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After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion:

* Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute.

* In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the dimension of "we know what we need to do" is actually pretty much orthogonal to the product, size of the company, tenure of the employees, etc. I've been in early stage startups with no PMF that nonetheless have strong product-centric leadership who can set down an unambiguous vision for what they believe needs to be done. And I've been in startups that have PMF yet have no vision, and everyone is standing around in their remote offices twiddling their thumbs on "what to build next".

For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2. I worked at Meta remotely for a year. My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.

TL;DR I think remote work is well set up for companies with leadership that resembles a benevolent dictatorship. I think if you are all-remote and your leadership is effectively "managerial" in nature, NGMI.

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

true.

> For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2

Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say?

No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO...

So your in-person experience is you booking a room just for yourself so you can video conference all those people who also booked a room for themselves.

Because every other team is in same situation, finding a meeting room is a challenge in itself.

Take the call from your desk then?

No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.

A lot of companies want the benefits of distributed teams, but also want to force everyone to come to offices and do conference calls in meeting rooms instead of work remote.

It's mind boggling to me. All I can think is that there is a lot of ego tied up in offices for some reason.

This was the first thing I noticed when I started working about a decade ago. Endless conference calls while people extolled the benefits of in-person interaction which wasn't even happening. As a result, I now have a healthy amount of cynicism about advocacy of office work. I take ICs who favor it at face value when they say it works better for them, but clearly, many of the most vocal advocates in management don't even care if any of the supposed benefits are realized.

Wall Street is pressuring everybody for Return to Office to shore up their collapsing commercial real estate holdings.

Not just wall street. All of the governments, and thus their budgets, where this real estate resides are completely dependent on property taxes and the overall commerce in the area which will collapse if people (and then secondary small businesses) just simply aren't there anymore.

Budget collapses would be karmic, given how many local governments court commercial real estate while neglecting residential real estate by not encouraging (or actively fighting) the development of new homes. Too many city halls decided that housing people who work in their city is someone else's problem, and would be quite happy with 0 new residents within city limits if it meant all new developments are commercial.

And to further reduce headcount through silent layoffs.

Because people with "people skills" need people in the office to justify their existence. It is beyond ego for them, it is about their survival.

Working for a FAANG right now and since RTO was mandated, I noticed that our team have been spending ~5 mins before the beginning of the meetings finding a room and setting up the audio/visual system for conference calls with other teammates across the country. This is for a company that has a lot of office space in its birth town and has HQs in a few other cities. A couple of teammates (out of 8 total) privately told me that they hate the RTO.

I personally prefer fully remote because I hate the distraction in the open office plan and associated pains like having to find meeting rooms, having to share restrooms with others (I admit this is just my personal pet peeve), and not being able to avoid distraction when I am in the zone for working. Most of all, I don't like the commute (I have to commute 1 hour each way, so everyday, I am spending 2 hours; when I worked from home, I started early and end up working an extra hour or two because I don't have to commute; these days, I try to arrive at 8-9am and leave by 5-6pm to beat the traffic and once I get home, I don't do any work). I consider quitting someday soon and am waiting for my wife to complete her training. Once she has done that, we will move to a place where she can find work, and I will quit my FAANG job for a fully-remote one (sure, my income will take a small hit, but quality of work life is more important for me).

If I went into "my" office I probably wouldn't recognize a single person at this point and I'm not sure there's anyone who I regularly work with who is assigned to that office, much less goes in.

>No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.

Individual offices have not been the norm for everyone at large companies maybe ever? Cubicles are "better" but not that much better. (Source: I had one for years--both full-height and then shorter.) And the fact is that lots used to spend a lot more time on the phone than they generally need to today given other communication channels. When I've been in an office I absolutely make calls from my desk and everyone else does too.

People taking calls from their desks is the worst post COVID office etiquette change I’ve noticed.

Sure this happens but it’s not like it’s everyone. For example right now 80% of the people I collaborate with are in the same office as me. So it’s still noticeably better to come in the office.

The downside is it’s hard to get actual coding down because of all the “collaboration”. So my ideal would be 1-2 days in office to meet and then 3-4 days to code ins peace at home.

> No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.

But at the same time it's perfectly okay to just come up to your busy colleague and pester them about something, because collaboration.

Establishing working relationships and setting boundaries is a professional skill

It isn’t okay, but there’s enough nonverbal cues you can use to determine whether someone is busy at their desk.

I can be just as busy at a watercooler away from my screen. That’s not the point. I think that all of the arguments in this conversation, whether they are valid or not, are not at all relevant to the purpose of the conversation.

I have this wild guess that if a significant number of companies cut their leases on all those monstrous office spaces that are kept being built all the time, it could hurt some people with important companies a fucking lot, and the ripple effect could prove to be immense and disastrous.

Spice must flow, and the fact that there are parties interested in those office spaces running and bringing money in has diddly to do with whether there are any actual productivity advantages of bringing the office workers back to the office or not.

For enough dough you can buy enough experts and pundits and other talking heads that will overflow the information space with thinkpieces and analyses that go either way.

Meanwhile, the only actual productivity boost is when you have a private office with a closable door within walking distance from your living place. But it’s not like anybody would give you _that,_ plebeian.

> No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO...

I don't think this is really that common. I spent a decade in MTV on a wide variety of teams. I had VCs with people in different locations a handful of times and I never had one by myself. And getting deep focus with those people was so valuable that it was easier to just go to NYC, MUC, or SYD once a quarter than it was to jump on a call.

Even FAANGs do not apply perfect hashing to distribute teams across their office locations (well, for all I know, Google does, but the one I work at doesn‘t). And often it already helps if some of the team is co-located.

My best experiences working remotely—both during the pandemic and with folks in other locations before that—has been with research-oriented work. The reason? We had the time and space to work and communicate the way that made sense to us. We had plenty of shared pair/group sessions to work out design ideas and experiments, iterate on the system, debug trickier issues... etc. Everything else we could do well asynchronously. Since this was longer-term, more speculative work, we didn't have to worry about tickets or product/management breathing down our necks every day.

On the other hand, the projects that suffered the most were the ones where folks had less scope and autonomy. If you can't unilaterally make decisions for anything that spans more than a day, and you're forced into some ticket-oriented process where everyone has "their" task to do, communication naturally suffers. If you're all in the office, there's a bit more slack to talk quickly and informally outside your immediate silo; remotely, this takes more intentionality, so the friction imposed by your culture and process has an outsize effect.

So my conclusion has been, pretty much, the opposite: remote works better when people have real scope, independence and autonomy. If engineers and small teams can make decisions over longer time-frames, they'll have the space to adapt and work effectively. They might need somebody to set the example or foster the right habits, but it's fundamentally healthy and effective. The frictions with remote work come up when it's thrust against a less flexible culture that makes it harder for folks to adapt.

I think you're using different phrasing to describe the same effect. Autonomy and the org knowing what it wants to do/needs to do go hand in hand. In your long-term speculative research oriented work, you had autonomy because you knew what you were working on - not what it was in terms of tickets per se, but it sounds like you knew your scope and your objectives.

At 10+ person org sizes, most people can't have long-term scope and autonomy if the management don't know what it wants/needs, since they're just going to change their mind in a week or two. Once those decisions are made you can start delegating responsibility for execution.

The easy thing to do is to blame this all on poor management, but I think that's too pat. I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem... and one that's often an ongoing, Sisyphean task, where high-bandwidth, low-latency communications are incredibly useful.

I agree. Research is ideal for remote work, since you are effectively your own manager and by definition there is no specific vision that needs to be worked toward - you are discovering that vision yourself. It's the literal ivory tower. In my experience if you give non-R&D engineers and small teams total autonomy they will all end up building great solutions to problems that are slightly different than the problem you actually needed solved.

> I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem...

Agreed, don't mean to downplay how difficult good management is. I think the key thing I've realized is that in a remote environment, bad management is so much more obvious and detrimental to the employee and organization. In office, if your manager doesn't communicate vision/objectives well you can always tap the shoulder of the guy next to you, or discretely pick your skip's brain in the break room. The rest of the organization can pick up the slack. But that's much harder remotely.

Do you write a blog? Your experience resonates with mine.

No, but maybe I should start one.

I think you articulated a sentiment a lot of people have very well. For the non-decision makers, there is a strange dichotomy I see with coding.

Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge. In my experience, having such barriers to doing these things makes new hires much less likely to reach out and put themselves into the situations where they can learn, no matter how much they are told it’s ok to bother people.

To me, this is why remote works so much better at smaller companies with less bespoke tooling and legacy code. There’s no better way to learn than in person and there is a huge productivity boost when doing so. That said, personally, I’m willing to deal with the lower productivity in my work life to get the higher productivity in my real life by being able to do laundry during the day and not sit in traffic.

> ’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge

For me, it's the exact opposite.

Before the pandemic, I always found the practice (and even the idea!) of "pairing" quite off-putting. You're standing behind someone, breathing in their body odor, awkwardly sweating next to each other, bending over if you want to type something... a really weird experience.

Remotely, none of those apply! You each get your own keyboard, your own screen, your own mouse. Both of you are 100% comfortable in your own environment. Using decent software helps as well, I recommend Tuple which makes sharing the mouse & keyboard seamless.

Pair programming doesn't involve anyone standing behind anyone else or bending over. I think you're describing a sort of "hanging around and kind of doing some programming together", which is probably a more common practice than pair programming, and a rather under-documented one!

Normal people get showers and wear deodorant dude.

How do you feel about sitting next to someone at a bar?

I'm guessing you've never actually spent 8 hours or so in a stuffy office doing hard/stressful work with people who also take walks (e.g. to go get lunch and get back to the office in 30 allotted minutes).

Also some people wear too much deodorant.

I agree, none of this is an issue if working with clean, civilised people... a few feet away. It can quickly become uncomfortable if you're too close to each other.

I'm struggling to identify how it's not glaringly self-evident that the person you're replying to would not enjoy sitting next to people at bars.

At least not people incapable of donning deodorant and a fresh shirt. One would hope the bartender would solve that problem too though.

Ha, fair.

You can just plug 2 keyboards and two mice into a pc for in person pairing

I am at the point where remote works better for me for a lot of what are ostensibly team / collaborative activities.

For example, incident handling has been lot more efficient for us with the team looking at different aspects and sharing on a call/huddle than what we often used to naturally do (involving a gaggle forming around 1 person's computer with different people offering suggestions of varying usefulness).

Demos and knowledge sharing I find also work better remote now than they used to in person now that people are used to the tooling.

I slightly prefer onboarding remote also, but that is because I'm the kind of person who gets distracted by wondering if I'm sitting too close or maybe I have not enough or too much deodorant etc.

The only thing that suffers remotely for me at this point is engagement. There's something about physically being with other people that makes their problems and desires seem more important to me, and I don't have any good hacks for giving more of a &"@$.

> Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree.

I certainly don't agree at all. Home is where all the distractions are. Home is where i can drift off to make a cup of tea and end up spending an hour reading the newspaper without anyone noticing.

I think it would be useful to understand the distribution of peoples' feelings and experience about this. I have seen so many remote work enthusiasts just taking it as read that everyone prefers remote work because they do.

Sure, I get that. But the office has just as many if not more distractions. Much easier to get pulled into a conversation while getting tea at the office.

