Just in case you were operating under the illusion that tech giants are run by forward thinking executives who are immune to the usual politics and problems of corporate life. Nope, most of their exec layer is a bunch of people who cut their teeth the industry in the 90's, and are operating within a thick fog of local workplace politics. I guarantee that behind this move is an executive who believes that developers need to be physically colocated to be productive, because that's how it worked when he was coming up at WordPerfect or whatever. Backing it is also a group of people who have a lot to gain from it politically.
At my employer we have some pockets of embarrassing leadership like this, but thankfully I haven't seen it in anyone senior enough to make global policy like this. My department is letting go of remote teams and only hiring in a handful of cities around the world, while ramping up office space spending. It's more expensive, less flexible, and less productive... and everyone knows it. But I guess it makes some people feel important, and it's how some others remember developing when they last did it 20 years ago. So it's happening anyway, and many of their best engineers are now on the market.
Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.
And I don't want to hang "with friends at work" I go to "work" that has to be specified clearly and that I expect to deliver with purely professional merit driven collaboration and not friendships and gangs.
I have friends or would love to have friends out of the place where I work. I want strict compartmentalisation between work and personal life. As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours.
> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.
I could also surmise that in a knowledge economy, high bandwith and low latency connections are very importance, and that in-person communication are much higher bandwith and lower latency than remote.
> in-person communication are much higher bandwith and lower latency than remote
Do you have any data to back this up? Also, what about other factors like accuracy, ambiguity and efficiency? Sending one single email to the entire company can be more accurate, less ambiguous and much more efficient than communicating it to each person one to one or relying on Chinese whispers.
I think we’ve got less than 3 years until that’s no longer true. A lightweight, wireless VR headset that you can easily put on when you want to talk to someone gets you all the presence you need for work related tasks. Transmitting points that track head and hand positions take far less bandwidth than video. Video calls have terrible lag compared to any of the VR social experiences I’ve had. The hardware is going to be key though, battery life, weight, hands tracking without controllers, and comfort. There’s good progress on all of those.
You sound like a right bundle of fun to work with.
You should consider that among the things less conducive to team productivity and mental health are "the guy in the room" types who exhibit the same lack of interest in normal social interaction with their colleagues you are claiming here under the incorrect label "professionalism".
There is a difference between being friendly and becoming friends. The latter is dangerous and you will be fooled in thinking your coworkers actually care about you and you need to drink the corporate kool-aid, work overtime and be a true best friend to everyone.
If you are going out binge drinking with your co-workers, you're doing it wrong because it blurries the lines between professional and personal life in my humble opinion.
Very few deep friendships develop at work, at best they will be acquaintances you see once in a while.
So by all means, be nice and cooperative but keep your distance.
Ultimately, remote is likely going to win out. Most people in the white collar work force are older, have families and live in the burbs. The commute for a lot of them is 1+ hour each way.
But what you're saying is legitimate, and it bothers me the amount of people acting like it doesn't matter. American society already isolates people. Work is a big (maybe the biggest) avenue to develop friendships as an adult, just like school is when you're a kid. Not everybody gets married and then their life becomes about their 2 kids and any social interaction outside of that is incidental.
>Most people in the white collar work force are older, have families and live in the burbs.
Maybe in USA, but my experience in multiple (>5) workspaces in Poland as 28 years old spftware engineer, is that people over 40 are maybe 5% of devs/tech leads.
You can be friendly without having to socialise. Not sure why those things would have to go together?
Doing socials after work is such a waste of time - sure it may be fun, but this way you are using up time that otherwise you could use to maintain friendships outside of work.
Socialising at work is when you develop unconscious and conscious biases and it is a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics.
Isn't this also how a lot of friendships start? People finding themselves in a similar place/situation/habit/interests. So to me it seems a bit natural that workplace friendships would naturally develop. It's healthier to make an effort to have friendships outside of work as well, of course.
Maybe I'm being naïve, but I don't see how "toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics" would result from these casual friendships. If anything, I'm more likely to hold myself accountable to my team members when I know them better personally.
FWIW, I've built and strengthened plenty of friendships with coworkers via Teams, which obviously, I've used a lot more during the pandemic. This shouldn't seem that weird... I've made plenty of lasting long term friends over the Internet too.
Within time cliques form and some people may be coming to those events out of fear they'll be missing out instead of to have fun and some people may just not be coming and will be viewed by other team members as weirdos. From there it is natural to side with something you know and feel affection to and you may be unconsciously treating people who don't socialise with you worse than the others.
Other things that may happen, often when also alcohol is involved, people may say things from their private lives that then other people may use against them or when you start talking about politics and it turns out some people have completely opposite views to yours. This is not helpful in any way.
> You can be friendly without having to socialise. Not sure why those things would have to go together? Doing socials after work is such a waste of time - sure it may be fun, but this way you are using up time that otherwise you could use to maintain friendships outside of work. Socialising at work is when you develop unconscious and conscious biases and it is a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics.
You're going to spend nearly 1/3 of your waking hours with these people. You don't need to be best friends forever, but working somewhere that you don't at least have some friendly interaction and culture sounds utterly miserable.
> Socialising at work is when you develop unconscious and conscious biases and it is a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics.
There is more to life than team dynamics. Metrics won't keep you warm at night. Perhaps I'm forgetting the HN demographic...
> You're going to spend nearly 1/3 of your waking hours with these people. You don't need to be best friends forever, but working somewhere that you don't at least have some friendly interaction and culture sounds utterly miserable.
Why are you assuming remote == unfriendly? That's silly.
What people are pushing back against isn't being friendly or developing a good working relationship with your peers. People are pushing back against "Not mandatory but you will be judged for not attending" after work happy hours, or extra-curricular work events where you are expected to attend during your free time. Things that seek to place your coworkers as your friends, and take away from time you could spend with your family and outside-of-work friends.
This parasitic work culture seeks to make the workplace replace your family and friends and it's all centered around the office.
Sure, a 100% remote company might be friendly, for example. I mentioned "friendly" since the previous comment mentioned "friends". Not my intention to suggest inclusivity/exclusivity.
I wrote a long edit clarifying a few things, and lost it on submit thanks to timing out. Damn.
I'm morbidly fascinated by the polarisation that drives some online conversations. Admittedly I have probably fuelled some of that with my question, I'll try to do better in future. However, it was intended to point out that there are shades of grey here (as evident in the comments) while the post I replied to seemed very black-and-white to me.
I wonder if a better question might be something like: what does a healthy, productive future of work look like now that covid has demonstrated that some people will very much want to continue working entirely remote, while some people very much do not?
For what it's worth, I completely agree and sympathise with all the issues people raise here. None of remote, in-office, or hybrid are perfect. They all have problems.
It seems that covid has given us the opportunity to at least try to improve things, even though clearly the answers are difficult to find.
Slight tangent: I was saddened to read recently that Basecap has permanently closed their Chicago HQ [0]. I've held up this place as a model for how I'd want to build an office space should my unicorn/cash-cow finally hatch. No, it's not perfect, but I loved the fact they explicitly tried, and they explicitly recognised it might be seen by some as a waste of company funds, particularly when they also did things like deliver fruit & veg to employee's homes rather than workplace as an incentive to go home rather than stay late in that expensive office space [1].
I think there are major underlying structural issues that discourage companies from solving issues relating to worker happiness. Extortionate rent and service charges have produced homogenous high-streets, and they're homogenising the business districts too. The labels over the door of each building might be different, but the attitude inside is the same. Worker happiness is grist to the mill, productivity and the bottom line reign. I think we could do better.
In a hybrid model the people who choose to be remote are damaging their own impact and career development. That's a tradeoff they're free to make if they want but it's the reason why I think hybrid models won't last for too long.
The reality is that most people don't grow in the same company. They grow by changing employer. So what you just said here, doesn't apply to most people anyway. The ones that most like the current structure are the ones most rewarded by it as well. No wonder they don't want it to change. Most people get promoted by social acts, even in google.
Longing for a career at a one company it seems like a concept from the 80s-90s or movies, where you start as a janitor and finish as a director.
However, this indeed can impact your day to day life at a company, as managers will develop biases towards people who they socialise with. That's why I think any kind of socials are a bad idea as they may be potentially discarding people who are bad are socialising but are great workers otherwise and that comes as a negative to a whole organisation.
A career at one company might span 5 years rather than a lifetime, and that's plenty of time to be affected.
One form of interaction benefits one type of employee. A second form of interaction benefits a second type of employee. Both benefit the company. Which form is best?
It's not just about socializing or climbing the ladder - you need to communicate with other people to get stuff done. Even if you only care about technical contribution and getting work done, if you aren't in the office and everyone else is, you'll have a difficult time.
