I think a lot of the responses to the straw man's questions are reasonable and thoughtful. But I think this sentiment:
>I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends.
Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being surrounded by smart people doing interesting work. For whatever reason, for some folks, exchanging Slack messages with those same smart people isn't similarly energizing compared to overhearing and jumping into interesting in-person conversations, etc. Maybe the tech giants need to be very accommodating to remote work in order to maintain their massive workforces, but I think a lot of typical companies could just say "we prefer being in-office" and find sufficient local folks to make that happen. That won't be for everyone. But there might be a sizeable enough cohort that performs better in the office that it'll be a good option for some companies.
I mean, I'm a strong introvert (defined here as somebody who likes people but is drained by socialization). Any given day I'd prefer working at home than from office; will prefer lunch at computer than cafeteria; dinner with friends or "me time" over team-building exercise; being at home with family than in office with co-workers. I'm friendly with my co-workers but we're not out-of-office friends -- I have my own circle of friends and family and interests.
But working from home, only home, for 16 months now? At macro level, it drained me of motivation after a few months - and it took a lot of self-examination to realize I'm no longer at my peak and why, because the change was slow and subtle. I lose this internal intuitive feeling of what we're doing and more importantly, why it matters. Everything is just words on the screen; success or failure, it's just an email or slack. There's no energy and pride to soak in when we wrap up a project. And most of all, I recognize I'm highly motivated by successful peers I respect; and I just don't get to experience that the same way. I see the good results/work of my peers, but I don't get to "see them be successful / good at their job", which is subtly but critically different thing, more of a continuous and passive experience - what you call "being surrounded by smart people doing interesting work" really rings true.
So while any given morning I'd rather stay at home, I recognize that in long term, I'm suffering from only staying home.
I cannot IMAGINE what an extrovert is feeling these days :-/.
(Oh and yes, I love them to death but there IS such a thing as "too much contiguous time spent with my kids", for me at least it turns out... but office is not necessarily the solution for that:)
I agree with you 100%, but want to highlight that this pandemic, and remote work, are entirely different things.
How often do we need people in the office? Some places are looking at hybrid schedules, anywhere from 1-4 days each week in the office, and 4-1 days at home.
Remote offices are rarely fully remote anyway; there's usually stuff like fly in for a week every quarter, or go to a conference or offsite together.
Absolutely, never connecting in person is going to lead to work feeling very separate, and a source of motivation we're used to will be missing. Whether that's a needed or even healthy source of motivation (do I benefit having a personal connection to people at work?) is complicated, but I don't think outside of a pandemic that it's actually -missing-. It just varies how much you'll get.
I agree; I should've added I've experienced most modes of work over my career - fully office (rare), some ratio of hybrid (most of my career, e.g. one week home one week traveling to client site), and even spells of up to a year doing remote-only work.
As I mentioned in another follow-up, it's those who prefer either full-time-office or full-time-remote, that I am least alike. Clearly, there are people who hate working from home at all, ever; and those who don't want to spend any time in the office, ever.
I wish people would remember this more often. The last year and a half or so has not been typical remote work. Typical remote work does not come with shelter-in-place orders; forced closing of many social spaces like restaurants, bars, and parks; mandatory masking and social distancing when in public; and the closure of schools and child care services.
The thing that amazes me is that even despite all the difficulties that cropped up due to forcing people into remote work (for jobs where that's been possible) during a global pandemic, people have actually done surprisingly well work-wise, considering all the challenges. Just imagine how fantastic it can be now that social-oriented activities are opening back up, most people are vaccinated, most areas are relaxing their masking and distancing rules, and schools and child care are opening again. And companies are finally having the time to breathe and figure out what flex office/remote work really will be like in practice, and will start allowing employees to travel for business again.
If we keep pushing for all of this, and help our employers see the value, we can craft a balance that works for each and every one of us.
A lot of the calls for returning to office work boil down to people wanting to be in an environment where there's this "hum" of Serious Business™ being done--the "buzz" of people actively present and Doing Interesting Things. It's not the work itself, but excitement at the performance of work going on around them. Lots of work-from-office folks seem to get a charge out of this excitement.
Maybe (and I'm half serious) companies should hire actors to simply walk around the office, quietly talk about things, draw things on whiteboards, maybe carry papers to and from the printer, etc. and in general provide that "hum" and "buzz" that people crave. That way, people who want the Office Experience™ can get it, and people who'd rather WFH can have things their way too.
I see what you're saying and don't necessarily disagree in general; but it's not, I think, my desire; as I said, on a daily basis, I don't love the "hum & buzz" - I have headphones in my cubicle like many of us here at HN do.
Could an actor become somebody I respect, and effectively portray a worker I know, understand and respect, having a breakthrough or trying something a few times or brainstorming or teaching spontaneously? Dunno. Would they be cheaper than just get somebody to do that AND actual work, I don't think so :D. And in some ways a lot of these things "could" theoretically be done over webex/zoom/teams/whatever. I don't have the answers - only the personal experience that after 16 months alone in my (phenomenal, fun, ergonomic) home office, there's definitely something dulled in my work life/satisfaction/performance, and I've tried to articulate it.
What it comes down to - I'm personally surprised at both extremes: at those who ONLY want to work from office, and those who ONLY want to work from home. Both, for me, would be imperfect compromises in which I'd lose something.
20% of the people do all the work. So let us stay home so I don’t have to wear noise cancelling headphones all day. Let the other 80% “perform” their duties.
I think it strongly depends how narrowly we define "work"
- I will agree that there is significant productivity variation between team members
- On my team, sure, ~20% of people are developers and doing Development work
- But testers, business analysis, system admins, release managers, etc are all still necessary and valuable. It is common but inexcusable hubris or unawareness of business goals and other team's contributions, to think they don't have necessary and productive roles.
- I've been on several dozen projects across at least two dozen companies and cultures, and I don't think I've ever been on one where only 5th of people do all the productive/needed work. Not even remotely close :-/
This was brave self exploration and a lot of empathy for others, I strongly resonate with everything you said. I think these surveys of people saying they feel more productive at home are taken as law right now but it will look different over time. From my perspective, there seems to be a negative feedback cycle too for a lot of people feeling bad from staying home over a long period of time and then wanting to stay home even more as the main lever for feeling better.
What ever happened to social clubs? I remember my grandpa was a member of the Knights of Columbus and would frequently go there to socialize / network. I feel like these clubs used to be pretty common: Scouts, Rotary Club, Moose/Elk Lodge, KoC, Veterans of Foreign Wars (which no longer requires members to be former military), and local cultural/historical clubs are pretty prevalent.
I've been to a lot of these clubs at the invite of friends, but found that most of the members are 60+. Maybe these clubs need to get out there and advertise themselves to a younger audience, because it's quite clear that many people need the social outlets that these provide. Plus, dancing is fun and people should do more of it.
Actually, they've seen an uptick over the past decade. Specifically because of the need the OP implies, and younger people becoming aware of their existence. The elks, for instance, had ~800k members back in 2012ish, and are over a million currently.
Which is to also say that I think these clubs tended to skew towards a white middle-class without a college education. That is a declining demographic.
I think a big part of the problem is that most of them have a purpose other than just socializing, that not everyone is necessarily interested in.
At least some of them also have fairly high dues. I remember looking into Rotary in my area about 15 years ago, and just feeling like there was no way I could justify paying however much it was per month, even knowing that a lot of Rotary's purpose is to try to do good works, given what I was making at the time. (I don't remember how much it was, but my impression, at least, was that even if I was interested in actually devoting my time to it, it would still be more expensive than I could comfortably afford on a just-barely-above-national-median salary.)
And there's also a religious aspect: the Knights of Columbus are explicitly Catholic; while it's not officially religious, my experience with Rotary was that it had a very high overlap with churchgoers, and my recollection is that they opened and closed their meetings with a prayer.
And while the VFW may not require members to be former military, it's never going to attract large numbers of people who aren't, just because that's its stated purpose, baked into its very name.
