, PyCon...
All the while not forgetting that people contributing to free software have altogether different motivations: they are (almost) all in it because they want to contribute their own time to something they believe in.
Quite different from what majority of people in any company are there for.
Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of).
I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote.
One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all.
So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts.
Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to.
Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary.
This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).
>In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch.
Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty years and only met the sales people in the period before it was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales was something that happened only rarely and always deliberately.
Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer.
Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?
For background, at least half, or more of the company is fully remote. It’s so many, that the transition to remote work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a year. It was called “All Hands”.
I enjoyed the free trips to Whistler, Berlin, and Austin, and Maui, but it never really felt like work was actually getting done. It was conference room chats ostensibly about planning, but everything always felt a bit phoned in.
I never got it. Inevitably the real planning work would end up after we returned back to our regular locations, so it was more social than anything.
My personal thought is that RTO among the FAANGs is 100% sunk cost fallacy. They wasted billions on bespoke glass donuts, circus tents, and airplane hangers. There’s pride on the minds of these oligarchs.
Yes, all-hands like that 100% are primarily about social and unplanned factors - getting people to see and talk to people they'd otherwise not meet and talk to.
Companies can make this more appealing by holding the meetings in nice parts of the world -- note, nice doesn't have to be outrageously expensive -- putting people up in nice hotels with suitable space for spouses and kids, and by making the week before vacation for half the group and the week after for the other half, with the option to stay in the same hotel at the company's expense.
This won't work for everyone, or every company, but it's a much nicer carrot than usual.
No. It's a lot easier to hire someone to watch the kids on a regular basis, and also they go to school during the day. I can hire people to pick them up and watch them after school, and then help them after work with homework and chores and such.
But if work wants me to travel for a week, it either means my spouse has to pick up all the stuff I do at home, or I have to find someone I trust to stay at my home for a week on an ad-hoc basis.
It's much harder to find ad-hoc babysitting than regularly scheduled babysitting.
When I owned a business, that’s what I did. Everyone worked remotely, except for me and a couple of people. I had a small coworking space simply because working out of my shoebox sized apartment was not fun. I hired everyone from the local area & occasionally had a meeting in the coworking space.
There are many people who have never developed social connections outside of school or work and unilaterally decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if they can’t socialize outside of such an environment surely no one else can. If they can’t see a person as a person if they’re not face to face surely no one else can.
It’s unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.
Well, I was really more addressing social connections with my coworkers, we share jokes, care about each other too but most I'd say have families and several of us are geographically diverse, so we don't socialize with each other or very little. Outside work, I do have social connections, long term friendships. I wasn't addressing socializing or not across the board.
People need social interaction, sure, people also need to have social interactions outside of the office.
What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.
That happens through zoom. Half my team (including my manager) is remote. All of our meetings are over zoom, even when half the team is on campus at the same time. I go to campus, I find someplace to sit (we don't have assigned places to work), I hop on zoom calls as needed, I work, I go home. I never talk to anyone on campus - so my social connections are entirely the same whether I'm working from home or working on campus.
Correct, it isn't self-evident to me at all, but it depends on what is being communicated, of course. In-person communications are slow, and half of the communication isn't really about the topic at hand.
In terms of meetings, I've only rarely seen a meeting that couldn't have accomplished the same goals in 1/10 the time if it done without being a meeting. Whether in-person or zoom. The information density is far too low, too much time is taken up with things that aren't moving toward the goal, etc.
More important role of those connections is that they promote inertness in the employees so they will remain employees even when they are disadvantaged because social component will hold them back from moving on.
OP pointed out that meetings and projects have happened remotely anyways for a long time - an experience I share. The peers you describe aren’t in the same place as yourself even if you’re both in some office.
I had an in-office contract in 2019. No one in the open office plan wanted to be interrupted while sitting at their desk. Everyone had headphones on. I literally used Slack to talk to the people sitting to the left & right of my desk XD
Love these soundbites with zero evidemce. Absolutely not true, plenty of us enjoying remote, we can socialise in a bar/restaurant. No need for an office.
That sounds like a reason why an employee would go to the office. But not really something employer would care about - they don't care about employees social lifes in other contexts.
Tens of billions of dollars in market cap of remote first orgs disagrees. You can work with colleagues without any superfluous social connection, it’s just a job, not a tribe or family. One should be both polite and effective; this does not make you friends.
The inability to support remote work signals the employer cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is managing from emotion instead of data.
Team cohesion is important as far as being able to work collaboratively to finish a project, but it’s not clear that requires being in an office every day for 8+ hrs
I think that in our field people work better together - more collaboration, knowledge transfer, teamwork and ultimately better solutions delivered.
I also believe that people are more motivated and engaged, and work harder and with more focus in a shared workspace outside of the home.
I was on the fence going into the remote work experiment, but everything I’ve seen since supports my feelings above. I’ve seen less of the good stuff and a lot more slacking off.
I think the level of flexibility we had before was about right for knowledge work. I could always get a day or two from home when I wanted some solo focus. I could always shift working hours to fit around life, or take a few hours out of the office for a personal errand. That was enough flexibility for me even though office was the focal point. I don’t think being asked to go back to the office with that kind of dynamic is overbearing or in any way unreasonable.
That does not require being in person, pretty much the entire OSS community demonstrates that.
Honestly I’m beginning to find “we need to be in person to collaborate” to be a red flag for unable to communicate and “will interrupt people working all day”
Far too many of these posts since the pandemic, it's OK if you personally feel more productive at home but if you seriously can't understand the benefits of working together physically then you have a serious mental block. There's some emotional reason why you don't want to hear why people find office work productive. You should at least be able to recite an opposing argument if not empathize with it (let alone agree with it). If you can't do that then you can't make a logical decision and instead you're making a faith based decision. A plug I make to everyone and I'm surprised more engineers don't engage in it; therapy is usually helpful in debugging what's going on in our brains and how our emotions are affecting our ability to navigate with logic.
> you seriously can't understand the benefits of working together physically then you have a serious mental block.
But we working together, just remotely.
Could you explain please, for us with "serious mental block" why do you feel that you need to be near me physically to do any work?
There's over 600 comments on this thread and you came here to say that you're still missing a single argument for in-office work? I can't help you through your mental block, only you can and it's hard work for sure. Also not sure the nature of your question, no one on this thread said they need to be physically near you to do any work, certainly not me.
Not an employer. But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home, and most employers aren't very good at rewarding people for their results, not their hours.
Opposite for me. At home I start working when I wake up and often don't stop until the evening. When I go into the office I have to get ready and commute, and then at the office there are so many distractions - our campus has fantastic fitness facilities and I'll often spend a few hours each day over there. So, at home I probably work for 10 hours. When on campus I probably get 4 hours of work in, if that. Plus, I am so much more productive at home. I have a quiet private office with a much faster internet connection and better equipment. On campus, people don't know how to shut up, so it is hard to get work done with people around me discussing things that have absolutely nothing about work - the other day, 2 people spent an hour discussing how much butter is in Danish cookies! Right next to me!
Same here, started my first fully remote job semi-recently. I've got a nice quiet area to work and the worst interruption I get is maybe my dog drops in for some pets. The productivity and satisfaction remind me of when I was way younger and used to code for fun before it became a job, so I actually kind of enjoy it.
Like maybe I go afk 30-45 mins here or there when I normally wouldn't in office. But for me, I put in more hours overall. A key to this was learning to not have my personal laptop open to the side, and avoiding distractions like social media and idle browsing.
YMMV of course, I think it can really depend on the person and their life situation. But the same could be said of anyone remote or not when it comes to productivity. It's on the managers to measure if things are getting done or not, which is the most important thing.
It is always the employees telling these stories, but how managers are supposed to know if they are really working? When they are at the office the see it with their own eyes.
Common counter argument to this is that the manager sucks because he/she can't measure the work otherwise. But from managers perspective it is much easier to force people to be on-site than fix his/her own problems.
Person you replied to said they spent hours in the company gym during office hours. Either they are delivering what's expected of them anyway, or the manager has no idea what to expect regardless of in-office or remote working.
They also mentioned avoiding other distractions: That's the main feature of remote for me, after many years of wearing headphones all day in various offices.
1. My manager lives and works in an entirely different state. 2. We do not have assigned seating on campus. We are just required to be on campus, but can find a place to work in any building. So, even if my manager was in the same state as me, I certainly would not be anywhere he could see me.
That hasn't been my experience. With a home office, it's hard to tear myself away from work. Commuting is a waste of my time, and a "clean break" ends up costing my employer several hours a day. I'm salaried, so that isn't a monetary cost, but I've seen a real benefit to productivity.
Of course, employers want both butt-in-chair metrics and 24/7 availability without increasing pay. Don't give them that.
> But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home
What do you have to back up your belief? I work from 8-6 on most days +/- 30 minutes. Lunch is a walk downstairs, grab something and eat it at my desk. That's pretty typical of the group of engineers I've been working with remotely on/off for the past 15 years. I don't think we're exceptional in this regard.
Just personal observations. I've worked with a bunch of larger clients and there were many people whose output over long periods of time was minuscule. Hard to measure when I was not their superior, so take it as just a feeling.
With three out of three different employees so far, all slowly did less and less work the longer they worked from home. I’m 90% sure one of them had an additional job, and another one admitted it when he quit. I don’t like to micromanage so give developers a lot of freedom. Few people have as much long-term integrity as we like to pretend we all have.
It’s not irrelevant and could be a conflict of interest if you work for competitors. Where I live I’m pretty sure you can’t have multiple jobs without informing all employers. Also you can’t claim more than a normal day job of hours, so both jobs have to be part time and can’t add on to more than one full time.
That's my point though. It isn't "oh they had two jobs so they got fired," it's "they weren't performing so they got fired."
Plenty of people with one job don't perform and get cut. I've worked with people in the past who I knew had multiple FT jobs, or a FT job and a very demanding contracting schedule, or whatever, and had no trouble doing their work in a reasonable timeframe.
This whole idea that it's wrong or bad to have two FT jobs just smells like some middle manager feeling like they "own" their employees. I'm glad to see the culture has shifted somewhat and people are starting to see how ridiculous that mindset is.
> I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home
From my experience and observations I've gathered from my teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to wait until Monday.
I've definitely been on the other side of this. If I have a 5pm train home to catch and a 45 minute ride to disconnect from work, I'm not likely to log on later and get more work done from home. With remote, there is at least the temptation to continue working longer, especially if I have a lot of work to get done or a deadline.
Over the past 2 years many studies have actually shown the opposite. People work during what was their commute time, they work when they are sick, during lunch break.
Remote is high risk, high reward. If you’ve built a great organisation filled with talented, motivated and trustworthy people who have autonomy then remote work can be a fantastic boon to productivity because it’s an extension of the autonomy that helps the workers thrive…
…if you’ve built an average organisation filled with people who are demotivated by bad management who have no autonomy and struggle to drag themselves through the day, then remote work will shred what little value you’ve managed to extract from a dysfunctional organisation.
Remote work isn’t the problem, the problem is further upstream: if you work for a company that is restricting remote work, whether you love to work remote or in office, it’s a sign to leave.
I love working in an office and do so every day, and consider in-office collaboration to be very valuable, however, autonomy is far more valuable.
So, from a managers perspective: if your organisation is struggling with maintaining output while permitting remote work, you can either radically rethink your entire organisation and engage in a multi-year project to undo years of mismanagement… or you can just ban remote work. Of course, the latter is just kicking the can down the road, but kicking the can down the road is usually the only real option without buy in from the board.
The desire to not be involved in professional cherry picking was a big factor in my decision to steer clear of data engineering / data science jobs early on.
Remote work requires a certain culture and skillset. You must be a good writer, type quickly, be self-expressive online even when not prompted by management. You must self-document and self-promote.
Believe it or not, many, many people are not good at that or don't fit that mold. Yet they can still be productive. They just require more supervision and the ability to express themselves in a manner that suits them.
If remote work suits you, and doesn't suit your management or your management's culture, don't try to change your whole company. It won't work. Instead, search for a company that is a better fit for you.
> You must be a good writer, type quickly, be self-expressive online even when not prompted by management. You must self-document and self-promote.
This right here. One of the failings of remote work being talked about in the comments here is, IMO, easily attributable to the company's focus on spoken (whether in-person or via Zoom) communication rather than written.
I have a strong preference for written communication with regards to work, whereas most of the companies I've worked for have preferred spoken. My preference isn't superficial, it's based on what appear to be obvious advantages -- past communication can be referred to again later, planning and documentation kind of organically occur via written communication, complex ideas can be given more time to be developed in an email vs off the cuff/probably worse explanations when spoken. The few times I can get people to actually just read the long email I just wrote, outlining a whole plan and my justifications for certain decisions, everything is super smooth.
But most of the time, peoples' eyes glaze over and they go "wow this seems like a lot, let's plan a Zoom meeting to discuss." The meeting happens somewhere within 1 - 10 days, usually being pushed at least once, I explain everything I wrote (often times just reading straight from the email), but then at a certain point peoples' eyes glaze over once again and they say "sounds like we're really getting into the weeds here, do you mind typing this up into an email that I can read later?" I then proceed to scream into the void.
Rinse and repeat, and after literal weeks, finally the contents of a perfectly cogent email that could have been read and understood in ~10 - 15 minutes have finally sunk in. It is absolutely maddening.
A strong culture of written communication is now one of the single most important things I look for in a company. I'm not against spoken communication, far from it -- having actual in-person or at least Zoom time is nice, and for brainstorming or discussing a plan, written communication isn't as good (though I've had quite a few great Slack brainstorming sessions). I'm not a shut-in, very sociable, and I enjoy a nice balance of remote and in-person work. But for work, which is by definition something for which I strive to minimize time spent/sanity lost and maximize income received, written communication is far and away my preferred method.
I wonder if there is a bias towards WFH on HN because the type of person most likely to like WFH is also the kind to post a lot on internet message threads. I think most people feel most productive spending at least some time in the office with other people, face to face. Further, I assume many people are like me and feel like some pressure to actually go to the office is good, or I'd too often make the short term easier decision to WFH.
Related, in my city (I sit on some citizens advocacy groups for public transit) - I’ve noticed the city’s planners that work at the department of transportation are still full remote after all this time. Almost all of the work this department has been undertaking has stripping half the lanes from MAJOR surface streets and putting in bike lanes nobody uses. The bike community is very active online and knows how to brigade people. I wonder if being remote all this time has made it so that they are hearing the loudest voices (bike advocates) and not talking to working people who have to commute everyday (online these people get bridgaded by bike people, they are also not as active on social media)
Basically think of it was having your worldview warped by r/fuckcars
A bit of a stretch IMO. I think you're onto something in that another reason I think WFH is a louder viewpoint is that they feel like they aren't the mainstream, just like the bike people. But the bike people have a strong excuse for activism in that their lives are threatened daily by cars. I wish I could ride my bike to work but it's too dangerous and stressful - more bike lanes would help and I support them ripping out parking places and lanes in my city.
Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of problems it’s useful to have people in the same room until we have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people, not leaving their home caused significant issues in their performance. People aren’t solitary creatures, so for some - the office fills that role. For others, home office works perfectly well. There isn’t a yes/no answer here. I should perhaps add, that coming to the office was always voluntary in my company, way before Covid.
Sorry but in my opinion you can't beat free styling with Excalidraw and a bunch of nerds leaning back in their own basements and home offices thinking deeply and being critical of ideas.
The overhead of having such meetings is next to nothing in remote compared to the office. No one has to get up to go to a meeting or book a meeting room.
Did you just have a eureka moment 5 minutes after a meeting ended? No problem! Ping the group chat and get on a call in less than 15 seconds while the idea is still hot in memory.
Oh you want to pick up where you last left off? No problem, upload last meetings Excalidraw file and start editing.
A lot of communication between people is non-verbal. Also, the interaction with drawing software is not the natural way for people to convey their ideas, we tend to use our fingers to point, to draw etc. For some types of problems, I stand by my point, that first person interaction speeds up problem solving. But obviously there are many kinds of problems that do not benefit from this. So the way we usually structure this, is we set a date/time when X people from a team work together in the same room, if it makes sense to grind through things together. And at other times, people choose their own schedules / workplaces.
Ha the good old tale of people gathering around the whiteboard to solve hard problem.
IME, it's usually 30/60 minutes during which the Architect listens to himself, draws some nice boxes and arrows, overlooks all the edge cases and nuances and then everyone goes back to their open space desk. And the next day you realize that the solution doesn't work and you start a Jira comment thread.
> Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing.
I hear this often, and it makes sense, but I am not sure how frequently do people solve problems with whiteboarding? Is it such a frequent problem that we need to be in the office every day?
Well, I do this every other day. The days where I need to focus on deep work and just grind things out, I stay home. The days where I need to be creative, I go to the office and get in front of a whiteboard.
At my company we have the worst of both works with "hybrid office". Employees need to come to the office 3 days a week, each team picks one day for the entire team to be in-office, the employees can choose the other days.
The team day is mostly consumed with in-person meetings with others on your team, so no individual work gets done that day. The other in-office days are either spent heads down with headphones trying to focus or trying to book one of the limited conference rooms to have a zoom meeting with coworkers that are working from home or in a remote office. It's hard to book meetings before 10am or after 4pm because someone's usually commuting during that time.
Companies should either pick full remote or full back in the office, Hybrid doesn't seem to work well.
Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff.
That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.
I mean, if you think about it, it may be crazy for companies to insist on RTO because of costs of all that overhead they're saving, except for the simple fact that you get what you pay for. There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen.
I've been waiting for the penny to drop for some time now. Since COVID-19 locked everyone at home with a consumer-grade ISP, I've had plenty of time to read my TOS and service agreements. And you'd be hard-pressed to find such an ISP that actually permits "commercial activity" or WFH to occur on their connections, which are intended for gaming and entertainment. In case you haven't noticed, consumer ISPs don't really care when your connection goes down. The SLA is 0 CBR, best-effort delivery. So, enjoy your WFH infrastructure, but you get what you pay for.
My Site B is the public library, where I've been assured that I can conduct my WFH activities on their network, even in a private study room. That's the best I've got for now. If you're RTO--count your blessings. I have no office to return to!
> That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.
By saving on office costs you can just offer those benefits to your remote employees. You can hire someone to clean a residential bathroom too!
Well you see, at home everyone has their own fridge, but in the office there's a single fridge for 50 people. And it's got free drinks in it to make up for the extra (say) hour a day spent travelling to get there.
I work as an engineer at NASA in Cleveland, Ohio. We went from 100% in person work to completely remote work for a year and half due to the pandemic, and now the work environment is mainly in-person but remote work is much more common. I often work in a lab with physical hardware which obviously requires me to be present. Additionally, we don't produce anything per se, we do tech development. I'm not cranking out widgets/code/whatever where my productivity is easy to objectively judge.
Here are some reasons I could imagine in-person work may be advantageous:
-I think there is probably an increase in camaraderie when people can interact with each other in-person.
-Spontaneous unstructured collaboration and innovation absolutely increases in-person. We rarely have informal asides after a Teams meeting, but it happens a lot after in-person meetings.
-Hiring new inexperienced people who are from out-of-town and having them start 100% remote is generally a bad experience and they pick things more slowly.
-People that working from home abuse it and multitask by running errands, watching their kids, etc. This is great for employees and I would guess that it is a large part of the reason that many employees are loathe to go back to work 100% of the time. Productivity can be difficult to track.
-The NASA network is very reliable and under our complete control. Remote work depends on each person's home internet connection/router/wifi and it's MUCH slower and less reliable. I often deal with large quantities of data and and the only way to work with it is locally on the same network it's produced on. Sure I can remote in, but then we're back to depending on public internet infrastructure. Sometimes things break so I guess I can't work on that today.
A related thought:
-If large percentage of the workforce depends on the complex public internet infrastructure to perform work, that creates a possible weak point in their operations that could be affected by adversaries or maybe a natural disaster or something. I get that many people here do work that would cease to have any purpose if the internet disappeared so there's less disadvantage to remote work. But most industries use the internet for convenience, it isn't fundamental to their existence and everything they do could be done without it.
Certainly regions which have been neglecting internet infrastructure directly or indirectly will be at a disadvantage, including economically. This is hardly news. The pandemic also made it more obvious to many people that fiber build-out is a must, since latency and upload also matter for remote conferencing, not just download speeds.
As for adversaries or natural disasters, internet rarely works without electricity. In the small scale, my guess would be internet barely increases the weak spot that is already present via electricity. In the large scale, it doesn't matter if someone is in the office or an hour away.
Pre March 2020 almost none of my meetings in the preceding 5 years included a single remote person. I liked that better for working. I felt more connected to my colleagues and more in tune with what was happening around the firm.
Of course I also enjoy some of the flexibility of WFH.
a) they are thinking that you are slacking off when you are working remotely. This might be true or not.
b) they are unable to quantify your work and decide if you are successful or not, which is an indication of unfit management. By forcing you to go the office, they can justify their own existence, claiming they are managing "their" people.
In my 25+ years working at US companies, I encounter the latter case with managers, who came straight out of the army, doing noting but but barking orders at their subordinates all day long. They were under the impression that corporate America was managed the same way. I personally put a couple of them in their places, in those days.
CEO of the company I worked for, straight out of college, one day, gathered up all 120 or so of us, new hires straight from the school and and gave a speech. One thing he said still sits with me: Good managers want to work with people who are smarter than themselves. Others want to work with mediocre or worse people, because they do not want their decisions to be questioned by their subordinates.
The people who want you back in the office are not good managers. They are "the others"
For those who are replying with "all my projects were remote before anyway" or "I was on video conference before fully remote work too!" - how many of these co-workers on video were at another office site, or had worked at an office site before "going remote?"
Before 2020, I also had video attendees in almost every meeting, but they were either at another office site where they still had a peer group and some co-located team members, or had a long tenure at the company and had been "allowed" to work remotely.
In my opinion these previous remote-attendee situations are totally different dynamics from running a fully remote team. There is a special, major challenge in managing a team where many team members have never met one another, a coworker of any kind, or their management in person. It's a surmountable challenge and I think some of this can be explained by the cynical "employers would rather let remote employees go than learn something new" take, but working in and managing a remote team is still a unique experience IMO.
Fully remote teams didn't come out of Zeus head fully formed in March, 2020. There was less of them, but they existed.
I consider the dynamic you described, of local teams in separated locations that have to work as one, actually to be a major antipattern. The communication doesn't flow as well between locations as it does inside each location. It's much better to shape the teams to the geographic organization.
I think the worst anti-pattern is the "soft return to work" pattern that's sprung up, where one cohort of people have met and work together in person while the rest remain distributed and have never met. I think that "partially distributed" works if the team have all met and worked together in person at some prior date, but otherwise it's a minefield which demands very careful management and ideally (if possible), periodic in-person meetups.
Of course remote work existed before 2019, but there are also an enormous wealth of statistics indicating that it was not very common. On the flip side, some Hacker News users assume that because they had an extremely rare remote job before 2019, it's the "normal state" of the world.
I’m unsure why an engineer would want to be back in the office. There are a lot of distractions and unnecessary stress.
From my point of view, engineers who depend on others to get their work done like to be in the office. Because it makes it look like they are collaborating and getting work done.
From a manager point of view, this looks like collaboration as well. And would benefit the project. This is why they want people in the office.
I disagree with it. There are engineers who like to manipulate other people and it is far less likely to happen in a remote environment.
Additionally to all the comments, I think it is a challenge for most middle managers and up. Because it becomes obvious who can manage people and who can not. Who is capable of planning tasks and who is not. They have less personal/social leverage => they need to be professionals... and 50% are not ...
In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks.
But in my opinion, managers who don't know what their employees do via remote. They know even less what happens in the office. But sure every one looks busy when the boss is walking the floor... :D maybe that gives them a good feeling.
I personally prefer a mixed week, like 2 days in the office and 3 days remote. But I would say the remote days are more productive in a sense of getting stuff done.
Managers don't have much idea what employees are doing, them being on site gives them a feeling of things being in control. It is not that surprising, if you think about it business on all level is just a guessing game, and people try to take the reduce their uncertaincies.
I'm an employer, but my opinion would be the same regardless.
The script is something like this:
Person1: Arg! This thing!
Person2: What ya working on?
Person1: <...> is giving me trouble.
Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out on this interaction.
Also, WFH is also just too distracting if you have a family/roommates etc...
I'm sure there are plenty of jobs where regular, informal face to fact interaction didn't help me solve problems faster, but not in my line of work.
I have some interaction with Federal employees too. They have been out of the office for a long time. You now have more a problem getting a hold of someone who is nominally 'at their desk'. I don't know why this is, but its a fact.
I'm not a direct employer, mostly an investor and solo entrepreneur who has low likelihood of ever employing people again. Used to be a big employer until sold my company.
Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems. People often end up working on wrong things.
Personally I won't be investing in remote-only companies, unless it is somehow extremely stellar project.
The must have pretty bad managers then. Why should there be a trust issue? My manager assigns me a task, I do it on time and they are happy or I fail to do it on time and they are unhappy. How does where I do that task make a difference?
I think the return to office thing is just a cover for incompetent management.
Yeah, let's say that it is incompetent management. As an business owner, you can fix the situation either by forcing people into offices, or firing the bad managers and recruiting a competent management instead. To me the latter solution sounds crazy expensive and difficult compared to the first.
Not an employer but the answer is obvious: control.
It is true you can get some organic team-building and spontaneous collaboration but the cost of that is so high, it's no justification. Not having to commute, being able to live in a lower cost area, having flexibility to run errands, etc are of such monumental value to people.
But the real lesson here I think a lot of people are learning to their surprise is that tech companies are really no different to any other companies.. Moves like forcing you into the office and all the entails (commuting, face time, regular hours, no real breaks, unpaid overtime) has the same motivation as layoffs for the "recession": to suppress labor costs.
15 years ago we had collusion by Apple, Google and otehrs to suppress wages through collusion not to "poach". Now? Other companies laying off 5-10% of staff gives every other company the freedom to do the same. It's all the same: to suppress labor.
So forcing you into the office is both about control and increasing organic attrition. Some people have made new lives in the last 2 years and can't just come back to the office. A certain paercentage of those will quit. Great. No severance.
Many tech workers with so many good years and high-demand for our services have fallen into the trap of thinking they're somehow above the adversarial (exploitative) pressures other people are subject to. Fancy offices, Herman Miller chairs and "free" food play into this delusion.
I really don't care - whatever works for you. But there are a few things I observed, due to which I believe remote work will not be default work mode in the long run.
* There's significant rise in burnout rate and LOTS of people looking for professional help with psychological issues. Many times more than in previous years. Some returned to the office and got significantly better, because they simply lacked human interaction (both their and surrounding opinion).
* There's group that prefers to work from the office for various reasons (people, work/life separation, small/noisy home).
* Both groups make significant part of our teams. Due to that some additional people decide to join as they feel they are missing out on part of the discussion and team interaction. This tends to snowball.