If half the team is in office and half is remote on Slack, then the communication throughout (both useful and pointless) is much higher among the in person. Some simple examples:
1) quick clarification for a technical question - easier to turn back and ask your colleague
2) design minutiae which you remember after a 30/60min meeting is over - very easy to grab your coworkers in hallways or by watercooler and nail down
3) coming across interesting conversations among your colleagues by just being in proximity - not possible when you have to schedule a 30min chat for that
4) reading body language to know whether your colleague is stressed or relaxed or happy or sad - helps tailor your response which improves the communication
I haven't even delved into the timezone issue yet, which matters a lot even between colleagues on East vs West coast (let alone Europe or Asia). Meetings before 8:30am PT? PT people would still be waking up or dropping kids to school. 9-10am PT? Time for people in ET to have their lunch. 12-1pm PT? Lunch time for PT people. After 2:30pm PT? ET guys are already out for the day.
Whiteboards were a huge part of my daily work prior to COVID and the lack of whiteboards had a negative impact on my team. Touchscreens have not really been the same for us, it is too much overhead when all you wanted was to quickly work out an idea with someone else.
We dropped whiteboards in favour of collaborative editing of documents. People write their ideas and then comment in realtime. It took some time to get used to, but not many people miss it. Some people got reMarkable if they want to draw something and share - this is a brilliant tool, but unfortunately it doesn't support encryption, so the use is a bit limited, but to draw some flows etc is great.
I completely understand this. I think best through conversation with others involving drawing on paper or whiteboards. Without being able to do this, I can really struggle to focus ideas and plans. Online just does not work as well for this, not for me anyway.
The reverse is true as well. A company with no focus on social interaction drives away people that enjoy socializing with their work mates. For them it makes the office seem like a cold and uninviting place and they’re more likely to take that job offer from a friend. I agree that everyone needs friends outside of work and that you shouldn’t be really close friends with people at work since it can lead to complications but there are benefits to being able to chat with the people at work about non-work related things and to let your hair down a little.
Let's say ideal data exists in some hypothetical company which will convince you. What would it look like? Asking because this is an area where it will be impossible to get meaningful data unless a big enough company runs an A/B test over a long period of time to measure the impact on career development.
Can't we have data showing career advancement differences between onsite employees and remote employees? I don't understand your attack/sarcasm. We manage to find data to show salary/promotion differences between men and women, or between different races, why not based on the location of the workers?
How many companies exist which have meaningful representation of onsite vs remote employees at various levels of seniority? Can you please name a few?
FWIW, at one of the FAANGs I worked that, HR shared data (promo rate etc) between HQ vs remote offices. But those were still remote offices and not remote employees who could work from anywhere.
Fine, I'll play along and say that you're right: the data doesn't exist - which btw I never contested, I actually asked if there was any data available to back a claim. It is then equally fantasist to claim that being a remote employee at a hybrid company is either detrimental, neutral or beneficial to career advancement.
This sounds like a copout. Lack of data doesn't imply equal plausibility. It means that you need to use other methods of reasoning. And people do this all the time - it's not like every time you're faced with a new situation you go "Oh I don't have any data here, all of my options are equally good". No, what you do instead is use common sense, draw on experience, best judgment, mental heuristics etc. Those aren't as good as evidence based decision making but they surely beat throwing your hands in the air and saying that all of your options are the same.
Some of the best friends I have, I met online and haven't actually seen face to face. Still, you can have a workplace with a reduced (not eliminated) physical presence. I know of people who do flexible office visitation, so they have two days per week when everyone is in, and the rest of the time, people are free to either WFH or at the office. Seems to work out for them for now - those who really want to be there can be, while those who prefer to work from home can do so.
Then by all means go into the office and get their element of social interaction together and let the introverts get their stuff done in their preferred environment.
There are introverts who value a dose of in-person interactivity. Some find the structure of the work schedule useful in ensuring a degree of socialisation. My question was more around whether the workplace can function better for both introverts and extroverts. There are several comments in this thread that suggest entirely remote work has issues, and hybrid models might favour the extroverts (although one interesting comment suggests they'd experience an increase communications burden, repeating messages in-person and in chat). Personally I would not want a 100% in-person workplace. How do we resolve the issues that come with, let's say, hybrid working?
> As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours.
Both of these are common scenarios at Google, though.
That's great if so. Google however isn't representative of most companies by even a long stretch. In most companies, any stranger cannot go past a checkpoint without some RFID and what not that too with prior permission and purpose that's "reasonable" or at least your line manager is OK with it.
If any serious work is being done in a company, it does not look like that. Why do people keep pedalling this lie? A big problem in engineering is a lot of the work is done by engineers in private and the supervisors don't get to see it or experience it. So they think it happens by magic and that maybe the laughing execs actually contributed to it.
Unfortunately there's a huge amount of people employed in offices who literally do come in all day and don't do any work. Working from home means you actually have to have some work to do. What we're seeing is a load of people realising they have no work to do.
I think you might be a bit jaded. I do work at a company where team meetings look a lot like this and yes we do get real work done. We don’t talk and joke around all day but there is space for it. Oddly, other, more somber places I’ve worked were much less productive. People were more guarded about asking for help or collaborating and there was little communication between management and everyone else which led to a very us vs them mentality. It turns out that liking the people you work with actually does make work fun and productive.
> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.
Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa.
Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.
The big wave of outsourcing in 2000s was a disaster. This is not just about knowledge. It is also about cultural differences that are sometimes more limiting than not having face to face time. It is about timezone differences that make it hard to have calls or meetings.
The reason cultural difference was an issue is one dominant culture enforced by presence culture. Without presence culture there would be no dominant company culture, it would be more distributed around the world. Also, timezones don't make it hard to have meetings, it's the same culture preventing it to happen. In my current company I sit in Europe, and it's easier for me to find a time slot for a meeting with my US and India-based colleagues than with people sitting in the same building with me.
I am reminded of my experience working for a German medical equipment company.
We have distributed shared service centres around the world. Policy, best-practices, etc are formulated in the head office. For some reason we have continual problems with colleagues from one South American region who never follow best-practices and cause a lot of additional work for other teams who have to clean-up after them. I believe this is exactly what we talk about when we discuss cultural issues. We also have problems with giving these colleagues additional training and mentorship because they prefer to start a lot later in the morning, so our working hour overlap is very minimal.
One thing I have noticed is that while the old hats (those hired some time before the pandemic) are as productive, or maybe even more productive while working remote, it's a struggle to bring in new people, especially more junior people. Maybe these are problems that can be solved, but it seems that an already a challenging and stressful situation, joining a new company, is even more difficult when you are not able to spend time together in person to pick up on team dynamics and just general mentoring.
I assume it's a bit easier if you are more senior and have a few company changes on your resume, but for someone for whom its their first or second job in the industry, it can be overwhelming. I think that's why often fully remote companies pre-pandemic seemed to be more focussed on hiring seniors.
Likely some of these problems can be mitigated as we learn how to deal with them, but this is one reason why I think post-pandemic most software houses will have to adopt a policy of encouraging some on-site work.
I have joined a company remotely and I don't feel I got slower productive than before. The ability to do pair work is almost enhanced and the fact that everyone is able and willing to be called in to help has accelerated learning and integration in some areas which I found harder in the past.
Also keep in mind that it may be slower than with direct in person mentoring but there can also be the opposite of in person mentoring and then being locked in the same office can become extremely stressful.
I also run a small team with new hires on one day and I'm seeing great productivity and teamwork.
We are going back to the office eventually but I don't think the on-site requirements will be as strict as in the past. In the medium term I see us moving towards a more flexible model beyond just the flexible allocation of desks (which imho. is a horrible thing, pretending to be office workspace and serving neither then needs of people there nor the companies output).
not that guy, but the two times I've had to do it I was miserable. I like getting an assignment and then going off to my cube to do it. To have to constantly be in communication with someone makes my work miserable. I'll gladly send you status at the end of the day, just don't make me ever work that closely with someone again or I'll find a new company.
I never had a job where I did but it happened sometimes (eg solving a critical problem together, or pair programming in new projects to learn). I found it hugely stressful: it made me anxious to have someone waiting for me to collect my thoughts, and work twice as tiring.
I would probably refuse some a new position if there was the expectation of constant pair programming, but I'm curious if others have different experiences.
"One thing I have noticed is that while the old hats (those hired some time before the pandemic) are as productive, or maybe even more productive while working remote, it's a struggle to bring in new people, especially more junior people."
My employer has always (started in 2007) been fully remote; we've never had office space ANYWHERE. It's a small team building a relatively niche product, and we're pretty successful, but what you say is true:
Getting new people up to speed is hard. And hiring "baby developers" is just not something we've done. All our hires are midcareer or later. I feel like a fresh dev needs the office environment to get traction early in their career, and we just can't provide that.
I did notice something similar. We brought on one junior last year and I had to schedule about 5 in-person days with him to do actual pair programming to teach him some stuff. That said, I think what stopped me the most with being productive over video chat was not being able to point at his screen and had to describe in detail when I wanted him to look at something. Giving people a virtual pointer to point at stuff on the presenter's screen would be welcome.