I don't think those kinds of organizations will do as well with the younger generations, today and into the future, given these things. Now, if there were more interest-based clubs/groups around (like community singing groups, tabletop gaming, nature trail groups, etc, just to give a few examples that would interest me), that seems more likely to appeal.
I just looked at Rotary Club dues, $36 for 6 months (6 bucks a month). Doesn't seem too bad.
For interest-based groups, I'm constantly seeing large bicycle groups cruising around, so such groups do exist (at least that is one that is openly visible). I periodically will jump in on Linux user group (or similar) meetings in my area too. But they typically have about half a dozen people that show up. I know that hackerspaces were popular in some areas for a while, they may pick up again post-pandemic.
That's definitely much lower than I remember it being back when I looked. (Which doesn't necessarily mean that it is lower—it's not something I took special note of.) Still, for me, not something I think it worth my time & money to do, but not nearly as much of a pinch as I was thinking for someone that does actually like that sort of thing.
I can definitely get on board with that sentiment. A number of years ago I was all set to join a Hackerspace in my area, but for two things. One was the monthly dues, $50 a month. I was already budgeting out to the last dollar of income, so that wouldn't have worked. Second was the commute into the city to make use of it. If I worked / lived in the city it would be a bit different, but just as there was the issue of budgeting money I had just as much of a problem budgeting time for it. It really does seem to me like we have less time available then what I recall my parent's generation having (for example my Dad always worked on family cars despite working a factory job with a 60 minute daily commute). And they still had time to watch 2 - 3 hours of TV in the evenings.
Edit: I just looked again, that is the dues that the central organization charges each chapter for chapter members. The individual chapter dues may be much higher, and probably varies depending on location.
On the contrary, I feel it deserves LESS respect. Treating the office as an escape from an undesirable at-home situation and then having the audacity to try to force more people to be in-person is incredibly selfish behavior.
If these people truly need that social interaction, how about putting more effort into community/personal relationships instead of workplace relationships?
We should respect honesty more. At least then we can talk about the real issues, like maybe finding relationships in a non-work context.
We can call this person selfish and attend to the root malice only because they were honest. If they just contrived a reason to further their goal state, then they are being both duplicitous and selfish, which seems to be something we should respect less?
For what it's worth, without the word option being emphasized here, yours is an equally selfish desire because it brings harm to that person or group of people who prefer the office experience. I liked working in an office, sorry you don't.
No, it doesn't. People who want to work in an office -- or in any kind of shared space -- can do so. Maybe that space is provided by your employer as a traditional office. Maybe your employer can rent some space a WeWork-type thing.
Your argument also rests on the premise that the people who have been forced to come into an office every day should continue to be forced to do that, because some other group wants that situation. The idea that that's an ok situation to begin with is just bonkers. If you can't have your communal office experience without harming others, then you should not get your communal office experience. (But you can have that! No one is saying you can't!)
The idea that a group of people wanting to work from home is somehow "harming" people who want to work at an office is ludicrous.
No. Nothing is keeping you from having a shared workspace. If you can convince your coworkers to share it with you, nothing is stopping that. Social time at your discretion!
This is very different than daily forced containment.
I'm confused about what you're arguing. Are you saying "by allowing people the freedom to work from home it harms people who wish those other people would join them in the office"? Or are you saying, "I realize you're not saying people should be forced to come into the office, but if you were arguing that it would be very selfish"? One of those is absurd and the other is the weirdest kind of straw man I've ever heard.
Is this comment stating that commuting to an office and dealing with the absence of in-person contact are equally burdensome? One of those things requires (often) buying a vehicle that costs thousands of dollars + maintenance and spending, on average, about an hour a day of their time just commuting (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...). These are not equivalent asks.
I think the word "option" probably needs to be emphasized more here. My workplace is moving toward hybrid, which allows this option.
> That won't be for everyone. But there might be a sizeable enough cohort that performs better in the office that it'll be a good option for some companies.
No, the option GP is referring to is the option for the company to decide everyone is working at the office, not for it to be optional for the employees.
I would be open to a remote working arrangement that was truly asocial. The problem is you still want all the normal social features of working relationships - meetings, collaboration, mentorship, collective commitment and sacrifice towards a shared vision - in a remote context. The imitation of a team over Zoom carries, for me, all of the costs (higher costs, even) but none of the benefits. Empty calories. From my end it's you, prospective remote colleague, selfishly offering a raw deal.
> From my end it's you, prospective remote colleague, selfishly offering a raw deal.
This just strikes me as not at all the same thing.
People wanting to work from home does not remove the world of office work from your list of options. Depending on how extreme your particular company wants to go with remote work, yes, that might mean you'll have to find a different job to get the office experience. But that's the breaks.
I think it's the height of selfishness to require that your colleagues continue to waste hours of their lives on a commute daily and deal with inflexible office working arrangements just so you can get the "working relationships" experience that you want.
Your side seems to want the status quo, and our side seems to just want more flexibility, flexibility that doesn't preclude office work, at least some of the time. Seems obvious to me here who is being selfish and unreasonable.
There is no option for those of us in office to have the experience we're looking for, when you have the "flexibility" to be a stranger 1,000 miles away but retain the right to be included and treated the same way as everyone else.
It's absolutely astounding that you'd use a phrase like "that's the breaks" about a radical new change you're proposing while not realizing how it applies to something as baseline for adulthood as commuting.
humans collaborating together, in person, to work on a common goal, has been a thing since humans existed. everyone working individually at home by themselves, only interacting with others digitally is pretty far removed from that. i might go so far as to suggest preferring the latter is what is not normal.
having distracting kids at home is not an "undesirable home situation", in fact its a great home sitaution, so great that it makes it impossible to focus on getting work done because i'd rather just play with my kids. there is a reason most workplaces don't typically have your children in them.
the fact that so many are happy being isolated at home with no real interactions with any peers is concerning in itself.
> the fact that so many are happy being isolated at home with no real interactions with any peers is concerning in itself.
That seems to be a huge straw man. "Interactions with peers" doesn't have to mean "going into an office for 8 hours, 5 days a week". I know plenty of (pre-pandemic) fully-remote people who get tons of interactions with their colleagues. And I know others who, yes, do want to keep that interaction to the minimum necessary to get their jobs done. Both of those situations are fine.
Work is not the be-all, end-all of existence. While I have made many good friends through work, and some (though not most) have made the transition to non-work friends (the true friendship-type test is when one party in the work friendship leaves the company), I have very little need or desire to socialize at the workplace these days. I get plenty of interaction outside of work, and that's how I like it. I certainly recognize that others want more interaction through their work, and that's fine. But you don't need to drag me into that to get it.
> humans collaborating together, in person, to work on a common goal, has been a thing since humans existed.
It was a very, very rare thing for most people for all of human history until the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, a lot of people helped build StoneHenge and the Pyramids, but most people were just farming (at home) or else hunting/gathering in family units.
For how pre-industrial farmers worked, look to the Old Order Amish. They are not isolated family units, the community is the bedrock. The oldest settlements found suggest group cooperation was essential in the development of hominids.
To be clear, there's no discrepancy between "the larger community was essential" and "daily life revolved around the homestead and kinfolk groups". The former doesn't refute the latter. Indeed, I grew up amid the Amish, and both were true: their daily work was on their own farm or else they were helping their kin farm and their communities were very important to them. I suspect that's also the case with the other hominids you're referencing.
it wasn't nuclear families hunting together, it was all the warriors/hunters of the tribe or whatever. that was "going to the office" for them. i wonder how those who wanted to "hunt remotely" would fare in that environment?
As somebody who finds social engagement with a task or knowledge domain pretty pleasant (and one way of reinforcing productivity), I do respect this.
Up to the point where it becomes "I don't want to change the way I work, so everyone has to join me in the office."
Lots of organization big enough to feel like they need a uniform policy are probably also big enough to find mutually accommodating and perhaps even complementary subgroups within the org.