* Then there's elephant in the room: I know some people (personally, but outside of my org), who will hire at a few places (three or more) and bluntly lie about being full-time dedicated to each of them. They'll actively delay work giving false reasons, to maintain that illusion. Some employers will react by implementing group responsibility, when they find out.
Disclaimer (I had that discussion before): if you have steel-strong psyche, prefer people from outside work, have great communication skills, can sleep 2h a day and work 16h or have negotiated terms of employment that allow to be hired at a few places - good for you. This comment is mere observation, not attack on your life choices.
This topic comes up a lot, and the biggest pro return to office argument is essentially social. People want more human interactions that online do not give them.
This I think is more indicative of society, and I think is something that is a gap in society / business opportunity. WeWork, which was poorly run, I think really has a foot into this, but not to the full extent. In urban design there is this idea of a third place, somewhere that is not work or home that people interact. These places have massively declined in the west, especially in the united states. People used to have many many third places. People had work, and home, but then they would also have church that they attended weekly or more, they would have union halls, taverns, social organizations (masons, elks, knights of columbus, vfw, etc). A lot of bars and restaurants are a lot louder and more consumer focused than they used to be I think as well which has hurt.
Public Libraries are another place that could step up, try and get more people to work from there and socialize, but most libraries have pretty bad hours and are undefunded or have strict silence requirements. But I can see a need for some kind location, that is open a lot, 7am-10pm or something, that you pay a membership fee for. That you can go anytime, and drink cheap coffee or beer and work / socialize in them.
Not an employer, but work at a pretty big company where the CEO made a pretty big tell: he mentioned that remote work seemed to cause a loss in overall productivity. But then almost all engineers chafed, and he had to clarify: we was talking specifically about the sales organization.
My sense is that leadership making these decisions simply isn't really tuned into how engineering operates. And that's mostly it; they're focused on the business, and probably are dialed into the sales pipeline. And that probably leads to tons of questions and one-off-style clarification sessions where video chats and Slack just aren't great, to be frank.
At the same time, I do think there are significant tradeoffs between a remote team and a "shared meatspace" team. With remote teams, cross-team relationship building is really challenging, and I've noticed that there's a natural tendency to focus purely on your team. With all teams in a same physical location, it's easier to actually just pop by and clarify complex details. But, I did work at a place that got hundreds of engineers together about 3x a year, and that seemed to be enough to build significant bridges across the org.
Ultimately though, in my experience, these kinds of decisions are just because upper management is more aligned with sales organizations than engineering.
Salesforce? I read Benioff’s comments differently. He gave an example of lower productivity in sales, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t apply to engineering. It was just an eye-catching example that 50% of sales wasn’t accomplishing anything or whatever it was.
I can't speak directly for the people you're actually asking. I'm involved in these meetings at my workplace. I don't agree with the call to bring everyone back to the office even though I like working from an office. I've been fully remote since before the pandemic but I like seeing coworkers. I'd like to think I can "see it both ways." I voted against bringing people back but I lack the all important "C" or "V" in front of my title so my opinion carries little weight.
From my company's discussions, my take is that it's hard for the C suite to feel connected to employees without face to face time. Why? Probably the very basic issue of 1 on 500 or 1 on 5000 communication, which is hard in person and even more so online. I don't mean 1 on 500/5000 presenting, I mean the exchange of ideas and gaining understanding of the people that work for you. If you're a front line manager or sufficiently senior on the IC track then you likely had to learn new techniques to communicate in 1 on 10 and 1 on 20 engagements. It's harder to scale that to 1 to 500 or so.
If you hold the power of sword and purse, then it's "easier" to mandate that people work from a location you can easily travel to.
I'm not answering this directly as an "employer" but just a few imperfect observations...
Many people do not need social connections and interactions to be productive and happy. I find that most of the people who want WFH or be entirely remote fall into this group.
Many people so need social connections and interactions to be productive. They find value in dealing with people 1:1. Its how they socialize in-part, how they make friends, and provides variety in their day. They may like to WFH on occasion, but the office interaction is integral.
So... it is (IMHO) mostly the first group that we hear from in these discussions. I would argue that OP is in the group. That second group is often ignored when these questions are framed in such an abolitionists manner ('this works better for me so it must work better for everyone').
Its not just 'employers' making arbitrary decisions. It is not a simple question to answer and a whole host of other factors come into play (company culture, company size, history of remote work, location of teams/people, timezones, and so on).
(Minor note: I find myself in the first group but I appreciate that there are many sides to this)
Employers are locked into all these commercial real estate transactions and since it's a big part of the budget, they have to utilize it. The alternative is a realization that without the performative part of office politics most of the stage is unnecessary since in most companies the core business ultimately is done by a small group of people. Often similar with tech teams... Management and middle management without the meetings and performances to prove their need and value require everyone in the office to be in attendance as an audience. Otherwise it's just even more obvious how much is needed for the core business to be profitable and succeed.
So far Twitter has been a good example. Now for workers, it's important to go back for other reasons. Remote workers reduce your power negotiating as an employee and it's a much larger pool to even get hired. Being able to be in person becomes an emoloyment advantage at that point.
Working closely with a number of pro-office senior leaders it basically comes down to a few thing:
1. It is very hard to steer a giant organization and get everyone on the same page under ideal circumstances. Work from home makes that even harder because people aren’t as tuned into what is happening beyond their job. If the business needs to pivot it takes longer.
2. Most senior leaders spend 6-10 hours a day in meetings. It really sucks when they have one or two people on Zoom and everyone else is around a conference room. Wait, your mic is muted, Ted. Oh, no it is the conference room speaker is off or something, I don’t know…20 minutes later someone fixes it, but it wasted 20 minutes that all those people don’t have in their day.
3. Usually senior leader, C-suite folks, got to where they are at, in part, because of how good they are in the in-person meeting / 1:1 in-person. It is their super power. You take that away and they feel less effective.
Answering the direct question in a simplistic way: because this is the preferred style of collaboration for these employers you are talking about. Let me elaborate.
It is not good or bad, effective or ineffective, nor it is the case for all employers.
Here is my take: the preferred style of work (office, remote, hybrid, flexible) needs to be shared between the team members. Not unlike people's values. If the vast majority of people on the team share it - you are golden. If everyone has their own - you have got yourself a problem. By all means, please, ask it on the interview! (Goes both ways, for the employees and for the employers.)
Now, I understand that right now there are probably more pro-office employers than people willing to accept it. Whether it is true or not (do we have some reliable statistics on this? are we a vocal minority instead?), I think only time will create an equilibrium (new generation of middle managers, etc.)
I'm an academic in the humanities, and we've had working from home (except for teaching) for decades. You have a range of people from those who just come in to teach during term time and otherwise work from home 2.5 hours away by train, to those who are in the office all day every day. We also have big get-togethers in the form of conferences.
My experience since 2020 has pushed me against working from home, in particular research seminars are far worse online. The quality of questions is much worse, and engagement is visibly worse than when we have them in person.
As for research... a lot of research ideas come from corridor chat. If you have an idea for a paper and Dave down the corridor is an expert in the area, it's much easier to test the idea out on him as you walk back together from a seminar than to email him. Maybe it shouldn't make a difference, but it does.
For many (most?) it’s fairly clearly about demonstrating power over the plebs. For some there’s making it look like their investment in shitty open plan offices wasn’t a waste of money.
Of course they dress it up as collaboration, much like they do open plan offices, and much like open plan offices it’s BS in this case as well.
Obviously there are some people who desperately want to return to the office as they use the office for socializing, except that of course they’re taking the position that their socializing /lack of non-work life is more important than everyone else’s life.
Also chatty coworkers isn’t productive, especially in open plan offices. Oh and of course now you get to have coworkers coming to the office size and giving you plague as they did prepandemix, only with an exciting new plague option as well.
It's a combination of the following:
1. Hr and management Karen's/Joe's looking for control
2. People who hate their families and want a socially acceptable way to get away from them.
3. Corner office types who spent their careers trying to get one just to have COVID and cloud services make them realize it was all a mirage anyway.
At least this is what I've seen. I don't have a problem with hybrid schedules but the last in office place I went to did a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday hybrid week. FFS, it was awful. Id have all of this go juice for Monday, lose it for work from home Tuesday and be miserable for Wednesday and Thursday. Just do Monday through Wednesday in office or Tuesday through Thursday. Just keep all the in office days together.
>Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.
C-level leaders at my company set a mandate for our "distributed sites" to be relatively autonomous with their own missions and roadmaps. But middle and line-level managers keep making exceptions, finding it expedient to use India and LatAm teams as extra hands for projects run out of the US, for example. So as an employee you experience most of your collaboration being remote. Your EM and your skip get it. But HR and the CEO don't.
We're in a situation now where almost nobody knows anyone in their management chain who cares about their attendance, but the CEO and HR have made clear that they will be firing people who aren't badging in.
Sadly, the biggest employer motivation is some have very long leases and don’t want to look stupid to the board for having signed up for useless office space with a decade still on their lease.
Others are motivated by ego, being able to walk down isles watching their minions tools away.
However, never meeting people IRL definitely reduces collaboration and performance on highly iterative and collaborative projects compared to everyone going and meeting IRL.
Meeting at least quarterly for 3-4 days can make things work, but time in an office is better. Again, if you work on a team. If you are and IC, quarterly if probably fine or entirely remote might be fine too.
Junior and some mid employees seem to do worse - at least in the small amount of data I've seen since the pandemic. This is likely part culture, which emphasizes individual performance rather than team performance. If you're a netflix-style organization that only hires seniors then this is less important.
I think hybrid, with ~2 days a week - one dedicated to any team meetings and the other pure work is a good compromise plus regular in-person summits if you have a geographically distributed team. Don't just get in-person to meet, working together allows you to learn the the many subtle things about people's workflows that may be good or bad.
Well, the recent graduates will be fine because they've spent the last couple years learning remotely and getting work done. You have to develop that skill.
Maybe does not apply to high-tech companies but I personally witnessed fintech company employees slowdown almost to halt. They stopped working and did not finish many of the tasks unless managed in person. Majority of employees find ways to watch netflix/hulu/youtube even on company laptops (or play games). They miss the first minutes of meetings, you can hear them eating stuff and plate sounds in the background while talking to them. Unless the employees are career driven, they stop working and find ways to do bare minimum to get their paychecks. That's why.
Because there are people who can self-drive and get themselves to work and become productive without having to be reminded/ridden.
Then there are people who need someone over them (and that's ok).
Most people think they are the self starting type. Most people are LYING or WRONG about their ability to self start & self manage. Most people simply are NOT more productive but think they are. The numbers state otherwise. I'm all for remote work for high performers and self starters but everyone places themselves in that category and it's only true for a small percentage.
I'm not in the position to set policy but if I had to give a reason: mentoring of juniors. This could be done over chat and webcam but it appears to me this is not a great fit for everybody.
I remember an interview of Blockbuster long time ago who claimed that their business will never go out of business because people come to their store for the people connection, chatting with employees, walking around the isles searching for videos, and ultimately the experience of even going to the store.
I was actually in agreement with them at the time. But fast forward 10-20 years and with Netflix and YouTube, looks like they were wrong about the whole thing.
I think the same is playing out here with the in office vs remote work.
Remote communication is not as good as in person. One zoom meeting is not the end of the world. But after 1000 zoom meetings, the problems start to compound and matter a lot for any team that requires a lot of communication.
If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.
On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.
Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.
I think we can categorise employees into two: Experienced professionals and everyone else.
The experienced professional has a track record of coming up the ranks in both position and skillset. He doesn't need to talk to people as much to get work done. He has a good understanding of the domain and has strong analytical skills, able to break down complex problems by himself or with another experienced engineer.
Then there is everyone else. Everyone else does not have the above characteristics. They do not have the skills needed to work by themselves or even learn by themselves. Juniors get frustrated because they don't have the necessary number of synchronous experiences, relying on async forms of knowledge without the ability to piece it together (or at least do it quickly). Furthermore, everyone else accounts for a bigger percentage of the organisation. Most people do not have the skills I mentioned above.
To conclude, some people manage equally well or better remotely. But it's not the case for the whole organisation.
Follow on question: I wonder what the long term effects on company juniors are of working fully remote. I estimate it takes each individual 3-5X more time to get upskilled.
As a counterpoint, I (like many other) love working from home.
I still get to see colleagues maybe once every few months for an all-hands/drinks after, and I consider some colleagues to be friendLY, but I wouldn't consider myself friends with them; my friends are the people that I have around every week for movie nights/gaming sessions. Colleagues can become one of those people but they generally do not (& in fact probably like most people I haven't stayed in contact with the majority of people from previous jobs).
In terms of mental health: I feel much better working from home for so many reasons, I don't have to commute so I can get a little bit of extra sleep when needed, nor am I contributing to mass pollution of the environment with my needless travels. I can have packages delivered and be there to collect them, tidy the house or cook myself a proper lunch over my break. I can do other chores like put washing on in the morning and be able to hang it to dry once it's done. When I'm being social in the evening we can start a lot earlier; no need to wait for everyone to get back to their respective homes, shower and get ready and then travel all to one place - because they're already at home. If I'm feeling ill, but still ready to work rather than going to the office and giving everyone a cold, or staying at home on a sick day and being bored out of my mine I can still just work. I can itch, scratch, cough, blow my nose, fart, sit in a relaxed manner without social repercussions. I can control my working environment in totality - if I want to listen to music on a speaker I can, if I want to put my desk next to my window I can, if I hit a brick wall and want to take a quick breather to make myself a coffee and decompress for 10 minutes then I can do that without looking "lazy".
I do still think for more junior developers that it's important to have an "office day" once a week or fortnight especially for mentoring purposes.
What a lot of people forget (including myself at times) is that a very high percentage of polite & friendly coworkers behave that way ONLY because of the contractual settings. IRL they wouldn't give you the time a day.
Funny story: I had a coworker one time who would come talk to me every shift (I never went to them), they wanted to know every detail about my existence, pick my brain, had surprisingly interesting things to say and tell, made funny jokes, laughed at my jokes. We would revisit topics and talk about them some more or exchange new found insights. Then when I quit I asked if we should stay in touch and the response was: why the hell would I want that? I'm like, why do you come talk with me every day? Oh I was just being polite. Apparently it was important for all of those people they didn't like to like them. It was entirely political!
I wasn't hurt or anything. More like amazed by the quality of acting. A format like: "Oh? you like pokemon! I like pokemon too! Let me impress you with my perfectly faked pokemon knowledge while thinking: o god, another one of those pokemon people & if only I could remember where I put my pokemon shirt.
This is the area my startup is in (hybrid working) and i've been exposed to work practices and decisions at several hundred companies. Unsurprisingly, the common theme is that it's a massive culture shift. You're looking at breaking something that's been the norm for a LONG time, and almost breaking it overnight.
I've spent quite a while trying to formulate a response that covers everything but it's a deeply complex subject and touches on physical space constraints, employee development, cost (both to employee and employer), speed of decisions and response, and (all) employee wellbeing.
For every positive, there's a negative and if people aren't sure what to do I think they just default to what they're familiar with and knee-jerk back to what was the norm.
I think we're only getting started with remote working, my feeling is that there will always be office only companies (in the same way there's always been remote only companies). And the most common will be 'remote first' model where you can work where-ever you want but you're expected to attend certain meetings in the calendar in person.
I worked for 5 years for a group that was located on a different continent; I was the only one not in that office. My performance was stellar based on official evaluations, but career was stagnant, I was almost a myth than a real person with a real career. Salary raises were limited by the level in the company, so that had a ceiling too.
Then I was the manager of others for even more years and we were part of a geographically distributed team. I asked the people to come to the office a couple of days per week, mostly to discuss face to face the stuff not so productive on audio (we almost never do videoconferences) and to have lunch and keep the feeling of being part of a team. This was only because of my previous experience.
The result was during the summer most of the team was in the office most of the time (the request was only for 2 days), while during the winter the people with complicated comute were coming only a few days per month. Some of us were walking, cycling or motorcycling to the office, so weather was an important factor and traffic is usually very bad on bad weather, working from home was the right choice.
A full work from office makes no sense, in my opinion, for most IT people except local helpdesk that interacts with people, from replacing a laptop to fixing an app for the business people, as IT people usually self-service their problems. At the same time I believe that a 100% work from home is not good for many people, especially new hires and people that thrive in a community.
There is also the aspect of performance: if a bad performer is just a name, a person you never met and don't care, it is very difficult to empathize and the tolerance for their mistakes or slowness is very, very low.
A lot of the comments here are binary. Why not advocate for hybrid, 3 days in, 2 days out, or vice versa, giving junior people opportunities for exposure and mentorship and giving everyone time to build culture together, but allowing people time away for deeper work? And then why not invest in your office space so people aren’t treated like animals at a trough and be in actually good locations with walkable amenities?
Nobody is actually in the office 5 days a week anymore, right? I thought RTO meant 1-3 days a week in the office.
Anyway, I don't think we need the term "hybrid." If employees are required to live within commuting distance of an office, then that is an "in-office" job. Being able to work remote at least some of the time is a given for any position.
Employee here, I really enjoyed full remote work during the pandemic, but I have to admit after 6 months I started to feel pretty lonely. I think for mental health reasons employees should be encouraged to at least do hybrid, but I do expect my workplace to also provide flexibility to suit everyone's needs. If I had kids I'd probably try to be remote as possible.
The company I'm with since 2015, was founded in 1989 and has been fully remote since that time.
As a remote working for 8+ years, I found the initial transition difficult (came from brick and mortar) but now I cannot imagine going back to that.
The collaboration and spontaneous connections work just fine remote, at least they have in my experiences.
I’m a middle manager in my 40s. I’ve been going into the office since the fall, but was fully WFH during covid before that and made the decision to go back in purely due to personal convenience. My company continues to offer employees flexibility and has not mandated RTO.
That said, we have a lot of team members in the firm in their early 20s, their first jobs. I’ve noticed a preference for those team members to RTO (at least a few days a week), and that a good deal of learning and camaraderie result. It is certainly far easier for me to mentor such folks in the office (especially since most aren’t on my team) than when we’re siloed at home.
More senior folks prefer remote — it’s generally easier to balance family demands. But ones who’ve joined the team having been fully remote from the start have even expressed difficulty coming up to speed, despite everyone on the team being transparent and working to solve the issue. It takes new habits and they’re hard to learn.
I think that within a few years this question is going to be much more nuanced. There are numerous tools for remote presence, from chatting to real-time code windows, 2d RPG-style shared spaces, and 3d and VR shared spaces.
My assumption is that within say five years the question is more often going to be something like, how often (if at all) are you required per day or per week to "teleport" into the shared AR/VR collaboration space.
We should anticipate putting on a pair of normalish glasses or maybe goggles that can then integrate a very realistic virtual room into your home. There will be eye contact with what appear to be real people. These will make heavy use of AI for compression and realism. This is just extrapolating from existing research or enterprise devices and software that have most of these capabilities already.
Many people will view this in the same way they do going to the office. They will either think it's essential or a total distraction.
I think over time remote is going to lose. Once the revolution is over and things mature remote working will become far more invasive and controlling than it is now. Then on-site companies will start out-performing remote, especially very large companies.
I reckon many employers make the same calculation and want to head it off.
Because "you", as an established worker in your industry don't need hand holding guidance.
Remote first will never replace the way impromptu mentor sessions happen in person or after hours. I am extremely glad I had the opportunity for this, and I want to replicate it for the juniors just entering work.
Not an employer and I'm not a fan of RTO personally, and I've figured out how to remote work.i do help with interviews and I do have to say our success rate of good hires kind of went off a cliff with WFH, hires that we would have expected to excel absolutely flopped. Now it may be that we as a company or group are not geared with our processes to properly bring up ppl in this environment,becaus we expect a basic amount of integrity and work ethic from people, which is starting to look like a bit much. We actually have a very relaxed culture, no unpaid OT generally and unchecked flex hours...all on an honor system, I see a lot of abuse from the COVID hires and I worry. So I see why management isosing faith. Even I'm starting to pitch office days to get people moshing.
If you live in any medium to large city there are countless young professional organizations available. Join one or two and get involved. Be willing to volunteer for committees and participate in events and you will quickly have a full social calendar. Junior Achievement is one great organization. Jaycees is another organization.
Young Republicans or young Democrats are a couple of great organization. Want to meet young people who are going places in their life? You will meet them in these organizations.
Do you like exercise and fitness. Look into Team in Training. This is a fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Sign up for one of their races Go through the training and fundraising process. You will me lots of other like minded people. After your race consider becoming a Team in Training coach.
The possibilities are endless. If you are lonely it’s by choice.
Traditional employers want their employees back in the office since they are unable to control them otherwise. Employers and managers who have failed to grasp the concepts of remote working, lack in async communication, and have trust issues with their staff, want to keep a physical headcount of the sheep
I have been working remotely almost exclusively for the last 13 years. One thing I've realized (and experimented) is that it is super easy to make a team of full remote developers to jump ship together since they don't have to move to a new place if they stay in remote positions. In addition they can continue working within the same team if all the team agree to change company together. And I think this can be quite scary from an employer point of view.
That can also happen with physical teams. I am familiar with several instances where one team member got a job somewhere and was able to pull a number of resources from current to new employer.
There aren't that many actual employers responding, but I read several of these comments, and kinda starting to see a pattern: clichês, anecdotes, no nuance, no acknowledgement that the world has changed, or that teams, jobs, and people, can be different then your own experiences
I had the same experience of finding loads of cliches, but mostly on the other side: from the pro-WFH people it's all some variation of "you're just bad at managing", "I don't care about your office lease", "I don't go to work to make friends" and "you can do that just as well online".
To be fair, I think both sides make decent points.
I want people to be around each other enough that they are comfortable interacting. Some of my most painful experiences in management come from having to mediate a low-level dispute between people who work together but never interact on anything other than work. They are quite often on the same page but have different ways of expressing themselves that can cause friction. This often happens as part of having a highly interdisciplinary and international team. It is incredible how much a few shared lunches or coffee breaks can relax people and help them cohere.
I see in-person work as one of the only opportunities for scheduled casual interaction. Mandatory fun time is not a real solution, but the fact that exists often speaks to the perception that casual interaction is an essential part of building a team.
I suspect HN skews senior/established in our careers, but it’s interesting comparing the sentiment of people on here (almost universally pro-remote) with candidates I’ve talked to when we’ve listed roles. A lot of candidates, especially more junior ones, explicitly want an in-person office culture.
I’m sure there’s some of that, but is it really that hard to imagine that someone at the beginning of their career would get more out of being in-person? I certainly benefitted from that at the beginning of my career.
20 years ago I was on a lot of conference calls early or late in the workday, offshoring my job to a time zone 11.5 or 10.5 hours off, or with sysadmins 1 hour off.
The only thing that's changed in 20 years is Zoom or WebEx vs a conference bridge. There wasn't an in office dynamic then or now.
I'm a wfh proponent. However, could the mission to the moon have been done from home, today? In the timeframe that it was completed? I'm sure there's good arguments on either side. But there's something special about the face to face connection that you can't replace with emails and video conference. I believe humans are more effective at getting things done, in person.
Another fact is that today's managers are all from a time before cellphones existed... For the most part. If you're 30 something years old, you remember when you still picked up a book or hung out with your friends at the mall. Which makes me believe that it will take a generational shift for us to truly abandon the office... Whether that's a good thing or bad.
It is much easier to perform the display of “valuable manager” when you can hover over people.
Employees that perform just fine without being micromanaged are a threat to the livelihoods of people whose entire jobs are scheduling meetings and arranging office pizza parties.
I see a lot of “good” answers where good translates to reasonable business or social goals. But I can think of quite a few bad reasons.
The top reason is, management wants workers back in the office because managers never learned how to manage people, so they practice management-by-walking-around, aka interrupt-driven behavior. Many companies have a culture of MBWA, and it’s a hard curse to break.
Another bad reason is, distanced work has led to a substantial reduction in workplace unfairness behaviors such as sexual harassment and race-based favoritism. And this, logically, has made female and minority employees more valuable and better performers. But in many workplaces, favoritism is the order of the day, and women and minorities were not the favorites. The favorites are now performing worse than the people they stepped on to be unfairly promoted, and it makes incompetent executives look, well… incompetent.
Another reason is that many people, particularly executives, have more authority, respect, or control in the workplace than they do at home. For quite a few people, their office has become their primary social outlet. And taking that away has proven unlivable for them.
The other reason that immediately came to mind is that executives are, by and large, older than the rank and file, and they (we) come from a time when building, maintaining, and overseeing an office space was both a critical part of the job and a source of pride / ego. For older management, offices are still a real-world manifestation of the success of the company that signals to other people how effective the leadership of the company is. People are less able to derive the same sense of awe from abstractions like sales numbers. If people don’t return to the office, it will not continue to make economic sense to have flashy offices, and this ego outlet will disappear.
Are these good reasons? They are not. But these reasons, honestly, ring truer to me than “hallway collisions.” In the real world, all motivating reasons are self-centered reasons, and executives simply don’t benefit from hallway and breakroom magic or mentoring of the young. They do perversely benefit from showy offices, discrimination, avoiding overt displays of their lack of skill, and forced social conduct, though.
Here at ardour.org "head office" (my home in a small village in new mexico), we just had a 5-6 day hangout of myself and the other main developer. We have spent years collaborating online on this large project, but in those few days we were able to resolve some high level design issues (well, we hope we resolved them) that have proved resistant to online discussion.
This experience isn't enough to justify the idea that we (or anyone else) should work in close physical proximity all the time. But it does point to one of the plusses of doing this at least occasionally.
- Busy execs __need__ a work family to rationalise their commitment
- Hard to make a culture when remote
- Hiring is one of the hardest task in most companies and it’s made harder by remote. Not being able to nail onboarding and the face to face getting to know someone can be lethal
- In the 1% of times, when shit really hits the fan, remote is best because you can have zero communication delays, command management etc. As an “exec” these are the moments that you optimise for
- Bad eggs leave such a bad taste in the mouth.
I’m not an employer and not even exec level. So I may be totally off base. Just my observations.
I have a mandatory 1 day in the office for the staff, the office is there for anyone to work from at any time - no one ever takes it up, they are very comfortable working at home.
And I get it - I prefer working at home too - I also love our 1 day in the office where we can have a laugh with each other, get lunch together and generally bond as a team, but as the CTO of a company where pretty much my entire dev team are introverted , its not a big priority for me to have to get people back into the office.
It's not about the productivity, it's about the culture and the shared experiences. It would be tough to argue that those two things don't matter for the success of a company.
- the communication aspect (I've noticed projects with people who are physically in the office progress much smoother than when I have to schedule a meeting or reach out via chat; the friction to ask someone is lower when you run across them and can see that they're not busy vs. pinging them and then not getting a response because they actually were in a meeting)
- some people treating WFH as "part time, work a few hours between child-minding, chores and other non-work tasks" or a fear of that happening
I have 4 employees. We're in person because the extra 1-2 hours of programming they do here, they do on issues I urgently raise and directly affect the bottom line.
And while I would trust any of them to work remotely, I would never hire someone to work exclusively remotely.