I don't think remote working is in its infancy, it's more a case of the scope has been changed the recent year or so.
The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. However remote work never brings the same connection to your co-workers as being physically present in an office and in my opinion that is extremely important.
I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Since that is at the cost of those living in the city with shorter commute, there will always be mixed feelings about working from home/remote working at the workplace.
> The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute.
One of the reasons there's so much opposing views on WFH is that there are also other big benefits, that apply only to a subset of the population. Among those are, the ability to optimize your workspace for your own needs, and not having to have the "connection to your co-workers". For some of us[0], this can easily make 2-5x difference in terms of ability to focus and lowered stress.
The more universal, but less important and a bit controversial benefit of WFH in many occupations[1] is that you get to optimize your whole schedule - work and private - globally. E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, and then work a little longer, instead of desperately trying to batch up errands and take a day off in advance. This also reduces stress, and allows you to rescue even more free hours in your life, at no cost to productivity.
> I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city.
Commute is a funny thing. Back in the day, my wife lived in a small town and worked in a different one, and her commute of 20km took less than my 4km commute in the big city, and that's using the tram system (which avoided most of the traffic jams).
The freedom to be anywhere is the important thing, though. It's not just about nice apartments, but also about being able to move closer to your partner's non-WFH workplace, or closer to extended family so your kids can see their grandparents more often, etc. I sometimes feel like an outlier here, but I'm planning to move back to a large city (different one than my employer is headquatered in, though!) - the costs of living will increase, but so will the access to benefits of modern civilization. Good cities are much more than work hubs.
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[0] - A subset of whom you could call "neurodiverse", but my current belief is that everyone's mind is different, and ones you'd call "neurotypical" are just good enough at hiding their peculiarities in the social context.
[1] - I.e. if your job does not require to actually be butt-in-seat for 8 hours a day, and your employer isn't of the abusive kind that decides to surveil you minute-by-minute anyway.
I believe it still is in its infancy. Cities and societies have not adapted for remote workers yet, at all. OTOH the office has a whole ecosystem of transportation, real estate, cafeterias, cleaning etc that is adapted to it.
Sure, being in the same space is a different kind of connection, the question is which part of that connection is needed for work. I 'd personally rather share a cowork space with my friends rather than whoever the company chooses for me, and i think that's going to be a trend in places that house lots of remote workers. There are in fact cities being redesigned around remote workers like Madeira. I think the actual problem that people complain about is not the lack of physical bodies at work, but the lack of physical bodies in general. That needs to change if people are going to work remote in large percentages, people will need to either find more friendly neighbors or just start talking to their neighbors , like people did a few decades ago.
And then we haven't even began to scratch the surface of ways to connect with coworkers. I find that sharing a gaming environment (like e.g. secondlife) gives a sense of presence, space, and connection and takes away that lingering anxiety of "where is everybody?" that I get when i work at home. Slack also does that to a small extent.
Ultimately, remote work is objectively giving people more options, and that is a measure of progress, so I see the transition as inevitable. I think people are being held back by the current designs of modern big cities, which have been entirely shaped around the home-work routine. In fact, large parts of the rewards of "real life" (e.g. making new friends) has been moved to the office for purely logistical reasons (other places of congregation stopped existing). This isn't inevitable, remote workers will develop new habits in a few years. Historically it's the cities that changed to adapt to work conditions, not the other way around , and now a critical mass of workers is ready for the change (In fact, the switch to remote was possible years earlier, COVID just accelerated it).
I agree. I've been remoting working for most of the last decade and it's great from a work-life balance perspective, but I wouldn't recommend fully remote to any company.
In my experience part remote works much better, if not better than fully remote / fully office based. It's nice have a few days a week for in person meetings then some quiet time to get stuck into work at home.
I'm fully remote and I don't mind it. Compared to being either fully remote or fully office-based, my ideal lies somewhere in between the two. Remote by default with the option to head in for co-working and stuff when I want to.
Have you considered the possibility that executives in charge of tens of thousands of developers might have some data you don't regarding its impacts on productivity in aggregate?
Sometimes its easier not to share. In a perfect world we'd be more transparent. If its an popular decision, discussion potentially fans the flames of disagreement and ill will. E.g. People take some small point of the rationale and blow it out of proportion for why this is bad etc, why it isn't relevant to them without seeing a bigger picture etc. I think we've all seen this. Sometimes its simpler and more efficient to say less.
Thats a charitable interpretation. But how do we distinguish when this is the reason and when the reason is "there is no data"? Why am I the only one who has to trust the upper management on their decision but they can look into mine and change it at any time they wish?
I don't agree with this premise. It's quite easy to share "we have data that suggests that this is the case", even if you don't divulge fully what that data is.
A decision where it's clear that some analysis has gone into it (even if you disagree with the outcome) is always going to be more accepted than a decision that seems completely arbitrary / driven by politics.
It seems that developers / ICs are asked to justify everything they do with data - making decisions from the gut is the privilege of the executive.
It's not "pretty unpopular", a large majority of employees strongly want to come back to the office at least part time. And this headline is ridiculously misleading, they committed to letting people work remotely till September ages ago, and that hasn't changed. The only thing that happened was they finally put a timeline on when people can come back voluntarily.
And there is quite a bit of data on it, most of which is widely shared internally.
Yes, many employees want to come to the office part time. But Google says they will need to come to the office (almost) all the time. How many people want that?
I don't know, but I think it's reasonable to assume that their primary concern is productivity, and that at a company like Google, that concern will be analyzed in a data driven way. Perhaps they don't want to insult their developers by implying their productivity dipped, or something.
Nonsense. You don't get promoted for what you did. You get promoted for what you will do.
Everyone who has made it up the ladder knows this and it's the single aspect that differentiates people who routinely get overlooked for promotions from the individuals who steadily rise through the ranks
They don't play politics with their subordinates, they play politics with their peers and their superiors. Developers are "human resources" - resources are there to be exploited, not catered for.
> I think it's reasonable to assume that their primary concern is productivity, and that at a company like Google, that concern will be analyzed in a data driven way
That assumption has been thoroughly refuted by Google's reaction to James Damore's internal memo.
Maybe they have. Maybe it's even good data, and analyzed correctly[0]. "We have data" has been the go-to excuse of companies in the past decades - a way to whitewash doing whatever it is they want to do anyway. Maybe Google is better than this[1].
But that still assumes the executives making these decisions prioritize employee well-being and work productivity. No amount of correctly collected, analyzed and understood data on WFH productivity will help if the change isn't driven by concerns about productivity. In that case, this data is just irrelevant. I believe this is the concern GP is expressing - that the goals of the management are not well aligned with the goals of the employee (which is obvious), and the well-being of the company (which is plausible).
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[0] - I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt here to Google, at least in areas where it matters. I'm not usually giving it to a typical company, Internet or otherwise: just because you have data, doesn't mean you have the right data, have analyzed it correctly, or even employ anyone who could analyze it correctly (or employ decision makers who could understand and vet the conclusion of the people doing the analysis). In my experience, these failures are very common.
[1] - I have my doubts where it comes to their product decisions.
I'd disagree at least a little here. Google has been surveying their staff about what they want to do after the pandemic is over, see this twitter thread where Google published some of it's data: https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/1308529118531...
People are split on what they want. Maybe people could be better trained to wfh, but some of us just prefer an office. While I am likely more productive at home (even with 3 kids there) I see that knowledge sharing with a large team is just harder (missing that hallway conversation, or seeing someone at a whiteboard and just learning random things).
That doesn't seem split at all. The vast majority don't seem to want to be in the office everyday. They disregarded those survey results though for their decision.
The vast majority prefer not to come to the office everyday. Google says you can only work from home slightly more than 1 day per month.
If they took the survey into account, it would have been the opposite - you're only required to come into the office 14 days per year.
Oh no, please don't start with the magical hallway conversations. I've never had a worthwhile conversation in a hallway or microkitchen, ever. This argument needs to die.
My previous 2 companies it rarely happened, if ever. But it has happened a lot with me at Google. But I also think it's a property of the teams I am on. Other teams it doesn't seem to happen as often.
Having whiteboards around, I will see people talking about certain things or explaining some new system, and it's easy to jump in. Maybe these could be considered impromptu meetings, but they still have been great for me.
Exactly. People with school-aged kids had to deal with them being home - and then many kids were doing distance learning and one or more parents had to become teaching-assistants - or at the very least, "tech support" for the myriad of cobbled-together distance learning solutions/issues/gear (many kids may have even had to share limited computer resources/bandwidth).
Their spouses who may have worked outside the home, were home.
If they had not worked from home previously, chances are - they didn't have a dedicated office space - or even equipment.
Add to that the constant low-level stress of being in a pandemic with constant media impressions, massive social change events/activities (at least for those in North America with BLM and the moronic exit of the Orange-moron), and it isn't a stretch to think that productivity has been down somewhat.