Assuming they want to do the work rather than just standardizing on everyone on-site, open floor plans (except management, of course), sun-at-noonday overhead high-blue fluorescent lighting, etc etc.
WFH opinion seems to split between people who see work as where you achieve corporate goals for pay and those who see it as a far more encompassing mixture of human experience.
I disagree fully with that statement. It’s completely oversimplifying the reasons to mostly work from home. One might want to spend more time with their loved ones, save money because of commute, might enjoy knowledge seeking and learning by themselves and love long focused work. You can get the human experience in many different ways. For example why meeting the colleagues at the far away office if most of them leave near downtown? You can have retreats and goal oriented team events… there are lots of possible combinations.
Your description summarizes what I've been trying to express so concisely – it's almost shocking. I'm left wondering on what side of the split you stand on.
I have far less of a normal life than most people and am far more obsessive about the kinds of things I do spend my time on than most people, so I don't personally bond that easily nor enjoy the casual moments or marshmallow and spaghetti tower building.
I see! I understand the obsessiveness, I believe, but to me WFH (which I dislike) seems more of a way of "checking out/focusing on the rest of my life" than to truly indulge in work. I find it interesting that you have a similar understanding of things but a very different point of view.
You quoted part of that without comment on something I think is crucial:
"My kids are driving me crazy."
I've seen that in practice. Long ago I watched a manager of mine on a lengthy call with his wife discussing the absolute chaos going on at home with the kids, the school, etc. When he hung up he said the most sincere thing I ever heard from him; "Thank God for work."
And he had a wife at home to referee it all. If one then asks what might the conditions of a household be where she works as well... Yeah. That explains a lot.
I don't know but I think we need a "scared sterile" program for the kids (similar to "scared straight").
I didn't realize there were so many reluctant parents until COVID. I feel society has coerced people into lives so unhappy that they'd rather spend time at the place everyone else is trying to escape than with their loved ones.
Spreading child-supervision duties around the extended family and community so parents can do other things besides be with their children 24x7 has been a feature of many human cultures for many thousands of years.
Right, but the times they are a'changin', and many people don't live within reasonable distance of extended family anymore.
We can throw up our hands and either say a) stop moving away from your extended family, b) deal with the struggle, or c) don't have kids. Or we can use our big brains and try to figure out a better way for everyone to live where/how they want, but also be able to raise kids in a loving, supportive environment where the parents can still get a break sometimes.
I don't know what that better way is, but I think it's pretty fatalistic and defeatist to assume it doesn't exist.
There's a huge space of professional and community childcare options other than "extended family" and "don't have kids". That the dual-income middle class has been using for decades.
In the same way that most people don't want to pair program full time, but it's perfectly legitimate for a company to decide it wants to be a full-time pairing shop if they think it's important enough to limit their hiring pool to people who want to pair program, it's perfectly legitimate for a company to decide it does not want to be remote.
The problem is, as usual, one of power imbalance. Employers -- especially those in industries where unions and collective bargaining is unusual -- tend to have a lot more power in the relationship than their employees do, so they get to dictate terms, at least up until the point that labor willing to accept those terms becomes scarce.
I think we can agree that if every software company decided that they were going to be a full-time pairing shop, that'd be a bad thing. In the same way, I don't think it'd be too much of a stretch to also suggest that it'd be bad if all employers decided that their workers had to be butts-in-seats 40 hours (or more) per week, no exceptions.
> I don't think it'd be too much of a stretch to also suggest that it'd be bad if all employers decided that their workers had to be butts-in-seats 40 hours (or more) per week, no exceptions.
Well, yes. That's not happening, though. My point is that I see people essentially claiming that it's immoral for any companies to not permit remote work, and I disagree with that.
I completely respect that for many people the office is a fulcrum of their social life and they don’t want that to change. The remote work revolution actually makes that easier, not harder. We just have to get past the anachronistic idea that the people you share an office with also need to have the same company name written at the top of their paycheques.
Invest the money saved on leases and cleaners on coworking memberships for those that want them. They can pick somewhere local with a pleasant commute. They’ll meet and share a space with people from their local area. They’ll be energised by interesting conversations with people from other industries. They can form friendships without the weird distortions of power imbalances caused by their positions in an org chart.
If the person at the next desk makes a weird noise when they breathe and always leaves dirty dishes in the sink? Cancel your desk and try a different place. No biggie.
Remote work doesn’t have to mean work from home. It’s up to you.
I work with a mobile desk in front of a couch so that when work is done I can either move it aside or switch my monitor input to my personal laptop which really helps compartmentalize work. Once the work laptop is off I have reclaimed the space.
Having said that I feel lucky that I've been able to move to a new apartment recently. Now my partner and I have an extra room to dedicate to being a work space and we're no longer taking up the living room to that end. This is a huge QoL improvement.
I think self-care becomes much more important when one has a limited indoor space that is seeing mixed use. Even just making making sure one takes 1 or 2 walks a day is a huge improvement in energy, mental clarity, motivation, positive outlook, etc.
The thing that's bothering me about this argument (and many like it) is that it assumes that we're calling for a complete end to office life. We're not. We just want more flexibility, and many of us would still like to come into an office once, twice, thrice, or even four times a week. And even for those of us (like myself) who would rather not go to an office at all, we don't have a problem with people who do want to spend time in an office. There's nothing stopping companies from offering office space to employees who want it. We just don't want it to be required of everyone, as it so often was pre-pandemic.
yes, but kids are going back to school. The "i'm lonely" part is an effect of how bad US cities are for social interaction. I guarantee you if you live in a European city you're not starved for social interaction, you can go to your neighborhood watering hole, or square, and meet with your actual friends anytime.
There might be something to that, but I think you still have to actually get to the watering hole / square / etc. Many people complain about there being no more boundaries when WFH, working all the time, etc. I think the issue is more psychological than purely logistical.
I live in Paris, where you can easily find a watering hole within walking distance [0], yet I used to hear this same sentiment from colleagues even before Covid was a thing.
At a previous job we used to work a lot from home, which I really enjoyed, and whenever I brought the subject up at the current one, many people would comment something along the lines of "I don't know, I'd hate to be alone all the time". And this was coming from people who seemed fairly sociable and who were often talking about friends outside work (so they weren't isolated).
---
[0] Assuming you live in Paris proper, not in the far-away suburbs.
> There might be something to that, but I think you still have to actually get to the watering hole / square / etc.
And this is why suburbs and "bedroom communities" suck. If you spend all your time either at home with your nuclear family, or at the office with your colleagues, my feeling is that you don't really have a healthy social life.
As much as people shit on San Francisco for its lack of density in many areas, I can easily meet up with a friend after work at a nearby bar or restaurant or park. I just did that last week and it was wonderful to be able to do that again after all the pandemic restrictions.
> I think the issue is more psychological than purely logistical.
I agree with that, and that's actually encouraging. It means that there actually is no real-world issue with this, and the issues in our heads can be fixed. People can learn to develop better boundaries while working from home, and train themselves to seek social interaction outside of work better. And also come to realize that social interaction at the office isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.
Beyond that, any feeling about WFH related to social interaction that has developed during the pandemic is immediately suspect. WFH without the pandemic will look a lot different, and a lot healthier.
I have to ask, how realistic has it been to do such things in most places over the last year? I mean WFH or not, most places, governments have not allowed people to do any of those things for the better part of a year.
I'm in Berlin and haven't changed a thing in my social life besides the occasional bar/restaurant
I still enjoyed drinks and meals with friends outside. People made it much worse to themselves than they had to.
There was a few weeks of crazy lockdown rules but even during these the police never bothered me when I was walking out at night with a friend. Most laws were passed so that they could have the legal rights to break up parties and large groups.
Besides France I don't know a lot of places that enforced a "stay at home and don't meet anyone at any time for any reasons" lockdown for very long
So I think this expectation that work provide social connection only works for some people. I like the people I work with, but I have no need to spend time with them in person because I have other social outlets. If I have to participate in another social scene because someone I work with is lonely, that’s gas out of my tank to solve their problem. I don’t really have a lot in common with my coworkers except we work together.