I have only met one person in my life, ever, who has asked for exclusively a remote arrangement and wasn't trying to take advantage of us, and the guy was practically a wizard of engineering and deserved whatever arrangement he wanted.
Because they have assets sitting there empty and accountants are like wtf you gotta make use of this were stuck in the contract for x years. There ya have it. Simplified but mostly the cause, if ya company rents space to operate and tells you reasons other than above they are probably lying through their teeth at ya. It's got zero to do with what they think is good for you the worker or some water cooler innovation bs and everything to do with profit,loss and expenditure.
I would love a fully remote job (currently looking, in Germany), and I understand that, for some people, the office is the place to meet others and socialize. I like socializing, but I have my wife, cats, and after work hours I have online friends who I do online projects with.
I understand the loneliness, and I've certainly been there, but learning to find people and things to do outside of work is the key to "surviving" a remote job.
> Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
Because we're all paranoid that the other companies will somehow gain some sort of economic/productivity advantage from bringing their guys back into the office and leverage this to push us out of the market.
Even though we keep seeing research that this absolutely isn't the case, the only way to be sure is to preemptively bring our guys back into the office too. Ya know.. just in case.
I assume it's mostly ego driven, imagining the side comments from their peers at the industry conference "Joe couldn't even get his people back into the office"
I’m not an employer. I’ve worked in academic research as a software engineer and research scientist for 20+ years. I don’t think great research can be done without some kind of regular in-person collaboration. Serendipitous, chance interactions are part of this. But for me, there’s no substitute for whiteboarding in the same room. Now of course we also need lots of time to do focused work by ourselves.
I dislike remote work, because I live in a small apartment which means I don't have a special room for work and that leads to the fact that my work and my free time sometimes aren't clearly separated anymore.
I also think that there are people who are good at remote work and people who aren't, the people who aren't mostly abuse wfh, while the other group strifes in it.
Heres the catch-22 for me. I dislike remote work where I currently live because I am in a small 1 bed apartment with a child so it's literally impossible to get work done. But why am I in this tiny apartment? Because my company insists we be in the office at least 3 days per week and therefore I cannot afford a bigger place in the most expensive city in my country. I want remote so I can improve my living circumstances.
Dragging us back.. says it all really. The majority of companies weren't supporting remote work as a new flexible way for their employees to work. They were supporting remote work because it was the only way to get ANY work done at all during the pandemic. There is always value in face to face interaction and compartmentalising work from our personal lives.
I have a very hard time believing people are so out of touch with reality that they don’t understand why employers want people in the office.
You’re not in back to back meetings from the moment you start work until you finish. Not all meetings involve teams in other geographies and even ones that do might still be one where most people in the call are from one city.
While in office, every single person talks to coworkers at many random times throughout the day. That builds comradery within and across teams. That, in turn, means each employee cares more about their job and the success of the people around them. That in turn, makes it harder for them to look for other jobs because your not just completing some tasks from day to day like a machine. It’s not just boring chit chat either. You’ll sometimes briefly turn your chair or walk a few steps to get someone’s opinion/ideas about something you’re stuck on with your work and vice versa.
Aside from this, having people in the office reduces the number of people who slack off during the day. This point shouldn’t be glossed over. Not only does it hurt productivity, depending on the type of job, that will put extra burden on others on the team. A slacker could at the very least take on some of the work of others and that reduces overall stress and improves overall morale.
I love remote work and would hate having to go back to the office more than a couple times a week. That said, I can still be objective and understand the viewpoint of someone running a company and wanting in person collaboration.
I don’t think work culture has broadly attuned itself to working from home and how companies operate hasn’t shifted enough to leverage its advantages and mitigate the disadvantages.
Companies that do figure this out will thrive of course, as it seems that this is something employees are willing to stand up to management over
Not an employer but if I was, I would absolutely be full remote. Employees mostly want this and costs / headaches are far lower. I don’t buy into the “water cooler” thesis. If you want people to collaborate more, ask them to work together. This is where I find the best connections are formed.
Well, see 4 years ago we invested in this new office building with lots of open office space and small conference rooms with shiny whiteboards. Now it's all empty and we need to make sure we can tell corporate it was a good decision. Therefore, we need as many butts in seats as possible asap.
1. We generate trust faster and stronger when we are physically present.
2. Teams with high trust tend to be happier and deliver better and more.
3. Some people need to be in the office. Hybrid approaches (some people at the office, some not) suck. So full-office, or say goodbye to the people that need the office.
In this thread: lies, fabrications, misinformation, disinformation, deception, skullduggery, wayward words, dirty deeds, and a case and a half of the finest bullshit you’ll ever read.
They want you back in the office to make the management happy, to make the corporate rent make sense, to make the banks happy, to feed the giant machine whose primary purpose is 100% unequivocally NOT getting stuff done (tm)
If your team isn’t getting stuff done remote, investigate a protocol for communicating the business and product needs to the developers, and maybe skim some commits.
If you are being threatened with back to office and you don’t want to go, make them fire you, use your resources, and I’d estimate there’s about a 95% chance most of you can find a higher paying position elsewhere, or at least equal pay & remote-first. The world is changing, don’t let them play tricks on you.
I’ve fought with DC traffic for twenty years, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to show up in an office for less than a client-vendor situation or L5/6+ all hands. If it’s on fire, you better call my work phone and make sure my deposits are up-to-date.
I know it’s tougher for the younger bucks out here, and that loans and rent and everything might tip the scales a little further away from you. Do your best, do what you can, but I strongly recommend putting up the fight for more comfortable work arrangements.
If we’re all gonna be obsolete in ten years, they might as well be paying us right and speaking to us right for the next nine!
Of course to control better and coordinate effort for the profit better!
There is no but in the most of coding business. We all know we have access to the information needed on the internet. This is something aimed for PROFIT. Not for your lives to make better!
Big organisations are lead by people that hang out with other people in big corporations. Some of these other corporations are friends with people in big organisations that own office properties or do office cleaning or whatever. These corporate leaders have common interests in office workers being at the office and justifying paying friends of friends and keeping them happy.
If you're a bigwig and cut down on office spending other bigwigs will be less likely to help you out when you need a new position, among other things.
To explain the 'hallway talk is great' myth: it's from the masters of process, owners of product, and other similar people, that work relatively closely to the people actually building and maintaining the systems that make dah mahney. These people learn a lot and get a lot of things explained that they otherwise wouldn't and that makes them feel less nervous about not having any actual control at all over the output and functioning of the 'team'. They could of course ask over asyncronous chats or email but they don't know what to ask and they're scared they'll irritate someone, so they prefer sucking it out of smalltalk by the coffee machine.
And then there's the 'but how will I ever manage to take a walk or bike if my boss doesn't tell me to'. If this is you, get help. You have some executive dysfunction that will eventually be unhealthy somehow, probably when you're unemployed or have a lot of spare time for some other reason. Fix it before you realise you've spent amazing free time that you yourself got to own on doing none of the things you know makes you feel good and strong. How to do it varies, it could be therapy, it could be to move to a less polluted place, could be something else.
Remote is here to stay. Fire your boss if they insist on you spending more than two days a month at some office for no good reason.
Solving the in-person/remote work problem is becoming intractable.
The people who prefer remote seem to strongly prefer remote. Any arguments against it are dismissed as RTO bootlicking. See the top-level comments here from people who will absolutely not give up remote work and are giving people advice on how to live in a remote-only world. (Just get a hobby, bro! How hard could it be? Can't make friends after work? That's a you problem!)
The people who prefer in-person strongly prefer in-person. They think that this is the ONLY way to build a community culture and foster spontaneous collaboration. Moreover, the kind of work the people with "power" in these organizations (executives, salespeople, marketing, etc) have is almost entirely face-to-face, and they are also raising families and dealing with traffic, so there's willful lack of empathy there too.
Hybrid work environments make it easy for the "minority" to miss important context.
Either extreme (RTO, or full-remote) leads to serious backlash.
I think that a mostly-full RTO will win out for the same reason that chain layoffs happened this year.
The biggest companies are all _very_ pro return-to-office. I don't know of any big companies that stayed full remote after vaccines were viable.
The smaller startups that can do full remote are vying for acquisition or to go public. In both cases, the power dynamics will shift towards making people go back into the office because that's what the people in charge want. (Again, their jobs are mostly face-to-face, and they also raise kids and deal with traffic and doctor's appointments, so empathy is lacking there.)
I think there will just be a delineation in companies and what they offer in the same way that people used to flock to the big tech companies for all the "perks". Remote will be a "perk", and people who care deeply about remote work will flock to those companies and those companies will benefit. The people and companies who prefer RTO, will do so. It will just be another factor in the labor market.
For the industry in general, "hybrid work" at a coworking space may be a compromise worth considering. Whole regional teams can be in the office a few days a week and the company need not commit to a long, expensive lease agreement.
I couldn't work in a modern office without my noise cancelling headphones. In fact, as I look up from my desk, I can see dozens of engineers all wearing them. We commute into the office to sit in silence with our headphones on.
Not an employer but I noticed that after 2 years of working remotely I feel like I have enough. Not just enough of working remotely. Enough of working at all.
Then again I don't think I ever stayed in any company for more then 2 years so that just might be me.
How about just reconfiguring bullpen office back to semi private cubicles or tiny phone room offices? Make the office a place to come to for a better work environment.
Let’s be honest- these bullpen setups suck and very few people want to “return” to that.
Obviously we’re not slaves. But if your employer says everyone is required to return to the office on some date, it’s not like you have a lot of options for saying no other than not showing up to see what happens or finding alternative employment.
How is this different from any other office culture of participation? Align or leave is not a new thing. You do realize employees negotiated WFH and remote work with their employers _prior_ to 2019 without issues, right? I'm not sure why the bar had to be lowered from the point, to be frank.
Perhaps those of us that would enjoy some in person socialization should meet up in person? If you’re in the Bay Area I’d be happy to get coffee as a group, maybe even make it a thing where it’s available frequently.
The elephant in the room for return to office is commute. If the office was <20 mins for most employees, I doubt there would a huge hue and cry over going in 2-3 days a week.
Am employer, but only after covid- during covid i wanted to get back to the office as soon as i was vaccinated. The reason for that is that i missed my coworkers. I missed the spontaneous connections, the conversations, the hang outs. People are social beings, and being fully remote means a lesser emotional connection. I don’t like that.
> what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the office?
The truth is, for a great many jobs it's impossible to measure work well enough to tell if you worked 1 day or 5 last week.
You're debugging a memory leak? Well, maybe it was very difficult to find. You're reviewing grant proposals? Who's to say how carefully you read them? You say it was very difficult to make this page work on chrome, firefox and safari? Well, if you say so.
Meanwhile, employers have read articles about "quiet quitting".
I suspect employers fear we're on the golf course, working a second full-time job, or reading HN. Sending people back to the office assures them that's not the case.
When I'm in the office, I have little, off the cuff conversations I can't have online, where I can express and develop a thought that would otherwise be gone as quickly as it came to me.
IRL, I have thousands of opportunities during the day to get 10 seconds of feedback, online I'm not likely to get a response because of the context switching overhead.
I don't want to be 100% in the office, but the one day a week we have at the moment is definitely positive for the whole team.
Tl;dr: the creativity that can be achieved by having people to bounce ideas off is multiplied when they're in the same room.
What do you mean exactly? Is there a conspiracy from people who own commercial real estate to force people who lease that space to renew their leases? Are employers stuck in a sunk cost fallacy where they just can't conceive of letting something they paid for go to waste until their lease is up?
Not an employer, just a mid dev. People waste their time so much remote. In 2021 it felt like almost noboby was getting any work done. You need good managers to handle that, and they are rare.
I'm not from the US (EU) and we're doing hybrid model (wfh if you want to, work from office if you want to, combine both as you see fit, no requirement to notify anyone on your preferred model).
I like to work from my office. What I hate about remote work is often waiting for responses from multiple people. Something that used to take ~60 seconds to deal with now takes up to an hour while waiting for everyone to answer. I dislike video calls and I prefer to use written text as a way of relaying information crucial to engineering / configuration / infra.
I never cared about office and having to work from the office, but it's noticeable that a lot of people don't have sufficient self-control or work ethics to be as productive from home as they are from the office.
TL;DR:
1. people work less efficient from home
2. it takes a lot longer to receive information
All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life.
I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.
I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life. But no, I had a remote job.
I got a new job that's supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office. And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.
I've been thinking about getting a new career, going into the trades. Anything that would allow me to have consistent interaction with other people.
I've become anti-technology, anti-society. I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.
I think what's happening is that we're in the shaking out phase where companies are deciding whether they'll be remote/hybrid/office. Each company will make that decision based on the preferences of the people with the most influence, and because opinions vary so widely there will be lots of diversity in outcomes.
And that's a really good thing. It's unfair that those of us who can't stand being in an office were made to go into the office to satisfy the social needs of other people who aren't getting enough socialization in their personal life. But it's also not right for people like you to feel like you have no choice but to be isolated.
What we need is for people to not feel trapped in a job that has the wrong balance of remote and in-person. If you are the only one of your coworkers who feels the way that you do, maybe the answer is to find a company where the majority of employees share your desire for in-person work. I know that sounds overwhelming right now, but once you've made the leap once you won't be stuck in the wrong alignment again.
However open plan, sales folks yelling on a phone, demands that I don't wear headphones to drown it out, is all so draining.
I remember the lead up to Christmas 2019, some fucking idiots decided that what we really needed in the open plan office, where I'm already positioned near the café, was removal of mini-meeting rooms, and 2 hours of carollers.
I don't want to listen to some people singing their echoing Christmas songs in a "jazzy" way. I still had to do calls and support other teams who I couldn't hear over the noise.
If working from the office actually meant having a small closed off space for my team so we could collaborate, have meetings, design sessions and planning it would be great.
If going to the office meant having other teams available to whiteboard their problems in an available meeting room, come up with a plan and roadmap the improvements it would be great.
However they got rid of offices for teams, they got rid of cubicles so that other people's calls would at least be muffled, they got rid of partitions between people's breakout spaces and the rest of the floor so I have to listen to inane conversations at other people standups.
If this kid wants an office because he needs social interaction, that's fine. We can do a hacking session once a week. We can go to the office to plan and design fortnightly. I've done paired programming, problem investigation, where we have just an open call between two people and a screenshare so that you aren't alone and we can talk it through.
In principle the office is a social space with productivity possibilities. In practice, most companies appear to want to make the office the most unpleasant location to be.
An uncomfortable desk and ancient HP monitors, none of which I can upgrade or change; loud coworkers; tons of unrelated teams, for whom sharing space is unnecessary; and calls with people, most of whom aren't even in the same city (or timezone). Meanwhile I can do all of that at home, more effectively, with far more flexibility.
No office I've ever worked at came close, the closest I've had was having dual monitors, as for shops, most offices took longer to get to the front door, never mind actually reach anywhere!
I've been at the other end of the spectrum where I don't get work done in the office. I get involved in crosstalk between coworkers too much. We go to far too many pointless meetings. Everyone wants to share about their family while I'm working. I feel over-socialized and it affects my work and my ability to disconnect at the end of my day. This is a job. I get paid money for the work I do. I should not feel indebted to people who parody themselves as my friends (coworkers) who need this last-minute thing done by me at the end of the day. I'm off the clock and I want to disconnect. How many times have I worked through lunch? How many times have people called my personal number for non-emergency needs? The workplace infringes on my work-life balance, and remote work gave a large part of that back to me.
If we care about both groups of people (those over-socialized, and those isolated), we should give the worker the option. A good supervisor should be learning how to engage with the employee in the way they wish to communicate, as long as the work is getting done.
Open offices are what destroyed the experience of going to work.
When I had a private office (the first 17 years of my career) I loved going to the office. I had all the silence and privacy to get work done, but at the same time I could step out of the office 2-3 times a day and hang out with the team, chitchat about work, projects, life, hobbies and have a real human connection. When it was time to get back to work, could go back into the private office.
But open herd rooms these days broke everything. No concentration, no privacy, no in-the-zone ever, just forcefully being distracted all day. So now I just hate all these people around me making noise all day. Thankfully the pandemic put an end to that so I can concentrate on work away from the office. But I miss the human connection we had then everyone had private offices.
I'd go back to an office enthusiastically 5 days a week if I had a private office. But if you force me into an open office, I will never again want to go in person.
And the crazy thing is some companies are pushing for even worse than open-office plans and have moved on to "hot desking", all the same problems of an open office except you also don't even have your own desk space, just nomad your ass around the office and hope you find a spot to slap your laptop down.
The fact that some companies have mandated return to office and also have adopted a system where you literally have no space of your own at said office just seems insane to me and makes me wonder when the bunk capsule style hot desking is coming.
Just think of the office rent savings if we stack them 2 or 3 high! Nevermind the fact that the company thrived for 2+ years with almost nobody in the office at all.
I don't need necessarily a personal office. But I need them to be reasonable.
A closed off space for just the 6 folks in the team would be fine, and a separate small space for someone to go to for a call or a 1:1.
At one point in time there were talks of sharing the space. I told them I had other options. The talks died.
Don't only negotiate on salary.
You're still right that plenty of people make irrational decisions under whatever incentive structure they're in, but I think that the steelman version of GP's argument would probably go something like:
...or, they might all just be lemmings, too. It's hard to say just yet, but I think it'll be interesting to see if there's an effect on stock performance over the next 10 years based on what companies decide now. (I feel like that's probably how long it'll take for the full impact on company culture to play out.)If there is a very strong impact on competitiveness, maybe we will notice in about a decade, if companies don't collude in stopping it.
Person flatly said no one works in WFH. I am also a manager and responded my team busted their balls the whole time, and delivered results. My personal opinion is my team did 120% of their productivity. I also acknowledge that some people are not built for it and their productivity may fall. I believe a manager can deal with this (either creating the right task-incentive structure, or getting the person off the bus). After my impassioned argument, the person said ..nope .. people just don't work during WFH. This was a social event, just the two of us talking, so I am quite sure this guy was being honest.
I also ran into a different person in a leadership position (just not very high; more like technical leadership; ex-professor; stints at Google). He was convinced the real reason FAANG hired so crazily was because productivity per employee had dropped dramatically. His belief was no one worked during WFH. Again, my impassioned arguments and personal anecdotes did not really move this person.
TL;DR: if there is no data, decision makers are going to stick to what they know best. And what current execs / c-suite knows best is in-office. They haven't learned management techniques for fully-remote yet.
I also started compiling research showing the value of in-person interaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235
> Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than workers with no ability to shift their schedule, according to a just-announced report from Future Forum. But do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office?
> Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” This lack of trust in worker productivity has led to what Microsoft researchers termed productivity paranoia: “where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”
So workers are more productive with remote flexibility, working more hours and managers and execs still want more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/glebtsipursky/2022/11/03/worker...
nothing about this figure from managers says employees are more or less productive, just that managers having a feeling workers are less productive, they can't trust them etc.
sounds like the managers are just projecting their feelings onto employees.
In my opinion and experience, coworker’s performance vary greatly in and of itself and we can hardly ever correctly measure a single person’s “productivity” in a non-faulty way. Many companies’ simply fall back on more-or-less subjective, textual analysis of their workers and base basically every decision on that.
Let's assume none of us have any data to make an informed decision. Then what is our "default path"? In-office arrangement is something that has been tried out for decades if not more. The decision makers, who are typically C-suite or execs, are specifically the ones who progressed and thrived in that system. Guess what they are going to choose when there is a lot of uncertainty? Obviously an in-office setup, with maybe some concessions to working from home 1-2 days a week because that's comfortable even for them.
The only exception would be young founders who haven't learned any setting yet, and in fact who would like the allure of a "digital nomad" lifestyle more to embrace fully-remote.
I've known math wizards, PhD mega-thinkers who would be terrible at leading organizations and pushing projects.
Lots of mgmt is incompetent, and there is a bell curve there just as bell-y and curve-y as other employee ranks. Like, basically by definition 50% are below average like anywhere else.
The missing piece is that plenty of these < 50th percentile can get jobs, often high level ones in respected companies. It's often who you know, how you make people feel, and what sort of connections and optics you bring to the table.
I agree with what you said at the end though, but would add OP needs to do the work of building a life outside of their job. Doing so is “work” in a physical science, vanilla dictionary sense. What we do to play Society: The Game is a job and coworkers have lives that do not revolve around other coworkers. Adult life is going to suck for OP if they don’t build a social network or even just general social skills outside of the office space.
Everytime I read that "humans are social creatures" it's a dog whistle for "i want to see people miserable and pressured to do it"
People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it should never be your primary place of making friends. (Friends and family won't lay you off like a job might. Having a network outside of work is critical if that ever happens.)
Asking your coworkers to come into the office just so you can get some needed face time with other people doesn't seem fair to them. They have social lives outside of work and aren't being paid to be someone's social outlet.
Once working, you spend 8h a day with a group of people.
It's by far the easiest way to make friends since the needed repetition of making contact (a minimum requirement for friendship) is already solved by going to work together.
Making friends as an adult is hard. Work is the easiest shortcut in establishing meaningful relationships with strangers.
Edit: addressing some of the comments below.
Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who will maintain a connection with you no matter the circumstance (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)
I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.
Friend just means someone you have established a platonic relationship with right here right now. You may drift apart in the future, but what's important is that the connection and relationship is genuine and real.
I have 1 friend I've made during my entire career that stayed with me after the job ended. The others I've lived with, or went to school with, or met following other interests.
If you just mean socialising with colleagues, sure, I do that. But they aren't my good friends.
The office may have been a good place to make friends for some young people, but certainly not all.
I was quite lonely in my early twenties. I had moved away from home and university and all the people I knew. It's quite normal. And nobody worked remotely.
More and more people are staying with their parents because they can't afford to move out.
>people still go to school together
More and more people are doing online/remote learning. During the pandemic, all learning went remote and it ruined childrens' social skills.
>people still have interests out of work
Less and less of these out-of-work interests involve regular, face-to-face social interaction and community building.
>people still go to bars and clubs
People are definitely going to pubs less - this is an issue that has been in the media for a decade and a half. When people do go to pubs, clubs and bars they're less likely to talk to people they don't know. People are certainly less likely to chat up a member of the opposite sex at a bar in 2023 compared to even 2013.
The Covid related ones are not dismantling the places young people meet, that was a public health emergency that will not continue forever.
If people are choosing not to meet in person now, that is also not dismantling the places people meet. That is a choice.
I know that the isolation of Covid has had a terrible effect on young people's mental health and I do not want to diminish that. But it isn't a dismantling of the places they could meet for the main part.
We are seeing a whole generation miss out on social connections, reporting mass loneliness and depression. You can't just hand wave that away "they made a choice". If an individual does something, its a choice, if an entire generation does something, its the environment that changed.
Maybe the internet and social media is encouraging people to forge remote connections rather than physical ones?
Call it network effects working in reverse, or a change in incentives, but there really are less serendipitous encounters in young peoples' lives.
Sure, you get a few shots at that.
> or went to school with
That's work for young people, who are better at making friends.
Regarding complimenting people on the street and potentially turning it into a conversation, it takes some practice. 10 years ago when I did some solo traveling (before uni even) for the first time, I had the choice to stay inside and feel even more agony or to go out and experience social anxiety and pain. I've experienced a lot of social anxiety and pain (initially). It feels better than feeling lonely.
There are courses on how to make friends (and influence people :P, see "How to make friends and influence people", it's a book, I haven't read it though). If you really want to, you can consciously make an effort on bettering social skills and meet anyone everywhere and maintaining it.
A good channel (a bit too broad though) is Charisma on Command [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Charismaoncommand
With that said, I realize now that I over-interpreted the word "bizarro". I gave that quite some tone in my mind. I now realize there are a few wildly different tones you can give to that word.
From the HN guidelines [1]:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends. Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
> People on the street always WANT something from you.
One can learn to spot the difference. This is not always the case. Also, this mentality doesn't help. I see where you're coming from, but when you do what I do, this mentality doesn't help.
> Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends.
Only true for the first 2 minutes, in my experience. And yea, you can't make friends with everyone. The first 2 minutes people live on autopilot. Approaching them is tricky and needs to be done precisely because you're not talking to the real person (IMO). You're talking to the person who has a whole program in their head that they need to execute and the chance they see you as something that once to sell something is high. It takes a bit of time for most people to understand that you're really just there as another human being. For some people it takes 0 seconds though, for others it takes longer. I personally have noticed it takes less long for guys (being a guy myself), because they're not afraid I'm secretly trying to hit on them.
> Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
I mentioned in my comment that I didn't read him either.
> These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
That's because for me they are. Like I tried to mention: this is my preferred alternative. I'm living this. It's a different perspective that I'm offering.
It's a hard perspective to offer as it's a "show don't tell" type of thing. I've showed many friends, they were all amazed and all bestowed magical abilities upon me of how amazing I was socially. They couldn't explain it away as training. I'm not a naturally social person. I consciously trained it.
They didn't believe it. So I trained a few of my friends to do the same. They see it. They're surprised. It takes a while to train, depending on the person. Though, as far as meeting people and making friends is concerned, 20 hours per week for max 3 months ought to definitely do the trick. So that's 240 hours of training to fix one of the biggest issues in people their lives: making sure they can consciously always build a social life.
The biggest thing I've learned in this regard are a few things:
1. Be positive / optimistic (read Seligman's stuff on learned optimism)
2. Be playful with people (aka not too serious, see creative interpretations in things, roleplay. Doing improv workshops helps a lot)
3. When starting to talk to people, you can:
A. Comment on the situation "This train is going so slow"
B. Give them a compliment "Excuse me, (they look up at you now you have their attention) I just wanted to mention that I like your whole vibe. The guitar, the clothing style reminds me a bit of a hippie actually, haha (they nod in agreement). Yea, just wanted to say it's cool is all."
In most cases the conversations don't go anywhere for me. That's fine. I'm just there to chill and have fun, no need to prolong what can't be prolonged. In one out of 10 cases it goes somewhere interesting.
A related comment I made in a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34653505
Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running / reading / trivia / sports groups.
Take a class.
Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm, shelter, political office..
Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends. The friends are a byproduct.
Isn't that the case for 'work friends' too? The people we never see or hear from again the moment they get a good offer at some other company or we ourselves move on to other roles? There will be exceptions of course, people you meet at work who you actually form real meaningful connections with, but there will also be exceptions for the people you meet while volunteering, or while playing a sport. Either way, most of the people in our lives are strangers or acquaintances.
My board game buddies are my closest real life friends, and I met them exactly like this.
However people do need to accept that not everyone makes friends the same way.
I’m just going anecdotal here from college friends that have dispersed across the US.
Warm intros, so to speak, help. If you join a running group attended by a friend of a friend it seems to stick better than joining when you know absolutely no one.
Public transit helps. It’s hard to be consistent when going to the activity requires slogging through traffic.
And lastly, an activity that encourages repeated regular attendance. Hiking is an activity that is super flaky attendance compared to say training for a triathlon with a specific event day.