Never did WFH until the pandemic, and will probably continue working from home for some time after things open back up. I have a hard time seeing how my day-to-day will differ significantly post-pandemic.
Many people don't actually have a setup optimized for working at home, or at least didn't for much of the pandemic. Seemed like half of my team had to buy a desk because they didn't have one before the pandemic started. People are working at their kitchen table on a hard chair with their 3 roommates or family members milling about. And a lot of the country has had schools closed or remote for much of the last year, meaning parents are trying to work while trying to watch their kids and make sure they are getting into the right Zoom meetings, doing their schoolwork, etc. No wonder some people are desperate to get back into the office.
But a true work from home setup likely involves having a dedicated home office space, with the right setup. Even now, a lot of people don't have that.
> Never did WFH until the pandemic, and will probably continue working from home for some time after things open back up. I have a hard time seeing how my day-to-day will differ significantly post-pandemic.
I would assume for people with children being able to offload them to public education institutions during work hours will be significant difference.
> Curious what you think the main differences are.
From my experience (2 days/week WFH before pandemic):
1. People with kids have to babysit (I do not have children, but people who have are noticeably impacted by this)
2. Everything is closed, so casual outing to coffee shop or just grabbing a lunch with colleagues not possible. Some goes for just going to gym for a bit.
3. Before the pandemic, sometimes we did morning in the office filled with debate/design work, then lunch and then go home to bunker down and code. Again, not possible now.
4. Two adults in one room makes meetings annoying (well, basically openspace but without the free food).
5. Team beer is remote now, which I mean, kinda works. I get drunk anyway. But still, suck a bit.
What is the measure of productivity? Lines of codes added/removed? Functions written? Jira tickets etc? How do we exactly know that if they are tickets, they are exactly the same size before and after the pandemic?
And is it the same for everyone? Like for HR, sales, marketing?
You can look at the distributions of ticket sizes and make sure they are roughly the same as before. With enough data it is pretty easy to observe a change in productivity even if you are using measures that aren’t good absolute measures of productivity.
same for my clients. the drop in productivity was huge and forced some of them to start letting people go.
and all of these companies are now asking their employees back to the office full time in a week or so.
i am sure that if productivity hadn't dropped during WFH then there wouldn't be such a big issue. but when the whole company stops producing, then it's pretty clear what needs to be done...
you have to put yourself in the manager’s shoes. before WFH x features deployed, after WFH and covid y features deployed. if y is much smaller than x then it’s clear WFH + pandemic drove this. so no more pandemic and no more WFH should bring back x.
Not sure I believe that, I think it was probably drop in profits because of the pandemic. My team has stayed coherent and 75% of us want to continue working from home because we're doing a bit better than last year and productivity and profits are up. There's nothing really special either about us, just a bunch of hardware and embedded engineers working on medical projects using email, webex and slack.
Down since WFH? Or down since the pandemic? Both have an impact on mental health and thus productivity metrics, and it’s important to differentiate, because the pandemic won’t be around forever, but it started around the same time as mass WFH.
If that demographics shares the mentality of seeing work as a place to "hang out with friends", it might not be surprising that when control, hierarchical and peer pressure incentives get loose, the same people consider being at home as being on holiday with a few minutes of work from time to time.
It is also likely that we are talking about a young demographics which lacks the maturity needed to work remotely efficiently through self-control (I've been that kind 15 years ago for my first remote experience which was a disaster, but my second remote experience was opposite, extremely positive for myself and my output). I didn't pay attention to it when I started writing, but the fact that you mention "gamedev" is a good hint at this.
Ex-gamedev but I'm still in touch with lots of ex coworkers and friends in the industry and most say the same thing, somewhere between 'low productivity' and 'disaster'. Some of them meet up on their own without management knowledge.
Sales and marketing seem to work as usual though, just from homes. Obviously game sales skyrocketed over past year, so it is hard to reliably grade their performance.
One production team that started transition to remote work before pandemic reported no significant slowdown. They hired bunch of highly skilled multi-disciplinary contractors all over the world and let go most of their regular staff, but it is fairly small team so I don't think this approach can scale.
I listened to a psychology prof., who said "the probability of encountering a person with anti-social trait in real life is extremely low, OTOH the probability of encountering a person with anti-social trait on internet is extremely high". Because internet provides a safe way to act toxic without any repercussion in real life.
When I see the OP comment which claims WFH is the only way and any other way to is just "backward thinking" in a very self-aggrandizing manner, I just remind myself that internet is safe haven for the type of people, whom I will rarely meet in real life.
Would that 34% come from fear and stress? People at office feel the pressure more and work above their means and then take holidays when they are completely burned out to recover instead of enjoying it.
66% is probably your real baseline level of productivity and something to learn from.
If you are their superior they may not even be your friends, but just pretend they are out of fear of being fired or treated unfavourably.
That's weird. At my company our performance improved with everyone working from home. Some peoples' individual performance deteriorated slightly, but it's made up for by the rest.
> need to be physically colocated to be productive
I suspect that my employer will have us back in the office before the end of the year after a year of remote working. Although I actually sort of prefer the office myself, the whole "physically colocated" thing is especially comical in my situation (which I think is common in most big corporations) - none of the people I actually work with are in the same office, or even the same time zone, as me. So I'll drive a half hour each way to essentially be a remote worker anyway, and I definitely won't be the only one.
Talk to your coworkers outside work--organize. Be united and push back. You can bend management in any direction you want. You truly own the means of production, not them--never forget that.
The cynic in me thinks that this back to office push is out of fear that it's far, far easier for remote workers to organize outside the view of the company. They are terrified and want to nip that in the bud as soon as possible.
neah, it's productivity related. when no one is working after WFH, then it's pretty clear the experiment failed and people need to be back in their offices.
if productivity stayed the same, no-one would have said anything.
I'm late to the party, but put me down as someone who genuinely believes there is a positive social and professional benefit to in person interaction that is absolutely lost for many people in remote work.
Does it require 5 days a week? Maybe not. Is every person who believes remote work has long term negative impacts some middle manager from the 90s? No.
Ever thought that these executives are not as dumb as you think they are, and maybe that they are aware that individual developer productivity may drop, but there are broader benefits to having everyone on site.
But who said the only way to improve productivity is asking people to go back to the office? Maybe they're dumb if they can't find a different solution.
The big exec that was behind building office space needs to show how successful their initiatives are. And they have enough leverage and influence to move you back on site.
When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts? The pandemic-driven remote working is hell for some people, and unfortunately they call the shots.
I don’t mind coming into your office now and again (there’s a special dimension to IRL connections), but the reason I don’t want to work there full time is that it’s crap for knowledge work. I outspend you by 10x per head in my home office, and everything there is to my exact specification. The whole field of modern office design should be a discredited pseudoscience; management is addicted to it because of the real estate crisis though.
This is also kind of terrible, because a lot of people use FAANG as their North star for every policy decision.
“Well Google use primary colours in their logo, Brian”
I'm totally not an introvert: I love being around nice people, I love playing table tennis and having lunch with my colleagues. But wasting 1h-2h daily on commuting to/from work is in absolutely no way worthy of this.
It's our duty as human beings to resist going back to the office as much as possible. To gain back some of the life we otherwise would spend on commute. Work is for work, not for socializing, or having fun, or playing Xbox and table tennis. I mean, sure, these are nice perks, but we are being paid for the work we do, not for the fun we have. And working without being distracted by some colleagues loud music in the headphones, or the chit chat of others, or the "sorry, quick question" of some manager, improves my quality of work tremendously.
Yes, two non-introvert reasons for remote work: Commuting is hell and deep focus is near impossible in modern offices.
For the latter, there are times when you need to think about working, and when you're doing that, being in the office with a group of people and a whiteboard is invaluable. But at some point, you know what you need to do, you just need to get into a flow and do it. And that is near impossible in modern offices. That is especially important for engineers, but it also applies to accountants and designers and carpenters and any productive labor that isn't management.
Introvert/extrovert doesn't come into play, all productive labor needs to get into states of deep focus.
Maybe if engineers all had doors that closed, but for some damn reason we haven't had those since the 1960s.
I worked in an office many years ago where I noticed that the accountant always stayed late in the office. I once asked her and she said: "I stay late because when they leave I can finally start to work".
I never understand why long commutes aren't "Pants On Fire" emergencies for people. If you're driving two hours every day, and not spending all your free time wondering how you can either change jobs or change housing, well, it's a finite life that you're pissing away.
I'm certain that there will be an outpouring of hundreds of reasons why people cannot move, and I'm sure all of those reasons have merit. But it doesn't change the fact that long commutes are a huge detriment to work/life balance.