Yes, I am going through this right now as a new hire onboarding to a boutique codebase. As soon as you are 100% reliant on internal docs, you realize just how large the gap is between them and mainstream OSS libraries.

I think a decent middle-ground between "Document everything" and "Organically relay all information" is to just write "doc-stubs". Just a list of everything out there with no real content. It gives people a jumping off point to ask questions and lets them know what they don't know.

I’m also a big fan of having new people document things they wish they had known starting out.

> t’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something

This feels like a tech choice issue to me. I'm constantly on calls with either slack/pop sharing where anyone can draw on the shared screen, or shared coding session like in vscode where you can see each other's cursors. It... works the same for me as pointing at the screen. Just without it being awkward when it's more than 2 people getting to cram into a a small space.

I don’t think in-person is better if you don’t know what you need to build. I’ve experienced teams where people were totally without direction despite being in-person. I think in-person just makes it easier to look like you are busy when you have no direction, and remote lays the fact bare.

Agree that though it's better in person during brainstorm / discussion, it isn't decisive. When people are having zero ground during the meeting, it won't provide any meaningful result no matter what you do. And if it resulting in something, usually it'll be bad.

What I found to be the best approach is one or two people already established a concept at what to make or at least the image of it, and the discussion can move to the details and implementation plan. And that doesn't need to be in person

>Agree that though it's better in person during brainstorm / discussion

Yes, that's why before WHF, people really loved meetings and brainstorm sessions at work /s

In person during brainstorm discussion usually means endless time-wasting and bikeshedding.

> What I found to be the best approach is one or two people already established a concept at what to make or at least the image of it, and the discussion can move to the details and implementation plan.

This is exactly what I was getting at by referencing a benevolent dictatorship. When remote, it's just easier if one person is providing direction by fiat rather than trying to collect everyone's input and communally make a decision.

In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build..

Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then?

It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and millions of examples of projects from company offices that are awful.

The physical geography of the team is not an indicator of success.

Is your average company made of some of the most brilliant and driven and experienced people in the world in their fields? Do they have no actual business goals but a wide open field to just do something big and different and impactful? If so then literally nothing else matters except not getting in their way. But there's very few cases like this.

> Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then?

Stating that it’s possible is very different to stating which model might be more effective or faster.

Unfortunately we don’t have a parallel universe where torvalds lived on the same street as a bunch of other collaborators to compare

I bet if we talked to Torvalds about it, he'd have an incredibly strong opinion to share, and I don't have any difficulty guessing what it would be.

Indeed, searching for "Torvalds remote work" yields this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-l...

> Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."

> "If you spend hours in online meetings from home, instead of spending hours in meetings at the office like you used to, you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse."

> ...etc happened without a big office

while linux or git was created relatively sololy by a single person (at least at the beginning), i dont think you can call the internet a solo production.

I'm not calling any of them solo productions. Linux and the internet were both massively collaborative projects built by many people who met up maybe once or twice a year, and certainly not all of them at once ever. They were globally distributed. Being in an office together was not necessary for the success of those things, which were some of the hardest technical research projects ever, so I'm questioning if people really need to be in-person to make YouTube or GMail.

(I don't know the history of git, maybe that too though.)

>i dont think you can call the internet a solo production

No, although there were certainly co-located or nearby individuals and teams that contributed specific chunks--certainly parts that were hardware or depended on hardware.

> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

My anecdotal evidence is different.

I've spent the last 2 years building a large, complex, and ambiguous system working almost exclusively remote, and half of it from another continent. For the first year I never met a colleague in person.

However, all this time I have been working closely with another engineer. Both of us are senior and very tenured, got good rapport and were highly aligned and motivated. We were able to execute efficiently, sometimes spending hours huddling in Slack per day.

So my feeling is that remote works in some scenarios and not others, particularly involving new or junior engineers.

There are more conditions that pertain

Remote Work is better if

1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have problems with home life going to office to work can help with productivity.

2. Remote work is much better if you are a person who is motivated by love of what you are doing and you actually love what you are doing, if you start to not love what you are doing but you have not left the company yet etc. there can be some slight loss of productivity, not because intentionally goofing off so much but because like #1 above working remotely makes it harder to get focused on something one does for money and not love if you are a love focused worker.

Why does it have to be because some want to go in an office so we all do?

If you want to work in an office go work in one. Join a co-working space or if there is sufficient momentum have everyone who wants an office join the same one in your area.

But don’t force it on everyone. Let people choose. That’s the thing I hate about these conversations is it should just be personal choice for the individual. Make async practices and communication better and re-tool the culture if need be, but remote first thinking benefits office workers too.

That argument works the other way around too, either way you are asking others to accommodate your preference.

I think “let people choose” is the right idea at the “choose your job” or sometimes “choose your team” level.

There's objectively practices of team building, communication, knowledge sharing, collaboration (and other attributes of a positive work place) that work for both remote or in office folks equally well and drive a net benefit.

Some of them are

- Async communication. Embracing long form writing is huge here, as is dropping the expectation of "now" in regards to getting responses.

- Holistic documentation & discussions. Processes, cultural values (and what they really mean and are expected to be followed specifically) and really just about anything meant to be repeated over and over should be documented at length, and reviewed consistently. This useful to everyone and has the added benefit of storing historical context and discussion

- Work in the open, whenever appropriate. If people can see whats going on, they can see things that traditionally are the "in between" things. Engineers already do this (PRs come to mind) in alot of ways, but this should extend to decision making as well, whenever reasonably possible. This facilitates the above points too.

- For socialization, its important that people have several avenues to get to know their co-workers. I think this one is possibly the least understand part of it, but its more than just "random lunch with co-workers if you join this channel!" there are ways to do remote team building exercises, to setup meaningful interactions between teams and departments etc. For instance, a positive thing I've seen people do with remote first around this is having product and engineering have Q&A with each other once every 2 weeks to just talk about stuff, it doesn't have to be related to what is going on right now. It can even be non work related if that is fitting to the people at the time, but it exists to just share things with each other, talk through ideas etc.

Unfortunately, these are things that aren't common in the work place currently. Most companies that have remote workers right now haven't moved beyond the "message eagerly or start a call" phase.

It's perfectly reasonable to want a co-located team that you collaborate with/are social with/etc.

But if that's not the situation at the team/company level, you need to either figure out some compromise approach (like getting a co-working space or even just picking up some non-work social activities) or move on to an environment more in keeping with your preferences. At some point, if a situation just isn't to your liking, you should probably stop hitting your head against the wall.

I think that's what I was suggesting.

During the Covid lockdowns and everybody was forced to work from home, the single people in the team seemed to be the most depressed about the situation. Some of them were really eager to get to the office as soon as possible. The people with families were stressed if they suddenly had to homeschool their kids, but otherwise they were fine.

Of course if your spouse also works from home, it's important to have a home with more than a single room. Not everybody has that luxury.

There are more conditions that pertain

Remote Work is better if

1. You prefer remote work

This always gets to be such a dogmatic discussion that will to someone claiming anyone who likes working in an office has no social life.

It’s just a preference. Remote work is not overall objectively better than office work (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true). Office work is not the right choice (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true).

For an autonomous IC who does not need to lead or contribute to thinks like whiteboarding, strategy discussions, client visits, etc, that is true.

There are jobs where in-person is just better, full stop. Remote can be accommodated, but it is not always exclusively about what the employee prefers.

> There are jobs where in-person is just better, full stop

Well yeah a surgeon should be working in person, you got me there.

#1 can be solved by renting a co-working space if troubles at home are really that severe. I doubt that #2 is really any different than if you are unmotivated while in the office. If anything, one unmotivated employee in the office can more easily spread that lack of motivation to their co-workers.

>I doubt that #2 is really any different than if you are unmotivated while in the office

ok but I know from my own experience that #2 can be really different. And really I don't understand how anyone could doubt it - in the office if you are unmotivated you have a limited range of things you can do to pass the time. at home there is no limitation.

At some point in the office it becomes reasonable to just do the work and get it over with.

Why would you spend your own money renting office space somewhere and commuting there when you have a perfectly good office your company will pay for?

Because your rented coworking space could be closer to home for instance

> You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there

Not sure why this needs to be repeatedly brought up.. I mean it is called "home office" for a reason. If you don't have a real one, remote can suffer.. no surprise.

>Not sure why this needs to be repeatedly brought up

Not sure why you think a home office is going to solve marital problems or other issues that going into an office and being around other people might allow you to not focus on.

Aside from that then we can add inability to get a home office made to the list of things that can affect whether or not remote work is a good solution

Cos definition of of "home office" for me is a place where I can work reasonably and with focus.

Yes, even in "work office" that focus is not guaranteed, but even there martial problems or other issues will hit me. So yeah, still not sure why we need to bring this explicitly up again in discussion after discussion. You need a reasonable office to work, offices can suck - orthogonal to if home/remote/company.

> add inability to get a home office made to the list of things that can affect whether or not remote work is a good solution

Again, no-brainer, no home office no good solution? shrug

> So yeah, still not sure why we need to bring this explicitly up again in discussion after discussion.

Probably because the reality of remote working was set by the pandemic, which forced a huge number of people to switch to remote work. Remote workers with a proper home office suddenly were, and I think continue to be, a minority.

FWIW, my wife takes our home office and I work from the main room or our screened in porch, but she often will work alongside me. It’s not really a problem.

I’m much more productive working from home; my only qualms are that team cohesion and sense of shared mission seems lower than it has at in-person jobs I’ve had. That may not even be causal.

> * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute.

> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

This is why the other day I ranted about how my actual preference is in office but having a door that I can close. Realistically we shift between these two modes. In the first mode I need to reduce distractions and isolate myself. This is hard with slack and hard with an open office or cubicles. In person let's me even ignore slack as someone can knock on my door if it is urgent! But that's not all the time, so I open the door and communicate that it is collaboration and discussion phase.

I don't know why companies have become so allergic to doors. They are amazing and can let employees be in control of the chaos of work schedules. They'll know far better than anyone else if they're more productive that day/hour/minute in isolation or in collaboration. Micromanaging doesn't help, a door does.

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

In-person has benefits in those situations, but whether or not it's better varies a lot based on the person and the office. I find it VERY distracting to have people talking around me. As such, I get a lot less done when in an office, because I can't concentrate as well. When you add in the other negative (commute time, in person interruptions, etc), going into an office for work can far outweigh any benefits of being around the people you work with.

I suspect what your describing is less the cause but a symptom of the real case.

In my experience(i have worked from branch offices most my career) the differentiating factor is literacy, ie how comfortable/confident are the organization with recorded text vs private spoken word and the more the organization writes the more effective the remote staff will be.

And one of the side effect of a written culture is that a lot of the informal conventions/conversations become formal structure so the same level of top down planning can look very differently based on weather the culture for disseminating it is literate or oral.

> implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

I have a hard time grasping this one. Is it brainstorming ?

For things like pair programming or specification of a product, having separate screens and independent access to the same documents makes things a lot faster and efficient.

Same way meetings tend to go smoother all participants can access whatever data they need independently from the presenter, and move through the docs at their own pace.

Basically a mix of synchronous communication and access to all needed resources seems to me to perform better than IRL binding of two or more people looking at each other.

I wouldn't call it brainstorming. More like "alignment". Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are. You can do this quickly if you have an experienced and disciplined PM guiding the discussion, but most people don't, so they just have long conversations. Which works fine IRL, but it's very uncomfortable to be on a zoom call for more than about 45 minutes at a time.

> Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are.

This is a part that probably varies a lot individually...I'm a slow thinker, and have a hard time reacting to fully formed ideas thrown at me thrown at me over a table. The other side coming with fully prepared for the discussion, while on the receiving end you need to do your homework realtime also doesn't help.

If it's random brainstorming it doesn't matter a lot. If it's an actually important topics, it feels like a DDOS on your brain when you actually want to take time to understand the implications. Then sure, some situations require speed, but I don't see that many of them in day to day life. "What you think about moving to X framework for our metrics ?" can probably wait for 30 min. and not be a realtime exchange.

> it's very uncomfortable to be on a zoom call for more than about 45 minutes at a time.

I've finding these meetings way more comfortable in remote...someone can be rambling for as long as they need, the effect on everyone's productivity is that much reduced. Same for people who speak very slowly actually, it's a lot less stress IMO and easier to engage when paradoxically you don't need to be 100% looking at them in the eyes.

> have a hard time reacting to fully formed ideas thrown at me thrown at me over a table. The other side coming with fully prepared for the discussion, while on the receiving end you need to do your homework realtime also doesn't help.

That's the feature, not a bug. It gives the meeting initiator a better chance of steamrolling their way to approval.

Notice the difference between meetings where people share agendas and docs ahead of time vs those where you show up and they walk you through the doc.

My experience leading an older startup is that category two is hard to escape whether or not you’re working in person. It has more to do with the “Innovator’s Dilemma” - once a company has found product market fit and is generating profits, everything is fine-tuned for that purpose. The company’s reason for existing is to generate profits from that one thing that really worked out.

Some companies are able to add great new products over time, but I sense that it’s more common for companies to have one great play, after which they either die or merge with another to enjoy better economies of scale.

If you’re big enough and rich enough, you tend to burn a ton of money on internal research groups, but very little of what gets researched is ever a successful product. Doing this as a smaller organization is nearly impossible, which is why I think so many startups just exit rather than finding entirely new things to build.

How often are entire teams at the same building ? Like the other person mentioned - you're going to meet in conference rooms with video - this was norm pre COVID.

I would say biggest benefits of in office is spontanious meet/discussion, assisting less senior coworkers etc. If I have a heavy day of work to plow through alone I avoid the office. If I need to sync or work on something with others in-person beats all the tools.

Your experience matches mine, where yeah, it could work even in situations where it commonly fails if there was "just" better management... but... well, yeah.

EDIT: and so many of the challenges people are running into now are not new, either - companies were incentivized to make remote work work for two decades pre-Covid, and for a while pundits were all convinced that software jobs were all going away overseas as a result, but despite the salary savings the ROI just wasn't there for all but the most basic of work.

I don't think it's true. This whole office/in office/rto has to do with people being dishonest about why the rto needs to happen and being stuck romanticising the good old days.

There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold.

IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.

Not to mention that even in-person workplaces (especially at large companies) still involve plenty of remote interaction due to the global nature of the workforce. Plenty of Googlers being required to be in-office will actually be working alone in-office, with their teammates far away...

If this is true then there is no need to worry: companies with thriving WFH developers will surely overcome the stuck in the old ways ones. Not only their developers have same or greater performance due to constant thriving but their expenses will be much less so they will be able to offer better compensation and steal the talent from the in-office dinosaurs.

This is going to happen in the medium/long term.

The only reason big corporations have a chance of pulling this off is the overall state of the economy. Once we see recovery their RTO antics will fail if the shift is not completely done.

We will see. Has not happened in the past so I see a little reason to happen in the future.

That description of Meta sounds like a high level of disfunction that has nothing to do with remote or in person.

The only other place where I encountered such a "system" was in one (small) company, where the CEO's dress code did not include pants and I wish I never went there in the first place.

> "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute."

Hard relate. Had my first internship WFH at Big Tech during the pandemic. I had expected work to be more on the lines of: there's always a lot of work to be done, and people will let you know about that. Instead it was the opposite, exactly as quoted above.

While it meant I had more freedom, I would have preferred if someone just doled out concrete tasks to me. I felt a bit lost. But then again, grass is greener on the other side.

> You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.

OTOH, from personal experience working on-site hasn't really ever helped particularly well in that scenario (which I'mm all too familiar with.)

I totally agree.

I used to work for Amzn and the management was totally idiotic about remote work. We had to go to the office to be on call for datacenters 1000kms from the office. Makes perfect sense right?

In person makes no sense for any FAANG, because they are geographically distributed. All you do is come into the office to sit on video calls all day with people in other locations, unless you're at a very low level and your influence is very limited to just your team.

I see where you’re going with this but pretty much all L3s and L4s mostly deal with just their team. That’s more than 50% of the company if I’m not mistaken.

I'm curious if you've considered that there is a pretty major cost difference between the two options? (at least for the company) Would you conclude that In Person is much better , in excess of the additional costs ?

The cost difference is probably rather small. CoWorking spaces in large cities charge something like $500/desk/month which we can assume is a reasonable cost of office space. That comes out to $6k/year/employee. Google's median employee pay is around $300k so we're talking a 2% difference in cost.

This doesn't make OP's point invalid.

If you are talking about cost, then the only factor here is the market.

>If you are talking about cost, then the only factor here is the market.

Can you please expand? I'm not understanding.

Weirdly, companies don't seem to care about this kind of cost. I don't think I've ever seen "we're going remote first to save costs"?

More likely is the "prestige HQ" which is deliberately made more expensive than it needs to be for status.

That's the trend in commercial real estate - prestigious, luxurious, eye-wateringly expensive class A space is doing well, but the bottom has fallen out of the market for practical, cost-effective class B space:

https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/06/05/jeff-blau-to-cla...

I think that's only one of many models where remote work works out. The other that I've seen function well across many companies is remote work where team members are highly skilled and have a lot of freedom in choosing what to work on. This essentially lets every domain expert identify what the biggest pain points are in their field and then figure those out. You don't need top down dictatorship for this to work, but you do need a clear vision of where you want to be.

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

Or sharing a zoom session. Bonus is that I don’t have to commute to an office on another continent to engage in this second modality - more than half of my teammates are in other cities and I don’t see a benefit in the standing next to each other.

Tech pays Industrial Psychologists, I don't know why we don't put them to work on this.

I restarted my software career doing remote work. I didn't have a problem finding things to do because my responsibilities were clear (read: I had a good manager) and I was self-taught so I already had a muscle for seeking knowledge on my own.

I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is and how much you innately know about what things your role is responsible for which can be propped up or replaced by seniority. I also suspect that new grads don't have muscles for finding/seeking internal and external information on their own, which feels powerless. There's ways to solve all these things without treating all of these folks the same.

Frankly, I think these are all the problems you and I relate to, but what's really solved for the business by returning to an office isn't productivity or happiness. It's a real estate problem.

>I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is

I suspect the people on here who like to hate on managers either have a bad one or just don't realize how much crap they're being shielded from--a lot of which is inevitable in a large organization (where you can't tell everyone "hey figure it out on your own").

That could explain some situations, but I very well doubt it's as simple as "managers are unappreciated".

Some managers are given wide latitude in controlling their teams work. Some managers execute on that, others don't.

Some managers are given a lot of control over hiring. Some execute on that, other don't.

Some managers are given wide latitude over reviews. Some managers execute on that while others don't.

The reason managers are perceived to be less useful in tech usually, in my experience, boils down to where they spend their time and political capital. They either spend it on their team and enabling them or on themselves and enabling themselves. All of the above are ways that could go either way and the feeling is generally an accumulation of those decisions over time. I guess I could surmise that there's just a lot of "bad" managers in tech, but I don't think that's a useful sentiment without knowing why.

> My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.

That just sounds like poor leadership to me. If you've got a holistic sense of what needs to be done, please share it with the people who need to be doing it.

That, or cut it up into concrete chunks and tell people to build that. But telling people to "figure it out" and then not sharing the overall vision, sounds incredibly dysfunctional to me.

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build

Not everyone is the same office - it’s a joke

Office work is nice for teams that actually benefit from open area desk layout. Teams that can work fine in cubicles and offices do great WFH.

For me, the extroverts that insist in socializing, gossiping and politicking in person make office work an unproductive nightmare.

having worked for a fully remote company that was successfully acquired for a decent sum by a much larger respectable company, remote depends on the top levels of management communicating the vision regularly and being transparent about direction, changes in direction, and reasons for changes. add in someone skilled whose responsibility is for facilitating remote culture and you have a recipe for success.

the problem is there is a ton of terrible leadership out there who want to rule by fiat, ignore their employees, and don't trust their employees (who they either directly or indirectly hired) to so their jobs.

Seniority is another factor.

People who have been in the industry and with a company for a long time largely have a network and don't really have problems connecting with people. (And at larger companies that network is often pretty distributed anyway.)

But the--admittedly not universal--consensus is that new folks struggle with onboarding and generally making progress in their careers. And even coming into an office doesn't really help if their managers and more senior co-workers are mostly not there. It's certainly hard for me to imagine graduating school and working remotely.

I graduated from uni and all my jobs were 100% remote, and I don't really feel I had any serious problems in onboarding or advancing in my career at least yet :)

I'm not gonna pretend that every project had 100% coverage and up-to-date documentation, but you should overcome fear of appearing weak/dumb and just ask a question, not even waiting for the next daily meetup. If culture is good enough, people are gonna realize it isn't you dumb, but docs and processes suck ass and will do something about it, maybe even asking you to participate. If not, just leave when the next offer lines up, I did that once when people straight up refused answering to my questions directly, and instead nagging that I didn't ask them properly.

Building up network is obviously more reliable when meeting in person, but it doesn't defeat the idea of getting to know each other through daily interactions, retros, 1-1s, whatever. And moreover if you appear professional and capable in eyes of colleagues by getting shit done, they're would want at least keep in touch

A lot of that struggle has to do with what others point out already: the onboarding processes and documentation being of shoddy quality and relying on word-of-mouth to transfer knowledge and repeatedly check in.

If you start raising future generations to be, you know, adults, instead of mentally stunting them into being eternal teens well into their 30s, and companies make an effort not to have a horrible onboarding and rely on 3 year tenures (and paradoxically do nothing to keep said employees that long), the problem is far less prevalent. Heck, most CS students are expected to do far more complex things at school without any assistance these days.

It's hard to argue with better documentation and process. However, if I think back to my early time in the computer industry (admittedly with much more limited electronic communications and other tools), it's just really hard for me to visualize taking away the in-person face-to-face--including a lot of social and quasi-social activities.

And with many travel budgets so squeezed at the moment (and COVID of course), you have teams with people who have never met anyone else on their team in-person in their whole multiyear tenure with the company. And to your point about short tenures, maybe they never will. If I'm honest, even though I've been around for ages, I'm less connected with co-workers than I've been in the past.

From where I sit, needing the in-person face-to-face as your social activity for the day is a symptom of something that widespread remote work should at least help to fix: the splintering and atomization of communities that once existed outside of the workplace.

Once upon a time, it was considered the norm to find a job where you were, because you lived in a community that was part of your support system. Over the course of the last century, this norm eroded and was replaced with the norm of moving to wherever you got a job. More recently, the situation deteriorated even further, with the disappearance of the "job for life" assumptions that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century, in favor of an expectation of changing jobs every 2-5 years—with a high chance every single time that you'd have to move.