Most people meeting over other activities I believe have similar stories. Dancing for example, or other group sports.
I've made some very good friends since leaving university. The simplest thing to do is to start with something YOU enjoy. Food, sports, music, pottery, knitting, boardgames even coding (gasp but that's our work).
If you have a passion and you want to be there, and so do the other people - the odds are in your favour that you'll get along.
You have to get out there. The Internet is not a great place to form solid human relationships.
Once you have the financial resources, _then_ you tackle the problem of no interest/hobbies/causes issue - which, i say is relatively easy to tackle as long as you have money; try different things until something sticks!
That's the kind of person I'm talking about
Either they have not tried everything, or they have imbalances or an illness that makes them feel this way. If this is true, there should be no shame in visiting a doctor or therapist of some sort. Otherwise, depression would set in sooner or later and get worse.
Perhaps my definition of "friend" is stricter than others. I differentiate between friends and acquaintances and a lot of people don't seem to.
But I think the more obvious answer is just that some people, like me, have a lot of difficulty connecting to other people. No amount of going to a gym will help that.
> Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running / reading / trivia / sports groups.
It is very hard to pick up a new hobby as an adult.
By 30, most adults (in the US; earlier outside of the US) will have real full-time job responsibilities, a significant other and a few children. Since the children will be young and will need almost all of your time and attention, that leaves little time for anything else.
Families with access to parenting groups will likely be living in bigger cities with high-enough density to support that. This also assumes that you have enough free time/money to participate in these activities (unlikely if you just spent most of your free capital on the house that you just bought because houses are at an all-time high now...).
Many new families are living in HOA-run communities that are wholly designed to be traveled by car, in towns that are also designed to be traveled by car, because you'll likely be commuting to work and back...by car.
Taking your kids on a walk to the grocery store that's 15 minutes away and seeing lots of people on your path isn't possible in these towns. Instead, you're driving four minutes to a huge supermarket where you'll run into families who are also rushing to pick up their groceries because time is scarce, and then driving right back.
Can you interact with neighbors and enjoy community in this environment? Sure! If you like your two or four neighbors in your surrounding area, and if they aren't filthy renters like me who aren't in it for the short-term. (Rentals are also increasing...because houses are at an all-time high and life happens...)
If you're childfree and live in a large city, then, sure, tons of opportunities to make new friends. Unless you're a lawyer working 100+ hrs/week or a SWE grinding at a startup that just hit PMF and is hyperscaling. Or you suck at breaking through cliques. (Lots of people suck at this; myself included. Don't feel bad! Most people make most of their lifelong friends in grade school or church, as a youth, so most times, you're trying to shoehorn yourself into a group that has developed decades of direct and indirect ways of communicating and interacting with each other.).
> Take a class. > Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm, shelter, political office..
This is actually good advice, but, again, time is scarce for many people.
This is more or less like saying "wanna lose weight? just eat less!" Not invalid, but also not helpful and very dismissive of people needing different things.
> Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends. The friends are a byproduct.
...of being in an enclosed environment with other humans for eight hours a day, doing things they might or might not want to do. Kind of like work actually...
Let's be clear. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make friends as an adult. I've done it, and I've met tons of people that have done it!
I'm just saying that it's significantly easier to make friends at work.
More importantly, it is a lot easier to foster a culture and a work community in the office.
Walking into a job, literally the only thing you have in common with these people is an employer. While time spent together is an important component of building relationships, it lacks the other substantially important pieces of relationships: Common interests, similar backgrounds, similar worldviews, etc. (Though it doesn't mean they're inherently absent)
But I generally have nothing in common with the people I work with.
I'm friends with people who share my world outlook, my moral and philosophical and aesthetic views, and there's no correlation between that and working with people.
> Friend just means someone you have established a platonic relationship with right here right now.
NO, that's not friend, FFS! That's an acquaintance or a coworker.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a very sociable guy, I love hanging out with people, but I only have a few actual _friends_.
> Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who will maintain a connection with you no matter the circumstance (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)
> I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.
I'm sorry, but if you leave a job and lose all your connection with someone, _you were never friends._
I moved to a new continent in 2016 and I'm still in touch with my small group of actual friends, and I even made two more here.
I played WoW for a good 8 years everyday through high school and college, became great friends with some of the people I played the game with.
When I finished school, I hung up my WoW character and said good bye to my friends in the game.
Although I no longer keep in touch with any of them, those were some of the best 8 years of my life and I am truly fond of the memories I made playing the game and working together.
Is that not the same as a work place?
No. In the workplace, you have to accomplish stuff every day of suffer serious consequences. You spend 8 hours a day with your coworkers, sure, but that time is not spent socializing. You're under the gun to produce.
In a game (or other recreational activity), none of that is true. They are inherently social activities. You can get to know each other, you are at play. It's a very, very different thing.
I disagree as the workplace isn’t a good locus of interest for personal relationships. I’m not interested in my coworkers hobbies. I have developed friendships with co-workers but they are rare.
Some of my happiest times at work are when I worked with friends. But they were friends before work and I worked with them because they are friends, I didn’t become friends because of work.
I also think it’s valuable to have checks and balances in life and having my personal life wrapped up with work, although great for my employer, puts too much risk in losing my job.
Add to this, that my workplace was distributed and I switched from driving into work to get in video calls with people in different locations to doing that from my home office.
If someone doesn’t see humans for days when working from home, that is an individual problem to solve and there are many options to solve that. Work is not efficient for solving that problem.
Join a gym, get a dog and walk it, join a grocery/csa co-op, use meetup, join a church, volunteer, visit seniors in your area, tutor kids, join a book club, do yoga/tai chi. The list going on and on and all those are more likely to result in human connection and friendships than going into work.
With normal friends, I can at least avoid them. Co-workers? Not so much.
I'm nice, I'll socialize, but I won't share or divulge any detail of my private life.
Until they, or you:
- quit and move to another company in 2-3 years
- move to another department in the company
- get fired
Then what?
The best friend I've made as an adult was met through work. Then he took another job, and I moved across the country when I went remote. We still keep in touch and occasionally travel to visit each other.
A lot of people in my life have had their feelings hurt when their “work friend” stopped talking to them after leaving the company, because they failed to understand this important truth.
But, we are talking about someone who need coercion to make friends. And they can be nice super ethical person, but there is that skill they don't have.
Most of them are from outside work. Because "but you spend 8 hours with them every day" is not true for most people. I now work with completely different people than I those I worked 3-4-10 years ago. I have friendships significantly longer than that, and I didn't have to work with them side by side all this time.
But... I no longer "spend 8 hours in the office with them". I spend 8 hours in the office with a completely different set of people.
See? Your friends will inevitably be outside the office life.
You can absolutely make friends at a company, you literally spend half of your awake time there. It is more time then what you spent with your school mates back then.
Ahhh, that makes more sense now. You're using "friend" to mean what I would call an "acquaintance".
I think the workplace is one of the hardest places to find true friends, because the relationship is dependent on the job. And, can you really be truly open and vulnerable to workplace friends? Can you safely talk smack about your boss, or your cube neighbor, or the company? Can you show up on their doorstep in crisis at 3am and have it not affect things at work?
I'm happily married, children, dog, several distinct groups of friends, great job at a great company, lovely house in a nice village, etc, etc, etc.
I worked from home for about 4 years as a freelancer and found it incredibly isolating (but lucrative, so endured it) but finally had enough and get a permanent job back in an office. This was 5 weeks before what would be the first of several COVID lockdowns and roughly 3 years later there's still no realistic "office culture" where I work.
Last year was incredibly tough for me. Incredibly dark. Despite everything that I ostensibly had going for me I was suddenly crushingly lonely, anxious, probably depressed. 8-10 hours per day of constantly interacting on Zoom calls doesn't just cut it. It's not the same.
I don't think the answer is to necessarily "return to the office" as a 100% arrangement. I don't think that's possible in reality. But something has to change; undeniable dilemma.
And what is more isolating than being home alone? Well, working completely alone in an office building meant to hold like 300 employees that was last updated in the 80s.
My basic idea about all of this is to restructure where people work. Take all the employees that want to come into the office on a regular basis and put them in the same building on the same floor.
Like, my whole issue could be entirely down to the job. I'm getting weird vibes from this place and these people (yelling in meetings about various things that aren't important at all).
I think what I'm finding out is that having great coworkers in my previous in person jobs either hid or overrode my new found hatred of system administration. If I liked what I did then maybe all of my comments would be different here.
I guess after 8 years of being a DBA/SysAdmin have taught me to stop applying for these jobs.
Edit: Like, I'm married. I have friends far away I see monthly and game with weekly. I'm not dying here. I just want the 8 hours of work to not be as lonely. My jobs won't get my best performance this way because I'm mentally so disconnected from what I'm doing since I'll never meet who I'm doing it for.
I’ve found that working from a local cafe, in my little suburban “village” centre has been really fantastic for this. I work, I bump into people I know, I meet new people and get to know my neighbours. It’s great.
Always someone to chat with when taking a break and getting a coffee.
Remote work left me choosing between fulfilling social interaction or personal time after work, either option leaving me unsatisfied. I can’t wait to get back to the office, those were the best years of my life.
Remote work is making me depressed and isolated.
Huh. It's wild how different two people's experiences of the same thing can be. I hated the office. I hated commuting. I hated meeting in stuffy rooms. While I like (most) of my coworkers, and enjoy the occasional drinks with them, I could also never see like 99% of them ever again and never even think about it. I vastly, vastly prefer WFH and would trade those "relationships" away in a heart beat in order to have it.
It's hard for me to wrap my head around the "best years" of someone's life being those where they're surrounded by people who think of them so little that the flexibility of doing laundry during the day beats ever seeing them again.
This thread has a healthy mix of both camps, which is pretty surprising to me.
My coworkers have all gone back to the office part time, they go out and do stuff in the city almost every week after work, they go to huge javascript meetups, go to the pubs and clubs, and I'm here sitting alone doing very little because my city doesn't have a large tech scene. Remote work has given me the ability to work senior level jobs which just don't exist here, but it's not enough.
I've decided, I'm packing my stuff and moving state this year primarily so I can work in the office with everyone.
If you don't have either -- filling that void by spending all day in an office sounds even more depressing. I'd focus more on making friends and finding a committed relationship.
There are lots of solutions here outside of working in-person: Find roommates. Start playing sports. Date more. Find an in-person hobby. Volunteer.
I’m going back to the office and I won’t take another job that has most people remote.
In that particular office.
Ive had spells of time like that. Mine were at universities working together in labs.
Ive worked software jobs in companies and startups where the developers sat in the same room all day and didn't speak. Completely unsociable. I found that much more soul destroying than remote working.
Me too! Research labs were the best. Office workplaces grind my soul to dust.
Congratulations, you're an extrovert. To me, that sounds like the PERFECT arrangement. 0 pressure to interact with people, but in case everyone is feeling like it, we meet up with friends over the weekend.
I like having personal time to work on personal projects 3-4 days a week. I'm also fine with only 2-4 hours of face to face interaction per week.
Yeah... good luck with that.
Not to say that people don't make friends outside work, but there are many variables involved with that.
But just use Meetup.com, right? Sure, if you want to spend a few hours with people of retirement age, not if there's anything wrong with that.
Not having friends is just the surface level of the issue. If all you want is friends and friends alone, then that really isn't that hard to arrange.
If the use of "friends", however, is those who are in your age cohort as well as romantic possibilities, that's an entirely different beast that can be ironically difficult to conquer once college life has been long since left in the dust.
For many, if not most, the office was the deciding factor as to whom you would associate with in adulthood. Plenty of people have met long time friends as well as their husbands and wives at the office. With remote work, this is extremely difficult to pull off. I've been fortunate to have made one or two good friends through my years of remote work, but I had 100x more social opportunities back when I worked in a physical office. I miss the fact that I could have a best work friend kind of like how I usually had a best school friend as a child. But it's usually impractical to make such connections when all you have is Slack and Zoom, neither of which are good for shared 1-on-1 experiences. There's no chance to say "Hey, wanna run to Starbucks with me?"
I wouldn't give up remote work entirely, but I'm finding there's a lot left to be desired that would be met in an office. The office is the missing variable that gets people to spend sufficient amount of time together on shared goals. That's not easily going to be replicated by introducing yourself to random people in town.
Fast forwarding to now, I find myself mentally fine when working from home. Of course things are different since I have family to interact with at home, but for me, not engaging with colleagues about non-work related things is what makes remote work not as fun as the olden times. This is also harder to arrange because my colleagues would rather go out or do something else rather that keep chatting with me about something else.
In some cities it’s unused though. When I lived in Athens it was terrible, just crypto groups used it.
I have had very good luck with that, thank you. That doesn't work for you -- you find friendships in the workplace. That's great, too. Clearly, neither approach is the right one for everybody.
Also, once you make a friend at work you can meet outside the workplace, or communicate with non-work communication channels.
Have you considered a co-working space? It seems like that could get you what your looking for. Beyond that I'd look to get creative around finding ways to get social outside work. A martial arts or social dance class for example. Frankly I think it's much healthier if your coworkers aren't the core of your social life.
FWIW I too had this problem at the start of the pandemic. My solution was to build a gym and workout with my friends 3x a week. Obviously this isn't a solution for your plight in a new city.
This is not an individual problem. It's an issue that affects the entire society. Social isolation feeds many undesirable things, such as political polarization and extremism. If a society wants to survive, it has to deal with the issue somehow.
Agreed, and I think the best way is for people to realize that "the people I chat with at the water-cooler" are not my friends, and take action based on that. Job loss and retirement are often terribly isolating events for people for exactly the reason your specify. Work is 1/2 of their waking life and they rely on it too heavily for their social needs.
Forcing the majority who prefer work from home to work from the office because a minority of people will feel lonely does not "benefit society". It hides a real problem that some people have while sacrificing the rest of us to do so. If the majority of us wanted to work in the office this would be a non-issue. GP would've simply gone to the office, found the majority of their co-workers there and been perfectly happy, while those of us who wanted WFH were happily home. Better to tackle the problem head on than sweep it under the rug.
The core problem is that remote work can easily mean 8 hours/day of social isolation. Especially because those are the hours people have the most energy to try new things. If people spend that time avoiding social contacts, they are obviously not going to make many friends.
Historically, neighbors were a key source of friends, because they were the community you lived in. 20th century changed that. Today neighbors are simply people who happen to sleep near you temporarily. They are probably away from home during the day, their jobs are unrelated to yours, and they will likely relocate sooner or later.
Who will form the community you will spend your time with by default, if it's no longer your neighbors or coworkers?
And that is where dance/martial arts class is different. Everyone there has decided to show up. Your also a lot less likely to get laid off from book club than your job.
If people want to work together in the same space 8 hours a day more power too them! Go have a good time in the office and let us WFH folks be. But if there aren't enough who want to be in the office to satisfy the office dwellers it doesn't become the WFH folk's responsibility to keep them company. If we are open to friendship, we already were.
> Once someone realizes this and learns to put effort into their social connections, they are far less likely to end up isolated than just hoping showing up at work will make the difference.
This is fundamentally the "communism would work, if" argument. Individual people can choose to make the non-default choice. People on the average don't do that.
This is part of the idea I'm contesting. Remember, "65" has an office they can go to, their problem is no one else wants to. Unless you are asserting that you are a better judge of what is good for 65's co-workers then they themselves are, presumably "on average" they have found sufficient social interaction to satisfy themselves outside of the office. And if you are asserting that you know better than them and they should be forced into the office for their own good, I soundly reject that notion.
Just "going with the default" of spending time with co-workers and is exactly how people end up isolated late in life or after losing their jobs. People who are struggling with isolation now should introspect on why they are struggling to make friends and address that instead of attempting to force others into being around them. That's not how friends treat friends.
If social isolation during work is the default, people will have fewer friends, because making friends takes more effort. They may be satisfied with their situation, because they contrast the outcomes of having more friends with the effort needed to make them. But the entire society may be worse off than a society where people have more friends because working with other people is the default.
Fundamentally, everything based on the idea that people should make different choices is doomed to fail. To make the society better, you must work on structural level and change the defaults.
> If social isolation during work is the default, people will have fewer friends, because making friends takes more effort.
I disagree. If these people were making friends by just being at work, they wouldn't be feeling so lonely right now. They would already have plenty of social connections that would not just evaporate because your not in the office anymore. Even those just entering the workforce should have these friends from school. Instead constantly being around people at work makes people "feel" less lonely, hiding the fact that they haven't actually made a deeper connection. Shoving people back in the office will just hide it again, it won't fix the problem. It'll just decrease the quality of life of everyone who happier right now. On the other hand leaving things as they are and instead supporting those feeling isolated in finding other outlets lets the majority of people keep doing what's working for them, and the rest are likely have motivation to fix the problem.
The issue is finding friends after relocating to a new area. That's easier for some and harder for others. With coworkers, you already have a pool of people to spend time with. Through them, you can meet other people and learn about activities that are available in the area.
Furthermore a read through the comments on this thread make it pretty unambiguous that the problem is not restricted to people new to the area.
100% agree, that was poor phrasing on my part, it was meant to communicate where the responsibility for fixing the problem lies, not claim the problem was isolated to a single, or even small number of people.
> There's hardly a substitute for that outside.
Strongly, 100% disagree. Work friendships tend to be fleeting, causing job loss or retirement to be isolating events. Yes lasting friendships can and do form in the workplace (I've formed some even while working remotely!), but getting laid off is a great way to discover just how many of those work friendships were of convenience.
Meanwhile there are tons of ways to meet people outside of work. Dance classes, workshops, exercise classes, book clubs, beekeeping clubs, etc. I submit that a person who can't form friendships outside of work is unlikely to form the lasting kind at work, and is better off in the long run examining why that is, rather than papering over it with a temporary bandaide.
I think the university system is pretty hamstrung by the number of students it can accept. A lot of grad programs are coming online (I used to work at 2U which does this) and this is good both for students and the school as more students get an education and the school gets more income. Whether or not I want it to happen (I think it's probably an important part of reforming the university system) it seems like it's happening anyway.
> School?
I think most studies show this is pretty bad, so no.
> Let's all wake up in our pijamas, hop on a zoom
Probably twice a week I get through the whole work day in my PJs and I'm great at my job, so that sounds fine.
> live most of our lives like that?
Nah I'll go to the grocery store in the AM for supplies in my PJs but that's the extent of it.
It's time saving AND money saving
I also think it's fair to say that a lot of people are happy going to work and a lot of people really aren't. I feel like all of these threads are super passionate with one side trying to convince the (super unconvince-able) other side, which is why my responses are something like "get a situation together that works for you". "Convince millions of other people they're wrong and you're right about something they care about deeply" is a steeper climb.
Many young adults have friends.
> As much as others can deny, work is source of most people's friendships, relationships, mentorships, and other social interactions.
I will deny it. Citation or speak for yourself.
And other commenters assert that most people don't get those things at work.
I think it's easy to mistake our own experiences as being similar to "most people". We should probably try to avoid ascribing our own preferences as being the same as the majority's.
Also, in the case of something as personal as friendships, it doesn't actually matter what "most people" do.
It's also a me problem, so there's at least two of us.
I'm extremely thankful that my company is mostly comprised of people who prefer and thrive working in our one office. And no, I'm not using my coworkers as my friend group. Despite loving some of my work friends, my strongest friends are all outside the office. But the office environment and the people in it give me life.
When it comes time to look for a next job (if ever), the biggest requirement by far will be a working environment that's mostly, if not entirely, in office.
I'm 27 for reference, but I've felt this way ever since the start of my career.
It's funny how people (in this thread and in general when the topic comes) find infuriating the idea of making friends or just socialize at work, when most friendships starts because some people happen to spend 8h/day at the same school/university
I have yet to see someone find this idea "infuriating". What people find infuriating is people who want to drag everyone else back to the office so they can pretend we are friends.
> most friendships starts because some people happen to spend 8h/day at the same school/university.
"Most" feels very strong here. I have exactly 2 friends I am still in touch with from high school, unless you count social media connections. None from college, but admittedly, that was a pretty isolating time in my life due to the combined demands of work and school. Anecdata, but looking at my friend group, I'd say this is pretty representative. Which is a perfect example of why I advocate strongly for finding friends outside work. Turns out "we were forced into the same building" just isn't the basis for a lasting relationship people hope it is, and these often dry up when the constraint is removed.
Which has obvious impact on spouse kids and genuine friendships outside of work.
I would not mind it, if people socializing in work would not pretended their socialization is work.
Enforced socialisation doesn’t seem reasonable any more than denying that some people like to socialise at work. Two sets of people, two different needs.
I agree with the rest though, now that people had a taste of WFH, you can't force them to come to office just for the sake of socialization. My point was to acknowledge the issue that some people used to see work as a place to socialize just like high-school or university, and this way of socializing has been suddenly taken away from them with WFH, and there is nothing weird in that
What if one could get paid for doing a job without any of that by skipping “socialize at work” altogether?
Even works for finding romantic partners as well if you’re not creepy about it, in fact two regulars at my gym just got married.
There’s always the bar as well but of course alcohol-based socializing is not quite so healthy.
I have so many great memories of work from 6-3 years ago, but 3 to now is just a void, sitting at home on Teams calls. What makes things worse is my city has the oldest population in the country so there is hardly anything going on outside of work as well. I've made the decision to move to a bigger city where I can work in office with everyone along with every other benefit of a larger population.
That turn of phrase was to meant to mean it's your problem to find a solution too, I should not have to change my behavior to accommodate you wishing for a bustling office. It was not meant to imply that you are alone in feeling that way and I apologize if it was taken that way. Anyone having a hard time with remote is in good company.
Again if they are available in your area I'd recommend checking out co-working spaces. They are great ways to work around others who feel the same as you, and, as a bonus won't come and go with the job. Part of the reason I feel so strongly that your core socialization shouldn't be work is because so many of those connections, even the ones you thought were close, will disappear with the job.
I used to love the office, but I never see anyone there. Once is started focusing on local community activities things got better. I’d suggest adjusting your hours such that 5-8 pm are free for social activities. I usually start work at 10, break for dinner, and then do an hour or two before bed.
The only thing that fixed up was moving to a company that was mostly in-office, with a few people hybrid/remote. Being able to interact in person with people working on the same project as me was rejuvenating, and that might be understating it.
We go to school and make friends with other people at school. Why is it wild that you'd want to go to work and make friends with other people at work?
> We go to school and make friends with other people at school. Why is it wild that you'd want to go to work and make friends with other people at work?
"Want" and "need" aren't the same thing. We made friends at school because we had no choice. We were required to go to school, so of course the result is that we'd end up making friends there. But even as children, we had other opportunities to make friends: recreational sports leagues, boy/girl scouts, church groups (if that was your family's thing), volunteering, etc. Sure, I'm not saying those sorts of things could replace socialization at school.
But in the adult world, we've already been socialized, and we should be able to meet people outside of required, structured activities. It's a shame that some people perhaps didn't learn that as well as others, but I don't think that's a problem best solved by requiring unrelated people to come to an office, when remote work offers so much more flexibility and many more possibilities.
Then again, part of the problem is that people have forgotten what real friendships are like. "Friends" these days are just people you go to restaurants/clubs/concerts/vacations/hiking/camping with so that you don't have to go alone. That's not friendship. That's just people you hang out with.
It might cure the itch for a real friendship, but don't confuse it for one.
Forcing me to come into an office would not change that; I completely understand that those in a new city without a strong group of friends would benefit from going to the office— and at most jobs they’re already free to go in if they choose, to work alongside people who also _choose_ to go into the office. Choose is the key word here. Work for me is a job first, and I’m not looking to make a best friend at work, so don’t force me to come in for that reason alone.
With the exception of fast food, I have never, ever spent this kind of time with a co-worker. I don't deny jobs like this exist, but it would certainly be the exception for all the tech jobs I've worked.
weird I thought you were talking about coworkers for a second
I don’t see how a persons feelings about how they think about relationships can be invalid.
That said I would be very, very careful about assuming your work friends are real friends. People are often surprised to discover which connections vanish when you quit working together. Hence why I strongly advocate for finding friends outside of work. Makes it much less likely you get laid off or leave your job one day and suddenly find yourself lonely.
Go for a walk outside. Say hello to a stranger.
Volunteer at the library e.g. helping illiterate adults learn to read, or helping English as a second language speakers by chatting with them.
Go to a game store. They usually have open board/card/rpg games you can join. Some bars also have this.
Look online for activity groups in your area e.g. a photography group that walks around the city together. A gardening group. A sewing group. A painting group. Some of these might be advertised at your local library. Some might even meet there. Can’t find one your interested in? Make your own.
Look at public events in your city. Some of these are run by non-profits that would love if you volunteered to assist. Be careful about what you volunteer for though. Since you are looking for human interactions do not offer to help with their website, for example, since that is solitary work. These events need plenty of on-hand help.
I don't want to relocate myself to be next to some office. I work on a computer specifically because I can do it from wherever feels right to me.
You're right that it isn't your problem that it's a hassle for me: because that mindset is making it MY problem when I don't want it to be. That argument is an incredibly selfish one.
> why is it my problem that you live far away from work, that you need to hassle and lose hours of your day commuting?
It's not. Work from homers aren't forcing office people to do anything. On the other hand, office people want other office people back.
One is you _forcing_ me to do something (come into the office). The other is me not forcing you to do anything. The company is the one making you stay at home.
Sure, we all go back to work in an office. Hurray! Is the company going to force everyone there to be best buddies with you as well? What if nobody in the office likes you? Is it now company policy to be friends with everyone?
> I doubt many friends were made in the chat box of an online class.
Many people became friends online. We have apps, for meeting people, online, and THEN dating them.
I don't know you; maybe you don't desire interaction as much, or maybe you just didn't take the time to really digest what the parent said.
For many people, it is really hard to be new in a city. Some people have _no idea_ how to make friends out of college. With remote work this becomes so much harder.
This doesn't necessarily mean that _you_ should be forced to go to the office as a solution. I'm just saying that this can be a really big problem, especially if your team is full of people in a new city.
I like technology as an auxiliary means of communicating with people, but having pretty much 95-100% of my interactions occur over texting and calling (people don't even usually bother to turn on their cameras) has been a personal hell, and honestly has soured my opinion of the entire internet. Beyond just work, what few personal relationships I do have at this point are usually also remote, so actually spending real life time with people is this far distant tertiary form of interacting, when it's the natural bloody thing we're evolved to do as a species.
Now you have companies like Meta investing in the metaverse "future" where we sit in VR headsets, trade crypto for fake digital goods, have romantic relationships with virtual avatars, and sit in virtual offices so our twenty-poly character models can discuss around a fake whiteboard. I just want to be around people again.
Getting on the social on-ramp is hard, especially if you live in a culture where overwork is praised and normalized. I had that problem too (I moved from the US to the Netherlands and this was one of the major reasons why). I super suggest taking a step back from work--it's clearly keeping you from doing other things that are critical for your mental health--and then using that time to invest in other parts of your life.