I have a 1-hour each way commute when I have to go to the office. I would love to live closer to the city centre, but the cost is extremely high for houses, so I would need to move to an apartment... I used to do that but decided that the feeling of having your own house and being able to walk outside on the grass and enjoy the weather (when it's a nice day), not to mention the silence at night and even during the day, are much more important to me. Living in an apartment felt like living in a jail to me.
With the pandemic I've been enjoying being at home so much. If they force me to go back to commute I will look for another job.
It depends on the nature of the commute. I've had a commute that was an hour each way, and that worked extremely well for me because the first half was by train, which is fairly low-stress and can be part of a relaxing morning routine (breakfast / coffee / reading the news), and the second half was by bicycle over quiet bike paths, which was important daily exercise that I would have to do anyway one way or another and also woke me up. The only part of the arrangement I disliked was the expense of the train fare.
Unless there are an equal number of housing units to office seats in a particular region of a city, by the pigeonhole principle, it's not possible for everyone to just live where they work. Also working spouses and other cohabitants can't always just work in exactly the same place.
Your suggestion works for exactly one type of person, who has enough resources to outbid others for housing and either lives alone or has a non-working spouse.
I have regularly had 2-3h (each way) commutes. It's not because I couldn't change, but because I actively enjoyed the travel each day. Dedicated, no interruption thinking space, and a clear buffer between the stress of work and my home life.
Wouldn't that 3 hours per day be better spent on meditating/yoga/woodcarving (or any other relaxing activity) instead? I mean driving doesn't appear to me like most relaxing activity, but maybe it is just my perspective.
I'd suspect the results would be different, the fact a commute is forced puts your brain into the mode where you solve creative problems in the background without thinking about them. There are good reasons ideas come out of nowhere to you in the shower or on a bus.
That said I'd never ever have a 1+ hour commutes, 30 minutes is plenty but I have noticed a difference in inspiration this year and I put it down to this.
Once you throw mass transit into the mix, a long commute also becomes dedicated reading/napping/web-surfing/project-management/side-project time.
I was doing 90 minutes each way, four days a week, before; I'm currently not worried about going back to three days a week, although I'm a little curious if I'll feel differently once it happens.
"a commute is forced puts your brain into the mode where you solve creative problems in the background without thinking about them"
I don't think about work outside of work, which includes commuting. I may have an epiphany while showering or talking a walk, but in the car I listen to music or podcasts. That is Me Time, not Employer Time.
"You might not be thinking about work, but your brain is."
This is definitely true after work sometimes, but a commute is not necessary for this. Walking helps similarly and is healthier, too. For me personally, I tune everything out and listen to music most of the time while commuting, or simply meditate (specifically not dwelling on any thoughts).
"Maybe I care about this more because I'm a designer so, creativity is what I'm judged on."
I'm not sure if you intended this, but this could be read that you're implying that programming is not a creative profession. Which is wholly false.
Part of tackling hard problems is coming up with creative solutions. One absolutely needs creativity and vision to architect larger applications and coordinated services.
I've met accountants that are more creative than some jazz musicians, but the creative work they do is much more abstract and not as intrinsically understandable as a musician that's improvising on a tune.
Seems like an odd thing to do for that. I take a short drive each morning to get my coffee and then come back home. It's my meditation/alone time/change of scenery and i get to continue my day working uninterrupted at home.
People think that the things they do at the office (beyond work) are impossible to replace in "real life". They are, office is the actual virtual life
I study on the bus because it's the perfect environment for it to me. I'm on the bus, so I can't do anything else. I'm on the bus so there isn't any expectation that I'm working nor can I change when I get to get to work. My mind is just at ease that there is this naturally occurring block of time with the perfect conditions to help me accomplish an important goal of the day without impinging on any other part of my day and that is solidly baked into the routine in a very stable way that doesn't require me to exercise any executive function to ensure it happens.
My bus ride is very valuable to me for this reason.
Try as I might, on the WFH days I virtually always wind up doing this same block of study after 10pm which is my free time.
I also get interrupted just as much regardless of whether I'm at home or in the office, so that's kind of a moot point in my particular case.
> I'm totally not an introvert: I love being around nice people, I love playing table tennis and having lunch with my colleagues. But wasting 1h-2h daily on commuting to/from work is in absolutely no way worthy of this.
I commute 2x 40-50 minutes plus if I work at the office I have a forced 1h break, so around a little bit less than three hours of life have been given back to me during remote work. I understand your sentiment and I share it completely. I am now able to run errands, exercise, nap, clean the house, play video games, or work in my garage during this found again time.
I often feel shy to admit that the pandemic-induced shift to remote work has given me back a lot. My boss lives a 5 minutes walk away and will never ever understand what it means to have to commute every day.
> I love playing table tennis and having lunch with my colleagues.
I don't know how others feel, but I am not outgoing enough to use the foosball and pingpong tables that are common in development studios, I feel so judged; so those are (for me) not perks at all.
I cannot agree more. If I have to choose between spending time with my kid or actual friends vs sitting in my car commuting it is an absolute no brainer. Thankfully I have been a contractor for a while and I don't need to put up with this nonsense anymore.
I've created https://sievejobs.com to allow software developers to simply "block" contacts regarding jobs that don't match your preferred working arrangements.
I try not to build too much of an us-vs-them philosophy into either the site design or the marketing message, but I hope to soon have an XHR-type feature where the hiring manager instantly sees the effect that each piece of job metadata (remote work-ability, interview format, etc.) has on their prospective candidate pool as they enter the job info.
I think this could send a useful signal upstream to the industry at large.
The commute sucks, luckily mines only 30 minutes but honestly after a year of this I'm now convinced video calls are half as productive as in person meetings and some people just never really engage at all in video calls when they used to working in person, not sure if they're consciously aware that they no longer provide useful input, they used to.
I've started going back into the office now for brainstorming because just being able to talk without latency and without only one person being able to talk at once the difference is just night and day, not to mention the casual non-meeting non-slack chats where ideas are born.
I think remote work is now something people will demand but I can't be the only person who's noticed the difference especially in creativity focused work and believe the end game within 2 years will be the people in the office will work on the interesting stuff and remote will work on fixing bugs. Which of course will trickle on to impact salary unfortunately.
> It's our duty as human beings to resist going back to the office as much as possible.
Please don't talk for all of us. If you're miserable in the office that's fine, but it's noones duty to support your preferences. This is why we have this amazing free market - everyone can work at a company that respects their preferences.
No. Most people don't have good options. It's a little ironic to say the OP needs more empathy and then go on to make an argument that's almost breathtakingly disconnected from reality.
I've seen many breathtaking articles on this very page which claim that majority of companies are shifting towards permanent WFH. They were followed by predictions that this will increase.
Just in terms of reduced CO2 emissions due to fewer people commuting because they can work from home, and the impact this has on climate change, he is correctly speaking for all of us, if by all of us you mean life on Earth.
If that's the main driver, then instead of forced WFH, let's do a blanket ban of cars. Not just commute to work, but force people to stay at home at all times. After all, we're ignoring all the other effects here right?
Tackling climate change is a step at a time. First, we support WFH. Then, we can move on to other things.
And yes- I would like to see a total ban on gas guzzling cars in my lifetime. I would like to see cities built around walkability, and ban all types of cars entirely in the city center. Etc. But it's a step by step process.
It's our duty as human beings to resist any normalization of remote working. Loneliness is a far worse problem in our society than commuting. We need to make sure everyone has a baseline level of social contact.
> you can choose your friends, your colleagues not so much
I did choose them, luckily I got to audition them from around 300 people I've been forced to interact with through over my career during the past 10 years. Not only do I get to know their characters well because I can decide if I like them or not and find out if they're trustworthy through working together I also get the extra benefit of being recommended for jobs through them.
How on earth am I supposed to do that though clubs? Presumably you mean sports clubs because no sure much else than that exists for adults, what if I want to make friends with people who are not interested in sports?
I didn't mean sports clubs. I don't like sports much either other than the gym, where I go alone.
But in my city Meetup.com has a huge amount of clubs and groups for basically anything, and I'm in Barcelona so the city isn't even that big and it's not all English-speaking (which I guess may be more likely to use Meetup).
There are sometimes local Facebook groups for stuff as well, I went on day-trips to various places like that.
I know my colleagues who are into tabletop games and D&D go to those groups, I personally just went to language exchanges and hiking/tourism groups. There are even groups for local video gamers etc. as I guess it's nice being able to meet in person too.
There are a plethora of groups for adults. There are groups for tabletop/board games, music, movies, sports, hiking, etc. There's likely groups near you on meetup.com or facebook groups.
For music specifically there are local scenes. If you go to local places consistently, you'll see some of the same faces. Etc.
I like programming, but I would find it very boring to only be friends with people in the same industry as me.
For meetup.com specifically, maybe, but there are plenty of facebook groups around hobbies that aren't specifically "meetup" oriented. You could look for organizations specifically in your area, and chances are they'll have a facebook group, facebook page for events, or a meetup account.