One inevitable result of all this is the aforementioned splintering of local communities. Changing the employment norms so that a much higher percentage of people never need to move to work in person at a job would make it much easier to begin to restore local communities, and provide a much better chance of good socialization outside of work.

Now, there are caveats. This still relies on people not working too many hours, and while it would still help for the people who do work in person, and move in order to do so (those communities existing and being more prominent, and sustained by the people who stick around, makes it much easier for others to find them, too, even if they'll have to keep finding new ones every few years), it doesn't help them quite as much as the ones who can stay and grow their place in the community over many years.

> My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute".

Do you mind sharing the job title for something like this? Sounds like a dream job.

I was a Data Scientist. Personally I found the autonomy immensely frustrating. Combined with the stack ranking performance review system, it was effectively a way of pushing the manager's job on to the employee and forcing them to hold themselves accountable for their own priorities. Makes sense in theory, but once you add huge organization churn + being remote, it was difficult to get a sense of what priorities were exactly, or would be next month. It made me feel insecure at all times that perhaps I was working on the wrong thing and would be punished for it.

I transferred within my company to the much bigger company that bought us out and this is basically what my boss told me. Actually his exact words were "you need to create your own job." I hated it. Give me a freaking task, don't make me network and sell myself (remotely of course, no one I worked with was anywhere near me) just for something to do.

I created my own job, just with a startup. For a year I had two ostensibly full time jobs. By the end the startup wasn't doing much either and I considered going for three full time jobs.

You seem to be doing something right. Imo most ppl are overworked and underpaid

Currently I’m a GTPM at Meta and this is the expectation we have for onboarding to a new team unless you’re early in career. I’ve seen this be the case for SWE and other roles in the technical domain. Typically you have an expertise area and at least on my team a starter project or 2 with a tangible deliverable to get you going on something while you ramp and meet others and figure things out. Meta is a big place though so could be other expectations in other organizations.

It’s less a job title (I’m a “software engineer” like everyone else) but the scope of the problem your role is aiming to solve. Look for places that 1. have an unsolved hard problem with 2. no real direction on where to go with it and 3. buy-in from someone to get it solved.

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

I'm curious how often anyone actually finds this situation to happen and improve the feedback loop. I feel like it's more of an illusion of productivity then actual productivity because it's a pile of constant interruptions.

Like the given example with Meta doesn't seem like it would be better in-person, it sounds broken regardless.

I have the same conclusions as well however, in-person collaboration can be done remotely but it requires less professionalism and more trust. You have to allow for unforeseen moments and allow each participant to have their time to weigh in. Take breaks. It’s a 2.5x time slog vs in-person but it can be done with whiteboard tools and open honest communication. It’s the ones that expect excellence that struggle with remote’s imperfections.

With your Meta experience I am curious - would the people you had to talk to been in the office near you anyways, even if everyone was in office? It seems like with a huge global company the people who would be hard to get context from (so not the people you might have a video standup with daily or weekly) might be in a different office or building requiring a video call anyways

Not everyone, but there would have been enough people around to have dramatically improved my experience. The problem there was Meta does not have a strong culture of documentation, and I didn't know what I didn't know. It was common to spend 2-3 days working on something only to find out on a random zoom call there was an entire team working on the same thing. Discoverability didn't exist. I found the environment untenable for doing anything of value.

At a large unnamed subsidiary of Microsoft, I saw four different teams working on a MSP solution. All of them crash and burned because each were run with 60+ engineers and not a single team talked to each other and they all reproduced the wheel (ignored federated systems and rolled their own)

> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.

Beyond the practical scope of this point, we also find the need for mentoring (building a sustainable team).

This is a good insight, but the interesting counter-weight to the reality you describe is that many people who want "remote" and the independence of work, don't really want the same "benevolent dictatorship" either.

Or in other words what business problem one is solving 0-1, 1-10 or 10-100. For first two remote is non-starter.

Similarly, what career stage one is in? Young workers who are in 0-1, and to certain extent 1-10, remote really does not work.

The first part of this is patently untrue. The most successful startup I worked at (defined as having IPO’d, and having their products effectively everywhere) was fully remote. This was very much 0-1, 1-10 type work. The only requirement to ever physically be in a given place was when visiting a customer.

The FAANG I work for now similarly has lots of 0-1, 1-10 type work (at least for my team), and a fully remote team. It works fine too.

The part about more junior employees is _more_ valid, though we had no problem on boarding juniors in either of those two situations.

Ultimately whether remote work is successful depends on whether the people doing the work have sufficient self-discipline to get the job done, and whether the hypothetical office alternative is set up for success. Most offices are not remotely set up for success, but optimize instead for middle management (toxin or cancer? [1]) being able to view their fifedoms.

[1]: https://www.talkfrom.com/video?name=leadership-without-manag...

My wife worked for several years for a company with only about a half-dozen employees. It was full remote.

She left there in 2011, after rising through the ranks to the level of division director.

They did almost all their business over email and Skype, because at the time, Skype was still the best voice/video conferencing software available without dedicated hardware.

If it was possible then for a small group of non-tech-focused people, it's certainly possible now, over a decade later and with an entire pandemic forcing the rapid improvement of all sorts of remote-work technology. That doesn't mean it's for everyone, but boldly stating that it's a "non-starter" is just unsupportable.

I would assume the importance of in-person versus remote also depends on the role.

More team work versus individual work?

Wow, this is matches my exact experience too. Just had never thought of it in these terms.

Probably the best distinction I have seen tbh...

What are PMF and NGMI?

what is PMF? NGMI?

Product Market Fit and Not Gonna Make It. The former is established startup product terminology, the latter is slang.

Fantastic summary

Big companies are also ridiculously overstaffed, as Elon Musk proved empirically. And many of them have only one thing that works and ambitions of doing more than will never work out. So there's a lot of wasted talent, in other words, but this ability to waste talent necessitates in person communication, just to make sure everyone is stack ranked according to the current arbitrary and probably mindless goals.

Musk didn’t prove anything. All he showed so far is that if you turn off the airplane engine mid-flight, it will glide for a time on momentum.

Still waiting for all the major failures people have been clamoring about. I think the real talk is that you can run a lot of dotcoms on a skeleton crew and when money becomes tight you can trim a lot of fat. It’s not something people like to hear because they realize they are the fat

Perhaps that’s me, the fat? If I were let go tomorrow there wouldn’t be any negative consequences for probably at least a year.

I do security things, and it seems those folks are all gone from Twitter.

But my hypothesis is that the negatives won’t emerge for some time, at which point something bad happens and everyone will be standing around shaking their heads at how negligent it was.

Although more generally I do sympathize with the idea that most tech companies are at least a little bloated because money has so often been cheap & revenues always go up historically

I don't like the "trim fat" methaphor. Layoffs are more or less random. There is no good, from the company perspective, selection.

Now is the time for managers and directors to find reasons to let go of the employees they don’t like. Some people don’t like eating fat, others will suck on it all day. Personally I trim a bit of fat off my meats before smoking them

There have been major failures. Several times there were outages at Twitter that were plenty serious enough to be a death knell, or near enough, for a company with less network effect keeping people using them.

I’ve taken FAANG sites down and took it personally when anyone got a 500 error for a minor change. Truth is, no one really cares. You can complain it’s down but who are you going to leave them for? Welcome to running a lean ship. Twitter isn’t hurting

Come on. I have been whining about Twitter et al. being bloated for years. There is no way all those engineers were needed.

I Twitter fails due to the mass layoffs it doesn't prove much either since it might be too hard to unwind a mess.

I might be reading your statements wrong. But it sounds like what you're saying it sounds like is:

* Remote work is better if the management has a common goal and everyone can swim towards it.

* In-person work is better if the management is adversarial or competitive with each other, or doesn't have a common goal to work towards.

In either case, it seems like the problem is management, not the work location. Am I wrong here?

Quick search on this thread didn't reveal the word "flame" (as in "flame war"), so I can´t resist: That's what the remote vs on-site debate is. About as interesting and ultimately inconclusive as Emacs vs Vi. Neither is universally better. It depends, _primarily_ on the people involved and their preferences. My advice would be to try and work with people that are on the same page about this with you - if possible. If everybody can muster the level of acceptance and respect for their colleagues required to make a hybrid environment work, that'd also do the trick.

What I find fascinating about the remote vs on-site flame war are the _stakes_ though, I don't think we see anything like it in dynamic vs static typing and all the others.

If remote loses, remote workers have to figure out how to relocate their entire families to a place they don't really want to live in, or accept severely limited job opportunities - on top of having to work in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.

If on-site loses, people who are fetching large salaries and bought a house in an area with insane real estate prices face a future where their house value shoots lower than the credit they took to buy it (more towards the national average), and where it's increasingly difficult for them to prove that they earn that large salary they're getting. That's on top of working in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.

Both sides have a lot to lose if it all goes either one way or another, that's unlike any other flame war I can think of. I wonder how much of this is at play at Google. Certainly seems to be escalating if someone feels the need to pull a stunt like that (with the performance reviews).

> Quick search on this thread didn't reveal the word "flame" (as in "flame war"), so I can´t resist: That's what the remote vs on-site debate is. About as interesting and ultimately inconclusive as Emacs vs Vi. Neither is universally better. It depends, _primarily_ on the people involved and their preferences

You nailed it. Ideally, both employees and employers should have the freedom to choose whether to work onsite or remotely, based on their preferences (again, this is subjective and not scientific). I believe the market could self-regulate in such a way. For instance, if the demand for remote work exceeds the supply, a savvy employer with a fit for remote work could take advantage of it by attracting better/more/cheaper talent through offering remote positions.

However, what needs to be debated and critizised is when employers change the rules midway through a game. It's unfair to hire people for a "remote role" and then force them to work in the office. This creates real-world hardships for individuals, such as the need to relocate.

Using your analogy, it would be like initially giving your future employees the choice between Emacs and Vim, but later giving Vim users extra points in performance reviews.

> both employees and employers should have the freedom to choose whether to work onsite or remotely, based on their preferences

Not that I'm antsy to get back to the office, but that scenario is not an "everyone wins" scenario, it's just another version of remote work. Onsite is only onsite if everyone is onsite. If it's some people in the office and some people at home, the people in the office are just working remotely from the office. All your meetings will be virtual, you don't get the benefits of onsite like being able to gauge someone's availability by just looking at them, you're gonna be screen sharing instead of just pulling up a chair next to someone, etc etc etc.

I'd argue that as soon as you have people sitting in different rooms (or at least floors or buildings), it starts to resemble a remote environment even on-site. I don't think people who work best on-site only reap the benefits if everyone they could possibly interact with is near them. There's models where teams within one company are either fully co-located in one place, or fully remote.

Also not an "everybody wins" situation, since then what you can work on is limited by where and how you work. But that's not what it's about in my mind. When people with different preferences want to collaborate it's about finding compromises. Personally, I started to place more value on who I work with than what I work on, so for me this flies. It's not as easy as it sounds to pull off though, since it requires people to accept that some of their colleagues work best in a way they personally find wildly unproductive. Takes quite a bit of trust.

I actually agree with you 100%. I didn't express myself clearly. I meant:

Both employees and employers should have the freedom to choose whether to work fully onsite, fully remotely, or hybrid, based on their preferences.