Join a casual sports league or a club or something but don’t make me pretend to be your friend just to draw a paycheck. This is one aspect of work I have no interest in restarting.
This is the thing that really annoys me, the suggestion that I have an obligation to solve the personal-interaction needs of my co-workers.
I have become genuine non-work friends with some (former and current) co-workers. But there are many with whom I have no interest in being friends, or even talking to them for one second more than is necessary for us to get our jobs done, and that's ok. I shouldn't be forced to fulfill their social needs; that's their job to do on their own time.
>But the people who work poorly when others are regularly distracting them with office chit-chat don't deserve respect?
I certainly don't mean that. Another poster who replied to my original comment compared it to a company that chooses to do pair programming, knowing that not all software developers like pair programming. It'd be fine for some companies to choose to implement pair programming and some not, and for the most part, employees would choose employers that fit their preference.
Likewise, I see room for companies that run with being in the office. Not all companies. Not everyone wants that. But if some companies offer remote, some companies are in the office and some offer a mix, I think that's a good thing for the variety of workers out there. There might be some transitional pain if your current employer does something other than your preference, but that's long been the case, and (hopefully) you have other options.
I love working from home... except when I really need to hash out an idea with smart colleagues in front of a whiteboard. I've gotten a lot more "done" over the past 14 months, I think, but I don't think that everything has been as well thought through as it would previously have been.
That only works if we're all online at the same time. And yes, so does office discussion, but we're more likely to all be in the office at the same time than we are to all be online simultaneously when remote.
Indeed, the assumption is that you're meeting, as you would with any other remote meeting solution (or in-person white boarding session).
That said, you can always whiteboard solo, save your digitized content and upload/send it wherever you want. We'll even support image vectorization soon.
Gah, I keep reading this over and over and it's so straw-man infuriating. No one is saying "shut down all offices". Half of the company working from home every day of the week does not preclude the other half from working from an office. We can all actually get what we want here; let's stop pretending this is an us vs. them fight.
It's not a symmetric need though. Your need requires other people to be around you to have your ideal lifestyle. The WFH need doesn't require other people to do anything different (we all use slack/email/etc regardless of where we physically are). Your need is wronging others (requiring them to spend time commuting and being in a distracting office) and their need (you aren't affected) is not wronging others.
It's insane that so many people are okay pathetically dragging other people into a shitty situation just to make themselves happy.
> I can't imagine another day of long Zoom meetings.
The pandemic really reinforced to me that so many of these are pointless, at least for many participants. I have played games with co-workers, gone to sleep, done freelance work, had lunch (away from my desk), and all manner of other things through pretty much every meeting over 1 hour that I have had this pandemic. Especially the ceremonies like retro (exercise in taking notes and throwing them away), sprint planning (creating a faux schedule and throwing it away as code is done when it is done), and even in many cases the daily standup. Ditto for departmental meetings.
We cargo culted a lot of processes to WFH and will cargo cult them back upon return to office. What WFH lets me do is opt out of them and just have the conversation happen in the background instead of me being stuck in a meeting room.
I agree a lot with your comment. No amount of planning or estimates will ever change that a feature will be done when it's done.
My previous job had about a 4th of the total work week dedicated to meetings. As someone with ADHD, this was very difficult for me. What made matters worse is that they were sometimes spread out and I could lose an entire day of productivity and I was just unable to work when my meds ran out and there was a shortage in the entire country (Mexico).
I am now back to contracting and my client just lists out the requirements in a document and I code away and have been VERY productive. No meetings or calls since I have started working with them 3 weeks ago.
> No amount of planning or estimates will ever change that a feature will be done when it's done.
I've been on teams where we got good enough at estimating that we were +/- a couple of hours each sprint on our burn down charts.
Long tenure, good knowledge of the code, and a healthy amount of time spent on reducing technical debt all combine to make accurate estimations possible.
Of course things can go awry in regards to partner team or 3rd party API integrations, those are always wild cards, but that is why you first do an exploratory task to figure out how hard integration will be (my current team calls these stories "spikes" in our workflow), which de-risks future estimates around the work.
And it also makes more sense. "Spend this week learning how to use this API and figuring out its warts, then come back and give an estimate next week on how much work it'll be to get it up and running for real."
Especially when I am just seeing the feature request for the first time and it is an adjustment to some existing thing I did not code.
We had a project a few months back where we used tech nobody on the team had used before. Had a fancy Gantt chart of where the schedule would be. It was shot to hell by day 3 and we spent hours trying to figure it out and gave up as it was never accurate.
> Especially the ceremonies like retro (exercise in taking notes and throwing them away)
Retro is one of those meetings that I have found very useful, at multiple companies. When done right, everyone should be involved, and useful action items will be taken away to make work easier in the future. I've seen retros done terribly wrong, where nothing is accomplished or taken away. Those seem like a waste, but I think when done right, it is actually a valuable use of time.
Retro can be useful if there are small problems to fix. I find that it misses the big ones because nobody wants to fight entrenched ways of doing things. It also does not help if there is no real follow through, which is my biggest gripe about it.
It really gets tedious hearing the same problem every two weeks with action planned and nothing happening.
This one, I just don't get at all. If you have nothing to contribute to a meeting, and nothing to gain from listening, why are you joining the meeting to begin with? Just decline like a grown-up and get some actual work done. It doesn't do anyone any good to have you there on mute with the volume turned down, getting actual work done in the background. Nobody is going to notice you're gone, and if they do, who cares? You think the boss is going to sit there during the yearly performance review and say "Hmm, we were going to give Joe a raise, but I noticed that he skipped a lot of meetings where he wasn't really needed in the first place. Clearly bad performance!"
At companies that misuse meetings, most meetings are not optional to attend. Of course you could say "Well just don't go", but some people don't like getting fired over things like this.
> Just decline like a grown-up and get some actual work done
There is also the old adage that showing up is half the battle. Even if the company isn't in the habit of misusing meetings, showing up to meetings is important for establishing relationships with different people and departments. It sucks, but people are still social creatures, and meeting and talking to people face to face can have a strong lasting impression then a well written email.
Yeah, I think the above comment's thinking is pretty unproductive. If you "just" skip all of the meetings you don't personally find value in, you're depriving everyone in those meetings any nuggets of value _you_ could add. You'll be quickly labeled a loner/difficult team member/etc. Nobody wins if you "just" skip all the things you don't want to do.
Also it's worth noting that the gripe wasn't about meetings, but about meetings that don't translate well to remote, which I think is a totally different class of problem than attendance and meeting misuse. If those meetings added value when they were in-person, totally skipping them is a big mistake. The "work" so to speak is adapting meetings that added value in person, to continue to add value while done remotely. This obviously isn't just "Use the exact same format, but have it via Zoom", but more thought needs to go into it I think.
Or just the general acceptance that for some people, some things will just never be good unless they're in person.
Right. You shouldn't "just" skip those meetings. You should skip those meetings.
As in, you should communicate with the organizer and give your reason for the meeting not being a good use of your time -- or rather, not a good use of the company's money that is paying for your time to be in the meeting rather than doing something else.
If the meeting really is overly broad, then the organizer probably won't really care; they invited everyone who they thought might need to be involved, and from their standpoint it's better to overinvite than underinvite. If you point out that you're extra, then you're taking the potential work to figure that out off of their hands.
In the best case, they'll reconsider the invite list and/or scope of the meeting. In the worst case, they'll fire you. In which case there's a decent chance that it was actually the best case, but you couldn't recognize it at the time.
But I suspect that it's a lot more common for the outcome to be "uh, ok, thanks for letting me know."
I would argue what you're describing isn't "skipping" a meeting, but communicating about process and changing required attendees to optional, which is very much not what was being prescribed above ("Just hit decline like a grown up").
What you're describing is fine, but also not what we're talking about.