I also don't see this as an issue. If you want to meet people, that's a great way to do so. I've done it across America and in Korea, and I have made many friends from it.
Does wfh really give back time to people? From what I've seen with colleagues and friends, it mostly has led to longer working hours. The commute time and the time before dinner has been replaced by more work.
If you have been able to draw the line and log off at 5pm, good for you, but that's not the experience for a lot of people.
Yeah, disconnecting can be hard. I was one of the guys who always left my laptop in the office.
But I'm not working extra hours every day, and given the time I save on commuting and lunch hour and being able to do various chores during the day - I think it's still a significant win.
> If you have been able to draw the line and log off at 5pm, good for you, but that's not the experience for a lot of people.
That's a personal issue though. It seems backwards to insist on an in-person work environment because someone doesn't have the personal discipline to log off at 5pm on their own.
If you can't speak to people unless they're forced to, that doesn't mean that you need to make it so that everyone else is forced to because otherwise you're uncomfortable.
For me, either I can go to the office 90% of the time or I can burn out from being alone at home and only talking to people via chat/video. My personal live is qualitatively better when I go to work most of the time. There are tradeoffs but on the whole the benefits of WFH (less interruptions) don't make up for the isolation.
In the same way working 60-80hrs a week will start being more productive at the start but eventually burn most people out, at least for me and people like me, not hanging out with others will do the same thing.
It's a balance for me. Too little direct interaction, short breaks, sharing lunches, having non-work related conversations, will end up decreasing my over all productivity.
You're welcome to WFH but I personally hope you're in the minority because if no one but me goes to the office then it's just as bad as WFH for me.
I'm in exactly the same position. My worry is, even if there's this move to both WFH and office, at some point 'office' is going to become an expense and be cut and then there's no choice. I am too cynical to believe that companies want to push WFH for good and nice warm fuzzy reasons.
Also I feel for the people who's work was supporting workers in, y'know, work. I no longer live there, but even a crappy day in London for me was brightened by the countless interactions with people, the guy in the magazine shop, a new hipster pop up cafe, the street vendors selling exciting new food. Will they work from home?
I’m not suggesting WFH is right for everyone; I think you should have the right to work the way you need to, as you know yourself and your work best. I personally feel you have nothing to fear in terms of numbers, because there’s an enormous bias towards IRL work for both strong and weak reasons.
I think one of the major challenges for an organisation is how to get peak performance from a diverse team (in terms of life circumstances and personality) and still maintain one culture and a ‘team mind’ where everyone is safe and content with their work.
I’m not a WFH evangelist really: remote is just another modality, with its own costs and benefits. It just doesn’t seem to get a fair hearing in a lot of places.
>>>When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts?
This is my exact complaint, even in the Marine Corps. All of our senior leadership are charismatic extroverts. They are trying to adapt "distributed command & control" because they recognize that large management nodes are easy to spot and kill. But they still insist on all forms of concentrated workspaces, in-person meetings, video teleconferences, etc... We have the technology, but it will never be fully embraced because it is fundamentally anathema to the character of our decision-makers.
For most people home office makes sense for practical reasons - long commute, spending more time with the family, living in a nicer / cheaper location but having a well paying job. On the other hand, extreme introverts that don't tolerate working in an office are a tiny minority and should dictate the working conditions even less than the extroverts.
Personally I tend toward introvert (it's not black and white) and have experience with working from home before the pandemic. For someone who's starting working from home it's easy to fall into a pattern of self-isolation which will have a negative psychological effect on them. I'm convinced that most people need at least a couple of days per week of social office time for their own sanity.
All these issues around “I like it my way and everyone should do it that way” issues have a very simple solution: let the adult people you hired decide for themselves! Make presence in the office entirely optional and see what happens. Those who can’t live without being in the office can come in every single day, those that hate it can never come, and those who want 1/2/3/4 days a week can also do it.
Commute length and comfort is often inversely proportional to income.
Sometimes you end up in a job with no good transit routes from where you can afford to live, so you have to drive hours a day. Search the web for stories about "supercommuters".
Compared to any of that, a 30 min bike ride is downright lovely.
This is the thing, right. The problem isn't remote or office per se, it's the commute to and from the office that's the issue. I can definitely focus more at home, but I really miss my 30 minute bike commute.
I've seen this argument before, and I don't understand how working from home changes this honestly.
Why not just start your day with a bike ride for leisure? Unbound by the location of your office you can now cycle to any arbitrary location. If you struggle to do it without a reason, perhaps cycle to a bakery or store and pickup some fresh food for the day.
> Why not just start your day with a bike ride for leisure? Unbound by the location of your office you can now cycle to any arbitrary location. If you struggle to do it without a reason, perhaps cycle to a bakery or store and pickup some fresh food for the day.
For me, it's a motivation issue. I had to go to work and had to cycle/walk there. Now, going out in the morning is optional. If I stayed up too late or if the weather is bad (it's almost always bad in Scotland) I'll make an excuse and not go out. After doing it a few times, I broke my morning habit and it's extremely difficult to force myself to go out.
I know it doesn't really make sense but that just adds to frustration. I hate that I cannot force myself to do daily exercise and it makes me feel like shit, creating a sort of feedback loop. I don't go out and do exercise because I feel like shit and I feel more shit because I don't exercise.
It's much easier to do something when you have no choice but to do it. If you have to commute to office, you have to do it, period. If you want to do "virtual commute time" when working from home, you have to somehow justify it to yourself (and your spouse), against the ongoing pressure of thoughts and words like, "I can skip my 'commute' this time to do just this one errand / complete this one task / read this HN article...".
If it's not a necessity, it's hard for people to maintain habits, particularly physical ones. The reality is many people are just not very disciplined if there's not an outside factor forcing them into it.
There are many comments here about missing their commutes as they could meditate/reflect on things, etc. One can quite easily do this with meditation or walking/running/biking for ~30 mins. However it takes discipline to carve out that 30 mins and leave it specifically for meditation or whatever.
Very well said. I am actually more productive working from home. I think asking everyone to work at the office again is just a decision by extrovert people managers.
In my remote office (which used to be at home, but is now a private, non-shared rented space), I have an ergonomic split keyboard that costs probably 6x a 'standard' one , I have 78" of screen real estate, split across 3 monitors, I have an Aeron chair (used, but worth every penny), my internet connection is completely dedicated to me and is business-class cable with LTE failover.
Typically, as a contract consultant, working onsite would have me provided a 13" cheap crap-top (my personal laptop has 32gb of RAM and 2tb of SSD in a RAID config), and then stick me in the worst "half-cubicle/half-storage/supply closet" that none of their employees would ever sit in.
Even then, there would be a non-stop stream of people dropping by, and/or "shoulder-taps".
And I am a weird introvert/extrovert - so I love in-person meetings, whiteboarding and training/speaking sessions. But I also love the quiet, uninterrupted time in a decent work environment to actually... "get stuff done".
I had hoped Covid would normalize at least partial WFH. I'm somewhere in the middle on this scale, but the reason to WFH is that it gives me some flexibility around chores and appointments outside of work, and saves me a commute. I hope we'll get to keep that freedom at least. 2/3 days at the office and 2/3 days at home would be great for me.
Our political conditions are also driven by extroverts. Our promotions are also driven by extroverts. Our insurance for the house, and the value we add as programmers, extroverts organize the world and take their share. I consider being extrovert as a quality for many things, and one has to learn to be versatile, even if I don’t like it personally.
I'm an introvert as well but even I recognize the effectiveness of face-to-face interactions and the necessity of creating team cohesion and esprit-de-corps. That is simply not happening in total WFH despite the best efforts of both managers and individuals. There was a recent posting on HN (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/30/microsoft-message-to-manager...) where Microsoft reports significant drops in team connectedness as the pandemic continued.
As for "The pandemic-driven remote working is hell for some people, and unfortunately they call the shots.", one might want to ponder _why_ the extroverts got into a position where they're calling the shots. Mastering the art of human interaction is important, even for introverts.
I agree but I think this is more than an introverts vs extroverts issue. Managers need an office to manage. They also want a large private office for themselves. They don’t want to be a “manager” in a Zoom window. They want all the people they manage around them. This is the career they’re trained to do and worked hard for. Not the Zoom thing.
This is way more nuanced than introverts-extroverts. I'm not a massively social person and I prefer working in an office over working from home by a very large margin.
My wife is exactly the same, while I'm fine with either (prefer meetings in-office but have been working 100% from home over a year now; though I personally haven't "made friends" from my work/office since I hit management, so an office setting doesn't provide that incentive to me).
> When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts?
While extroverts are overrepresented in management, I think a bigger issue is that people who overvalue physical proximity as a tool for establishing/maintaining control (both of formal subordinates and otherwise) are overrepresented in management. You don’t have to be an extrovert to be cargo culting Management By Walking Around (if you aren’t cargo-culting, you can probably adapt it to a remote environment) or to have developed and lean heavily on communication techniques (non-verbal, especially) that work better for dominating meetings in=person.