> Using your analogy, it would be like initially giving your future employees the choice between Emacs and Vim, but later giving Vim users extra points in performance reviews.

That analogy doesn't quite apply to this Google situation.

Google has a distinction between "full remote" and "hybrid" employees. Attendance will NOT be considered in the performance reviews of full remote employees.

Did you miss the part of the email where remote employees near offices are "strongly encouraged" to switch to hybrid?

I agree with respect to real programmers.

For the politicians and influencers, however, on-site work is vital (especially if they are good looking or charismatic). They need meetings to shine optically and verbally and dominate the real workers.

This parasitical category of people usually has the most influence, so the move to return to on-site work is not surprising.

I know what you mean, but this kind of negative spin probably doesn't help the situation :D

Some people are better at creating (real or fake) value face to face. I've seen what you describe in remote/distributed setting as well, in internal message boards for example. Some folks are shy and/or incoherent in person and master manipulators in writing.

I’m a good looking and charismatic programmer, one who understands we evolved as a species solving problems with other humanoids on the planes, and it makes perfect sense to me that a hybrid work situation is the optimal way for most teams to solve problems most of the time. I’m sorry you feel dominated, consider developing the non programmer side of your spirit.

Your analysis is spot-on. Almost all of the other comments here are "I want X, so X is better. If you prefer Y, you're wrong and stupid."

Nobody ever actually wins a flame war, though, right?

Normally internet only flame wars like the vim/emacs ones break out because they are fun so in that case everyone does.

emacs won, didn't it :D

Doesn't vim have way more users these days? I haven't used it myself, but I know a lot of people who do and every IDE has vim bindings whereas I don't think I've seen emacs bindings.

Vim still has a substantial user base that won't/can't quit.

By admitting defeat with evil mode.

Reminds me of Kobayashi Maru (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru)

It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. I suspect many/most of the developers reading HN want peace and quiet far more than the chance of magical hallway conversations.

And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, run test calculations and "interact" using existing technology. Companies either trust their staff or they don't and the staff should act accordingly.

Fully remote with 2-3 day quarterly in-person meet ups would provide tech companies with the in person collaboration they seek and be cheaper. Remote first companies do this all the time. Employees feel way better about it if the company provides hotel and accommodations when doing destination meet ups.

I haven’t found in-person meetups to be that useful. In my experience they only really started happening in late 2021/early 2022 due to the pandemic, and since then they’ve been severely curtailed due to the market downturn. So when you do meet up it’s more about finally seeing people in person, team building, and restating your team’s goals and mission. Any brainstorming I’ve seen happens in over-long sessions with 30+ people in attendance, where a ton of ideas are generated but there’s no actual momentum once everyone gets on the plane back home. The real collaboration happens in the interstitial times- lunch, breaks, and so on. Which again points to the importance of having at least part of the team co-located.

Full disclosure, this is at a company that is hybrid and not remote-first. But I’ve seen the pattern repeated enough times across various teams that I don’t think my experience is unique. And I say this as someone who personally prefers to work remotely- I’m just not unaware of what’s lost in that environment.

We used to do this in a startup I worked at. Was a lot cheaper to book a big AirBnB for the meet-ups than to have a fixed office space. And we could pick interesting meet-up locations.

> Fully remote with 2-3 day quarterly in-person meet ups would provide tech companies with the in person collaboration they seek and be cheaper

I am a fan of hybrid (people can choose whether or not they're in the office).

However, you want to be able to collaborate effectively at any time and not have to wait for quarterly gatherings. I've got complex problems to solve together with my team mates!

Hybrid usually means office is required every week. It’s terrible

Exactly, that's basically "not remote most of the time"

> It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need.

This is not the dichotomy you make it look. There are lots of other tasks to do, and for those I personally would often go in a cafeteria or public space, since I didn't mind the distractions -- reading code, doing code reviews, reading docs, writing docs, responding to emails. "Coding" was a relatively small part of my day as a SWE at [FAANG].

The problem is just that there are some people who are able to concentrate while lots of other people are having lots of non-related conversations around them in a cafeteria (sounds like this might be you), while others can't. And the latter will prefer home office to a cafeteria or even to the usual open-plan office...

I find debugging to be easier when everyone has their own machine. You can screen share the primary person's screen but then have others try out little things and do exploration on the side. And I'm far better with my desktop setup than I would be on a laptop that might not even have a mouse.

> It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming.

Really? what does it bring that you can't do remotely? I can hardly think of a problem where "being in the same room" is a requirement to have a productive discussion

I'm pro work from anywhere so long as shit gets done but...

Picking up on social cues. Bouncing ideas around using a whiteboard. Speaking quickly without that ever so slight lag on Zoom which means you struggle to get a word in without potentially talking over somebody. Having food or drinks before or afterwards to unwind and build relationships and kick things around informally.

There's lots more.

The differences with in person are that conversations have a much higher fidelity. There can be spontaneous multiple conversations going in the same room which is impossible virtually without spinning up another videoconf session, people leaving, people re-joining, etc. So it really is much better for brainstorming and doing the “figure things out” mode of software engineering. Once you’ve figured things out, the implementation can be dome remotely.

Sharing meals during this time together also helps build relationships and trust within a team. I mean as you work, or even offsite at a restaurant - go out to breakfast or lunch during the work day.

Maybe it's just me but I don't really want to think about work outside of working hours, much less hang out or 'unwind' with my coworkers before or after work.

Nobody said it was outside of working hours.

you just said food or drinks before or afterwards. people don't have food in the middle of the day after a meeting.

> Having food or drinks before or afterwards

That's not work. That should NEVER be part of work, even.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

You sound joyful to work with.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

Also, please don't cross into personal attack on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

+1 every time we have these in-person sprints they are dominated by the managerial types trying to make the engineers and designers engage in trite 'activities' they read about online or in some book. And even when the result of the sprint is one poorly thought out doomed to fail concept, the managerial types parade around their ability to run a sprint, the outcome of the thing not really relevant at that point.

It's not a requirement, but it helps a lot. The biggest factor might be latency, which makes it much harder to informally coordinate multiple people talking without speaking over each other.

Gee, I wonder how people worked before we had Zoom calls and we were all working in different locations across the country. Either people were really smart before, or we have become really dumb now.

All in the room works for reviewing ideas, not creating them.

Even for that I feel like asynchronous works better. You often get stuck on someone’s pet peeve and waste an hour when on something like a Google doc you can have 30 different threads for comments concurrently

Good point. The 20th century is over and the networks and iron are amazing.

Iron?

Iron = computers/computing gear. See Big Iron for mainframes. Sorry, I'm old.

I understood what you meant, but I'm also old.

>It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming.

Hasn't every study on brainstorming found that it's not a good way to generate good ideas? With having people breathing the same air in a small space believed to be a contributing factor to that.

Yeah high CO2 concentration is probably making people less sharp, but mostly I've heard it's about people being less creative due to consensus-driven thinking

Per https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1194301106584616960:

> People in groups self-censor and anchor on each others ideas, reducing creativity.

Also can be anti-inclusive when "anchor on each other idea" is a euphemism for that guy repeating what a more shy person said, but louder, stealing credit.

With remote, usually comes a more doc-driven culture, where someone's original idea can be easier to identify and make sure they get credit.

Lots of people are too shy or anxious to break perceived consensus or even just to challenge a "stronger" personality in person. Put them in a chat room and they get all fired up.

And in dysfunctional workplaces, breaking consensus can put your job in jeopardy.

I have a hunch that the sort of mental incapacity that comes on with higher CO2 levels lends itself to group-think, so it's a combinatorial problem. I think you'd still get the same problems outside, I just think they're more pronounced in a stuffy meeting room.

Yes. Brainstorming is better done by

1. Brainstorming questions, not ideas (then go answer them)

2. Soliciting responses anonymously and quietly. This avoids both hierarchical biases and "Loudest person wins" bias. And not to excessively disparage verbal processors (I am one myself). But it's important for them to realize that the constant talking can drown out others' thinking, or their sharing, or their will to live.

I’ve experienced recently people thinking they were doing some creative brainstorming and being productive by being in person collaborating in a big room, but the output ends up being basically the same solution or idea that was created using remote collaboration. And of course everyone’s exhausted at the end after a week of “collaborating” for 8-10 hours a day. It seems like it was mostly theatre.

Worked from home ~5 of my ~10 years in development.

Obviously, the "pros" of WFH are massive. No commute. Comfortable office. Food in the fridge. Daytime exercise + showers. Etc. etc.

I found however that too much of a good thing, is bad. For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I wouldn't have been able to really tell you it for the first few years, but I was slowly moving toward being mildly depressed.

Returning to office restored my excitement for my work. I credit my colleagues and the process of working toward a big goal with other people. We really underestimate how important this is for mental health.

If you're in office and you now what I mean, show some love to a fellow co-worker. You gotta admit it's nice to see each other.

The obvious counterpoint is that many people were and are miserable commuting into a workplace and then putting in the grind. It's actually humorous that most tech "social media" like HN, Reddit, Digg, and so on were much busier back when most of us were in offices, because we all would bide our days doing anything but work. You could see the bursts as the primary demographic timezones started their "work" days.

Not everyone, of course: I had a peer once who absolutely couldn't stand his family, and he would be at the office before everyone, staying until late at night. Volunteered on weekends too. Almost all of his contributions were the sort of thing that could have been easily automated, but he was happy just wiling hours away. Mileage varies and everyone's situation is unique.

Then of course there's the change element itself being a temporary boost. Turn the lights down and productivity increases. Turn them up and productivity increases. Return them to the normal and productivity increases. Having a varied life is essential. HN's history is littered by posts of people who changed some element of their life and This Changes Everything...at least during the initial period. Then it fades and they abandon it.

None of this is to diminish your personal experience that you obviously enjoy.

> It's actually humorous that most tech "social media" like HN, Reddit, Digg, and so on were much busier back when most of us were in offices, because we all would bide our days doing anything but work.

Do you have a source on this? I’m both curious and skeptical.

(And ironically, for many in Europe and Eastern NA/SA it’s the work day right now.)

100% anecdotal. Zero credible sources.

On the anecdote side I do know that within the past couple of years I saw a discussion on here about how many visitors someone gets from a top of the front page on HN. The numbers were absolutely miserly compared to what I experienced getting the same repeatedly years earlier. Like, 1/20th or less.

Maybe it's just HN that declined, but if so where did the tech news community go? Digg? /. Reddit /r/programming (to some degree yes for the last one, though still it is nothing compared to what once was).

Everything is much quieter and more restrained than it was.

And sure, there are time zones circling the globe. But generally on the English tech sites, the US/Canada are going to dominate the demographics and have an outsized effect on spikes.

Right, but you could find and link to that thread instead of “citing it” from memory.

As it is it remains conjecture.

(Aside, this thread now has 300 comments after just 2 hours. HN’s purported slowdown in the WFH era feels grossly exaggerated.)

Yes, it's conjecture. I explicitly, outright said it was an unproven anecdote. Demanding citations when I'm explicitly giving a "feel" narrative is misplaced and not charitable.

As to how many uniques you can expect from a front-page on HN, go ahead and search. Pre-2020 you can find countless people detailing 30,000+ uniques in the first few hours (my own, personal, direct experience was 50,000+). Now, if you average out more recent reports, you can expect about 11,000 over the first 24 hours.