Find co-workers who are local and suggest meeting for lunch or dinner on occasion. Hopefully you've developed some level of rapport through video calls and chats so this won't feel weird to you. Your company/team should be organizing regular get-togethers anyway. If not, they are failing at doing remote work. I hesitate to say "find a new company where they are better at this", but that's better than "require everyone to come into an office to fix your social life".
Beyond that, don't center your social life around work. Go to meetups dedicated to topics and activities you're interested in. Just get out and walk!
> I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life.
That seems to be a problem you've created for yourself, and it's a bit selfish to want to require everyone else to go to an office in order to make your choices work for you.
Stop working all day. Set boundaries with your employer. If the maker space really closes by 5pm, negotiate a more flexible work schedule where you get to take a 2-hour break (or something) around lunch or in the afternoon so you can go to the maker space, but then you work later into the evening, or get up earlier in the morning to start work. Also, I'm not sure how any of this would have changed if you were working in an office: the maker space would still close early, and you still would be working all the time and be unable to get there during their open hours.
If you want to people-watch, take a 30-minute walk in the morning and in the evening, to replace what a commute would be like.
> I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.
This is a bit much, frankly. If you really truly are so inflexible that you can't imagine a good life without an office job, find a new job that has an office you can go to! This isn't rocket science. These jobs exist. Stop advocating making life worse for all of the people whose lives have been markedly improved by the extra opportunities for remote work, just because you can't figure out your own life.
Made the decision this month to pack up everything and move to Melbourne so I can work in the office among other things.
Also great cafes you can work from on the remote work days.
PT and urban sprawl sucks though, which is why I did the opposite and work remotely 100% now.
Reading about your struggles made me reflect on my twenties in tech and what a day to day looked like. Most mornings would start on a tube commuting into central london, getting to see how people dress, was anyone attractive on my route? what music should I listen to on the way? Then getting into the office, I worked with with engineer that was a developer at roscosmos and escaped the soviet union. We would walk the streets of london and discuss what problems we were going to solve that day and have a morning espresso while doing it. The city was always buzzing with traders and office workers. Work was tough but I had a lunch outside to look forward to with my team. If it was thursday or friday most of us would head to a pub for a late boozy lunch or end up at bricklane for a curry and the night just went on and on.
Amazing time and when I compare that to the last few years of remote work it cant even come close to the interactions and experiences I gained during that time. My day to day has been wakeup, grab a coffee, walk into my office and start responding to emails. I then try to squeeze in time to walk my dog and then get back to continue more meetings and zoom calls. Once the day ends I'm pretty exhausted and try to get outside to ride my bike or go to the gym. I physically interact with less than 2 people a day. My wife and the barista at the local coffee shop.
I completely empathize with how you're feeling!
I agree fully with you. I'm in my 30s though everything else the same. I would definitely feel oppositely if I had a partner and kids (like my brother) but I don't.
People saying it's a "you" problem are missing the big picture. For a lot of people, the workplace is a primary context in their life.
It's two days a week for me. Mostly alone, just sitting in my bedroom and working on my own tiny project.
I'm lucky because I do have social interaction in the university, but I feel just how much of any job-related motivation this kills. If I would be full time amployed, this would be driving me into a depression as well.
I'm sure that you will be able to find some nice people to hang out with and talk to.
Humans are social creatures, and for the vast majority of human history, we've existed in communities of various shapes. Evolutionarily, psychologically, and even physiologically, it's not healthy for us to be going to work for 8 hours—with or without people—then retreating to a home with just our immediate families 5 days a week, (nearly) 52 weeks a year.
The shift in zoning after WWII to heavily prioritize hard separation between residential and commercial areas (motivated, in no small part, by racism) is a major culprit in the creation of this new lifestyle, and disruption of previous forms of order. (Though I believe the first big shift was probably the Industrial Revolution.)
I don't have much of a solution to offer in the short term, because it's not a short-term kind of problem. However, I do know that there's a movement called Intentional Communities[0] that's supposed to be working on counteracting it; perhaps you could look them up and see if there's anything in your area.
[0] https://www.ic.org
There are tons of companies that still have offices. Get a job with one.
Consider how much social time there is in high school and college. There was barely a moment to be alone. Classes are full of discussion, meals are eaten together, and shooting the shit with siblings or roommates fills in all the other time. If you forego social interaction during work hours, I don't see how the math adds up to get back to the baseline from high school and college.
It sounds like you have an office to go to even though your team doesn't come in often. This is the case for me too, but luckily I'm at a big enough company where there are people my age on other teams. At first, barely anyone came in, but someone has to break the deadlock so I kept coming in every day regardless. Fast forward a year and there is a group of 20-somethings that come in every day. I've formed some of the best friendships of my life here. I recommend going into the office every day even if it's going to be empty. It's a good routine anyway to get out of the house.
While I don't have any personally, I'd also recommend housemates. A lot of my friends from work have housemates and I feel like it's an easy way to build a large friend group since you can share each other's friends. It especially seems to help those who are new to the city and don't have a friend group yet. Your housemates can also easily become your friends!
I really sympathize with your situation. You're simply asking for what used to be normal to return. Don't lose hope - there are so many of us like you and we just need to find each other.
If you (or anyone else reading this) are in the SF Bay Area in a similar situation and are looking for potential friends, hit me up at my profile email
I would strongly suggest volunteer work, as a way to socialize. Geeks have extremely valuable skills, and can give a great deal, to most volunteer efforts.
In my case, I have been involved in a fellowship, for my entire adult life, and it richly satisfies my socialization needs. I also do a great deal of tech volunteer work for it.
I wish you luck, but I'm not sure that returning to the office would fix things.
What you have to do is you have to be proactive about your social activities and find a thing that allows you to do that. I ended up starting my own social group off of reddit. That helped a lot and taught me a lot about groups.
Couchsurfing was great for the social aspect. Another thing to note: Just because you are around coworkers it doesn't mean you'll relate to them well. Some have a tendancy to stab you in the back.
I just moved a thousand miles from school to a new state. I live near work, which is about 30 miles from the nearest city (no public transit to speak of). If there's any spots for young people to socialize nearby, I haven't been able to find them.
My long-term girlfriend has a career near where we went to school, so many weekends I'm traveling there, or she is here. Both of which are great, but neither of which are conducive to making friends in this new place.
I'm really excited about the job, and I'm a late sleeper. I tend to work 11am to around 9pm.
I've had some roommates, but they've been pretty uninterested.
Luckily, work is fully in-person, and it's a very young office. The first few months were rough, but I've finally made friends with people, I had a barbecue, we went skiing, went to see a co-workers band perform.
My personal situation could be a lot worse, but it could have also been a lot better. Compared to the last year of my Masters program, the adjustment period was very painful, and I think not having human interaction would have made it worse.
-- Though, (and I'm just realizing it now), if the job were remote, I could have just stayed in the part of the country where I had many friends. Sadly, I work with hardware, so that's probably not going to happen.
Makes you appreciate the jebus out of f2f hands on trades. Stuff where your actually involved with people and the results of your work aren't a constant reminder of how detached from society you truly are.
But I somehow found the balance by going to a co-working space, going to the gym and playing any physical sport.
PS: I live with 6 people but it still happened to me.
Currently, the economy is not aggressively hiring at the junior level. But this could change. What does that world look like when junior employees go into a fully isolated and remote setup? Either we need a structured central place for supporting those employees or society needs to solve these social and economic problems in a completely different way.
Remote work is easier for senior employees with families or a more established life. I think many here probably fit into this category. After even 4-5 years of life in an office, you probably lose the need to regularly see employees. But being junior / early on, it's a VERY tough road to be fully remote.
I too would like some in-person time with colleagues, but I also know that with an open plan office it can be so noisy that I know that nothing will get done.
Prior to 2019 a well used phrase was "I need to work from home so that I can get stuff done" and we all understood it. A lot of actions have been taken over the years to ensure that we know who the boss is, Taylorism is the cause and the boss gets an office. We have had decades of research showing that open plan offices increase sick days by 30%, and reduce productivity.
Unfortunately you are right at this inflection point where those of us who have suffered the worst of it are fed up and want change. The best we can do is work from home.
Have you told other members of your team this? I don't need to see my friends every day to know they are my friends, but would once a week or fortnight help, even if it was to pair with one other person?
You expect to find a girlfriend on the job? I don't mean it as a snark. But in office means that work and communiting takes even more of your life. Unless she comes from the job, which is unlikely in male dominated profession, being with team won't get you girlfriend.
The parent didn't say this. He probably meant it as in "if I had a girlfriend, not having friends wouldn't be as rough".
This is your problem. The rest is a red-herring.
Having said that, you're in a great place to make a few key changes that might help! I moved to another country and learnt a new language and a whole new culture when I was in the same place as you!
Perhaps that's not a option for you, but maybe you could travel to a new city for a week or two! Trial out a few places and see what fits you. It takes a bit of effort and persistence, at the cost of routine, but having a fresh start might be the thing that gets you out of this.
Edit: You might want to look up Croissant to go and meet other remote co workers, there's a fair few of us around the world ;)
I need my habits and routines, and I just don’t make myself stick to the routines when I stay home. Less of a reason to shower at the same time or at all, less of a reason to take walking breaks during work hours.
It has come down to me being able to handle a bullshit job when I like the people I work with and see them often enough to where we are inbetween work friends and real friends. But a bullshit job where my coworkers aren’t even interesting or nice to talk to? I’m just not gonna want to work with them ever again.
Benefit of remote work is generally that its flexible and you can schedule time in the day to get out and do things than otherwise the usual office grind would prevent.
Your employer shouldn't care that you're out at noon but working at 7pm instead as long as the work is getting done.
Sounds like you also have boundary issues where you're working all the time and killing yourself, quite voluntarily, for your job. You should consider just stopping doing that. You probably won't fall behind.
If you have remote work and a rigid schedule like you're constantly oncall and dying because of the work, then find better and more human remote work.
But I don't know anyone who would hire me to do remote work. Nor how to find one reliably. I'm getting depressed at the thought that I might have to go work in a physical box again.
Check some of the event type apps such as meetup, they usually have quite a few fun things on there with cool people to meet doing all sorts of hobbies.
Then again, it is true that tech can be quite lonely and solitary work, so as you mentioned a career shift may be in order.
> And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.
If you spending time alone is torture, is it torture because of the loneliness or is it torture because you aren't at peace with yourself?
I get that connection is needed, but if you're in a situation where it's inconvenient or hard to find you shouldn't be attacking yourself because of this
That will actually be better for social life, because people won't need to lose touch when they change jobs.
People were stuck at home by the pandemic, not by remote work.
This may sounds crazy but I actually like to go to the office when I'm team isn't there! The place is lively and there are other people who aren't in my team, and I prefer to interact with them (perhaps it's less stressful as we're less likely to talk about ongoing team work, or they won't require my assistance).
I would hope you wouldn’t have to abandon your career and maybe a little job hopping is in order. I don’t think the world will go full remote, even if that’s personally the way I enjoy it.
Go to a climbing gym or get a dog or something if you want to meet people.
This is the problem in my opinion. Not the fact that you were working all day, but generally that our work now bleeds into personal lives or leaves no time for it.
Why do kids need to go back to school? They can sit at a desk at home. They can make friends elsewhere and they don't need to go to school for physical activity. They can do that in any club, group meet, sport, hobby whatever. Schools for learning after all, not making friends.
That’s your decision. Very convenient for your employer. Perhaps not so convenient to you, given that you are getting depressed.
> My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office.
That’s their decision.
You can't bet only on work for meeting people. It can work by luck, but an ex coworker of mine recently left my ex-company and the city, because he was only seeing coworkers and didn't manage to meet people in the city, they ended up feeling lonely, aka work from the office didn't fix their loneliness. It's also a matter of social skills, and joining groups, and stuff like this if you don't have an established social group yet.
I also think remote work is not for everybody, and preferences might evolve during someone's life. I guess there will be office-first companies for people who prefer being at the office, remote-first companies for us preferring remote work, and hybrid ones if they manage to pull if off. That's very hard but somehow my current company is very successful in this, but you will need to have remote-first habits in such an hybrid setting, like using the chat / mail / whatever even between people at the office at the same time for many things.
So I have four pieces of advice for you, each one can suffice:
- move to a city where you already have friends - make sure it allows you to meet new people too.
- join clubs, do stuff outside work. Work is a mean to have a good life, don't spend all of your life at work, that's nonsense, unless it's absolutely what you love and you are happy, but that's not your case
- join an office-first or hybrid company. You don't need to stay at a remote company if you don't like it
- you can still be at a remote company, but go to a coworking space. Try it out! I have a coworker who does this. You can have a routine, meet the same people everyday and have breaks / eat lunch with them, etc exactly like coworkers, just that you don't work on the same things. Not the same thing as working at the same place with people who you work with but I guess that can be enriching / rewarding too in its own way.
Finding a coworking space was my plan B if I figured I didn't like working from home in the end. My company would be willing to pay for it. Hasn't happened yet but I personally think that's a great way to both avoid commute time, see people during the day, address the loneliness of remote work, and not be limited by the choice of whatever companies are near you.
Good luck, I hope you will find a solution that works out for you!
That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
In the before times, good remote companies would be intentional about having regular company meetings in a single location. That is a good alternative. But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?
Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020. Now I’m not an SM and largely work independently, but I love being able to walk to the office every day (30 minute commute). I used to do hybrid but now I’m really enjoying the separation and am loathe to work from home, except on weekends.
I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that directly leads to any of the productivity gain that the anti-remote crowd would like you to believe.
Not everything in life is about career advancement.
I think people who wants to work from home should be able to. I'm doing hybrid personally as well now, it's great for keeping my chronic pain under control. And I enjoy coming in couple days a week to a quieter office (as lots are doing hybrid/mixed wfh as well).
Internet has conditioned us to think that people can only have extreme beliefs, and any disagreement means their opinion must be the polar extreme opposite of mine. I can simultaneously appreciate opportunities I've got from socializing with people in a fully-WFO setting while also appreciating benefits of WFH ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This isn't about assuming extreme positions, this is about reading what someone has written and responding to it at face value.
Yes, that's not what you said, just like that's not what the comment you replied to said.
I explicitly did not say "everyone should work from home", using words like "many of us", so right, "that's not what [I] said", and you're just making up an argument where none exists.
Well said :)
If you're not ok with that, that's your choice to make: find jobs that give you those opportunities, and tilt your work-life balance toward work. Hell, you should be happy that I have more flexibility in my working arrangements and can make this trade-off: less competition for you to get what you want.
But you see, all the decision makers about the RTO are the sort of people who would be obsessed with career development. So they would be very biased against this sentiment. In an employer's market, they have all the power now.
(Yes, I am aware of a few exceptions who attain "fellow" or equivalent levels, but they are the exceptions to my observation and such positions are anyway <1% of the technical workforce; not everyone can be a fellow).
Maybe what you describe works at some places or for specific people. Many companies will ignore your ideas. Your title is code monkey and that's all you do - shut up and listen to us important people. Some managers are very threatened by their subordinates, or are unimaginative. The business side generally wants what they want. God forbid you suggest some new approach.
And that's mostly what you get with this attitude that doesn't value any meetings / communication which doesn't relate directly to one's work.
But the organizations don't want to have code monkeys (typically), because to produce value, people can't just churn out code to complete assignments, they need to also understand the context, be able to identify made up problems, be able to design the most minimal solution covering the business needs etc. That requires understanding, certain alignment, communication.
> And that's mostly what you get with this attitude that doesn't value any meetings / communication which doesn't relate directly to one's work.
But all the things you've listed in the following paragraph are totally communications that relate directly to one's work. What is the case that unrelated communications are also essential?
Remote work will continue to reduce over the next couple of years. If you don’t have a real reason for being at home during the work day, expect to be back in the office soon.
Any real data on this? All the data our company has shows increased performance during WFH, such as an increase in deliveries and decrease in cycle time. So even if it's not as well formed, it seems it's formed sufficiently.
That’s not where it actually ends, however. How do you know what to work on? How do you know if you built a profitable thing? Being remote lets you ignore those things in ways that are harder to do in person.
Hybrid is probably here to stay, but “remote first” was a pandemic only thing.
Lol don't tell me what I think. Those are the metrics that our management uses. That's their focus, and are pervasive in the industry. Sure, you can talk about shipping the wrong thing. What's the metric called for that, or would it fall under rework? Our rework has not gone up. There's no noticeable increase in failed projects either.
"Being remote lets you ignore those things in ways that are harder to do in person."
No, it really doesn't. These same ritual and due diligence conversations take place remotely. Or maybe your org doesn't have good procedures?
a) we're not talking about how people decide what to build, as that has nothing to do with working remotely,
b) managers aren't involved in determining either what to build or how well the plan to build something was executed, and
c) the people who do decide those things have meetings which are irrelevant when talking about working remotely or in person.
Am I understanding you correctly?
How? That's certainly not what I've observed.
And I say this as someone who was also working remotely before the pandemic. I’m always wary of people who refuse to acknowledge the downsides of ideas they support…
You’ve got to do better if you expect to retain employment long term, and certainly if you expect to retain the privilege of working remotely.
You may have had a better experience. If so, then, with all sincerity, I congratulate you on your luck; I bear no ill will to those who happen to find genuinely good employers.
Just don't take your experiences as typical and use them to argue that the rest of us should act as if our experiences either didn't happen, or aren't common.
I've retained employment for nearly two decades, and have retained the "privilege" of working remotely for nearly half of that. I'm not concerned.
If you expect anything else, you might expect humans to not be like humans.
Its a free for all for asking questions, sending messages, making unofficial FYI notes, its an attempt to document those conversations that would have otherwise taken place between individuals. Everyone from the top down has read/write access. Main objective to document those conversations, so nothing gets missed, like people being otherwise engaged in meetings/phone calls. Self Censorship takes place because everyone can view it, reduces staff harassment problems.
I agree most of my 'big breaks' were face to face, that was due to the point I was in my career at that time. I've still had some great progression during remote working times - sometimes you just need to make these things happen - contacting someone just for a chat if that is what you need, turning up to online meetings early to spend a little time chatting before the proper meeting, or asking specific people if they have time to stay on.
I really think half the problem is that we aren't yet used to the new rules of engagement, and are still figuring out what feels right. But opportunity is still there.
But I really enjoy socializing with folks with similar interests (e.g., tech), and I work with a lot of neurodivergent colleagues which puts less of a strain on my social battery as I don't have to be "normal"---we're all weird and it's fine.
Still, my social battery drains quickly nonetheless, I tend to have to leave after hanging out for an hour or two.
You are just as capable of taking a bag lunch to a cafeteria, or going out to eat...
It will be impossible to quantify these "water cooler chats." For as much work gets done, just as much probably doesn't.
Some of my best ideas that ended up being company changing started as a conversation walking to lunch with colleagues.
Initially these ideas were just undeveloped thoughts and I would never dream about booking a meeting to present them. Having a chance to develop them in a casual conversation might have been the difference between successfully building the thing and not doing it at all.
I love working from home but miss the unstructured collaboration.
Your company doesn't have informal communications channels for this sort of thing? Team/Slack/whatever? In every place I've worked for the last 15-20 years (it was different before that), such informal "watercooler" talks have never happened in person, whether everyone was in the office or not. It was always over electronic communications.
The reason for this is that it's less disruptive to other productive work.
Companies that are all remote will survive but they won't thrive and in a competitive market will lose to those that are in person.
I say that after running a company that was one or the other at various times. The periods when we were all in person (constantly, not as a special event) is when real innovative progress was made.
Exactly, and how many of those conversations are wasted on nothing? Sure, there's a social element to it, so how about we highlight that aspect and not some "lightbulb" moment that derives from small talk.
I don’t really understand why many commenters here are expressing a sentiment that you can’t get to know someone digitally. Some of the best people in my life were met online, both personally and professionally.
I'm not saying it's worth 2+ hours of commuting. And honestly, I think it's bullshit that employers expect commuting time to be unpaid; if having people in the office is something they consider valuable, they should be paying for that commute time. But I reject the idea that those conversations have no value.
The problem is that it is obvious how useless and misconfigured our entire corporate management structures are with remote work so the easiest solution is to go back to the office.
The pandemic was a fun exercise in forced, real efficiency but we need to get back to the Dilbert cartoon version of life because the Dilbert cartoon characters call the shots and put a ton of time into becoming those characters.
I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.
What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?
People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense.
I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
Looking back though, I think the important thing is not physical proximity, it's conversation without an agenda. If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk: grousing about frustrations, daydreaming about improvements, comparing notes, etc. I think these things are important (not to everyone, I get that some people despise small talk, but to some people). If you only communicate in formal meetings, you can end up with 6 people independently realizing Greg's data lake proposal is doomed to fail, but not speaking up because they each feel like everyone else is on board.
And it hadn't occurred to me before this moment, but the way to get this back without returning to an office seems obvious: pairing and mobbing. That's the only time since I started WFHing that I've had or seen others having these kind of un-directed conversations with coworkers: during downtime in a mob. I need to think about this a bit more...
Whats stopping people from scheduling “shoot the shit” of coffee calls though? That’s what I’ve seen many do since the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you describe: people vent, talk about what happened during meetings, etc.
This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that can be about anything. It can differ based on the person and your relationship.
It completely feels like the scene from Arrested Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".
A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether you're in the meeting or at home.
So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private channel during the week that the messages are alive -- probably less than the chance of the person you're talking about standing around the corner.
Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
How would I know that these conversations happen over Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's or small private channels. And this was commonplace well before the pandemic and WFH started.
Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
It's hard to have a private in-person conversation outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people that you don't want to hear them.
I would find it highly suspicious if someone tried to have a backroom convo with me on a digital platform.
The failure there is that the person is afraid to tell that in the meeting. He or she has to rely on backchannel.
I like having casual talks about nothing in particular without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for growth in many aspects.
The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly.
Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company that can do it should be and any that isn’t should go the way of the dodo.
But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.
One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their offices in order to facilitate random meetings between people:
> However, almost as many fruitful interactions described in the book can be traced to architectural features. Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate the building were included intentionally, so that chance encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:
> In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to investigate the effects of inter-office communication. They convinced their employees to where sociometric badges for the duration of the experiment and identified three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by about $200 million.
I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way, companies definitely should play around and see what works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.
Ultimately, only the social aspect (building relationships, small talk with coworkers) remains. This should not be completely discounted, but everyone should do an analysis of what they are willing to go through to be in office. A 20-30 minute commute or a slightly longer public transit ride where you are assured of a seat? Sure, office will be worth it. 1+ hour each way in bumper-to-bumper traffic? Might as well WFH.
That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.
And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably invisible to you because you don’t take the time to get to build a relationship with your fellow workers.
Engineer only stand ups are a good one
That’s so wildly untrue and obviously so, I’m blown away that you could declare something so obviously false so confidently.
Where do you work? I’d love to short that company’s stock.
I’m betting you can imagine who is helpful and who is less so, and further I bet it’s pretty obvious in most cases, which makes the folks who are on the bad end of it defensive.
I’m honestly curious about where you work that that doesn’t happen.
Why on Earth would I not want any of that, and spend all that time out of my life with people who are not also my friends? What a sad way to look at life.
If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres more to life (and business) than that.
Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and depressing.
It’s interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways, and it makes life better to know them a little bit.
Personally I find the negatives to required office work far worse than the positive of social opportunities in the office. Maybe I'm too biased to have an objective opinion on this (I'm in my early 40s and already made my office friends after years of being required to be in an office), but I would much rather have the flexibility of remote work, which still allows me to meet up with co-workers after work if we choose to do so. I absolutely agree that there's much more friction and inertia that would make those sort of meetups less frequent. But for me, that's a worthwhile trade-off.
I think businesses that are embracing remote work should still maintain a (smaller) office where employees can come in when they want to or need to, for whatever reason. Sure, this doesn't work when people are geographically distributed all over the place. But that can also be a choice when looking for a job: just as I might look for an employer that's remote-first, others can look for employers with office cultures.
"Revenue driving" is one metric. Another one is, "cost reduction", and still another on is overall zeal for the work.
A good conversation can hit any and all these metrics. And it all adds right up too.
I care about coworkers. When people are able to make it OK, it shows! Tons of small things happen, people helping one another out, feeding off one anothers overall energy, and more really matter!
There needs to be laughter, fun, and the good vibes that come from a group of people who understand one another well enough to appreciate the time they spend together.
A group like that will have plenty of the business conversations too. First and foremost, they will be comfortable enough around one another to have those chats with few worries.
Another thing to keep an eye out on is fear, blame and shame.
Much better to boil it down to choices and outcomes.
Did we make a bad call? Ok, great. The outcome sacked, so how do we avoid that in the future? Easy conversation that should not worry anyone.
Making failure into learning opportunities is another big one. People need to be able to try it whatever it is. And when they can share the experiences and draw own their more seasoned peers, they improve rapidly and feel good about the whole process.
I could go on here, but there are just a ton of human dynamics well worth the bit of time and attention needed to insure everyone is able to participate without having fear, blame and shame front and center.
I totally respect people who prefer the office life, I was just trying to offer a perspective as someone who is, like, half-aligned with you :)
Simply smiling at someone nicely over the coffeepot a few times can make them disposed to help you later. A three minute chat about nothing, and now you have a contact in IT/purchasing/payroll...
Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've implemented in companies comes from employees having beers together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things should be".
I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and another person who wasn't really in the conversation overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.
As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire buildings were built with this in mind.
* not a real statistic, but the intent is real
Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddling from management.
Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.
I think you just had bad luck
I never said that I didn't make friends, I said that I never made a connection that proved valuable in the context of networking, i.e. career growth.
That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers offered/provided any mentorship?
I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.
It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.
I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.
I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.
The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.
One man's cynic is another man's realist.
In my opinion, OP's description of office life is idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus.
I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with.
I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful professional relationships, but despite having made many work friends, as stated previously none of them have led to career development (OP's mention of networking).
Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with
I STRONGLY disagree with this universal claim.
Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.
And before you reply: how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you? Keep in mind that a lot of people in tech (myself included) are literally digital natives who learned to socialize on the internet before adapting to doing it in person.
When you spend multiple hours together with someone day after day, you develop a bond. That leads to being generous and helpful and this connection is sorely missing in a fully remote world.
> how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you?
No setup will work for every single person. But for most of the humans, in-person interaction helps create better bonds. Here are some research papers[1][2]. Yes, there will be a few outliers who do not like meeting people IRL, but that ultra-small minority should not be dictating policies which go counter to human nature.
[1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/s41598-021-045... - "In‑person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion."
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321... - "In both experiments, positive affect was higher after in-person support vs. texting."
Otherwise, they probably just moved on to be another cog in the machine that has no say over hiring.
And if you are under 40 (probably under 60), yes, some of your coworkers will advance to positions of power. Nothing to do with luck, it's just numbers. But you can certainly increase your own opportunities by directing your helpfulness, generosity and competency towards as many people as possible.
In my experience all my valuable connections have come from me working really hard on the same team as them and being goals oriented and meeting those goals; not wasting time dilly dallying in the hallways. Making meaningful connections in the hallway sounds like a middle manager thing.