Honestly, I think introverts who have spent time crafting a particular set of tools for surviving as managers are at least as dangerous here here as extroverts.
It's broader than that. Their whole life is being dictated by extroverts (teaming up with other extraverts, something introverts cannot do). And that's why one should strive to shift as much into extroverted state as possible and defend their opinion and find allies.
The problem is the working environment in general, doesn't matter if it's at home or in an office, if the surrounding environment is full of distractions then productivity will be as bad everywhere.
For a knowledge worker where they need to concentrate there needs to be a quiet distraction free environment without interruptions. If this is at home in a separate low-traffic room or in an office with few people and a door that can be closed , both will work well. However I don't think many people's environments are like that in either place.
So to me there's no difference between working at home or the office, if you're going to have people interrupting you, high levels of background noise, and other visual/scheduling distractions.
In these circles, yeah, maaaaaybe introverts are the majority.
For the general population? No way. Most studies put the number of introverts somewhere between 20-40%.
Extroverts are loud and they are the majority, too.
As someone on this forum put it, the only evolutionary advantage to being an introvert is that you're insurance in case all the bunched up introverts die in a natural disaster, while you're away sitting alone in your far away corner.
Most people can't work remotely and productively because they are not trained to do so. E.g. You are in your office (inside your home) and your wife, your dog or child enters it demanding you do some kind of non important issue right now, distracting you from your work.You need to be trained to not them let them distract you. The people living in your house need to be trained as well on what to do.
The training for working in the(external) Office started at school, from a time fiber optics telecommunications were unheard for common mortals.
Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work, or just lack the initiative, knowledge and internal motivation to work without external pressure and supervision.
The companies that will solve this issue at big scale in the future are those that solve it because the they have to in order to survive(against established companies). It will be a startup that faces all the risks involved, not an established company like Google or Facebook.
It will not be companies that could pay millions for people living in ultra expensive places and are already making big bucks doing that. They don't need to change because the system already works for them.
This chestnut 'home has too many distractions' line is getting old. Work has equivalent distractions, and those people actually get paid to distract you. It takes time management wherever you sit your butt.
For you maybe. For some of us, the office is like a monastery compared to home and is the only place where deep work is even close to possible. As we return to normal, I hope more employers embrace a hybrid approach that allows everyone to thrive.
I've been advocating "quiet rooms", for head's down working, like a law library.
Mitigation until such time employers acknowledge decades of empirical evidence that open offices and cube farms sabotage productivity, health, morale. (Never.)
Quiet rooms have some benefits, but a big downside is that I want to use the equipment I have at my desk - multiple monitors, mouse and keyboard, etc. The quiet rooms I've experienced have either no peripherals, or a shared set that is a significant downgrade from what I'd have at my (noisy) desk (or home).
>This chestnut 'home has too many distractions' line is getting old.
And yet in my home it's accurate. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Where I work, it's like a library. Quiet, serene, productive, but tense.
At home it's noisy, disjointed, non-productive [hey look, I'm on HN!], and full of disruptions [slack, 5+ zoom meetings per day, kids screaming [Brother keeps hitting me!!!], and wife trying to live her life [TV, music, etc...]. But it's relaxed.
I prefer working from home, I feel like it's better, but there is a lot that can be improved.
I think you’re lucky, then. I’ve worked at multiple places and they are almost always nothing but distractions. In fact I think most employees need training on how to behave in an office environment.
For many, when they have a question or an item to discuss, that moves to top of mind and the first impulse is to go interrupt whatever the person is doing to satisfy it. This is made even worse when these types of employees are in management positions because saying “not now” isn’t an option. I used to work with a guy who would regularly have unimportant questions come up and if we didn’t have an immediate answer he would say “let’s go ask X.” I’d usually say, “let’s bring it up in our next meeting or ask in an email, I don’t want to interrupt what he’s doing.” He’d say “who cares, let’s go bother him!” Zero consideration for other people’s time. That experience permanently scarred me I think.
To this day I pretty much never call anyone at work without an appointment or at least pinging them asking when they have a few minutes to chat. I realize most here probably get that but I think the average workplace has a few people like that and it only takes one or two on a team to make a massive impact on productivity.
Work distractions are generally work related. The person at work who closes his door gets more output, but often that isn't the output that is needed. The person who pays attention to work distractions gets less work done total, but more useful work. Home distractions are not the same.
It's a nice thought but is there any evidence of this? I've also heard this quote "If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on."
In my experience at work, I've seen the opposite. The people most distracted get the least done and it's obvious to everyone on the team. Plus obviously you do need to pay attention to some distractions. Going too far in one direction is not good. I think, however, most people lean more towards distractions than focus.
The whole premise of this line of thought is faulty because everybody seems to assume that you're entirely either a door-open person or a door-closed person.
The point is choice. There are door-open and door-closed times of every day. In an open office, there is no choice, it's door-open always, and that sucks.
Do you live in the US suburbia? Because that is a unique place in the world which is built to support big houses for middle class people, where everyone can have a room for their home-office for cheap.
Most of the world is not like that. For example[1], avg apartment size in Bangalore 1260 sqft and in Mumbai is 700 sqft. Most of the knowledge workers live in dense cities around the world and it is not feasible for them to move to the US suburbia.
If you have a door you can close at the office you must be upper management. Everyone else is still in cubes if they are lucky or in open seating plans more likely.
>"and those people actually get paid to distract you"
And it looks exactly like other non-productive things at work: in my morning standup i can say: " i got pulled into a meeting about 'random irrelevant issue' so thats my day"
> Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work, or just lack the initiative, knowledge and internal motivation to work without external pressure and supervision.
I've been remote for ~5 years now, and making friends as an adult, esp. in a new city or location, isn't easy.
But you're right, when you're remote you have to make an effort to build social bridges yourself. That's impossible, or at least greatly strained, during COVID.
Kudos to you, I and most people I know haven't cracked that particular nut in a meaningful way.
It may be an unpopular opinion on this site, but I don't think the human mind is especially well-suited to remote work. We're social creatures by nature and our brains evolved to interact in the meatspace, rather than via a zoom call.
Aye, same. I'm friendly-ish with my coworkers, have played a couple of coworker-only rounds of Among Us, but honestly we're not especially tight and I'll probably never interact with them again once I leave.
At least in an office there is the geographic similarity and discussions that can come out of that, e.g. weather, housing market, sports teams, etc. But half my staff is in Mexico City, India, or the UK. We're swamped with work -- this post is me procrastinating -- and a huge number of them are contractors, vendors, and customers, who we're explicitly told not to get too close to.
And if I'm making friends online, there are far, far better forums for that, e.g. Discord, Reddit, etc.
I’ve been working remotely on and off over my career and full time for the last 2 years. I get distracted all day (have 2 kids) and I’m highly productive. I think the biggest adjustment people don’t understand is how to be more asynchronous. Working remotely requires the whole team to understand that reply’s and answers won’t be instant and jumping into calls should be the norm. Being used to impromptu calls was the hardest adjustment for me, but I’ve been doing it for a long time so I was already adjust before everyone became remote.
For me it's about picking and choosing. The value of being able to do the school run, or do some DIY at lunch for 2 hours, and then do a bit of deep work in the quiet of the evening is incredibly valuable.
> or just lack the initiative, knowledge and internal motivation to work without external pressure and supervision
I will humbly raise my hand and admit to this.
As someone who has so far really enjoyed the lifestyle benefits of WFH but has struggled with this, what advice/tips/strategies/recommendations can you or other senior remote engineers provide on how to improve this specific aspect?
My life improved so much since working from a co-working. I looked for a place that shared my work/life style and I've made friends, we share lunch, we've gone on trips, we usually share a friday drink, etc. And since everyone works on different things and/or companies it's quite interesting as well to get some other input that's not just work colleagues.
I also looked for a place 2min from my house so I still have most of the benefits of WFH
Reading this thread makes me realize that not everybody is currently in a lockdown. Co-working spaces where I am are closed (due to the virus) since ~October and won't reopen before a while :(
"Lockdown" is essentially a meaningless term. There may have been exceptions at one point but in the US, there were mostly never meaningful restrictions on leaving your home and certainly not enforced ones.
Ah, I started working at a co-working before the pandemic.
Where I am currently (Spain) there's been different levels of lockdown. The co-working is open, but with a lot of the usual activities heavily restricted.
Coffee shop patios are open here. Lots of folks working without masks there (socially distanced of course). Indoor spaces are still limited. I was going to go work at a coffee shop today but it’s a bit too cold
One potentially tricky thing is that larger companies may have rules against co-working.
My last BigCo employer had a lot of WFH (as exceptions and due to acquisitions or site closures, the overall policy was butts in seats, but still). If you actually read the security policies, you saw lots of things that would make co-working de facto a fireable offense.