And sure, the most inclusive possible discussion gets a few hundred comments. Everyone wants to put some paint on the shed. There is a 4 hour old submission on the front page with 2 comments. Eh, guess it doesn't represent much.

Ah, see I think denigrating the conversation by moving to personal attacks - painting me as a child who “stomps my feet” - is far less charitable. I legitimately wanted to see the data / could be persuaded.

Aside, my personal anecdote is that this lack of decorum is why I rarely comment on HN anymore. So perhaps you are right.

Given that I explicitly stated that it was 100% unproven conjecture and anecdotes, replying with scare-quotes and demands for citation is not a good example of decorum. It's argumentative and hostile, and with little intention of good faith.

Anyways, hope you have a good day.

> changed some element of their life and This Changes Everything...at least during the initial period. Then it fades and they abandon it

This is basically the essence of life

It’s sometimes called Hedonistic Adaptation

And it’s also almost the same concept as the endless arising and passing, the source of “suffering”, in many eastern spiritual traditions

>For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life.

I would suggest that it's possible to interact with people outside of work. It's genuinely sad to me how many of these "if I don't go into the office I have no one to interact with" posts I see.

This is so common on HN. I find it rather dystopian, as if we’ve all finally given our full selves to our corporate jobs and can’t piece our own lives together. I can feel the “but you’re at work 8 hours a day” commenter typing away as I type this, but the point is that all your social interaction doesn’t and shouldn’t come from your job regardless. That isn’t healthy.

People are often in a weird headspace at work too and a bit guarded. I don’t know why that as a social setting is inherently healthier than surrounding yourself with people outside work.

Yeah, it's super-weird for me too.

I have a circle of friends and a habit that we keep since 20+ years: every Friday morning we meet for a coffee in a physical coffee shop. Location varied along time, I lived as close as 2 minutes walk from my apartment to (now) 1 hour drive (because of the traffic).

It's not a religious thing, people miss meetings. Got other stuff, or just not being in the mood (like I drank till 2 AM, no way I'm waking up at 6 so I can be out the door at 7 so I'll be in the coffee shop at 8, stay an hour then back home). But the habit has stuck and we kept our friendship. Some people have left the group (one died), others joined it. It's easy to expand a group once you have a stable kernel: just go out for some coffees at day or drinks at night and talk to people.

I get along well with work colleagues as well, mostly I'm asking the question: if I leave this company, will I be ever talking to these guys ever again? If the answer is yes (stay in touch through WhatsApp and the occasional beer in a bar) then they're more than acquaintances and useful connections in case I need a job. Like recently got laid out (whole office closed, some 200 people fired), found a new job in less than a week. Connections, people.

So office has some value but it's far from being "the whole world".

While true, I think you are missing the time commitment and the relationships. Once the kids get home and you have dinner and soccer and karate and chores, a lot of people don't have time to squeeze in "find friends" time. Additionally, they may want to spend that limited time with their kids. Work interactions are free from a time commitment and that may be the best chance for some people to have adult interaction.

When you go into the office, you can build quite a history with people over time. I have good friends that I've worked with (off and on) for over 25 years. And we are not just "work friends". I've also felt much a part of a "team" working in person than wfh and those connections and trust can manifest in the work too.

I think that we need to continue to acknowledge that this is a human preference. And we all have quite different history, goals and situations.

That’s not how I read it. I have a fine social life outside work, but when my wife heads out every morning and I’m alone from roughly 8-6 every weekday, I feel exactly how that comment described.

It’s not that I don’t see friends and family outside those hours, it’s just that those hours constitute like half of the awake hours of my life, and the grind sucks when I do it alone.

Also the fact that the change of pace helps in general, you can turn his anecdote around and it still sounds plausible (worked in the office for 5y and started to get slightly depressed, really appreciated starting WFH once it came, etc).

That's great that you get something out of being in the office.

I really wish the powers that be would put some data to this. You and I are complete opposites; paying exhorbitant rent, transportation, and living costs usurped much of the enjoyment I could get out of going to an office. I build infra products and in an office setting I usually get a lot of interrupts because product folks generally lack some amount of knowledge/background to fill in gaps on how to use products like mine. When I'm remote they have to follow a support queue, read docs, learn more about infra basics, and attend talks on infra. When I'm in person they can just stop by my desk.

My hypothesis is that folks who like going into an office generally fall into a couple categories:

- people who get/enjoy a substantial amount of social interaction out of work and work adjacent activities

- people who work on public facing products who don't have many internal customers

- people with disruptive home environments

The thing that upsets me is that we're being treated the same and that most of this is to save face for their real estate investment. Not to mention all the half-truths/gaslighting about the universalness of productivity.

After trying both for years I don't really know what we're talking about here.

I can go to an office where we can schedule room to have a video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.

I can stay at home to join the video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.

I don't know what this mysterious in-office inspiration cycle is. It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk.

Offices exist for companies where management has sufficiently removed the ability of the people they pay to make decisions. Now you need to come to them and ask to be allowed to do things, so your manager can ponder whether that thing makes sense in whatever weird inter-department power struggle they are working in.

> It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk.

A lot of 'management' doesn't build communication or workflows more advanced than that. And when people are never more than a short walk away, they don't have to.

Slack is just the online version of that. A noisy conversation always within earshot. One that you can usually ignore, but should still be a little aware of what's going on overall, and occasionally you get pulled in to the larger conversation.

While I enjoy this whole debate in HN about remote Vs in-person, the point here majority seems to be missing is that the sole attendance is used as a threat for performance review. Effectively a joke. If Google had a problem with people and teams hiding behind a monitor not doing much, I'm sure you can recall a pre-pandemic world where this was also the norm when in the office.

Now that my company has started enforcing RTO, I noticed patterns in some of my colleagues, such as arriving late and leaving early, leaving the laptop in their desk disappearing for a long while, not answering messages for hours with nowhere to be seen, and very vague status updates when asked.

It turns out slackers will slack, be it at home or at the office.

I love the fantasy that some management hold that back in my day you couldn't slack in the office and it was a thing that was invented on the first day someone "worked from home".

Over a few drinks they will also tell you stories of the old days where you would leave your jacket on the back of your chair and go to the pub at 11am come back to the office at some point in the afternoon.

But kidz these days...

> you would leave your jacket on the back of your chair and go to the pub at 11am

I’ve talked to junior employees (in 2023) for non-tech companies and you’d think they work for Amazon warehouses - I’ve heard people say they get criticized or called out for spending a long time in the bathroom “probably on social media”. So there’s probably some cohort of people that truly experience that level of oversight.

I don’t know about going to the Pub at 11, but I’ve definitely seen plenty of ways to slack off in person. My manager was buying a new laptop last month and spent 4+ hours measuring random books and objects trying to get an idea of the dimensions of his future laptop… as if he didn’t already spend the day at the Apple Store and didn’t already place the order.

> such as arriving late and leaving early

You see someone doing this and think: "slacker"...?

I come into the office around 9am and leave at 3:30pm to beat traffic and get a quick gym session in without the crowds. And then I hope back online to do some work. Am I slacking?

I don't always slack off, but I do often need time to rest and gather my thoughts. Sometimes my brain is just not ready or already fatigued and needs time. At home I'll chill out watching some mindless Youtube video or go for a walk. At the office I used to pretend to work by clicking around in some emails or something that was equally unproductive. I prefer not having to pretend to work.

I find that having to pretend to be engaged while I need a rest takes way more time than just taking the time and watching a youtube video for 10 minutes.

They are having water cooler conversations and collaborating on the new product engineering.

Sounds like Google is eliminating remote work. Has VP Urs Holzle returned from New Zealand? https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh...

You misunderstood. Such rules never apply to _those_ people's performance reviews. They are only for peons.

Same with open office plans. Managers who implement them always seem to end up with a private office, for some weird reasons.

Or, as is often reported, they commandeer one of the conference rooms for themselves.

The idea that Urs was hard core about colocation is absolutely false. I was a direct report to Urs when he was VP engineering and I telecommuted one day every week. Urs successor, Wayne Rosing, was much stricter than Urs ever was.

No, remote work is still allowed. It might be a bit more difficult to switch to a remote work contract now (but still possible), but people who are already remote will continue like this.

> people who are already remote will continue like this

My understanding is that everyone has to get approval even people who are currently remote. For those who are near an office, they are being told to expect to be asked to come in frequently.

Many people applied for fully remote work last year and got a contract with it (often with a different compensation). They already got the approval.

What changes is that new approvals will be "by exception only".

But those people are still working at will.

In most countries, no.

(not everything is in the US)

This is just another form of layoffs, I think. The problem is that many other execs will follow. It's bizarre how this is purely about making life worse for the engineers without any rational reason.

>It's bizarre how this is purely about making life worse for the engineers without any rational reason

There's absolutely a rational reason: many people in management went into management because they enjoy having power over people, and they can have more power over employees who are physically in office.

> and they can have more power over employees who are physically in office.

that's superficial power

Not at all. It's physical power.

100%

This is absolutely another form of layoffs. Google get the double benefit of 1) loose head count 2) only keeping dedicated* people.

They do loose people with the highest agency as they will be the first to leave.

* Those dedicated people could also just be most in need.

it's almost like there should be a union or something

I was told developers had enough leverage without unions to prevent this from happening /s

When the market goes up, devs don't want to hear about unions because that would prevent them from jumping ship with a 50% raise. When the market goes down, they want a union to protect them from being fired from that +50% job they got knowing they would be paid much less in the current economy.

The dev logic is "fuck you I've got mine, you go get yours" but only as long as "line goes up".

>When the market goes up, devs don't want to hear about unions because that would prevent them from jumping ship with a 50% raise.

NOTHING about unions prevents an individual being rewarded for their individual merits or jumping from job to job.

Unions, at least in Germany, dictate stric salary bands for all employees, existing and new-commers. You can't have new-hires making 50% more than old-timers who've been 10 years with the company, just because the stock market has an uptick and an increased demand for people where there's a shortage. You can bring in the new-hire at similar wages to everyone already in the company with the same experience as him, or you have to raise wages for everyone else to give him a major increase. Guess which options companies here take.

Unionized companies don't grow according to the stock market but according to profits, sales and customer orders, so you never see mass hires because the stock market went up, you also don't see mass fires because the market went down.

That's why there isn't a huge salary difference between a senior and a junior, at least not like in the US where seniors can make 4-8 times as much as a junior.

Unionized companies here also look down on job hoppers (people who jump ship for more compensation every 2-3 years) and tend not to hire them.

So yeah, from historical evidence we have so far, from my PoV, unions and crazy compensations that also grow like crazy in sync with the stock market, are mutually exclusive. Do you want uniuonized slow stable growth that lags the stock market, or do you want to make money in sync or above the stock market? Pick one.

I am in a unionized big corp in Germany. Union does not stop layoffs or full back to office. Union representatives happily agree on business needs.

you mean the union of people who show up in the office? Surely they will care a lot about remote workers

A friend of mine who is a PM at google was telling me about this the other week.

Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.

> PM at google

> couldn't afford living in SF

Seriously though, it's a major city with too much single unit family housing. The fact tech exists there is more of an anomaly at this point, our democracy continues to fail us.

I agree, though I think the problem is that they should've never zoned the city such that you have all the residential areas in one spot and all the commercial areas in another. I mean there are residential units in the business areas, but not that many. That's how downtown gets freaky at night.