> Yeah, I think the above comment's thinking is pretty unproductive. If you "just" skip all of the meetings you don't personally find value in, you're depriving everyone in those meetings any nuggets of value _you_ could add.
I was specifically talking about the meetings OP was talking about: The ones that have no value-add and where you have no nuggets to add. You can sleep through them, or otherwise tune out and do other work in the background. Why are people even going to these? If there's really absolutely nothing you can gain or others can gain from you, just don't go. I didn't think this was a controversial view, but the votes say otherwise.
EDIT: Also, who is actually being fired for not being attendee #47 at a meeting that they are not contributing to? If you actually saw this happen, let us know the company to warn us all not to accept offers there, because that seems extraordinarily petty.
I downvoted more for the massive condescension than anything else.
edit
To answer your edit: Most (all?) companies would fire an employee that refuses to comply with required company activities (meetings as an excellent example). I don't really think it's petty for a company to not allow every individual employee to decide what required team meetings are right for that individual.
Sure, but (as I posted in another comment), if you're delivering completed work at the price of others delivering completed work because they needed information from you, and the culturally-defined place for that information to have been exchanged was all the meetings you're skipping, that's still probably a huge net negative.
This is the type of thing my CEO says, and then shows up to meetings with a black screen, muted, and does not respond to any inquiries while things are going on (so nobody directs anything to him) - but if you dont show up to the meeting he will message you and ask where are you?
Because, for example, the things that make retros pointless and wasteful (write down stuff and never consider it again) can challenge fundamentally the follow through ability of the department/manager/team members.
I have a ridiculous sounding but very important to me reason for my preference to work at home: bowel movements.
I worked with a small team in a small office. Everybody is typically at their desk in silence with the occasional manager or sales person on the phone. At predictable intervals throughout the day, someone will get up and be gone extra long.
You know, and everybody else knows, they've gone for a number 2.
Occasionally a manager will say "where's X" and someone will respond they stepped out. Nobody cares, and yes I'm being neurotic, but it is still slightly embarrassing that everybody _knows_.
Again, nothing is devastating here, it's just... awkward.
The fact that I can have my morning coffee and then when the urge comes, march off to my porcelain throne without anyone knowing better, answer Slack messages from my phone, etc. is one of the great joys of no longer being in an office for me.
Not to mention I’ve worked in places with two bathrooms total for like 300+ males lol. Always a pleasure to be standing in line after lunch.
If you're based in the US, that's likely illegal. OSHA requires 1 toilet + 1 urinal per 50 employees (IIRC). CA and other states have slightly stricter requirements.
This, and being able to shower whenever I want, and being able to put on presentable clothing for a Zoom call but then return to my sweatpants or even go topless... these sort of things are the reason I want to work from home. Maybe I'm crazy , or maladjusted, or maybe this is just the optimal way for me to work.
I'm not embarrassed about going to the bathroom, but sometimes I was at work and I was pretty sure I stunk for some reason, and I couldn't do anything about it other than leave for the day. So I just sat there, miserable, wondering if anyone else thought I stunk.
At home, I can actually go change my shirt and/or take a shower and actually be sure I don't stink.
Also, nobody cares if I stink while I'm working from home. I still shower mid-day anyhow when I want to.
Lunch is also a lot easier to deal with. I don't eat out because I have to watch my diet or I'll gain all my weight back that I lost. That's really hard when eating out. It's pretty easy at home.
I actually had my first dream about a colleague at a new job within the past month. They were giving me feedback for my performance review, and it was 100% all about how I frequently stink up the place, how embarrassing! Nearly brought to tears.
Then I remembered, we all work remotely, and got a good laugh out of it, since this can never happen. (Even if I do stink!)
Yes! This true for people with physical disabilities in general. While the law says companies must make "reasonable accommodation", that still leaves many people unsupported. Working from home, where they don't have to deal with office equipment, layout, and furniture tuned for the "average" person is a huge boost to productivity.
I've tried a bunch of online whiteboard tools to design stuff (where stuff could be system architecture, UI, a business process, whatever), and nothing beats a whiteboard + post-its. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, it's possible, and I'd love to have some great counter-examples. Until then, I think that teams that can meet up in person will, on average, win over those who can't.
Other days I just have long list of individual tasks that I want to get through without being distracted. On those days I'd love to just work from home, have space to dramatically crash on my bed to think about things, go for walks, etc.
With these two things combined I think the hybrid approach is probably going to win out, either where employees can use their own judgement when to WFH, or maybe having a system around particular days of the week.
I think it has to do with expressiveness. Mice + online whiteboarding tools are always a hassle, and are far far less expressive than just using your hands to draw shapes/words on a whiteboard. I don't really think online tools can replicate this process because of how hands-on it is. It's the same reason it's harder to draw on a WACOM vs. a piece of paper.
Being able to quickly draw some things that may or may not make sense, and then have someone else quickly draw on top of what you drew, and then sharing those ideas, is really hard to replicate online.
I don't think any of this is an argument against true WFH, I just think you'd have to change your process to accommodate the lack of interactive whiteboarding. RFPs + doc reviews + (for really big projects) in person quarterlies are definitely good enough, to me.
"Being able to quickly draw some things that may or may not make sense, and then have someone else quickly draw on top of what you drew, and then sharing those ideas, is really hard to replicate online."
This is exactly what ShareTheBoard is aiming to deliver. The last piece of the puzzle are digital annotations - those will be added in July.
Please take a look and share some notes. I'm curious if our solution scratches the itch!
For me, a hybrid system combines the worst aspects of both worlds. I think employees should get clear commitments on WFH days so they can decide if they want to move out of the city.
For example, I wouldn't mind moving from my apartment in central London to a commuter town to have a garden and dedicated home office. But that would only be possible if days in the office are limited.
11 x 17 inch paper is also pretty useful (the next size up from 8.5 x 11 paper).
Unlike a whiteboard, you can prepare 11 x 17 inch paper ahead of time and bring it to a meeting. Including carrying all those random post-it notes in some weird order that you made up.
For you Europeans out there... that'd be roughly A3 sized paper.
robbie-c, checkout our solution to the remote whiteboard situation (And please share some feedback): https://sharetheboard.com
We too are not fans of "online whiteboards." Instead, we're looking for ways to bridge the great offline tools around us with the powerful online/digital tools we use everyday. Our work is "hybrid" already - it's weird that our tools have not been.
Anyway, please check it out and share some notes. Happy to answer any questions you may have too.
Two days at the office every two weeks is my new regimen, and it's the best of both world for me. I can afford to live pretty far of a big city, and a 3 hour train commute is just easy.
People are not homogenous, and that includes both managers and employees. I’ve been working remote for the majority of 2.5 years now and I’m okay with it but it’s not great. Some coworkers absolutely lost empathy when they stopped seeing other people in person and I’m sure managing them is a struggle and the transition there has been awkward to say the least. Some are seemingly more productive but it’s not clear to be something which is sustainable/reliable because it’s not clear if they are more productive per hour worked or just working more hours because they didn’t have anything better to do.
In short, I can’t exactly blame managers wanting to return to prior conditions to reduce the level of uncertainty, especially if the last year has been a mixed bag. I do think most people I know want to return to a hybrid model but there was already a significant part-time WFH culture before the pandemic (1-2 days a week). moving to WFH 2-4 days a week is probably where it will end up.
I hope This is where it ends up. Not in some "One size fits all" solution, but management doing it's job and looking at the individual output of the contributors and asking what they prefer. Ostensibly, this is why our work places is stacked so tightly with middle management, in order to use "micro-management" not as a big brother hammer, but as a tool to help makers produce better and more comfortably. Doubtful, but one can hope.
"I can't let me team work from home, they might not work hard."
"Maybe you should work to improve what you measure and how you encourage feedback. It is normally a good idea to have ways to tell if people are doing a good job for what you are paying them to do."
Measuring this stuff is really, really hard. If you're a manager who's non-technical it's almost impossible.