Being sociable and taking an interest in other people via hallway convos is also a good way to build connections and/or friendships, but that has nothing to do with my earlier comment.
Lol. Never knew that, time for me to to go into therapy.
Why do you assume he doesn't do that?
My first decade of employment had zero mentoring and was basically just a gauntlet of abuse and unsafe work practices. Only time it got good was working w big blue, no abuse there. Idealic tbh. After that back into the slums of normie business. Got fired for upholding security standards lol.
Business/work isn't as kind to some of us as it is to others it would seem.
It's no different. American corporate culture has assimilated FAANG 100%. The only thing remaining is the free food and fancy offices (but not for long).
There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.
Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.
So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares, remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire them.
I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.
> There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
I think, this could potentially help, but we seem to be still very far from it technologically. It's still impossible to achieve a realistic eye contact. Audio in calls is still tragically bad - it's actually somewhat shocking that nobody was able to figure this out yet, it feels like there was hardly any progress in the last 15 years.
Personally, participating in a remote meeting is very noticeably more demanding for me than an in-person meeting.
> Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet.
Might work in theory, but in my experience not in practice. My company tried to organize some socializing remotely, but the attendance was dramatically lower than in the in person events.
> I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.
So what? Just because something is different, it doesn't mean you can't get useful benefits from it.
No, you're not going to have a random hallway meeting and conversation on on a chat platform. But the barrier to just saying hello to someone or asking them a question drops to near-zero when you have those chat platforms. Yes, it does mean you need to be more deliberate about making interactions happen, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
The "remote renaissance" is still very new. (And it started during a time that was not ideal for methodically exploring and learning a new paradigm.) It'll take many more years before people adjust and really find out how communication works best.
You've missed the point. It's wasn't that there are no benefits from it. It's that there are specific benefits from conversations that won't happen on a wiki.
This is a great example of how people can miss the point if you don't go round the houses with conversation and say something in multiple ways, so they can't misunderstand.
It's nice to be able to meet in person sometimes and going out is more fun. But it absolutely is not important for effective communication. Unless they literally have poor writing skills and/or poor reading comprehension.
Email and text (and surely Slack as well) are notorious for miscommunication as a result of missing emotion, lack of visual cues, not recognizing sarcasm/joking, etc. Dozens of studies and millions of personal experiences confirm this.
I’ve literally never seen this. I’ve seen people sit around and gossip about coworkers or talk about the latest TV shows or movies or sports, though. (And nothing wrong with that. We can’t think about work for 8 hours straight.)
> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on
That’s the exact opposite of my experience. The first few months were awkward because it was slightly new and assumptions were made that we’d be back in the office in a few weeks. But as time went on, everyone became much more productive. But that’s just my office, not everyone else’s.
> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.
> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Or you can just turn off your work computer and do something else to create that space, like hang with your family or friends.
I think remote is better for personal focus, but at a small cost to team focus.
> That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.
These are not the same thing, although you aren’t the only one in this (frankly depressing) thread making this mistake. You don’t have to be completely best buds with your mentor, including outside of work.
Spontaneous discussions and networking don’t work as well online because it requires more intent to talk to the other person. That spontaneous networking is more important for junior rather than senior people.
Being “in the kitchen” is a sign someone is probably not really working on something at that moment, and therefore may be open to conversation about something other than work. That signal is almost always missing online, and therefore doesn’t happen.
Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.
I miss my ~30 minute commute (by bike) from my old job. It provided good delineation between home and work, and 1h of good cardio a day meant I didn't need to do any of that at the gym. I didn't have a need for that time to myself to choose what to do because I liked that choice being taken away for these relatively short periods and me being "forced" into doing a nice chunk of exercise. It also allowed me to ramp up to work thoughts on the way in, and to slowly dump my work thoughts as I went home.
Maybe this is also just me who, now working fully remotely, struggles to regularly schedule in a similar amount of exercise despite having more time available with no commute. Since it's no longer strictly required I'm less likely to do it.
But discussing this with other colleagues and we worked out that, as a generalisation, which side of the fence you are on these types of things comes down to whether or not you have children.
If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30 minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this time to yourself. If you don't have kids you've no idea why you would crave this time.
Allowing remote work increases possibilities, and you've presented a false dichotomy. There's nothing that says an employer can't still maintain a (smaller) office for people who want to come in (either every day, or a smaller part of the week). Employers could also provide a stipend so people like yourself could rent a desk in a co-working space (assuming they still exist post-pandemic). And at the most basic, assuming you really did have to work from home, there's nothing stopping you from taking a break and going on a 30-minute bike ride. You could even "simulate" your commute by taking that ride once in the morning and once at the end of the day.
Requiring people to come to the office reduces possibilities, and requires that everyone conform to the same mold. I totally get that you liked going to an office. But it's selfish to require everyone else do that just because you want to. And you don't need to require that in order to get what you want, too.
> If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30 minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this time to yourself.
This is completely unrelated. Please don't suggest that everyone else should have to go to an office every day because you somehow can't negotiate a 30-minute break from your kids with your partner. That's your problem to fix, not mine.
I work remotely, but I walk to an office. I also like to have a separation of work and home.
Also I'm very physically active, I do crossfit 4x a week right next to my house.
I find it easier to commit by not being tied to any other location other than my home.
I definitely go through phases where I need a lot more structure in order to make things happen. Having an office just the right distance away to go to was a good target. I could either run or cycle to/from it. A public transport option was easily available (this is London, so public transport is nigh on amazing) but I was able to resist that lazy option.
I guess what I'm saying is that the freedom of working from home is just too much freedom for me. I'm way more productive and my employer gets way more of my time (not that they demand any extra time from me) but I'm lacking the initial impetus to get out of the house to do my own stuff.
Even something as simple as walking my kid to school (they're old enough now to make their own way) meant that I was out of the house and, on days without any early morning meetings, I'd walk on to the local pool to do a ~1h swim, or I'd run a long route home. Now it's just too easy to be holed up indoors and think "ah, I'll go for a swim/run/ride a bit later" and never do.
I know the motivation/planning/execution will come back eventually. I've successfully trained for various endurance events in the past but I guess my brain hasn't caught up with all of the changes that the pandemic has had influence on, including my working setup.
I have already told my manager that despite the official "you must work 2 days in the office per week" policy, if they ever try to apply that to me, I'm out. I'm looking for an excuse for early retirement, but it's just too much of a risk to disturb the status quo at the moment. Perturb the situation at your peril, employer-mine.
I got a seat-assignment earlier in the week (the official line is that they've hired too many people and can't place everyone, so some of us have 'volunteered' to stay at home). I was just about to enquire what was going on in Slack when he got to me first saying it was a group-wide thing and he'd reassign me to a non-desk seat as soon as he could. Which he did; and so I continue to work there...
Actually I implemented this. When I worked in the office, I used to bike to and from work every day. Every week I tried to choose a (slightly) different route. An it was really, really good for my mental health.
For the first 10 minutes or so of the ride I still had some thoughts from work, then gradually they started to disappear, I got intrigued by new shops being opened, some random folks doing crazy stuff on the street etc. In the end, I could feel endorphins coming and finally felt pleasantly tired when arriving home.
Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride whenever I want instead to the office.
Thank you! I've seen far too many posts where someone is saying "I biked/walked to work and it was great; everyone else should be forced to go to an office so I can keep my nice commute".
How are so many people blind to the idea that, if they are working from home, they can still take a bike ride or go for a walk before and after work? Hell, they might even now have the flexibility to take that ride/walk during lunch, or at other times when they need it.
Most people who commute across Puget Sound go the other way. They live on the west side and commute east to Seattle. That direction is a nightmare, with heavy traffic and long waits both in traffic and at the ferry terminals.
Going my way traffic was not too bad even if I went in during rush hour. I usually went in a couple hours or so later though and then it wasn't even noticeable. Similar coming home.
On the ferry I could nap in my car, or read in my car, or go take a nice stroll around the deck enjoying watching the water, or have a meal or a snack at the ferry's cafeteria, or relax in the fairly comfortable passenger seating area. There were newspaper vending machines with the Seattle Times, Seattle PI, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal which provided another way to spend my time on the boat.
Pandemic royally fucked over that lifestyle.
Spontaneous conversations happen every once in a while to creates an opportunity for collaboration, or maybe someone is working on a problem that another colleague worked on, so you can connect them etc. IMO, Happy hours in front of the screen are boring and feels like more work.
I don't want to go back to the office on a regular schedule, but I actually miss having stronger connections to my coworkers. I think the regular company meetings in a single location is an excellent alternative
Thank you for mentioning the importance of this. I graduated and entered the job market during the start of the pandemic. Getting a job was super difficult because every company suddenly implemented a hiring freeze. I managed to find a job at the company I interned at because they lost many developers due to the company being in the travel space (they didn't want to find themselves jobless in a pandemic, travel related payments were tanking). They were so desperate for bodies I got waived through because I was an intern one whole year before.
I quickly found myself in an empty office trying to onboard myself through the process, with a handful of tired devs trying to do the work that before had a team of 30. I spent my first few months in panic because nobody could find the time or patience to work with me, and the business logic was quite dense. It was still my first job and I hadn't worked up the courage to ask for help, and it was x10 harder when we worked from home. I could ask my fellow desk-mate because I could judge how busy they were, but it was torture asking people over teams and interrupting their flow.
Now almost 3 years into my job, I can definetly see how my anxiety kept me from progressing and I grew a lot. But WFH as a new person into the workforce, it was difficult until I found my footing and a routine. And a nice mentor. I am not ashamed to admit that it took me quite a while. Now I have more experience and I can work a bit more independently, so I appriciate our 2 wfh days. But most of our collaboration work is done best in the office.
There's more demand than ever before to live in NYC, as evidenced by record high rent prices. Cities don't need to be about offices.
The number of people who want to live in cities seems to be pretty similar now to what it was before the pandemic. I don't think urbanism is dying, or, if it is, it's not because of remote work.
> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
As an employer it's your job (via delegation) to facilitate how people (can) collaborate with each other. Relying on people doing that for you during their breaks is just lazy and poor leadership.
At the start of the pandemic we went full-remote and it worked, because we all knew each other well. Yet even then, I felt the loss of informal (sometimes work-related, sometimes not) communication with coworkers.
Time passed and now I'm in a fully-remote job. It's alright, my coworkers are nice, and things get done. But it's not the same. I don't feel like a part of anything. I'm constantly subject to the distractions of being at home -- there's lots of interesting stuff to do here, and my ADHD makes it tough to ignore.
More than likely, I'll retire early rather than finish out a career that's some mix of WFH or going to a nearly-empty office.
I used to work at a job where I was required to go into the office (Florida). My teammates were 1. offshore (India) 2. in Nebraska 3. in Atlanta.
My manager was in Atlanta.
I had 0 teammates in the office in Florida.
What's the justification there?
I also had to do a lot of 2am-3am on call.
Our laptops were also tracked with Sapience Buddy.
I no longer work there.
I've personally found mentorship is much easier remote since you can more easily dedicate your entire focus on a person rather than just catching up real quick before meetings.
I had a team member who was really struggling with isolation. Mentioned it to me briefly in chat and I had him give me a call. That turned into regular bi-weekly meetings where we chat about work issues and whatever topics are interesting to us. It's helped us both tremendously.
The only reason for anyone to suffer remotely is deliberate ignorance by senior member of the team.
And because of the more private nature of remote communication, I've found colleagues are much more willing to open up about concerns and frustrations they have about the office.
Sure remote means that if you're a senior member of the team and want to abandon your responsibilities it's easier to hide, but some of my best working relationships have been founded remotely.
I can see how employees existing solely in the Slackosphere can be crippling to the sort of shop talk that can spur new ideas, but I see no reason why it has to be that way.
I can't believe the amount of people here denying this exists or that they've ever seen it. I wonder if they are the type to neglect social dynamics over cold, detached, ultimately flawed and incomplete metrics? They can't even conjecture about unseen forces and subtle influences, a sort of butterfly effect where an off topic conversation about the weekend leads to different technical decisions? Because all that stuff does happen. It can be very hard to quantify or understand.
That's one reason I hate cultures they put too much weight on performance reviews. They think they can measure individual contribution and productivity. They don't get the less obvious things that arise from group settings and informal collaboration.
I've had equal or better success following paths on my own that while being highly tangential/unrelated to my work ultimately provided valuable and relevant insights.
I guess my point is that valuable spontaneous connections require time but they don't require in-person interpersonal interactions.
Unhealthy separation: spending 45-90 minutes (one way) in traffic, polluting the planet.
Healthy separation: the 6 vertical meters between me working in the attic and my kids playing downstairs in the living room
Those spontaneous connections yielding noticeable results are probably an urban legend. 25 years in the business and I've never seen this happen. You're talking with people in your team/project anyway in regular meetings, so there is no reason to drag that into the hallway. Talking biz to people from other projects/teams is mostly impossible - would take hours to explain a specific problem to get a meaningful contribution. Never goes beyond basic griping and commiseration.
If you think those meetings are essential for company success you REALLY should examine your process.
I feel like this isn't really true in the SF Bay Area, it's too expensive even for most software engineers. We're not all making L7 @ Meta money.
If your business success is predicated on random encounters, then your business success is just pure luck compensating for a lack of planning and communication.
If you actually plan and communicate well across teams & orgs then your business will work equally well in person or remote (or a hybrid).
I agree, but not with the hallways and kitchenettes part. Sorry, never have I ever seen anything productive done in a hallway.
But I wholeheartedly agree with the "spontaneous communication" part, but *in the office, at the desk*. There are many things that are much easier when you can just come to a desk of your colleague (someone on the team, or your manager, or your direct report) and discuss instantly, then maybe grab another person into this discussion, make a decision, etc. Yes, I see that happening all the time in the office. Just not in a kitchenette indeed.
Now, I agree that maybe not every team needs it. Consider the two extremes. One is when your daily work is mostly "executing tasks”. In this case, whatever is more *comfortable* is the best: for some it would be working from home, for some it may be working from the office. Or, on the other end, if the team is in the early stages of making some important decisions. In this case, I truly believe this team needs to be able to communicate spontaneously. If this team is Okay with Discord - fine. Or if this team prefers being in the same physical place - fine as well.
Bottom line: being in *the office* is *one of the ways* to create an environment for spontaneous communications, which works wonders for making a series of small decisions fast.
P.S. I currently work in a flexible hybrid environment: we just agree with colleagues when we go to the office, if we want to.
I can see why you would think that but might I offer another perspective: we are better off without cities being built as commuter hubs for suburbanities.
Cities in the US are often located in very valuable real estate, most of which is used suboptimally for office spaces, which are occupied only during certain time on weekdays. I would like this to change. American cities should build a TON more apartment towers and dense housing in city centers that no longer need so many office buildings. Let the young, the weird and the creatives live in the cities and make them great.
In fact, I am seriously happy about the reduction in traffic to/from suburbs. Every weekday, most American cities turn into traffic severs, mostly commuters getting in/out of the city. This is just madness! And no doubt makes our cities more polluted (air and noise) and less desirable to live/work in.
It has been certainly be nice distraction, and I definitely knew more people by name but I haven't noticed anything actually profitable for company happening there.
The things that did happen is that I could just catch the few people needed to push things forward, drag one to the other and clear the roadblocks but grabbing a quick call on the communication system of choice isn't that worse.
The brainstorming on problems was better when in person tho, but that might be the mix of tooling and platform company I work for chose (MS Teams, need I say more?)
> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
Yeah, the one remote work experience that has been my benchmark (in startup) had us meet every 2 weeks and just had half-party, half socialising, half-brainstorming thing. I feel like there is heavy underuse of tooling, back then our standard was voice only but screen sharing via ancient methods (screen session) that worked well, editors like IDEA also have very neat "editor sharing" feature that I rarely seen talked about
Pandemic changes in work has thrust into the open the challenges with remote. But you ignore it at your own peril or curl up to the familiar return-to-work ass-on-the-seat model and be left behind.
Btw, if you need good ideas, you schedule and organise a brainstorming session or create an idea board org wide. You encourage challenging assumptions and involve your team in decision making. All of this need to happen irrespective of whether your team is local or scattered. Might as well use modern technology when you can and support remote and local discussions.
Clearly you don’t live in the Bay Area. My commute was 2hrs each way. That’s 4hrs a day, just gone.
From the about 1 year i spend in the office about 10 years ago it was mostly annoying to have to "connect" (and the worst thing was force "team building", after 8h spend together in the office). Sometimes we had fun and laugh aut at the end of the day work is just work. everything beyond that is some weird, twisted invention by the HR and corporate mumbo-jumbo (especially part about "corporate culture") - remember, you don't own anything to the company, you are not a slave and corporation doesn't own you anything (which was shown by the recent lay-offs)..
I thought it sounded great. Spent most of my time out of the office for the first 3 weeks. Quickly felt the downsides and got back in the office for the remainder of my next 2 jobs. Networking alone was more valuable for my career personally than anything that we actually accomplished in the office by being there together.
I don't know that the company benefited, but I felt like I did.
At the larger company though (business telecom), it was a lot easier for them to secure the network by controlling all of the devices and endpoints in the office, including camera access and building access. Dealing with all those employees on remote devices over a VPN would have been a huge security headache IMO.
May be true in some small, limited segments of the States. The vast majority commute by car. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death. Very pleasant!
To be fair, most of this doesn't happen in the office either. I don't see any real mentorship going on in my 10 years at the company. Comany culture is a joke in my experience. Management doesn't really care about the culture as long as it facilitates getting work done and keeping people in line. Networking might be easier in person, at least for some people. I personally think networking is toxic since it effectively means that outgroups remain outsiders and potentially promotes cronyism.
And there's a major advantage to being able to operate that way since you don't have to be geolocated with your customer or your customer services folks and you don't need plane tickets and you can get it done with an hour or three virtually rather than having to take days out of your schedule to do an onsite.
Digital hallways exist in the form of private messages.
I guess more real-time digital communication such as video or call (video taking priority given that it contains additional sensory information) could come close, but none of these are 'memory-less' as physical interaction.
I wonder if I myself have blown through professional relationships in this way...I like to think that the cultures I'm in aren't so risk averse towards the first impressions they make.
I'm supposed to move whenever I change jobs?
When I hung around in person, we'd chat with them about totally random stuff. You can learn from that, but it's not nearly as business-centric as intentionally talking to people about work stuff.
I call bullshit.
This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality.
In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to ask. And guess what? In 2023, that happens over Slack.
At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate business units were all competing for the same tender, they were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3 separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender #tender_response_customer and #project_unicorn_tender not one single person was in more than one of those channels.
Now all this goes away if your company only uses public channels and has regular discourse in them. But unless the company was built remote first, I've never seen this in my 25 years of professional experience.
And all of this is without counting the fact that most enterprises use Teams not Slack, and Teams hides information from everyone.
Don't get me wrong, remote companies can work, and some people do not work well in offices. But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.
But I've been in your shoes too. (ok, not that smart, but I sat next to an ML guy for six months once troubleshooting his Kafka woes). I don't every intend to imply that there is one perfect answer for everyone.
But you are correct; however again in 25 years, the number of those years working for a company that had perfectly working leadership, management, communication and coordination is very very low.
While I agree, I could rephrase your argument as "remote work is very easy provided that you adjust your structures accordingly."
"Zwayhowder, the way you've phrased this sounds very angry, could we just tone it down a little" is comment in slides/reports that I receive often :D
I'm just passionate, I swear.
This sounds so horrible as to be unbelievable to me.
I've worked remote since I was 19 years old, managing remote teams and/or entire companies most of that time. I have advocated for remote work since before it was a thing, so I guess I'm a remote work Hipster.
That said, some of my largest accomplishments started out via a chance in-person encounter. I can't understand how anyone would see unrealized opportunity in any other way? It'd have been realized if so.
Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add up.
I understand this definitely depends on your role but I'm absolutely stunned that someone could have 25 years of experience in an office setting and never have had a serendipitous unscripted moment.
Developers rarely get to lunches with customers even before covid
Now, even when people are all in the office, very nearly 100% of the communications are done via chat programs (even to the person next to you) or email. For good reason, really. It minimizes the risk of interrupting someone deep in the flow.
There's often the hidden assumption that "solving technical problems" equals "creating value", but that's not always so. Lack of communication often leads to solving the wrong problems, solving more general/complex problems than needed, overengineering the solution over actual needs etc. To avoid this, it's a good practice to talk about stuff you work on and getting feedback from other people, including questions you yourself did not think of.
I deprioritized collaboration as a result and now I get much better results. It’s not an issue because I am happy to explain the trade off up-front to anyone who asks. My job title is “software engineer” and my job role is to ship code. If you want me to be a staff+ engineer, engineering manager, or PM, happy to chat about a role change, but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.
But once in a senior position, a person should start thinking "larger" than just their own code, especially if they want to further advance.
> but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.
For sure. I would say from Staff position upwards, the collaboration aspect might take a larger chunk than pure engineering.
All this is of course very organization specific.
I’d say you’ be taken the wrong lesson from your observations.
Big formal coordination rituals typically are simply round robin of 1:1 communication. Occasionally 1:3, but never ever 1:n when the speaker isn’t management.
The reason is simple. Tasks are often independent. In that case, there’s no one to coordinate with, beyond updating the person running the status board. Even when there is a take that needs coordination, that coordination is already happening, just not at that place.
Or in other words, people that get the most out of these rituals simultaneously overestimate the average degree of connections in the social network, and underestimate the amount of communication that happens outside of their immediate view. Call it a bias in a local a hub in a network.
That's an interesting way to say "office politics."
I personally enjoy it and generally work remote 2-3 days a week, but it’s awful for the organization. At this point I keep doing it as I expect there will be some incentives offered to come back.
On the productivity side, There’s way too much babysitting and people in certain roles doing errands. On the work relationship side, units with turnover struggle as new hires don’t get assimilated well.
In fact, a counter example: people regularly spawn random threads of conversation like the one you mention in Slack channels. A lot of times nothing comes of it, but some of these threads tag senior executives and managers within the company who have followed insights from threads into new cost improvement or even revenue generating ideas.
These conversations are unlikely to happen in passing hallway conversations and even if they did would likely not develop further than a couple remarks without forcing people to creating meetings to discuss topics that may or may not be important, which quickly gets overwhelming and makes people lose interest in further discussion. Having people sit around all day at an office in case such a conversation spontaneously happens is very inefficient when it can be done online in asynchronous fashion.
The central tenet of your argument is thus unraveled and the conclusion you must come to is that we don’t need offices. Accept it. Office workers aren’t here to serve as NPCs to fill your pretty little cities.
I love reading things like this, because it tickles my hypocritical funny bone.
Where is the evidence for this? Where is the hard data showing that these "hallway conversations" ultimately generate more sustainable long-term revenue for the company? Because at the end of the day, that's the only reason a company should ever mandate anything that employees don't want: because it either generates more revenue, or saves them money. If you can't prove that requiring employees to be in-office accomplishes this, then there's no reason to do so.
Regarding hypocrisy: I recall as an individual contributor all the times I've been required to justify -- with hard data -- things I wanted management to support because I believed it would increase developer happiness and comfort, and thus increase productivity (and reduce costs). It was always hard (or impossible) to do this, especially before the fact, so management would often turn me down. And yet, we have this completely unsupportable statement -- "everyone in-office creates better connections that leads to higher productivity" -- that management is all-in on enforcing.
I think the real reason for "return to office" initiatives is mundane and obvious: ego, power trips, and an unreasonable lack of trust.
> But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?
If you already have an office and expect everyone to be relatively close, you don't have to fly everyone anywhere. You just have "come to the office" days. Depending on the level of remoteness of your workers, that can be as often as once a week, or once a quarter.
> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day
False. You're not taking into account the myriad ways people choose and need to live. I wouldn't do the SF<->south bay commute ever again (used to do that 10+ years ago daily). Are you telling me I'm required to move to take a job that's a 60-minute drive away? That's ridiculous.
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.
Ah, I see. So basically you see "people are leaving cities in droves" and think the solution is "make people come to the office". Another unsupportable statement, and also unreasonable to ask of people. I live in a city, have no intention of leaving, and value the fact that I work from home, even though any job I'd take would also be in the city. I hate sprawl and would never go back to living in a suburb.
Maybe some people don't want to live in cities, though. Your "solution" to this problem is to require people do that (through completely unrelated employment considerations), just to keep cities healthy? How selfish!
It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure.
Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person, so we have periodic “off-site” retreats for a day or two, or we meet at a conference. But most of work is just grinding. That works perfectly well from a home office.
Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.
I find it very strange that being in a room with someone is somehow different than being on a video call.
You can see the peoples' faces...what are you going to do in person? Touch peoples' naughty bits? Fart so everyone can enjoy? I don't get it. You are there to exchange ideas. Being face-to-face in person allows you to see the person's face and non-verbals. But you get that in a video conference.
I don't understand.
Be patient, kind, and spend an extra minute writing a more detailed email that is helpful to your colleagues. If you're a manager, give them the right tools and empower them.
But this is completely orthogonal to whether the work is in an office or remote.
If people are bad at writing, they can get better at it, like any other skill. I have a bad memory for voice/video conversations, so my preference is to always have a written email to go back to for reference.
But I'll still attempt to do what my other team members are comfortable with.
Some key components for me are:
- don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully some useful ideas might come up - Bring in relevant people, that actually get work done. The less managers the better. - Don't be afraid of being negative. The whole point is to complain about shit and see communalities in problems, and perhaps come up with potential solutions.
Especially questionable in an open-plan office, everyone is trying just to concentrate and are wearing headphones.
It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things.
Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”.
Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.
I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this.
Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year?
It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
This is fantasy.
It's not interesting to discuss outliers. Millions are being made playing this talent/wage arbitrage as we speak. The top 1% of engineers is not interesting to discuss, and certainly is not representative of the average FAANG employee (or salary).
Edit: Direct personal experience during my entire working career. Are there bubbles of super-talent completely out of my reach for such a pleb? Absolutely. But those folks are not interesting to the vast majority of companies needing basic but competent IT talent. Many folks here seem to be under the impression they are in that pool. Time will tell.
I'm not saying there aren't some talented developers working for cheap, but most of the time you get what you pay for.
The problem with “off shoring” is that’s how it is treated.
Remote work, where people become part of your team and work with everyone else is quite different and avoids the failure cases you have likely seen.
It’s hardly controversial to say that a huge chunk of Silicon Valley talent is from migrants. So clearly the training overseas is up to scratch.
Thank you. I believe this is the point everyone is missing.
And this is new. Giant companies never did this sort of thing really. It was always the low effort outsourcing approaches I was seeing in these markets.
Today I'm now competing with IBM and the ilk in these markets for direct employees. The tides are shifting extremely rapidly and I don't think many in the US even understand what has happened underneath them in the past few years.
LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here at play. It is a complex and competitive market.
I'm sure all the latin american developers are super hyped about this advice not to hire them.
It’s meant as a counter ti the idea of hiring them just because they’re “cheaper”
You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?
Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
You might laugh, but for some being a builder of a place that treats people well while also being financially successful is important. In any event, it’s a interesting challenge that it seems few care to undertake.
Like I said in a sibling post, the best we can do is: first, don't give our talent or time to these people. Second, start our own companies built on treating human beings with respect.
To give you an idea, Google Warsaw pays just a touch above 100k to local senior engineers.
What data do you have to back this up? Top 1% engineers who have all the options? sure.
80% engineers? You will be paying double local market rates already and you will find you can trivially out-talent for the same budget.
Will this change over time? Sure. But reality on the ground is you can hire someone of equivalent talent for half the cost in Europe/LATAM/etc. vs. the US a the moment. In quantity.
The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for.
My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company."
It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.
You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior dev in the Philly region is generous.
That's really just a veneer for "transactional and performance based"
Whenever I hear a company say that they are like a family, I run. In a family, you don't lay off family members. As a matter-of-fact, if it is a family run business, and there's a business downturn, they will lay off all workers and leave their actual family members working.
In reality, saying it is "family" is just a machiavellian ploy to pretend a business actually cares about the employees, in order to make them loyal to the company, without the loyalty going the other way. I've read so many stories about how owners were always talking about the company being "family" but when push came to shove, they shoved the employee out the door. But like so many companies, all the ones that are shedding employees, they never seem to fire the C-suite, somehow.
As far as culture goes, all companies want to create a culture that is maximal efficiency for the company. That's all the culture is in a corporate world. It's transactional. No company is going to have a culture of 5 hour picnic lunches every day, followed by an hour foot massage for everyone so that only 2 hours of work get done a day. That would be silly. ALL business cultures exist to maximize shareholder investments. To the extent that cultures are different is just a different way of trying to maximize employee output. Nothing is wrong with it, but it actually is transactional. To the extent people talk about "culture" that is really just trying to polish the turd.
I agree with everythinig else you wrote.
The more we collectively push for remote work, the more likely it becomes that our compensation takes a huge nosedive. Engineers in Brazil or El Salvador will LOVE working at even 30% of total FAANG comp (while enjoying fewer worker's rights and fewer benefits), and they are by and large technically competent.
This whole thread has a very "I got mine" vibe to it.
> ...you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things... There are great engineers in Latam
> ...globally average Bay Area engineer
There are two sides to the kind of broad strokes generalizing you are doing.
It has been my experience, and the experience of everyone else that I know, that the Ivy League US-SF-NY people we work with are far and wide smarter, more productive, nicer, and way fewer problems, fewer emotional problems especially, than others in engineering and management.
Go ahead and run a LATAM team. Nobody really cares. It will not turn out to be the management superpower / huge insight you are making it out to be.
Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work. My email is in my About if you have the time!
Plenty C level people know this is the eventual outcome. They just also know that the runway is likely to extend beyond their working career because they control most business decisions for the foreseeable future.
They still operate on a relationship basis with ownership/capital while managing the company on a Netflix performance model for everyone else. Those relationships are likely to stay in place until both sides age out of the industry.
I've worked with a number of C level folks hired into companies from low cost regions and they have all been utterly stellar. This is coming, just not for the current generation of senior execs.
For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
1) I don’t care about per-dev productivity. Might well be some teams are more productive fully remote, looking at some numbers I suspect they are. But our biggest problem is not “cranking out lines of code faster” - it’s making sure we are doing the right projects, not wasting time on the wrong things; and dealing well with all the cross-team dependencies. I’m quite consciously making the trade off that I think devs will be more frequently interrupted and get less work done … in return for which they will be much better informed about what the company is doing and we can focus our efforts more effectively.
2) because this development organization works and I want to keep it functional. This is a public company, we have analysts looking over our shoulders and constantly querying our strategy. We have potentially hostile acquisitions always around the corner. If I am running a fully remote organization then I can’t justify a physical office space in the EU and there’s a very clear route to cost-reduction which is “push all the work out to low CoL countries” And honestly it won’t matter whether that is actually feasible or not, the logic looks too compelling and there’s a risk it would be forced on me, which would be a massive headache because I know it won’t work well. On the other hand, if as a dev organization we are mostly back in the office, it is much easier for me to make the argument that offshoring wouldn’t work.
1. I don't know how my employees are doing; many times in my career I've had to tell programmers to "go for a walk" or "time to go home" when they get stuck on a frustrating task or fall in to a flow state far past leaving time. Solutions I've found to this put onus on the employee or create more restrictions that hinder in other areas
2. Brainstorming whiteboard sessions are harder; the issue with remote meetings is that you need each person to finish speaking before the next person can start, which IMO slows down collaboration. Also I still haven't found a great tool to replace the whiteboard, Miro / Figma (Figjam) come close but also are slower at spinning up a flow diagram or sequence diagram or describing a stack.
3. Juniors / Grads need handholding; I've written frameworks to train newer developers in a remote setting but the remote divide creates an invisible barrier between the seniors and juniors for base support. I used to purposefully sit them next to eachother to enable the quick "do I use this or that?" questions or, better, have the senior look over and spontaneously create a learning opportunity related to whatever the junior is doing.
I guess the themes here are speed and spontaneity
(I haven't had my coffee yet so I hope above made sense)
For #3 I just recommend pair programming. Pairing is already a skill that needs to be learned and remote pairing is a more difficult one. But the tools for it are better than they were a few years ago and are good enough, and it's an excellent venue for naturally exchanging a lot of that sideways knowledge and mindset that makes more experienced engineers so effective.
But I agree with #3. The problem is getting the seniors to RTO just for this express reason. Though having an always-on call for that day would help with adhoc questions from juniors.
Completely agree, it's also about building that open and honest culture to enable having that kind of conversation with the entire team. But even with this it still doesn't catch many day-to-day frustrations or things you may pick up on that the person wouldn't offer up regardless.
> having an always-on call
The problem with this is you put the onus on the Junior to ask the question, which is hard for someone who's still learning (especially with imposter syndrome being so rife). Also this doesn't allow for the Senior to spontaneously create learning opportunities relevant to whatever they're currently doing, the barrier cuts down a lot of it.
Also sometimes people need a sequence break to realise it's home time
“Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4
They’re pretty removed from the way you work as a non-executive and don’t really care that you can accomplish your job just as easily remotely. In their mind, it’s not best for the company.
They’ve also lived the mandatory WFH days and the whole decision making processes slowed down or they just put a lot of things on hold because it couldn’t fully or appropriately be decided without difficult meeting logistics. These are things you’re unlikely to be aware of as a non-executive.
Managers schedule VS makers schedule.
Add to that exec level are usually already rich enough that they don’t have commute or schooling problems to deal with. So they just can’t understand why RTO isn’t popular!
Did anyone say it was?
> I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement...
What does "it" refer to in that sentence, if not the immediately preceding "abusing WFH?"
The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.
That's a load of context that wasn't clear from your original comment. The jargon "refinement" is not used where I work.
> The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.
That you then need to backfill assumed context is not going to be solved by returning to office. That it's now been clarified in text, in a work situation, could be turned into a resource to be referenced in a future conversation. In the office, the explanation would be ephemeral, and may need frequent repetition until somebody overcomes the hurdle of committing it to text.
This is why return to office is an attractive option. People are definitely not bringing veggies to chop or laundry to fold to a conference room. And most of them are going to pay attention to a person in their presence talking to them because of basic social niceties. It solves the problem with much less hassle than actually having to identify and cull people who can't handle WFH.
That seems odd to me. I can give my full attention to something I am reading, or to listening to what a person is saying in the meeting, but not both at the same time. If I start looking up documentation, I'm going to miss what is being said.
Can... can most people split their attention this way? Am I weird?
I can do a completely mindless manual task while listening to someone speaking (though I struggle to do something manual while reading) - but this doesn't seem to be what is expected here.
Your refinements work a little different than mine. In mine, the SME or the person who opened the issue (often the same person) reads the story, gives any extra context, answers questions, etc., we assign a point value, and move on. Refinement can be a discussion -- it doesn't always have to be a research session.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The fact that having a standard of "pay attention in meetings & don't be a ghost" gets you labelled an "irrational micromanaging bully" is exactly why management pushes for a return to office. It's just way less of a hassle for them than having these sorts of battles.
> evaluations of people without knowing their story.
Pot meet kettle
If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.
And "results are there" is just hand waving away the problem. Nobody can measure developer results in any sort of systematic fashion. If you've got a way then by all means share with the world.
Time does matter because the agreement between companies and workers is money for time/effort. I'm not giving back salary if my project flops and they're not giving me (much) more money if it makes the company millions.
If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.
Over at Google, there’s an internal study that shows raw code checkins have dropped dramatically since WFH. I’m pretty sure Sundar’s 20% more productivity comment came directly from the numbers in those slides.
It does not surprise me that Zuckerberg and Benioff have gone the length of calling out their employees’ productivity directly. I’m really surprised this comment is this far down, when it’s been painfully obvious at the couple companies I’ve worked at through the pandemic that productivity is the elephant in the room. Some CEOs dress it in corpspeak about collaboration, but if Google, Meta, and Salesforce are all complaining of worker productivity, I think that’s the true reason. I think we’re too afraid to take an honest look at how productive we are, which will ultimately be the demise of WFH we want to defend so badly.
This person also routinely ignores/mutes as many meetings as possible and frequently multi-tasks in the gym, house chores, etc. Had that person been in the office they'd have had their time wasted on useless all-hands meetings, etc., so now everybody's happy (because that person hasn't had to quit, because life's too short).
Working based on hours doesn't work remote. It should be based on deliverables.
I'm not sure if people are even doing that. And really if you tack on a couple hours of pointless meetings we're pretty close to 40 hours a week. They're within spitting distance of an expected work week and if they're responsive and hitting targets then who cares. I'm talking about people I think work more like 3-4 hours a week.
In a rare occasion I get a desk anywhere near a coworker when we are in the office, I also find it hard to know how much they are working.
The physical presence in the same city, building, or even sat right next to each other, goes not give me any information.
1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool team to coordinate their work without a project manager, design, or business analyst if they are in close phyiscal proximity. The struggle is when you distance that team from larger products/project. Even in the minimal case creating visibility for that small team into larger workstreams requires overhead itself. With the macro environment and with leaders being forced to tighten the belt, this is less and less possible. All communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure requires management.
2. I've found about 20% of people have the ability to maintain a professional work environment at home. I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours. I'm all for flexibility, but it becomes a distraction.
3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.
Do you really think it's good, and that people should be separated from their children for 8-10 hours (or more if commuting) each day? I don't.
Also, since you don't want your employees to get distracted by childcare, does your office offer daycare for their children?
Edit: And yes, they daycare question is also met with awkward silence from the management on each all-hands I've heard it asked before.
IMHO most “perks” are just someone else spending your money for you.
I also think that the least that your employer could do is facilitate a place for your child to stay close by and be taken care of, so you can be able to spend your breaks/commute with them, take immediate action if they get sick/hurt, etc.
Why the employer? Because good luck organizing with your co-workers to rent a place suitable for daycare in/close to your office building and hiring personnel to staff it. I wonder what salary should they offer me to make this more feasible than sending a CV to a remote-first company instead...
How often were they mentored by senior engineers? Daily meetings? Weekly? Who developed the training program? Who wrote the documentation?
As opposed to work from office where management does not required because... Managers already present in the office?
2. Erm. From my exp 20% of people have to learn to how to maintain a professional work environment at home. Thats just a skill, nothing more.
3. Agree.
If you think that's bad, you should've seen what they did at the office during work hours for their kids when they were required to leave the house.
And sometimes we have a leadership meeting where I fly into the corporate HQ, as do my coworkers, and we have an all day in-person meeting with no one remote. And it's amazing how much we can get done in a day.
Sometimes it's just a lot easier to discuss a contentious subject where we don't all agree in person, and see body language, and not have to deal with the weird gaps that happen with online meetings.
That being said, I won't ever return to the office full time. The boosts in productivity only happen because it's not a regular occurrence, and it's a huge hassle to get there and back.
But I do see the upside to occasional work in the office.
Also, I used to work at a company that had no remote employees, so we were all in the office every day. That was nice, because if you needed to talk to someone you could just wander over and hash out an issue right then and there, and you could have meaningful hallway conversations, and we were just generally closer as humans. But that only works if you have no remote employees, and I'm not sure that's feasible anymore, at least in software. People got too used to remote work. But if I ever found a company like that where everyone came in every day, and it was close to my home, I'd be willing to do it.
I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.
All the while not forgetting that people contributing to free software have altogether different motivations: they are (almost) all in it because they want to contribute their own time to something they believe in.
Quite different from what majority of people in any company are there for.
> Just be a professional
In my experience, there are many people that find this an incredible challenge. This is where it can easily fall apart.
I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote.
One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all.
So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts.
Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to.
Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary.
This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).
Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty years and only met the sales people in the period before it was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales was something that happened only rarely and always deliberately.
Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?
For background, at least half, or more of the company is fully remote. It’s so many, that the transition to remote work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a year. It was called “All Hands”.
I enjoyed the free trips to Whistler, Berlin, and Austin, and Maui, but it never really felt like work was actually getting done. It was conference room chats ostensibly about planning, but everything always felt a bit phoned in.
I never got it. Inevitably the real planning work would end up after we returned back to our regular locations, so it was more social than anything.
My personal thought is that RTO among the FAANGs is 100% sunk cost fallacy. They wasted billions on bespoke glass donuts, circus tents, and airplane hangers. There’s pride on the minds of these oligarchs.
Companies can make this more appealing by holding the meetings in nice parts of the world -- note, nice doesn't have to be outrageously expensive -- putting people up in nice hotels with suitable space for spouses and kids, and by making the week before vacation for half the group and the week after for the other half, with the option to stay in the same hotel at the company's expense.
This won't work for everyone, or every company, but it's a much nicer carrot than usual.
But if work wants me to travel for a week, it either means my spouse has to pick up all the stuff I do at home, or I have to find someone I trust to stay at my home for a week on an ad-hoc basis.
It's much harder to find ad-hoc babysitting than regularly scheduled babysitting.
I believe parent is suggesting quarterly gatherings of the existing office team, the ones who share an office now.
Our team doesn't, are we anomalies? People need to be mature, reasonable, responsible and accountable to work together well.
There are many people who have never developed social connections outside of school or work and unilaterally decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if they can’t socialize outside of such an environment surely no one else can. If they can’t see a person as a person if they’re not face to face surely no one else can.
It’s unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.
What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.
This isn't self-evident to me at all.
Do you know how much time people spend on other tabs while in zoom meetings?
In terms of meetings, I've only rarely seen a meeting that couldn't have accomplished the same goals in 1/10 the time if it done without being a meeting. Whether in-person or zoom. The information density is far too low, too much time is taken up with things that aren't moving toward the goal, etc.
One size very much does not fit all, and that’s the entire point that those who prefer remote work are trying to drive home.
The inability to support remote work signals the employer cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is managing from emotion instead of data.
(have worked remote for 10+ years)
I also believe that people are more motivated and engaged, and work harder and with more focus in a shared workspace outside of the home.
I was on the fence going into the remote work experiment, but everything I’ve seen since supports my feelings above. I’ve seen less of the good stuff and a lot more slacking off.
I think the level of flexibility we had before was about right for knowledge work. I could always get a day or two from home when I wanted some solo focus. I could always shift working hours to fit around life, or take a few hours out of the office for a personal errand. That was enough flexibility for me even though office was the focal point. I don’t think being asked to go back to the office with that kind of dynamic is overbearing or in any way unreasonable.
Honestly I’m beginning to find “we need to be in person to collaborate” to be a red flag for unable to communicate and “will interrupt people working all day”
the culture at the company you co-founded and i worked for would have absolutely 1000% not existed if we were 100% remote.
we did amazing things, and i believe a lot of it was due to us being able to work together in person.
But we working together, just remotely. Could you explain please, for us with "serious mental block" why do you feel that you need to be near me physically to do any work?
I just curious to hear your reasoning.
Like maybe I go afk 30-45 mins here or there when I normally wouldn't in office. But for me, I put in more hours overall. A key to this was learning to not have my personal laptop open to the side, and avoiding distractions like social media and idle browsing.
YMMV of course, I think it can really depend on the person and their life situation. But the same could be said of anyone remote or not when it comes to productivity. It's on the managers to measure if things are getting done or not, which is the most important thing.
Common counter argument to this is that the manager sucks because he/she can't measure the work otherwise. But from managers perspective it is much easier to force people to be on-site than fix his/her own problems.
They also mentioned avoiding other distractions: That's the main feature of remote for me, after many years of wearing headphones all day in various offices.
Because if they're not, they miss deadlines.
Of course, employers want both butt-in-chair metrics and 24/7 availability without increasing pay. Don't give them that.
What do you have to back up your belief? I work from 8-6 on most days +/- 30 minutes. Lunch is a walk downstairs, grab something and eat it at my desk. That's pretty typical of the group of engineers I've been working with remotely on/off for the past 15 years. I don't think we're exceptional in this regard.
Plenty of people with one job don't perform and get cut. I've worked with people in the past who I knew had multiple FT jobs, or a FT job and a very demanding contracting schedule, or whatever, and had no trouble doing their work in a reasonable timeframe.
This whole idea that it's wrong or bad to have two FT jobs just smells like some middle manager feeling like they "own" their employees. I'm glad to see the culture has shifted somewhat and people are starting to see how ridiculous that mindset is.
From my experience and observations I've gathered from my teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to wait until Monday.
…if you’ve built an average organisation filled with people who are demotivated by bad management who have no autonomy and struggle to drag themselves through the day, then remote work will shred what little value you’ve managed to extract from a dysfunctional organisation.
Remote work isn’t the problem, the problem is further upstream: if you work for a company that is restricting remote work, whether you love to work remote or in office, it’s a sign to leave.
I love working in an office and do so every day, and consider in-office collaboration to be very valuable, however, autonomy is far more valuable.
So, from a managers perspective: if your organisation is struggling with maintaining output while permitting remote work, you can either radically rethink your entire organisation and engage in a multi-year project to undo years of mismanagement… or you can just ban remote work. Of course, the latter is just kicking the can down the road, but kicking the can down the road is usually the only real option without buy in from the board.
The company caved because they depended on city approval for some licenses.
The person who told me this was an analyst tasked with cherry picking data to justify the decision that had already been made on political grounds.
(This was after a few drinks and has not been independently verified)
Believe it or not, many, many people are not good at that or don't fit that mold. Yet they can still be productive. They just require more supervision and the ability to express themselves in a manner that suits them.
If remote work suits you, and doesn't suit your management or your management's culture, don't try to change your whole company. It won't work. Instead, search for a company that is a better fit for you.
This right here. One of the failings of remote work being talked about in the comments here is, IMO, easily attributable to the company's focus on spoken (whether in-person or via Zoom) communication rather than written.
I have a strong preference for written communication with regards to work, whereas most of the companies I've worked for have preferred spoken. My preference isn't superficial, it's based on what appear to be obvious advantages -- past communication can be referred to again later, planning and documentation kind of organically occur via written communication, complex ideas can be given more time to be developed in an email vs off the cuff/probably worse explanations when spoken. The few times I can get people to actually just read the long email I just wrote, outlining a whole plan and my justifications for certain decisions, everything is super smooth.
But most of the time, peoples' eyes glaze over and they go "wow this seems like a lot, let's plan a Zoom meeting to discuss." The meeting happens somewhere within 1 - 10 days, usually being pushed at least once, I explain everything I wrote (often times just reading straight from the email), but then at a certain point peoples' eyes glaze over once again and they say "sounds like we're really getting into the weeds here, do you mind typing this up into an email that I can read later?" I then proceed to scream into the void.
Rinse and repeat, and after literal weeks, finally the contents of a perfectly cogent email that could have been read and understood in ~10 - 15 minutes have finally sunk in. It is absolutely maddening.
A strong culture of written communication is now one of the single most important things I look for in a company. I'm not against spoken communication, far from it -- having actual in-person or at least Zoom time is nice, and for brainstorming or discussing a plan, written communication isn't as good (though I've had quite a few great Slack brainstorming sessions). I'm not a shut-in, very sociable, and I enjoy a nice balance of remote and in-person work. But for work, which is by definition something for which I strive to minimize time spent/sanity lost and maximize income received, written communication is far and away my preferred method.
Basically think of it was having your worldview warped by r/fuckcars
The overhead of having such meetings is next to nothing in remote compared to the office. No one has to get up to go to a meeting or book a meeting room.
Did you just have a eureka moment 5 minutes after a meeting ended? No problem! Ping the group chat and get on a call in less than 15 seconds while the idea is still hot in memory.
Oh you want to pick up where you last left off? No problem, upload last meetings Excalidraw file and start editing.
IME, it's usually 30/60 minutes during which the Architect listens to himself, draws some nice boxes and arrows, overlooks all the edge cases and nuances and then everyone goes back to their open space desk. And the next day you realize that the solution doesn't work and you start a Jira comment thread.
Source: worked in various CS labs for a few years
I hear this often, and it makes sense, but I am not sure how frequently do people solve problems with whiteboarding? Is it such a frequent problem that we need to be in the office every day?
The team day is mostly consumed with in-person meetings with others on your team, so no individual work gets done that day. The other in-office days are either spent heads down with headphones trying to focus or trying to book one of the limited conference rooms to have a zoom meeting with coworkers that are working from home or in a remote office. It's hard to book meetings before 10am or after 4pm because someone's usually commuting during that time.
Companies should either pick full remote or full back in the office, Hybrid doesn't seem to work well.
If a team were to adopt a common set of three days by consensus things might be better? Perhaps some teams have already done this?
Good luck with it
That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.
I mean, if you think about it, it may be crazy for companies to insist on RTO because of costs of all that overhead they're saving, except for the simple fact that you get what you pay for. There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen.
I've been waiting for the penny to drop for some time now. Since COVID-19 locked everyone at home with a consumer-grade ISP, I've had plenty of time to read my TOS and service agreements. And you'd be hard-pressed to find such an ISP that actually permits "commercial activity" or WFH to occur on their connections, which are intended for gaming and entertainment. In case you haven't noticed, consumer ISPs don't really care when your connection goes down. The SLA is 0 CBR, best-effort delivery. So, enjoy your WFH infrastructure, but you get what you pay for.
My Site B is the public library, where I've been assured that I can conduct my WFH activities on their network, even in a private study room. That's the best I've got for now. If you're RTO--count your blessings. I have no office to return to!
By saving on office costs you can just offer those benefits to your remote employees. You can hire someone to clean a residential bathroom too!
Such as?
Here are some reasons I could imagine in-person work may be advantageous:
-I think there is probably an increase in camaraderie when people can interact with each other in-person.
-Spontaneous unstructured collaboration and innovation absolutely increases in-person. We rarely have informal asides after a Teams meeting, but it happens a lot after in-person meetings.
-Hiring new inexperienced people who are from out-of-town and having them start 100% remote is generally a bad experience and they pick things more slowly.
-People that working from home abuse it and multitask by running errands, watching their kids, etc. This is great for employees and I would guess that it is a large part of the reason that many employees are loathe to go back to work 100% of the time. Productivity can be difficult to track.
-The NASA network is very reliable and under our complete control. Remote work depends on each person's home internet connection/router/wifi and it's MUCH slower and less reliable. I often deal with large quantities of data and and the only way to work with it is locally on the same network it's produced on. Sure I can remote in, but then we're back to depending on public internet infrastructure. Sometimes things break so I guess I can't work on that today.
A related thought: -If large percentage of the workforce depends on the complex public internet infrastructure to perform work, that creates a possible weak point in their operations that could be affected by adversaries or maybe a natural disaster or something. I get that many people here do work that would cease to have any purpose if the internet disappeared so there's less disadvantage to remote work. But most industries use the internet for convenience, it isn't fundamental to their existence and everything they do could be done without it.
As for adversaries or natural disasters, internet rarely works without electricity. In the small scale, my guess would be internet barely increases the weak spot that is already present via electricity. In the large scale, it doesn't matter if someone is in the office or an hour away.
Of course I also enjoy some of the flexibility of WFH.
a) they are thinking that you are slacking off when you are working remotely. This might be true or not.
b) they are unable to quantify your work and decide if you are successful or not, which is an indication of unfit management. By forcing you to go the office, they can justify their own existence, claiming they are managing "their" people.
In my 25+ years working at US companies, I encounter the latter case with managers, who came straight out of the army, doing noting but but barking orders at their subordinates all day long. They were under the impression that corporate America was managed the same way. I personally put a couple of them in their places, in those days.
CEO of the company I worked for, straight out of college, one day, gathered up all 120 or so of us, new hires straight from the school and and gave a speech. One thing he said still sits with me: Good managers want to work with people who are smarter than themselves. Others want to work with mediocre or worse people, because they do not want their decisions to be questioned by their subordinates.
The people who want you back in the office are not good managers. They are "the others"
Before 2020, I also had video attendees in almost every meeting, but they were either at another office site where they still had a peer group and some co-located team members, or had a long tenure at the company and had been "allowed" to work remotely.
In my opinion these previous remote-attendee situations are totally different dynamics from running a fully remote team. There is a special, major challenge in managing a team where many team members have never met one another, a coworker of any kind, or their management in person. It's a surmountable challenge and I think some of this can be explained by the cynical "employers would rather let remote employees go than learn something new" take, but working in and managing a remote team is still a unique experience IMO.
I consider the dynamic you described, of local teams in separated locations that have to work as one, actually to be a major antipattern. The communication doesn't flow as well between locations as it does inside each location. It's much better to shape the teams to the geographic organization.
From my point of view, engineers who depend on others to get their work done like to be in the office. Because it makes it look like they are collaborating and getting work done.
From a manager point of view, this looks like collaboration as well. And would benefit the project. This is why they want people in the office.
I disagree with it. There are engineers who like to manipulate other people and it is far less likely to happen in a remote environment.
Just my observation, not 100% facts in all cases.
"We have set unrealistic expectations and those aren't met. So we conclude that employees are slacking. Thus we want you back"
Or
"We pick lower-tier employees who won't work until they are forced to."
In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks.
But in my opinion, managers who don't know what their employees do via remote. They know even less what happens in the office. But sure every one looks busy when the boss is walking the floor... :D maybe that gives them a good feeling.
I personally prefer a mixed week, like 2 days in the office and 3 days remote. But I would say the remote days are more productive in a sense of getting stuff done.
The script is something like this:
Person1: Arg! This thing!
Person2: What ya working on?
Person1: <...> is giving me trouble.
Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out on this interaction.
Also, WFH is also just too distracting if you have a family/roommates etc...
I'm sure there are plenty of jobs where regular, informal face to fact interaction didn't help me solve problems faster, but not in my line of work.
I have some interaction with Federal employees too. They have been out of the office for a long time. You now have more a problem getting a hold of someone who is nominally 'at their desk'. I don't know why this is, but its a fact.
Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems. People often end up working on wrong things.
Personally I won't be investing in remote-only companies, unless it is somehow extremely stellar project.