Well yes, at some point in many people’s lives, renting a crappy apartment or buying a small condo in a failing, crime-ridden city ceases to be a compelling life choice.

I had a apartemnt in west oakland. I was paying 1800/month. when I left, they increased the rent to 3000. And that was in the "hood." it was a bargain compared to what my friends in SF proper were paying.

They can afford to live in SF, they can’t afford the lifestyle they want.

this is a bit bizarre, how do you know what personal issues they have? maybe they need to care for someone or need special assistance due to their disability, maybe she is actually paid less than many other PMs

I think it was stated that she “couldn’t afford” to live there, not that she just “couldn’t” live there. Pay at large companies is typically in a defined band, so while she could be getting paid less it wouldn’t make or break being able to afford living in a place at all. If one can afford “a” place to live, but perceives the city as unaffordable, then the places that are affordable must be considered below standard.

[dead]

How can she not afford to live in SF on ~$300k a year?

Because it's not rational to pay $4000+ rent for 1 bed apartment regardless of how much you're paid; especially when that job has no reason to require a physical commute to a shared office space.

If the alternative to renting that apartment is getting fired then it is rational for the employee to rent, even if it was irrational for Google to require RTO in the first place.

Because it "afford", not afford. Clearly it would be possible, but not for the QoL they prefer. For $300k/yr you're buying a SFH in many other parts of the greater bay area.

So glad you mentioned committing badge swiping fraud.

I was going to ask on an original thread, what is to stop people simply swiping other people in on their badge to pretend that they're in the office more than they actually are?

On a large tech campus you might expect

* Cameras recording faces near badge swipe points, and | or

* Campus wide mobile phone services that also log SIM cards and other locale data.

You can imagine some data analyst being tasked with trawling logs to look for inconsistancies.

There are, of course, other meta data logs and sources that could be used.

Or the very simple human intelligence factor: "It says you swiped your badge every day this week but nobody seems to remember seeing you around the office"

I've mentioned this in another WSJ just five days ago:

"For context, Fortune, WSJ, FT, etc. have all been consistently over the past 2 quarters churning out several opinion articles on the topic of remote work."

It is an obvious concerted effort to shape public opinion in order to save commercial real estate investors who were caught with their pants down now that several companies are not renewing leases.

It's not just commercial real estate. Those are all print publications bought as physical products by commuters. They're looking at through-the-floor print sales and panicking.

The correct formula is remote with team summits but FAANG is too cheap and dysfunctional to manage that. Travel is cancelled due to perpetual "headwinds" and the budget is strictly used by high level middle management to bounce around the world and vigorously agree with each other.

https://archive.ph/wJelE

"A separate internal document showed that already-approved remote workers may be subject to reevaluation if the company determines “material changes in business need, role, team, structure or location.”"

What are you quoting? that link doesn't have that quote.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/08/google-to-crack-down-on-hybr...

Sorry, I mistook this topic for the one referencing the CNBC version of this story.

It's also being said that HR will get involved if you haven't badged into your designated office in the last 30-60 days. That's the real threat.

There are many people at Google who are splitting their time between their desk location and somewhere else. Some are supercommuters - moving their families to a home in another state and coming back periodically for face-to-face meetings. Others are digital nomads, working remotely part time and on-site part time.

It's unclear if there's a tenable solution for those people.

I put in the last thread that I find having an attendance score rather interesting for a company that is so proud of how well OKRs work for them.

That is, I can see some reasons to want more visibility into what people are working on. And when. That is exactly what they pitch OKRs for solving, for as long as the goal is getting achieved, you don't have to measure other things.

Instead, this is what happens when you have bean counters look at the system. Everything starts looking like a bean to be counted. You can't, with a straight face, tell me that attendance counts, but lines of code doesn't. Or all sorts of other countable things that we all, as an industry, claim to agree is a bad idea to count.

The title is essentially clickbait. From the article:

> Google is the latest company to tighten its return-to-work policies to get workers to commute more often. In an internal email, the company said it could make office attendance an element of an employee’s performance review if they did not comply with the three-day minimum for in-office work, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Why, yes: if you don't come to the office as often as your employer wants you to, you'll get in trouble.

It's not that simple. Previously, remote versus in office was sort of at the discretion of the various organizations and leaders. This change which states there will be an expectation or regular in-office work, and that not complying would impact performance, was announced company wide a few days ago. I know someone who literally just hired an employee who must be remote for at least a year and was told that after the year some in office work would be expected, but would be infrequent. Now they have to go back and tell this same person that they probably need to figure out how to come on site several days a week and this will need to be sorted out in the next few months. If this employee decides to comply, it likely means his spouse has to quit her masters program. The manager who hired this person is afraid he's probably violating some sort of labor law/verbal contract given what was stated during the offer period. HR is really helping.

people are getting so hung up on remote vs office as though it's either or.

Out side of tech people who want to work in the office 5 days a week are in the minority along with people who want to work at home 5 days a week. The vast majority of people want the _flexability_ to decide when to go in. They'll go in for a change of scenery, to socialise with colleagues (not necessarily after work but idle chit chat in the office) or to informally speak to a few people.

Demanding and mandating people come back to the office is a real shitty move, and does nothing but cause stress and anxiety to everyone.

From the point of a rational organisation it doesn't make sense either. Do it half-way and you end up with everyone on video calls to people who aren't there; do it fully and you're overpaying for the space because, yes, really, it's colossally inefficient to have everyone on-site when they don't need to be.

Weirdly it also doesn't make sense to give people full flexibility to pick when to be on-site, though - at least, not from the point of view of their role within the larger organisation. Yes, you want them to be able to choose to be on-site when someone they need to work with is there, but also there needs to be a mixing function: as their boss you need to be ensuring that they are physically proximate to functions they haven't previously interacted with. You don't need much of this, but the main benefit of on-site working is discovery, not collaboration within an existing framework. And without a certain amount of curation that's unlikely to happen by accident. When two people get chatting in the kitchen, you need one of them, at least, to have that spark of recognition that says "Ah ha! Your thing is relevant to my thing!" because that's the fundamental innovation and discovery driver.

What's happening is that the bosses are leaning on random chance to do that curation job. I think that for most organisations it's very, very unlikely to be doing a good enough job to compensate for the downsides, but it also explains why the 37Signals approach of getting everyone in the building together at once works for them. That's still relying on randomness, but it's stacking the deck. Or rather, un-stacking it. If you allow people to pick which day a week, say, they come into the office, you'll get the Monday people, the Thursday people, and ne'er the twain shall meet. With everyone on-site at once, there's at least a chance a natural Monday will meet with a natural Thursday and produce an outcome that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

This is yet another sign that Google is in ruin …

It's hardly in ruin, has more cash on the balance sheet than, for example, all the help sent to Ukraine, military and humanitarian. It's just that making a shit ton of money ain't actually that fun because your job is basically to constantly patch holes in this gargantuan ship that never stops.

IBM was in this position way back too. Revenue is a lagging indicator.

IBM was a big driver in viewing teams and employees as fungible and assembly-line pieces and shifting to offshore work.

I think the fact that Google isn't yet worried about cost more than productivity is a good sign that they're still a ways away from that.

What makes you think they aren't? Everything they've done the last few years has been cost driven.

"In ruin" is probably too strong. But, there are lots of expectations that double-digit YoY revenue growth will continue forever. Growth that far exceeds audience growth. That's mostly from ads, and now the most lucrative queries have nothing but ads above the fold...videos are fully saturated with ads, better targeting is constrained by various privacy laws, Apple, etc. So that expectation cannot be met for much longer. They have squeezed all the easy juice. Growth will continue, but at a much lower rate that more closely matches audience growth.

So, "in ruin" may not be right, but there is some kind of big shift coming. The conditions they've enjoyed for a long time aren't going to hold.

On the same order of magnitude, but not quite. Plus, the second figure is from four months ago.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/cash-on-hand/....

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2023-02-...

Pledged vs delivered :)

But yeah, the point stands either way.

Is that so? WFH is still a largely a COVID thing, even 3 times a day is still better than going to office 5 times week, as before?

Any number of days > 0 will require people to live near the office. Many people can't afford that anymore and moved away and moved away because of that or other reasons.

One day per week, maybe two, really broadens your living options though. The approximate two-hour commute each way at commuting times I have into the nearest major city is pretty doable once a week. I have a colleague who routinely flies in for a day or two of customer visits. (He actually doesn't take all that much longer than I do to get to the office.) From personal experience, much more than that and it's not really sustainable.

Twice a week could, if your partner enables it for kids, to go to office on the morning, sleep there and go back at the end of the next day once per week and then wfh the rest of the week in your big home in a nice place to live.

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3 times a week in way worse than zero.

Are we all going to just drive somewhere, sit at a desk and not talk to our co-workers cause they actually in some other office, then drive home?

Are we all going to just drive somewhere, sit at a desk and have a zoom call with our co-workers that are working from home that day, then drive home?

Yes? I did this at my last company and it ruled.

I could have been fully remote, but I wanted to be in the office most days because I liked the routine and liked talking to the people who did want to come in. And my commute was short.

I would have to zoom most people on my team for meetings anyway because they live all over the world. (This is, btw, a good thing: it means we had people working on the project 24/7, each with access to different resources. I was online with the video team and could ping them with any questions, my teammate +8 hours away was online with the majority of infra folks and could get extra support with deployments. etc)

If you have to zoom people anyway, why would it matter whether they live near you and decided to stay home, or live on another continent?

I got both benefits of: 1. Getting to be social in person with other likeminded people and 2. Having happier teammates who didn't have to sacrifice 3 hours every day commuting and were that much more alert and efficient for it.

When a workplace or organisation is capable of 3 day office / 2 day remote working - it is (or should) be capable of fully remote working.

Pretending that there is a functional business requirement for 6 of the 10 person team to be doing the morning call from their office desks as opposed to their home desks is dishonest at best.

Embrace the reality and the benefits you yourself see and create working spaces that are better than someones sitting alone in a spare bedroom.

Well nothing can be done about that, Google's trying to force people back and it's gonna do what it's gonna do. Unless people get together an exert their voice.

Though an interesting question is whether people who took a pay reduction for remote working "somewhere cheaper" will get an IMMEDIATE bump in salary due to now having to move back to SF? Like if Google is gonna uplift the entire lives of its workers, then it's gotta be prepared to pay for that to happen.

But companies are companies, so I think we all know the answer to that unfortunately.

> Though an interesting question is whether people who took a pay reduction for remote working "somewhere cheaper" will get an IMMEDIATE bump in salary due to now having to move back to SF?

So Google really had two types of remote workers for the last couple years:

- Those who were "officially" remote: these people went through the process of converting their job title to "REMOTE" and took a pay cut in exchange for a different location (unless they were moving from a low cost to high cost location).

- Those who were "unofficially" remote: they just didn't show up in person often (or ever) but were paid like their local counterparts. Sometimes these people moved far away from their assigned site. Managers were often cool with people rarely showing up as long as they hit their KRs.

Right now Google is explicitly limiting new additions to the first "officially" remote group and trying to eliminate the second "unofficially" remote group.

So, until they start trying to eliminate the "officially" remote group, they won't have to adjust pay. But they will likely have to if/when they go after that group.