No-one is saying that you can't slack off while at the office, or that you are guaranteed to slack off if you're working from home, but I think the discussion would be better if some of the more rabid pro-remote people acknowledged that for a lot of people there is a big difference.
In the office:
- You're limited in what slacking options are available
- You're surrounded by coworkers who at least act as though they mostly work which can be motivating
- You know your boss is around and could stop by, so you don't want to do something too outlandish
At home you could go play your xbox for 8 hours while responding to DMs, and then say "investigated the bug, think I made some progress" during stand-up and in many places get away with that for a very, very long time.
I don't think some lighter version of this is that uncommon. Sure, you can take the position that it's managements responsibility to figure this out and fire you but understand that this type of thing is why many companies are against remote, especially with how vehemently most developers reject any form of tracking.
> Sure, you can take the position that it's managements responsibility to figure this out and fire you but understand that this type of thing is why many companies are against remote, especially with how vehemently most developers reject any form of tracking.
The position to take that leads not just to a successful wfh environment, but a great work environment in general is to not worry about “slacking off”. People are either producing results, or not. Especially in software development, developers will have spurts of great productivity and plenty of downtime. Trust, freedom and positive motivation are the keys to success.
There are hard metrics, with time you see who fixes bugs and codes new stuff. For those who do less, you can still measure their engagement - how many questions and ideas they have, how they interact with their mentors, what are they motivated to do next… After some times, a pattern is clearly identifiable. And if someone slacks and still bring results, then what is to worry about? What’s sure if that people output varies, so don’t jump to conclusions too early (which goes back to my statement “after some time”…). Someone might just be tired or overworked. Which goes to the last point - for the people I know, they all seem to work more from home, not less. I think when people go back to the office and the happy hour and the commute, there’s going to be a fun drop in productivity.
A non-technical manager who can somehow do his tech job unburdened by having to understand technology to me sounds just like a non-administrative programmer who can somehow do his tech job unburdened by any administrative tasks such as issue tracking or planning.
How does that even work? How can one be 'non-technical' when they are managing people who produce technical output? Is it not key to managing this situation that one understands what is being done to at least some degree? And if one understands to some degree then one is not 'non-technical' I would say. If understanding is lacking; it can be learned.
Things don't take unexpectedly longer all the time. No, you can not make this judgement based on a single week, or even a single month. That's true whether the employee is remote or not.
I agree completely and that's my point. Evaluation is hard.
Separately from that, many people believe having people be in office leads to a higher chance of them doing work because the alternatives are much less enticing.
Things take as long as they take. Certainly, they will take longer if a “non technical manager” is cracking the whip on the team.
Hire good people, managers included. Keep trust high. Keep motivation high and keep autonomy high and I assure you software will get produced at a high quality.
Software development is a high leverage creative field. You want to maximize for developer flow, creativity and comfort.
Not everyone can afford or attract top level developers. Saying Keep motivation high and keep autonomy high and I assure you software will get produced at a high quality. is handwaving some extremely hard problems, especially if you're not working on an exciting problem and can't afford $200K salaries.
You didn't really answer the question. Say I'm a non-technical manager and I suspect one of my employees is slacking off, they just respond with "oh, the load router was misconfigured, luckily I caught it in time. I'll need to hot patch it, it will probably take another 2 weeks" what do I do?
If you can’t afford to pay for good developers, then you shouldn’t expect good software to be written quickly. That’s something only good developers can accomplish.
I think what you want is not possible. More process, monitoring… is only going to slow down your development.
I also think if a developer manager is going to be non-technical that they should be able to demonstrate extraordinary developer relation skills. Otherwise, what are you paying them for?
If you require good developers and managers with "extraordinary developer relation skills", and do manage to hire them out of wherever they worked before and fire all that don't satisfy that requirement, where do all the average developers and average managers work? Picking out only the best people is something that a particular company can choose to do, but it can't be a recommendation for the whole industry - what do we do with the other half of the tech workforce? We need reasonable processes that work somewhat well for most developers and most managers.
I would argue that software is too complex to be created by non-experts. This is why so much of the software ever created is garbage. There is no magic wand or process that will ever turn an average team into a unit that can produce great software.
The real answer of course is to pay more to hire better developers. You may even need to pay “hazard pay” if your software is boring enough.
From the perspective of the whole industry there's no such thing as "hire better developers" - if one company does that, then all it means that the "better developer" moves from company A to company B, and an "average developer" moves from company B to company A. It's an almost-zero-sum game - it's an appropriate mechanism to assign better(more expensive) developers to more important jobs and average or weaker developers to less important jobs, but it doesn't influence (in the short term) the total quantity of "better developers" available, that's achieved only by education and training (and immigration, and overseas outsourcing). "Hazard pay" means that you attract a developer to work on your boring software, but they quit working on someone else's boring software. It's not satisfactory to answer questions of "how should developers work" and "how should developers be managed" just with respect to top developers working in top places, they need to be answered with respect to median developers working on median tasks.
Your answer, including "The real answer of course is to pay more to hire better developers" and "software is too complex to be created by non-experts" is essentially saying that only a portion of the current developers should be writing code at all. Okay, so let's assume all the companies hire only "better developers" and everyone else gets pushed out of the industry - but there's not enough developers as is, so what do we do with half as many developers? Writing half as much software is not really an option.
I think we continue doing what we always do: write mountains of terrible code. My argument is that it would be less terrible if you at least put yourself in the mindset of good development, and to me that means not obsessing over “catching someone slacking off”.
I also will believe we have a real developer shortage when dev pay and exec pay are more closely aligned. As it is, I see a lot of room to pull from exec salaries to pay for devs (which would be required if there was a shortage).
I think you have a very idealized picture of the software industry. There are absolutely cases where more process helps keep things on track and increase overall productivity.
Mainly that people are good at different things so I wouldn't want to compare two people on only one task. I don't really see how that interjection is particularly relevant for the point I'm making though.
Okay then what do you compare people on? If you're not comparing them against other people who can do the same job...
The point you made is that you think it's only a fair comparison if you can clone the same person. Which is simply false unless your determination of a person's value is dependent upon that person rather than upon their output.
There's a lot of vested interest in making people go back to the office. First, in large corporations, there's an entire army of middle managers that essentially do nothing but political machinations, micro-managing, and are the very definition of "market inefficiency." This has been accepted as a necessary evil of mega-corps but remote work threatens this delicate balance.
Second, there's also a lot of external pressure that pushes the office building as a bastion of productivity. From commercial real estate landlords to agents to contractors: many livelihoods are reliant on the exorbitant inefficiencies of office real estate. I remember when I was working for Edmunds.com, our new offices were better than Google's (the company spared no expense on the suspended rotating Corvettes[1] and free delivered lunches). But just a few years later (I had quit a year prior), over 100 employees were laid off[2], including several friends. Their jobs may have been secure had it not been for the $XX million dollar "new office" project that mostly served as an Instagram photo op.
In short, I think the argument in posts like this is oversimplified. It's not just "are people more productive from home?" -- the research has already been done on this, and we've all just been unwitting Guinea pigs for over a year now. The answer is a resounding "yes!" -- but that's hardly the only consideration.
You’re right on just about everything, especially the external pressures that come with a fancy office.
After 10 years of writing software, I’ve realized that being in an office is the opposite of productive when it comes to coding. The office is where your more career driven peers climb the hierarchy through soft skills, currying favors with each meeting and business lunch.
This might sound a little like a brag but I was pretty good at playing that game. Doing it remotely is a bit harder, but it’s possible if you’re especially power hungry. Honestly though, it was stressful and not even all that fulfilling after rising up to engineering manager.
Just getting to write code without bad managers who negatively affect my mood is all I’ve ever wanted, and I think there’s a lot of folks on this site that feel the same way.
> Doing it remotely is a bit harder, but it’s possible if you’re especially power hungry.
The entire problem is that the set of people that are good at the online game is not the same as the physical game, thus the people that already got the power by playing the physical one will do anything to stop changing the rules.