The must have pretty bad managers then. Why should there be a trust issue? My manager assigns me a task, I do it on time and they are happy or I fail to do it on time and they are unhappy. How does where I do that task make a difference?
I think the return to office thing is just a cover for incompetent management.
That probably doesn't really fix the problem, the incompetent manager is probably still incompetent just in a smaller sphere of operations.
It is true you can get some organic team-building and spontaneous collaboration but the cost of that is so high, it's no justification. Not having to commute, being able to live in a lower cost area, having flexibility to run errands, etc are of such monumental value to people.
But the real lesson here I think a lot of people are learning to their surprise is that tech companies are really no different to any other companies.. Moves like forcing you into the office and all the entails (commuting, face time, regular hours, no real breaks, unpaid overtime) has the same motivation as layoffs for the "recession": to suppress labor costs.
15 years ago we had collusion by Apple, Google and otehrs to suppress wages through collusion not to "poach". Now? Other companies laying off 5-10% of staff gives every other company the freedom to do the same. It's all the same: to suppress labor.
So forcing you into the office is both about control and increasing organic attrition. Some people have made new lives in the last 2 years and can't just come back to the office. A certain paercentage of those will quit. Great. No severance.
Many tech workers with so many good years and high-demand for our services have fallen into the trap of thinking they're somehow above the adversarial (exploitative) pressures other people are subject to. Fancy offices, Herman Miller chairs and "free" food play into this delusion.
* There's significant rise in burnout rate and LOTS of people looking for professional help with psychological issues. Many times more than in previous years. Some returned to the office and got significantly better, because they simply lacked human interaction (both their and surrounding opinion).
* There's group that prefers to work from the office for various reasons (people, work/life separation, small/noisy home).
* Both groups make significant part of our teams. Due to that some additional people decide to join as they feel they are missing out on part of the discussion and team interaction. This tends to snowball.
* Then there's elephant in the room: I know some people (personally, but outside of my org), who will hire at a few places (three or more) and bluntly lie about being full-time dedicated to each of them. They'll actively delay work giving false reasons, to maintain that illusion. Some employers will react by implementing group responsibility, when they find out.
Disclaimer (I had that discussion before): if you have steel-strong psyche, prefer people from outside work, have great communication skills, can sleep 2h a day and work 16h or have negotiated terms of employment that allow to be hired at a few places - good for you. This comment is mere observation, not attack on your life choices.
This I think is more indicative of society, and I think is something that is a gap in society / business opportunity. WeWork, which was poorly run, I think really has a foot into this, but not to the full extent. In urban design there is this idea of a third place, somewhere that is not work or home that people interact. These places have massively declined in the west, especially in the united states. People used to have many many third places. People had work, and home, but then they would also have church that they attended weekly or more, they would have union halls, taverns, social organizations (masons, elks, knights of columbus, vfw, etc). A lot of bars and restaurants are a lot louder and more consumer focused than they used to be I think as well which has hurt.
Public Libraries are another place that could step up, try and get more people to work from there and socialize, but most libraries have pretty bad hours and are undefunded or have strict silence requirements. But I can see a need for some kind location, that is open a lot, 7am-10pm or something, that you pay a membership fee for. That you can go anytime, and drink cheap coffee or beer and work / socialize in them.
My sense is that leadership making these decisions simply isn't really tuned into how engineering operates. And that's mostly it; they're focused on the business, and probably are dialed into the sales pipeline. And that probably leads to tons of questions and one-off-style clarification sessions where video chats and Slack just aren't great, to be frank.
At the same time, I do think there are significant tradeoffs between a remote team and a "shared meatspace" team. With remote teams, cross-team relationship building is really challenging, and I've noticed that there's a natural tendency to focus purely on your team. With all teams in a same physical location, it's easier to actually just pop by and clarify complex details. But, I did work at a place that got hundreds of engineers together about 3x a year, and that seemed to be enough to build significant bridges across the org.
Ultimately though, in my experience, these kinds of decisions are just because upper management is more aligned with sales organizations than engineering.
From my company's discussions, my take is that it's hard for the C suite to feel connected to employees without face to face time. Why? Probably the very basic issue of 1 on 500 or 1 on 5000 communication, which is hard in person and even more so online. I don't mean 1 on 500/5000 presenting, I mean the exchange of ideas and gaining understanding of the people that work for you. If you're a front line manager or sufficiently senior on the IC track then you likely had to learn new techniques to communicate in 1 on 10 and 1 on 20 engagements. It's harder to scale that to 1 to 500 or so.
If you hold the power of sword and purse, then it's "easier" to mandate that people work from a location you can easily travel to.
Many people do not need social connections and interactions to be productive and happy. I find that most of the people who want WFH or be entirely remote fall into this group.
Many people so need social connections and interactions to be productive. They find value in dealing with people 1:1. Its how they socialize in-part, how they make friends, and provides variety in their day. They may like to WFH on occasion, but the office interaction is integral.
So... it is (IMHO) mostly the first group that we hear from in these discussions. I would argue that OP is in the group. That second group is often ignored when these questions are framed in such an abolitionists manner ('this works better for me so it must work better for everyone').
Its not just 'employers' making arbitrary decisions. It is not a simple question to answer and a whole host of other factors come into play (company culture, company size, history of remote work, location of teams/people, timezones, and so on).
(Minor note: I find myself in the first group but I appreciate that there are many sides to this)
So far Twitter has been a good example. Now for workers, it's important to go back for other reasons. Remote workers reduce your power negotiating as an employee and it's a much larger pool to even get hired. Being able to be in person becomes an emoloyment advantage at that point.
1. It is very hard to steer a giant organization and get everyone on the same page under ideal circumstances. Work from home makes that even harder because people aren’t as tuned into what is happening beyond their job. If the business needs to pivot it takes longer.
2. Most senior leaders spend 6-10 hours a day in meetings. It really sucks when they have one or two people on Zoom and everyone else is around a conference room. Wait, your mic is muted, Ted. Oh, no it is the conference room speaker is off or something, I don’t know…20 minutes later someone fixes it, but it wasted 20 minutes that all those people don’t have in their day.
3. Usually senior leader, C-suite folks, got to where they are at, in part, because of how good they are in the in-person meeting / 1:1 in-person. It is their super power. You take that away and they feel less effective.
It is not good or bad, effective or ineffective, nor it is the case for all employers.
Here is my take: the preferred style of work (office, remote, hybrid, flexible) needs to be shared between the team members. Not unlike people's values. If the vast majority of people on the team share it - you are golden. If everyone has their own - you have got yourself a problem. By all means, please, ask it on the interview! (Goes both ways, for the employees and for the employers.)
Now, I understand that right now there are probably more pro-office employers than people willing to accept it. Whether it is true or not (do we have some reliable statistics on this? are we a vocal minority instead?), I think only time will create an equilibrium (new generation of middle managers, etc.)
My experience since 2020 has pushed me against working from home, in particular research seminars are far worse online. The quality of questions is much worse, and engagement is visibly worse than when we have them in person.
As for research... a lot of research ideas come from corridor chat. If you have an idea for a paper and Dave down the corridor is an expert in the area, it's much easier to test the idea out on him as you walk back together from a seminar than to email him. Maybe it shouldn't make a difference, but it does.
That's it.
And I think it's understandable. Management is hard.
Of course they dress it up as collaboration, much like they do open plan offices, and much like open plan offices it’s BS in this case as well.
Obviously there are some people who desperately want to return to the office as they use the office for socializing, except that of course they’re taking the position that their socializing /lack of non-work life is more important than everyone else’s life.
Also chatty coworkers isn’t productive, especially in open plan offices. Oh and of course now you get to have coworkers coming to the office size and giving you plague as they did prepandemix, only with an exciting new plague option as well.
At least this is what I've seen. I don't have a problem with hybrid schedules but the last in office place I went to did a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday hybrid week. FFS, it was awful. Id have all of this go juice for Monday, lose it for work from home Tuesday and be miserable for Wednesday and Thursday. Just do Monday through Wednesday in office or Tuesday through Thursday. Just keep all the in office days together.
C-level leaders at my company set a mandate for our "distributed sites" to be relatively autonomous with their own missions and roadmaps. But middle and line-level managers keep making exceptions, finding it expedient to use India and LatAm teams as extra hands for projects run out of the US, for example. So as an employee you experience most of your collaboration being remote. Your EM and your skip get it. But HR and the CEO don't.
We're in a situation now where almost nobody knows anyone in their management chain who cares about their attendance, but the CEO and HR have made clear that they will be firing people who aren't badging in.
I think hybrid, with ~2 days a week - one dedicated to any team meetings and the other pure work is a good compromise plus regular in-person summits if you have a geographically distributed team. Don't just get in-person to meet, working together allows you to learn the the many subtle things about people's workflows that may be good or bad.
Then there are people who need someone over them (and that's ok).
Most people think they are the self starting type. Most people are LYING or WRONG about their ability to self start & self manage. Most people simply are NOT more productive but think they are. The numbers state otherwise. I'm all for remote work for high performers and self starters but everyone places themselves in that category and it's only true for a small percentage.
I was actually in agreement with them at the time. But fast forward 10-20 years and with Netflix and YouTube, looks like they were wrong about the whole thing.
I think the same is playing out here with the in office vs remote work.
If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.
On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.
Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.
The experienced professional has a track record of coming up the ranks in both position and skillset. He doesn't need to talk to people as much to get work done. He has a good understanding of the domain and has strong analytical skills, able to break down complex problems by himself or with another experienced engineer.
Then there is everyone else. Everyone else does not have the above characteristics. They do not have the skills needed to work by themselves or even learn by themselves. Juniors get frustrated because they don't have the necessary number of synchronous experiences, relying on async forms of knowledge without the ability to piece it together (or at least do it quickly). Furthermore, everyone else accounts for a bigger percentage of the organisation. Most people do not have the skills I mentioned above.
To conclude, some people manage equally well or better remotely. But it's not the case for the whole organisation.
Follow on question: I wonder what the long term effects on company juniors are of working fully remote. I estimate it takes each individual 3-5X more time to get upskilled.
I still get to see colleagues maybe once every few months for an all-hands/drinks after, and I consider some colleagues to be friendLY, but I wouldn't consider myself friends with them; my friends are the people that I have around every week for movie nights/gaming sessions. Colleagues can become one of those people but they generally do not (& in fact probably like most people I haven't stayed in contact with the majority of people from previous jobs).
In terms of mental health: I feel much better working from home for so many reasons, I don't have to commute so I can get a little bit of extra sleep when needed, nor am I contributing to mass pollution of the environment with my needless travels. I can have packages delivered and be there to collect them, tidy the house or cook myself a proper lunch over my break. I can do other chores like put washing on in the morning and be able to hang it to dry once it's done. When I'm being social in the evening we can start a lot earlier; no need to wait for everyone to get back to their respective homes, shower and get ready and then travel all to one place - because they're already at home. If I'm feeling ill, but still ready to work rather than going to the office and giving everyone a cold, or staying at home on a sick day and being bored out of my mine I can still just work. I can itch, scratch, cough, blow my nose, fart, sit in a relaxed manner without social repercussions. I can control my working environment in totality - if I want to listen to music on a speaker I can, if I want to put my desk next to my window I can, if I hit a brick wall and want to take a quick breather to make myself a coffee and decompress for 10 minutes then I can do that without looking "lazy".
I do still think for more junior developers that it's important to have an "office day" once a week or fortnight especially for mentoring purposes.
Funny story: I had a coworker one time who would come talk to me every shift (I never went to them), they wanted to know every detail about my existence, pick my brain, had surprisingly interesting things to say and tell, made funny jokes, laughed at my jokes. We would revisit topics and talk about them some more or exchange new found insights. Then when I quit I asked if we should stay in touch and the response was: why the hell would I want that? I'm like, why do you come talk with me every day? Oh I was just being polite. Apparently it was important for all of those people they didn't like to like them. It was entirely political!
I wasn't hurt or anything. More like amazed by the quality of acting. A format like: "Oh? you like pokemon! I like pokemon too! Let me impress you with my perfectly faked pokemon knowledge while thinking: o god, another one of those pokemon people & if only I could remember where I put my pokemon shirt.
These aren't real people people.
I've spent quite a while trying to formulate a response that covers everything but it's a deeply complex subject and touches on physical space constraints, employee development, cost (both to employee and employer), speed of decisions and response, and (all) employee wellbeing.
For every positive, there's a negative and if people aren't sure what to do I think they just default to what they're familiar with and knee-jerk back to what was the norm.
I think we're only getting started with remote working, my feeling is that there will always be office only companies (in the same way there's always been remote only companies). And the most common will be 'remote first' model where you can work where-ever you want but you're expected to attend certain meetings in the calendar in person.
Then I was the manager of others for even more years and we were part of a geographically distributed team. I asked the people to come to the office a couple of days per week, mostly to discuss face to face the stuff not so productive on audio (we almost never do videoconferences) and to have lunch and keep the feeling of being part of a team. This was only because of my previous experience.
The result was during the summer most of the team was in the office most of the time (the request was only for 2 days), while during the winter the people with complicated comute were coming only a few days per month. Some of us were walking, cycling or motorcycling to the office, so weather was an important factor and traffic is usually very bad on bad weather, working from home was the right choice.
A full work from office makes no sense, in my opinion, for most IT people except local helpdesk that interacts with people, from replacing a laptop to fixing an app for the business people, as IT people usually self-service their problems. At the same time I believe that a 100% work from home is not good for many people, especially new hires and people that thrive in a community.
There is also the aspect of performance: if a bad performer is just a name, a person you never met and don't care, it is very difficult to empathize and the tolerance for their mistakes or slowness is very, very low.
Anyway, I don't think we need the term "hybrid." If employees are required to live within commuting distance of an office, then that is an "in-office" job. Being able to work remote at least some of the time is a given for any position.
That said, we have a lot of team members in the firm in their early 20s, their first jobs. I’ve noticed a preference for those team members to RTO (at least a few days a week), and that a good deal of learning and camaraderie result. It is certainly far easier for me to mentor such folks in the office (especially since most aren’t on my team) than when we’re siloed at home.
More senior folks prefer remote — it’s generally easier to balance family demands. But ones who’ve joined the team having been fully remote from the start have even expressed difficulty coming up to speed, despite everyone on the team being transparent and working to solve the issue. It takes new habits and they’re hard to learn.
My assumption is that within say five years the question is more often going to be something like, how often (if at all) are you required per day or per week to "teleport" into the shared AR/VR collaboration space.
We should anticipate putting on a pair of normalish glasses or maybe goggles that can then integrate a very realistic virtual room into your home. There will be eye contact with what appear to be real people. These will make heavy use of AI for compression and realism. This is just extrapolating from existing research or enterprise devices and software that have most of these capabilities already.
Many people will view this in the same way they do going to the office. They will either think it's essential or a total distraction.
I think over time remote is going to lose. Once the revolution is over and things mature remote working will become far more invasive and controlling than it is now. Then on-site companies will start out-performing remote, especially very large companies.
I reckon many employers make the same calculation and want to head it off.
Because "you", as an established worker in your industry don't need hand holding guidance.
Remote first will never replace the way impromptu mentor sessions happen in person or after hours. I am extremely glad I had the opportunity for this, and I want to replicate it for the juniors just entering work.
Young Republicans or young Democrats are a couple of great organization. Want to meet young people who are going places in their life? You will meet them in these organizations.
Do you like exercise and fitness. Look into Team in Training. This is a fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Sign up for one of their races Go through the training and fundraising process. You will me lots of other like minded people. After your race consider becoming a Team in Training coach.
The possibilities are endless. If you are lonely it’s by choice.
Traditional employers want their employees back in the office since they are unable to control them otherwise. Employers and managers who have failed to grasp the concepts of remote working, lack in async communication, and have trust issues with their staff, want to keep a physical headcount of the sheep
Y'all are not looking good, bosses.
To be fair, I think both sides make decent points.
I see in-person work as one of the only opportunities for scheduled casual interaction. Mandatory fun time is not a real solution, but the fact that exists often speaks to the perception that casual interaction is an essential part of building a team.
The only thing that's changed in 20 years is Zoom or WebEx vs a conference bridge. There wasn't an in office dynamic then or now.
Another fact is that today's managers are all from a time before cellphones existed... For the most part. If you're 30 something years old, you remember when you still picked up a book or hung out with your friends at the mall. Which makes me believe that it will take a generational shift for us to truly abandon the office... Whether that's a good thing or bad.
https://www.defiant.com/truly-remote-vs-total-control-wordfe...
Both are doable, but managing someone remotely requires either the manager and/or the employee to be really good at remote comms.
2) in person spontaneous collaboration
3) my experience is most people get less done remotely. Some do more, but most do less
My experience is quite the opposite.
Employees that perform just fine without being micromanaged are a threat to the livelihoods of people whose entire jobs are scheduling meetings and arranging office pizza parties.
The top reason is, management wants workers back in the office because managers never learned how to manage people, so they practice management-by-walking-around, aka interrupt-driven behavior. Many companies have a culture of MBWA, and it’s a hard curse to break.
Another bad reason is, distanced work has led to a substantial reduction in workplace unfairness behaviors such as sexual harassment and race-based favoritism. And this, logically, has made female and minority employees more valuable and better performers. But in many workplaces, favoritism is the order of the day, and women and minorities were not the favorites. The favorites are now performing worse than the people they stepped on to be unfairly promoted, and it makes incompetent executives look, well… incompetent.
Another reason is that many people, particularly executives, have more authority, respect, or control in the workplace than they do at home. For quite a few people, their office has become their primary social outlet. And taking that away has proven unlivable for them.
The other reason that immediately came to mind is that executives are, by and large, older than the rank and file, and they (we) come from a time when building, maintaining, and overseeing an office space was both a critical part of the job and a source of pride / ego. For older management, offices are still a real-world manifestation of the success of the company that signals to other people how effective the leadership of the company is. People are less able to derive the same sense of awe from abstractions like sales numbers. If people don’t return to the office, it will not continue to make economic sense to have flashy offices, and this ego outlet will disappear.
Are these good reasons? They are not. But these reasons, honestly, ring truer to me than “hallway collisions.” In the real world, all motivating reasons are self-centered reasons, and executives simply don’t benefit from hallway and breakroom magic or mentoring of the young. They do perversely benefit from showy offices, discrimination, avoiding overt displays of their lack of skill, and forced social conduct, though.
This experience isn't enough to justify the idea that we (or anyone else) should work in close physical proximity all the time. But it does point to one of the plusses of doing this at least occasionally.
- Older execs are too stuck in their ways
- Busy execs __need__ a work family to rationalise their commitment
- Hard to make a culture when remote
- Hiring is one of the hardest task in most companies and it’s made harder by remote. Not being able to nail onboarding and the face to face getting to know someone can be lethal
- In the 1% of times, when shit really hits the fan, remote is best because you can have zero communication delays, command management etc. As an “exec” these are the moments that you optimise for
- Bad eggs leave such a bad taste in the mouth.
I’m not an employer and not even exec level. So I may be totally off base. Just my observations.
I have a mandatory 1 day in the office for the staff, the office is there for anyone to work from at any time - no one ever takes it up, they are very comfortable working at home.
And I get it - I prefer working at home too - I also love our 1 day in the office where we can have a laugh with each other, get lunch together and generally bond as a team, but as the CTO of a company where pretty much my entire dev team are introverted , its not a big priority for me to have to get people back into the office.
- the communication aspect (I've noticed projects with people who are physically in the office progress much smoother than when I have to schedule a meeting or reach out via chat; the friction to ask someone is lower when you run across them and can see that they're not busy vs. pinging them and then not getting a response because they actually were in a meeting)
- some people treating WFH as "part time, work a few hours between child-minding, chores and other non-work tasks" or a fear of that happening
And while I would trust any of them to work remotely, I would never hire someone to work exclusively remotely.
I have only met one person in my life, ever, who has asked for exclusively a remote arrangement and wasn't trying to take advantage of us, and the guy was practically a wizard of engineering and deserved whatever arrangement he wanted.
I understand the loneliness, and I've certainly been there, but learning to find people and things to do outside of work is the key to "surviving" a remote job.
Because we're all paranoid that the other companies will somehow gain some sort of economic/productivity advantage from bringing their guys back into the office and leverage this to push us out of the market.
Even though we keep seeing research that this absolutely isn't the case, the only way to be sure is to preemptively bring our guys back into the office too. Ya know.. just in case.
You’re not in back to back meetings from the moment you start work until you finish. Not all meetings involve teams in other geographies and even ones that do might still be one where most people in the call are from one city.
While in office, every single person talks to coworkers at many random times throughout the day. That builds comradery within and across teams. That, in turn, means each employee cares more about their job and the success of the people around them. That in turn, makes it harder for them to look for other jobs because your not just completing some tasks from day to day like a machine. It’s not just boring chit chat either. You’ll sometimes briefly turn your chair or walk a few steps to get someone’s opinion/ideas about something you’re stuck on with your work and vice versa.
Aside from this, having people in the office reduces the number of people who slack off during the day. This point shouldn’t be glossed over. Not only does it hurt productivity, depending on the type of job, that will put extra burden on others on the team. A slacker could at the very least take on some of the work of others and that reduces overall stress and improves overall morale.
I love remote work and would hate having to go back to the office more than a couple times a week. That said, I can still be objective and understand the viewpoint of someone running a company and wanting in person collaboration.
Companies that do figure this out will thrive of course, as it seems that this is something employees are willing to stand up to management over
2. Teams with high trust tend to be happier and deliver better and more.
3. Some people need to be in the office. Hybrid approaches (some people at the office, some not) suck. So full-office, or say goodbye to the people that need the office.
They want you back in the office to make the management happy, to make the corporate rent make sense, to make the banks happy, to feed the giant machine whose primary purpose is 100% unequivocally NOT getting stuff done (tm)
If your team isn’t getting stuff done remote, investigate a protocol for communicating the business and product needs to the developers, and maybe skim some commits.
If you are being threatened with back to office and you don’t want to go, make them fire you, use your resources, and I’d estimate there’s about a 95% chance most of you can find a higher paying position elsewhere, or at least equal pay & remote-first. The world is changing, don’t let them play tricks on you.
I’ve fought with DC traffic for twenty years, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to show up in an office for less than a client-vendor situation or L5/6+ all hands. If it’s on fire, you better call my work phone and make sure my deposits are up-to-date.
I know it’s tougher for the younger bucks out here, and that loans and rent and everything might tip the scales a little further away from you. Do your best, do what you can, but I strongly recommend putting up the fight for more comfortable work arrangements.
If we’re all gonna be obsolete in ten years, they might as well be paying us right and speaking to us right for the next nine!
- I like easy access to my crew
- I feel like people goof off when WFH. I know I do.
- For most people (not all) office work is better from a mental health perspective than WFH.
- For most jobs (not all), the work is more easily performed at a high level in an office environment with easy access to colleagues and resources.
If you're a bigwig and cut down on office spending other bigwigs will be less likely to help you out when you need a new position, among other things.
To explain the 'hallway talk is great' myth: it's from the masters of process, owners of product, and other similar people, that work relatively closely to the people actually building and maintaining the systems that make dah mahney. These people learn a lot and get a lot of things explained that they otherwise wouldn't and that makes them feel less nervous about not having any actual control at all over the output and functioning of the 'team'. They could of course ask over asyncronous chats or email but they don't know what to ask and they're scared they'll irritate someone, so they prefer sucking it out of smalltalk by the coffee machine.
And then there's the 'but how will I ever manage to take a walk or bike if my boss doesn't tell me to'. If this is you, get help. You have some executive dysfunction that will eventually be unhealthy somehow, probably when you're unemployed or have a lot of spare time for some other reason. Fix it before you realise you've spent amazing free time that you yourself got to own on doing none of the things you know makes you feel good and strong. How to do it varies, it could be therapy, it could be to move to a less polluted place, could be something else.
Remote is here to stay. Fire your boss if they insist on you spending more than two days a month at some office for no good reason.
The people who prefer remote seem to strongly prefer remote. Any arguments against it are dismissed as RTO bootlicking. See the top-level comments here from people who will absolutely not give up remote work and are giving people advice on how to live in a remote-only world. (Just get a hobby, bro! How hard could it be? Can't make friends after work? That's a you problem!)
The people who prefer in-person strongly prefer in-person. They think that this is the ONLY way to build a community culture and foster spontaneous collaboration. Moreover, the kind of work the people with "power" in these organizations (executives, salespeople, marketing, etc) have is almost entirely face-to-face, and they are also raising families and dealing with traffic, so there's willful lack of empathy there too.
Hybrid work environments make it easy for the "minority" to miss important context.
Either extreme (RTO, or full-remote) leads to serious backlash.
I think that a mostly-full RTO will win out for the same reason that chain layoffs happened this year.
The biggest companies are all _very_ pro return-to-office. I don't know of any big companies that stayed full remote after vaccines were viable.
The smaller startups that can do full remote are vying for acquisition or to go public. In both cases, the power dynamics will shift towards making people go back into the office because that's what the people in charge want. (Again, their jobs are mostly face-to-face, and they also raise kids and deal with traffic and doctor's appointments, so empathy is lacking there.)
Then again I don't think I ever stayed in any company for more then 2 years so that just might be me.
Let’s be honest- these bullpen setups suck and very few people want to “return” to that.
Yeah, because folks like you insist that office culture has nothing to do with productivity. I wonder if you've ever worked somewhere productive.
> dragging us back into the office
Dragging? Are we slaves now?
The truth is, for a great many jobs it's impossible to measure work well enough to tell if you worked 1 day or 5 last week.
You're debugging a memory leak? Well, maybe it was very difficult to find. You're reviewing grant proposals? Who's to say how carefully you read them? You say it was very difficult to make this page work on chrome, firefox and safari? Well, if you say so.
Meanwhile, employers have read articles about "quiet quitting".
I suspect employers fear we're on the golf course, working a second full-time job, or reading HN. Sending people back to the office assures them that's not the case.
what’s an example?
When I'm in the office, I have little, off the cuff conversations I can't have online, where I can express and develop a thought that would otherwise be gone as quickly as it came to me.
IRL, I have thousands of opportunities during the day to get 10 seconds of feedback, online I'm not likely to get a response because of the context switching overhead.
I don't want to be 100% in the office, but the one day a week we have at the moment is definitely positive for the whole team.
Tl;dr: the creativity that can be achieved by having people to bounce ideas off is multiplied when they're in the same room.
None of the online whiteboards equivalent tools work as well a old fashioned white board and markers.
I like to work from my office. What I hate about remote work is often waiting for responses from multiple people. Something that used to take ~60 seconds to deal with now takes up to an hour while waiting for everyone to answer. I dislike video calls and I prefer to use written text as a way of relaying information crucial to engineering / configuration / infra.
I never cared about office and having to work from the office, but it's noticeable that a lot of people don't have sufficient self-control or work ethics to be as productive from home as they are from the office.
TL;DR:
1. people work less efficient from home 2. it takes a lot longer to receive information