Google pays by where you live, as determined by your work location. If people move back, they get a bump assuming they took a cut in the first place.

This is not true. My understanding was that some 'office regions' are paid less than remote workers in the same state. https://archive.is/FQsXB

You're correct. This famously (within Google) came up in three scenarios: 1) people living in parts of Contra Costa County who were remote, and then paid 10% less than those living in the same place who commuted into a Google office in the bay area, 2) similar situation regarding NYC mapped employees living in Connecticut, and 3) NC-based employees being absolutely abused by being classified as "low cost" and given a 25% haircut in both base salary and equity refreshes.

I did not say people are paid the same based on the state they live in. They are paid based on where they live. Some regions are paid less than others, even within a state.

Back in the day, Google understood that the reason they offered perks like microkitchens, onsite meals, and so on was that they weren't competing against other companies offering similar perks... They were competing against their own employees, making the decision to work for themselves by freelancing or starting a competing company.

It will be interesting to see how the workforce responds to what appears to be a Google increasingly convinced that their employees are dependent upon them for success.

I attended a HR conference a few months ago with several Fortune 500 company heads of people, etc. Most of the sentiment in the room was that WFH flexibility is valuable but so is collaborative time in office. Some more 'forward-thinking' leaders were all in on remote though it was clear this was the minority.

The leaders talked a lot about pressures from other execs on wanting to go back in-office even though they knew most employees wanted more flexibility. I think most companies will go back to 3 days a week in office and 2 days remote. Remote companies will continue to hold an advantage on attracting talent.

We've recently improved our remote filter on Levels.fyi Jobs - give it a try and lmk your feedback as well: https://www.levels.fyi/jobs?workArrangements=remote

I would strongly suspect a division between hierarchical and egalitarian mindsets on this, and would be fascinated if there's any research on it. My gut suspicion would be that a hierarchical mindset would value exerting control over the outcomes of that control, and that an egalitarian mindset would value giving autonomy over the costs of that autonomy. In fact, I think that's likely to be such a strong influence that haggling over the value of "collaborative time in office" is going to be a fig-leaf over the underlying drivers. Not a small part of that is because when you look at the argument it just falls apart: you can tell me to be in a room with someone else; you can't dictate that the result of that proximity is going to be any sort of useful collaboration. Whereas if I have the flexibility to choose to be in that room when it is useful to both of us and we have something defined to get done, the outcome of that collaboration is far more likely to be positive.

If the argument was about discovery rather than collaboration I'd have far more sympathy, but "we need to force our employees into physical proximity so they'll work together" - which, when you unpack it, is all that is being said - is a more revealing position than the pro-office-mandate crowd might want to lead with.

I think it's relatively well known that heads of people/whatever fancy name HR peeps come up with for themselves are generally sociopathic scumbags, so it's not surprising to me that this was the case.

There is just no way any of this is based on actual data.

Actually we have lots of data on sociopath and narcissistic tendencies in management. Management consistently scores higher in these negative personality traits.

Have you met any of these people? They're quite normal people like you and I. They've climbed the ranks in some cases by spending 20+ years at the same company. The discussions I attended were HR leaders in attendance only aside from myself. I was just popping into breakout rooms and observing. I left with the impression that the HR leaders are genuinely interested in improving the workplace experience. A central topic for instance was "How can I convince my CEO / board that we should allow hybrid / fully remote?". If they were sociopathic scumbags I would instead expect "How can we force employees to come back to the office" discussions.

I misread your original comment. I rescind my previous statement. Apologies for commenting on the internet while tired :-P

What a horrible workplace, the google of early 00s was the place to be, now it's just corporate optimisations taking place

What’s the important metric? Performance.

What’s one of the measures they use to establish performance? In-person attendance.

Why? Because it… improves… performance?

I mean, that’s just like testing to see how warm a house is by seeing how often the heating is turned on. Except some houses are in Cuba and some are in Siberia. It’s the wrong approach.

But meh. The largest company I’ve worked for had 0.5% of the staff Google has, so who am I to say what does and doesn’t work as a metric for them? It’s an entirely different ballgame, and not one I think I would enjoy being a part of.

Before they push for RTO “because collaboration “,they should make sure that everybody works in similar time zones. For me the real killer of collaboration is to work with with people who live in California, India and China on the same project. If you aren’t willing to sacrifice your personal life and talk to them at night, there is almost no collaboration possible. Being in the office doesn’t help at all there.

I wonder if all of the WFH excitement would have happened if open offices had never become widespread and we all had an actual office with a door. It’s kind of funny that they’ve made offices so bad that no one wants to go there, but no one (on the corporate side) talks about improving the working environment in the office at all in the context of WFO.

They've tried and were met with all kinds of retorts. It's more difficult to get an employer to spend an extra 50/month on your equipment, than to piss 10x of it away in inefficient code run on cloud computing. WFH at least got a foothold, most individuals don't even know what it is like to work in an area tailormade to your way of working.

Yeah I’m referring to e.g. Google the company, not its employees. It’s amazing that companies pretend the modern office environment is a reasonable place to work. IMO office with closed door is much better than WFH, you’d think someone would start offering it again. Is it really that prohibitively expensive?

This is why I started only choosing remote work (contracting/consulting or FT) 10 years ago. I originally did it so I could travel the world (which I did in 2013-2014) and now because I want to be able to spend more time with my family.

So the main benefit for me in going into the office, besides the psychological boost of being outside of the house, is that I often learn things about what is going on that I wouldn't have learned otherwise because they never rose to the level of, "we better should tell him". Instead, I'd just over-hear it, or there'd be a group on-the-fly conversation happening, and someone would mention it. Sometimes those things were rather important, and the only reason it wasn't brought to my attention by the people who knew it, was because they didn't know how important it was.

On the other hand, Google encourage underperformed employee to show up for improving review score.

If they does well, remote work are acceptable since they has some additional score to be deducted?

I guess it means there will have many underperformance co-workers in office?

> "Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in person and then transferred to remote or remained in person performed better on average than people who joined remotely," Zuckerberg wrote in a statement in March.

I'm still waiting for the fucking data Zuck.

None of these CEOs "have the data" about remote work, or they would beat us over the head with it over and over. I would be seeing graphs and pie charts all over the financial press.

It's 3 years and nothing. Every employee should be demanding this data as proof before setting a single foot in an office.

Well, a lot of company-employee relations is about control. Or fear of loss of control. And so, with work from home, the encroachment on the privacy of the home. I guess I'd rather be spied on at work than at home.

Heard on Blind: soon HR will be calling engineer parents about missed days in office: "your son is smart, he is just not applying himself".

All of his school work is top notch and delivered on time. He's helpful and kind to his classmates. I'm just not getting a strong senior signal for him. Perhaps it's a behavioral issue?

We think he has weak senior signal, we want to put him on these powerful stimulants to boost his senior signal receptors*

* side effects may include mild psycopathy

Realistically, how does the review conversation go if your Impact and areas of Competency are high? I can’t see a ‘yeah but your attendance was low’ holding any water from a credible manager.

It's been commonly said that 80 percent of success is showing up.

Companies with a school-like atmosphere treating their employees...like school children? Perhaps the culture and hiring/recruitment practices optimize for lack of trust.

This is too funny.

Mr Zuckerberg cited a study showing new employees that started as remote performed more poorly.

Does anyone know if the level of new hire training and onboarding is the same?

My experiences with onboarding is you generally sit with someone for a week, all day - and sometimes for two weeks.

Usually the productivity hit of doing this is swept under the rug. When working remote, are managers still designating mentors? In places where this happened unofficially, does that style of onboarding still happen?

For an employer the great advantage of remote work is the ability to hire people who live anywhere in the world (or at least anywhere in your country). But, when you're not hiring, that no longer matters.

Remote works for me. Usually on-site there is always trying to stand over my shoulder asking for something when I’m in the middle of doing what they asked me to do an hour before.

fwiw, I get this just as much with remote, but it's a chat message.

To fix this, use "the process". Create a ticket for the job for this person and if they want the job done right now, get them to up to priority themselves (presumably with their and your managers' approval).

RTO is a manager v labour issue.

It was only a matter of time before corporation started preference, and those who showed up and those who prefer to work from home

Google wants to do layoffs?

I never cease to be amazed the extent to which companies are trying to squeeze the remote work genie back into the bottle. They're desperate to find ways to make that expensive office space seem justified.

"See, look! The people are using it. They love it."

(Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)

It's great for people who want to do crime, and for people who want to bully their colleagues into doing crime or help cover it up: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eufm.12426

Not only trying, but largely succeeding. I haven't seen one instance where these decisions have been reversed due to pushback.

I'm pretty sure compliance rate with the policies isn't great. People who like being in the office down to people with small WFH preference just go along. Prime with stronger WFH preference probably simply ignore the policy.

If management had enough leverage to push them back in, they weren't going to escape

That’s because people just leave.

What happens when all the other companies are implementing the same policy...

This is why individual action is significantly weaker than collective bargaining.

In the company I work for, this is currently in the form of nudging. "Come to the office, we have prepared healthy breakfast for you" (obviously I don't work for FAANG or a startup trying to lure employees with such stuff) and more lately "we encourage you to start coming to the office for our regular team meeting".

I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which knowledge workers want to make "replace us with Eastern Europeans/Latin Americans/Indians" as painless a drop in as possible.

If they could have done it 10-20 years ago, they would have and Covid would never have been an issue. Was in a company in the 90's trying to do that with Russian developers, and didn't Sun hire 50 when the wall came down? Paid them in Levis and the like.

Outsourcing/offshoring is old news.

They are doing it. Slowly, but surely.

True, and the location of your posterior (unless you're in Asia or Eastern Europe) won't matter in the least when the flush your group and move it offshore.

Right now they're convinced I have to show up in the office. I'm happy not to convince them they are wrong.

Most everyone from those "cheap" areas have either already moved/organized good pay and thus getting paid the same as the "expensive" westerners, or are completely garbage and will result in a complete rewrite that ends up costing 10x more than just hiring competent people in the first place.

This has been an ongoing issue in tech for at least two decades now. The workers in these places are generally not as skilled at software development. Their countrymen who are quite skilled have, to a large degree, moved to the US for work. My in-office coworkers from India, for example, have for the most part been at least as good as those from anywhere else including native US citizens. Those who have worked off-shore? Not so much. Quite poor, in fact. On more than one occasion I've seen units off-shored only to be brought back in a year. Companies try it because they want to save labor costs, and then regret it because the cost ends up increasing, as those who are left on-shore have to sacrifice their own productivity to make-up for the negative productivity from these workers.

Negatively productivity? We are teaching our supplier how their SaaS product, magic quadrant leader, is working ffs.

If that’s really going to happen, I guess I’ll switch careers.

If that happens to every career, I guess I’ll become one of the managers making those decisions.

Stay on top of change, don’t be victimized by it.

> If that happens to every career, I guess I’ll become one of the managers making those decisions.

Because there are as many people who need to manage programmers as there are currently hired programmers? The number of jobs would certainly go down, or there would be no point.

> Stay on top of change, don’t be victimized by it.

Sometimes you can ride change, sometimes you cannot. You focus on being one of the 100(?) US programmers who becomes a manager. Good luck. I'll just continue advocating return to office before that happens. Since the C-suites seem to want to return to office, I'll just enjoy that for now.

You get what you pay for

In other news, Google has been taken over by High School Principals.

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