I have worked at a few places that oppose remote work, middle management and leadership at these places have some common traits:
- They are control freaks. They feel the need to control their employees beyond their body of work, they want to control their lives. Useless "team bonding events" and intrusive behaviour are to be expected.
- They are very bad at minding their own business. These people often have a mix of extroversion, lack of self awareness, and a frivolous personality. They will interrupt developers and other knowledge workers and they couldn't care less about the thousands of €/$ that they waste, missed deadlines, etc. Ironically these are the people whose strong point is supposed to be their soft skills.
I've run my company remotely since inception, I hate the idea of making people commute for free.
But one thing I've struggled with since growing to a size where the number of employees is more than I can keep mental track of is measuring individual performance and success.
Can anyone share any resources on how to handle that? What sort of metrics can one use to realistically measure the performance of a developer or designer where work consists of changing requirments & lots of back and forth? How to handle employees who seem to be working low hours or slacking off? How to reward those which have been working efficiently & productively? Any advice or experiences will be appreciated.
One of the few good parts of scrum is to have developers judge difficulty before assigning work. It’s not going to be completely accurate so 800 vs 900 units over a few months is probably meaningless. However, very large differences are a sign of problems as are code quality issues etc.
At a more basic level measuring value created vs what you pay someone is far more important than measuring hours worked.
If you can't keep it all in your head then you could type it in a file. But sounds like you may need another manager or lead or two to help with tracking success. The other thing you can do is track team success based on project.
You would not want to use metrics but rather knowledge of the actual effectiveness of the programmer. Evaluating this requires someone with programming knowledge who can see first-hand what their code is and what they accomplish on the project.
Again look at the work output rather than your guesses about their hours. If they are accomplishing their tasks then they are not slacking off. If they are not accomplishing their tasks, make sure they have motivating work and autonomy. Having covered all of the above, the next step if you really have a problem is a serious warning and probably just firing them if/when they don't radically change their behavior which is somewhat unlikely to occur.
Delegate. Delegate that supervision of some people to someone else. That's what middle management is for - there's a limit on how many direct reports you can effectively handle; someone does need to "keep mental track of is measuring individual performance and success", but above a certain number (whatever that is for you personally) you can't be that someone for everyone in your company.
Please don’t “test” to see if people are slacking when they’re wfh. Successful wfh requires a high degree of trust. Everyone benefits from that increased trust. It’s an unspoken upside of wfh.
> Do they deliver what is expected of them?
If the answer to this question is “yes”, then congrats! You have a great team and shouldn’t waste your energy (and their well-being) worrying if they are working hard or not.
I'd be willing to flex a little and work a little longer to get more done short term for a cause, but if that became the new norm then I've just taken a pay cut and that's not an ok approach to it. A manager can always keep asking for more. That sounds like greed and costly employee turnover.
This is hard. Developers set expectations. How would a non-engineer manager have any idea if something should take hours vs days? Most managers ask engineers to estimate.
On the flip side, comparatively, it is much easier to compare performance vs other engineers working on the same project. At least for outliers.
Maybe change the scope you assess, and dive if you see problem. Or find a way to create smaller team, and delegate to the team lead the appreciation? Those are my usual ways of assessing teams when they grow too big.
Don’t forget also that the bigger the team, the harder it is to manage, so splitting is always a good options!
In addition to what others have said my advice would be to shift focus from individuals (component-level) to teams and the broader organization (system-level).
> You might also want to learn how to handle your kids while working from home.
Work was a respite from home. Then came WFH and remote-learning. "Just figure things out" smacks of privilege. For starters, (almost) no one plans to be a single parent.
I can sympathize with WFH with kids being challenging and even needing a change in norms if it continues, but I'm not sure how it quite applies to single parents in this context. If the single parent is working in an office, then they would need to figure out daycare for their children. If they WFH, they could still use the same daycare, or even save the money of daycare if they take on the burden of taking care of the children at home while working.
Unless there was an underlying assumption that the office provided daycare that I missed. Or if this was more toward remote learning than remote work.
Also, If the child is old enough to care for themselves at home, I don't see the issue of being in or out of office.
> If they WFH, they could still use the same daycare, or even save the money of daycare if they take on the burden of taking care of the children at home while working.
Depending on age, caring for kids is a full-time job. Perhaps even 1.25-1.5 full time jobs for 12-24 month olds. And even in those blissful moments when you don't need to be doing something specifically to care for them, they are either making noise or your brain is "on call" and splitting it's attention on work-and-watching-out-for-kid. It's hard.
Luckily they sleep outside of work hours so parents can rest or catch up on work.
It's a soft thing. "I can't, I have to be in the office" gave you an out. I spoke with a coworker who is expected to still make dinner every night because she is home during every day. There are other situations where you don't want some flexibility because it's not an option you want to openly turn down. It's complicated, buh coming into an office gave an equal slate with everyone else there. It gave boundaries for those with trouble establishing their own.
This all seems to boil down to "we should work in the office because some people have personal and family issues". You mentioned privilege, I would consider those who are able to set company policy based on their own personal and family problems as the ones who are privileged.
I get what the author is going for but agile, scrum, process, and such are ephemeral helicoptering.
When the outputs are socially restricted, it’s not as if work from home is enabling free thought and novel productive agency.
IMO it’s merely step 1 to on a long path ending the aristocratic control of productive output. Somehow what we do has no value unless they can own and speculate about its financial value.
I see no merit in emotional grifting by a minority. That’s the binding we need to question. Not the middle manager who is aristocratic in title only.
Privus lex should be universal. Currently it clearly favors those with financial control of the planet.
I think this is something that society can adjust to and be better off for it. People would have to be more intentional about meeting new people (seeking out meetups or whatever), but the results are likely to be better.
I find people just want to drink at home alone and watch Netflix. Good friends I had unworn for 20-odd years. WFH I imagine many will drink themselves to an early grave.
And intentional about exercising (as opposed to walking to BART or even directly to work for 20 mins), and intentional about eating right (instead of hopping over to Mixt Greens for a complex and healthy salad). And intentional about their work area actually being healthy (adequate sun exposure, free of radon in the case of a basement office). On and on and on.
There is no way to guarantee all of this stuff for remote workers. The US was already becoming too isolated. I just don't understand all the optimism about people just figuring this stuff out, or even companies being able to help from a distance, at all. We're in for a ton of downstream problems.
> There is no way to guarantee all of this stuff for remote workers.
That seems like a non sequitur to me.
Are you expecting the employer to guarantee this stuff? To police an employee's exercising, eating, and meeting people? (Some degree of policing healthiness of workspace seems reasonable, but it can very easily go overboard...)
If resources are made available to help people become more intentional about these things, why would they help people working in an office more than people working from home?
Exercising is much easier if you aren't stuck on a train/in a car on the freeway for an hour every morning and evening.
Eating right is much easier when you have the extra time (and energy) to make a fresh home-cooked meal some or all evenings.
Meeting people is easier when you have the freedom to choose where you live based on where you would prefer, rather than being stuck living within 1-3 hours' drive from a specific office building.
Even having a healthy work area is easier when you have the freedom to design it yourself, rather than having to be in exactly the same cost-efficient cubicle as 999 other employees.
If we can make working from home a norm—for those who want it, for companies for whom it makes sense—a lot of these things can be improved.
You mean people will have to take more responsibility for all aspects of their lives, without an employer helping them? You've convinced me, that's an unacceptable outcome, let's shove everyone back in offices.
Sarcasm aside, this was already my situation before the pandemic, just due to not making real friends at work. It takes work, but not that much. Each individual is ultimately responsible for their wellbeing, because they're the only ones who can be. Any help from their employer (if they even have one, e.g. not a freelancer) is a bonus.
Most Americans drive to work. Most people will eat better at home (with plenty of their own groceries to cook) rather than at work (where they either have to prep ahead of time, or eat out). And I've literally never seen a single room in a house with less lighting than any of the offices I have ever worked in.
And if people want to work in an office... let them? I'm not sure why everyone hears remote work and thinks "oh great, businesses will just not have an office at all". ???
Well, there's some merit to that last objection. Hybrid remote/local workplaces have a pretty poor track record w.r.t. making sure the remote portion has equal participation, opportunities, etc. IMO that will be the real challenge.
> Once you pass your 20s, your exposure to strangers diminishes greatly
Could it be, at least partly, caused by having to commute to the office? When you work from home, it becomes so much easier to pick up a hobby and meet new people.
The two fronts of people shouting "Working at home" vs "I want the office" can be almost always summed up by how long the commute is:
* Working at home: commute longer than 30-45 minutes.
* Working at office: commute shorter than 30-45 minutes.
Like everything in life, people optimize for different things in life. Optimizing for a short commute is a choice that people can make if they want, likewise optimizing for a bigger home 60 minutes away.
I still have to hear somebody who lives at a short walk to the office, wanting to work from home, because it really wouldn't make any sense at all. Remove the commute from the equation, and the office is superior in any possible way: socially, economically, mentally. Now if they were to move 60 minutes away, I would understand why they would want to work from home.
It's all a function of commute, which in and by itself is a choice in our highly paid industry.
There are a lot of reasons to prefer one over the other, and dismissing it as being "obviously" based on one specific factor is unhelpful, and likely to leave you with a skewed view of the situation.
Personally, I live 5 minutes' drive (or 25 minutes' walk) from my office (and on the other two divides, no kids, and distinctly introverted). I love working at home, because it means I get to eat lunch with my family every day, pet my cats when they come over to see me, and take care of random household chores that it's often a bit too much to always cram into the weekend. But I also love that I can go into the office easily any time it's helpful to do so—and I'm expecting to be walking to work again at least a day or two a week this fall.
But while I'm unquestionably part of the tech world, with my everyday work being basically a full stack developer, I'm not "in your highly paid industry", and I think it's a lazy and self-centered shortcut to think of everyone who works in tech—or, worse, everyone who has a choice between working from home or working from the office—as being part of Silicon Valley culture or among the small fraction of Americans lucky enough to be making six figures.
Look outside the techbro culture, look outside the cities, look outside the high-income bubble you're clearly stuck in, and you'll see a lot of people whose life experience and reasons for doing things look very different than what you're used to and expecting.
> Optimizing for a short commute is a choice that people can make if they want
It's a choice until your office moves or your job changes (and you had to balance other priorities).
Mostly I agree with you though--if getting to the office is painless, then working from the office is great--except if you need to concentrate on your work. Any task that needs focus will take 2-3x as long to accomplish in an open office.
To clarify; 20 minute walk, or 5 minutes of waiting for a 10 minute train ride (we don't have reliable signaling in my city, so hard to get to the train JIT).
What I find interesting about work from home and flexible working schedules is that it seems like we are no closer to understanding optimal policy now than 10 years ago. I've seen this discussed on HN over and over and over in the 13 years I've been registered here. A year of WFH transformation under COVID seems to not have broadened our understanding of it, but rather simply exposed more people to the overall debate.
Last week I watched the movie 'Nine to Five', which was released in 1980. In it, the characters were working toward equal pay and flexible work schedules. It was depressing to realize that for many people, what was considered radical in 1980 seems just as radical in 2021.
Better yet: you have to trust the people you hire. You're trusting them with your trade secrets, you're trusting them with your reputation and brand, you're trusting them with your customers' data... etc.
Working at home during the pandemic != remote working. Full stop. Remote working is not about never going to the office again and not seeing anyone on your team for incredibly long stretches of time. Remote workers are typically physically present with their coworkers several times per year - often for several days at a time. Smart companies will make those opportunities available for their fully-remote staff.
More logical than the appeal to tradition fallacy would be to say if one needs A, B and C to do the work D should not be required, D should not even be part of the conversation.
One need a place where one can work [at home] if one fails at that for whatever reason a remote place might be an option. Just like proper training for a job one has to organize that themselves.
I work a lot of night shifts. My employer doesn't provide a place to sleep during the day. Productivity is regularly hurt by peoples children, construction work etc etc Should the employer now provide office style bedrooms and expect everyone to sleep there?
The office primarily exists for clients and investors to marvel at the marble floors, the fancy decorations, the smoothly shaved men in expensive suits, the open floor plan and many other D type rituals that after examining the price tag can only be considered a cult.
Why not replace some of that with parents playing with their kids? Or should that be: Show kids how work is done? (if we for laughs pretend nothing else is important) Which kids would end up more productive?
There is an expression in the Netherlands: "Dad is the man who cuts the meat on Sunday".
I do feel sympathetic to the families with two working parents and kids in school when the Inside Times came upon us.
Some don't have a dedicated office space at all, those that do often don't have it set up for two people to work (dueling Zoom meetings are a problem). Most people in the US can't afford or even get enough bandwidth to support two simultaneous video conferences, much less three or more if there are kids doing remote school.
Don't forget that with parents in the office and kids at school, lunch was pretty easy to take care of if you could afford to eat out, and often dinner would be scattered among friends. Now you've got to figure out food for the whole crowd. Ordering delivery gets expensive.
That's the skeuomorphic way of working from home, of course. While the article is on point, it doesn't offer any suggestions for new ways to work. Where are the Forbes, WSJ, CNBC, Bloomberg, etc articles on embracing remote work?
> ?!?! How much bandwidth do you think it takes???
I'm not OP, but latency matters more than bandwidth in this case.
More specifically, the variance of latency matters. It's easy to grow accustomed to a constant 500ms delay, but it's incredibly difficult to deal with the random delays you get when you put a packet-switched network atop a high latency physical layer.
Yeah, I didn't even go to latency. One of my co-workers clearly had a lot of variance in latency to his home and it was noticeable. It might not matter much in an hour-long meeting where one or two people are doing most of the talking, but in a short meeting between 2-3 people working together it can really disrupt things and turn what could have been a 10-15 minute meeting of minds into a frustrating 20-30 minutes of "say again, you dropped out" and "I didn't get that, my stream froze for a second".
It's not the download speed that's the problem, it's the upload.
For one person, the FCC definition[1] of "broadband" speeds of 3MB/s up are barely sufficient. The are lots of places that barely break that. Now get both parents and the kid, there are plenty of folks who can't do it[2]. Sure, they could watch, but they'd have to have their video off. Better hope that some program doesn't try to download an update.
We're all a bunch of relatively well-paid nerds here on HN, so we have better-than-average internet speeds. I'm still betting there's a portion of us living in the 'burbs who would struggle streaming more than 2 video conferences.
>But we are paying all this money for office space, I don't want to waste that.
let's rearrange office into gym, pub, strip club or something else and let's increase profits!
Anyway, my co-workers want hybrid approach, 1-2day office, rest home, with exceptions for ppl that have long commute (tiny minority) - they can 100% remote.
Work from home is great and should be kept as an option.
I am a little surprise though that noone mentions this option must be earned by trust and experience over time.
I'm pretty sure if this was a comment on HN it wouldn't meet the guideline standards, one snarky comment after another, "Stupid Reasons", "Sounds like you hire clowns".... The only reason this flies is that at this moment in time, it is the popular opinion. There is absolutely no empathy for any dissent for any reason and if you can't acknowledge the validity of any tradeoffs, I can't take you seriously. If this level of spin is necessary for getting your point across, you might want to reconsider your whole viewpoint.
>I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends.
Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being surrounded by smart people doing interesting work. For whatever reason, for some folks, exchanging Slack messages with those same smart people isn't similarly energizing compared to overhearing and jumping into interesting in-person conversations, etc. Maybe the tech giants need to be very accommodating to remote work in order to maintain their massive workforces, but I think a lot of typical companies could just say "we prefer being in-office" and find sufficient local folks to make that happen. That won't be for everyone. But there might be a sizeable enough cohort that performs better in the office that it'll be a good option for some companies.