But I doubt it was ever enforced, and I bet a lot of people did it. I had a proper home office instead.
It’s best to know what the co-working rules are at your employer.
O/T: Apple autocorrect thinks “coworking” should be “cowering” which is probably a worst-case version of my point...
Not saying I agree but I can see some logic in that kind of restriction. If you're in a traditional office most of the information you work with will be accessible (to some extent) to those around you and either way, they can be held to account as employees. If you're in a purely public location you're likely to be quite guarded about who has view of your screen and maybe you will avoid working on anything sensitive. But in a shared space it's potentially the worst of both worlds - you might be comfortable / friendly with those near you, but they have zero legal relationship with your employer.
Due to an extremely busy home-life, with a large family and many pets while juggling multiple contract clients - each with hours and hours of concalls/meetings, I rented a private/older office last July.
It has been worth every penny - it you are self-employed, I highly recommend doing so. My only regret, is not verifying the HVAC situation first... During summer months, I have a standalone AC unit, with window venting, and it cannot keep-up to our humid/hot days.
Routine is paramount. The old routine of commute to work, chat a bit, get a coffee, and log into your computer needs to be replicated. Wake up, shower, put on normal clothes, get coffee, talk a bit, then log on and do work. Then its a matter of not breaking the illusion by having random family members barging in and talking to you about non-work stuff.
So first of all, there are (or should be) a lot less interruptions when working from home. People tend to disturb folks that they see, it's a lot easier to give address someone at the other end of the room or across the corridor than it is to call, email or chat with someone. With these disturbances gone, you are more likely to be more productive from the start when working from home and so a little slacking off here and there probably does not make you less productive than what you were at work.
That said, self motivation and lack of external pressure can be a problem. When I feel I have a hard time to focus on something my last resort is the pomodoro timer. I sit down, set a timer at 25 minutes and force myself to no break focus during that time. Once the first period is over it's usually no problem to keep going since I've gotten into something by then.
Worst thing is that my partner thinks sitting by a computer is not work and she feels entitled to interrupt any time she pleases. I didn't know that side when I worked in office. The first few months were difficult and she only came to terms with that when I started packing my things and said I will be moving out. I learned that this is probably wrong relationship but it is hard to throw away those years, but I can't live with someone who doesn't respect what I do. I am not sure how I missed this?
How do you set those boundaries in a healthy way?
I can help with this a bit, we suffered this really badly when COVID started which was exacerbated by our first child only being 9 months old or so at the time.
Aside from the obvious (wear headphones, keep work area away from common areas) something else we did was set a boundary limit. If I was in the bedroom, that was now the “office” and was to be treated as such. This one is more personal but I tended to get too annoyed at the interruptions at first without realizing that I needed to make more effort to help and not be (to put it bluntly) a dick about it. My girlfriend started getting in the habit of tidying up or doing crafts during her downtime instead of coming to me after we discussed the huge amount of distraction it caused.
Ultimately though the living situation is what made it hard. We were in San Diego, in a cramped two bedroom apartment that had no privacy. We moved and bought a house where I now have a large upstairs loft area as my office. That is absolutely not the answer to everything but I think some of the issue is just most people not being prepared or having the right accommodations.
My advice sucks but if you have any specifics I can try to help out and answer more. It’s hard but hang in there if you feel it’s just a rough spot.
We down sized 4 months before the pandemic kicked in and I started working from a coworking space. Not great timing but we make it work. I get up early for 4 hours work before wife and kids get up and then later in the day my wife takes the kids out and I get another stint in.
Turn it around and clearly establish and promise the time that belongs away from work, so the message is not just "get away from me" which makes anxiety and behaviours seeking reassurance that exacerbates the problem.
It's "our time starts at 5pm, dinner, and the rest of the evening".
OP already explained that the partner does not see sitting at a computer as working. They have different underlying assumptions which need to be addressed. That can be hard but not worth throwing away a relationship unless one person won't work towards resolving it.
HN is not /r/relationships so I don't want to discuss healthy relationships too much, but their partner not seeing sitting at a computer as working does not mean that reminding them that it is in fact working won't change their behavior.
If anything I empathize with OP because I had the exact same issue with my partner where she'd come to show me tiktoks while I was working but when I said I did not want to be disturbed she stopped. Sure she teased me about being too serious but I just don't see how a healthy relationship could have something like this escalate...
I don't know what /r/relationships. I am glad you and your partner resolved your issues. Do you think the same solution will work for every similar problem?
Or, rather than hinging your relationship on the current extraordinary pandemic situation, just leave it unresolved and avoid working from home as much as possible. Presumably it will get easy to avoid again.
2 a light outside the door or a sock on the door let’s people know you cannot be disturbed
3 don’t forget to open the door when you can legitimately be disturbed
4 calmly and clearly state that you are at work while door is locked/light is on/sock is on the door. Compare to partner being at work/school and you being unable to barge in
5 meditate because this won’t be resolved over night
Like you it took threatening to leave (renting an office space and working from there. She was not fond of throwing out $1200/mo) for my wife to take it seriously. I have been working remotely for almost a decade now but over the last 3 years my wife stopped taking it seriously. The pandemic seems to have driven the fact home (esp when our little one would disturb her while she was working)
You must realize working remotely is not common and with any new lifestyle change there will be adaption periods. Some people longer than others. The ultimatum usually gets their attention but not always the way you would like (my wife refuses to enter the office now, which is also not what I want but baby steps)
I can relate. What worked for me was getting noise cancelling headphones and working inside a room with a door. It took some “training” (aka listening to loud music on noise cancelling headphones if she tried to interrupt) but she no longer interrupts me during work hours except on rare occasions when it actually is important. She will usually IM me too, instead of talking through the door.
In other words, respect your own boundaries first. That goes a long way towards helping other people recognize the same boundaries.
> Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work, or just lack the initiative, knowledge and internal motivation to work without external pressure and supervision.
Or perhaps because I've spent a month over the last quarter effectively under house arrest to comply with local quarantine laws?
It is hardly as clear to me as your post makes it out to be that the din of an office, packed with people sitting at the now industry standard four foot desk with no separation of any kind between them, is quieter than my home.
> Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work, or just lack the initiative
I'm not sure that's how I'd put it but the alone-ness is a real problem for many people but I don't see how some new startup is going to solve that problem.
I think many of us have been so conditioned by social media, dating apps and group chats that we’ve forgotten how to make friends. Meeting new people was super tough during covid, but we’re not going back to the same world.
I’ve been putting real effort into this: I dumped social media years ago, so now I just message someone individually if I want to talk to them. I’ve really focused on 1-on-1 friendships versus “group friends”. I don’t have the same friends as all my friends, and that’s ok (and makes for more interesting parties).
The problem is that this type of engagement detracts from your available attention share, so social media actively discourages it. Instead they want you to be a lonely voice shouting into the void hoping someone will notice you. That’s not a great life.
> or just lack the initiative, knowledge and internal motivation to work without external pressure and supervision
Most people who lack the motivation to work without external pressure are in it only because they need to do even the most menial "bullshit job" to survive: "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
> Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work
It's hard to have time for making friends when you waste 8 hours of your day on work, another half to whole hour on lunch break, another one and a half on commuting and eight hours on sleep - that leaves only six "free" hours a day of which then go one hour for eating (breakfast+dinner), one hour for personal hygiene (shower, toilet visits), half an hour to an hour for house work (cleaning, maintenance)... suddenly you're left with only three "leisure" hours, and that assumes a decent work commute in the first place. Weekends are often enough used for recovering from a stressful work week and shopping groceries.
Add in kids to the mix and it's no surprise that for many people, work is the only place they can reasonably form social connections during the week.
We need to get rid of excessive commutes, we need to get rid of the 8 hour work day in favor of a 5-6 hour work day, and especially we need to get rid of "bullshit jobs" that add additional mental stress.
I will not 'train' anybody. If my wife or my child comes to me with something it's important. I'll put work down and continue when I speak to them and make sure all is ok.
Of course they do understand that 'daddy' is working and don't call out for me when on meetings but no special training needed in my opinion.
After a year working remotely, I don't think I'd be willing to go back to working fully (or even primarily) in the office.
I could do a day here or there for team-building activities or major meetings, but that's pretty much the extent I'd be willing to do.
Granted, this is based on having a 40-minutes train commute (each way, so 80 minutes/day), but unless I could have a 10 minute walk or bike commute I don't think my opinion would materially change, and that's pretty unlikely where I live due to downtown property/rent prices (Tokyo).
I wonder how many people's opinions will change after a longer time. I wrote the exact same type of posts five years ago when I started my first fully remote job. After two years or so I had to look for an office because the isolation is just murderous and it takes a long amount of time to actually start showing its teeth.
I can highly recommend renting a co-working space once that's a viable option wherever you are in the world. These can be surprisingly inexpensive and often come with internet, electricity, etc. included.
Gives both the "short commute" benefit of work-from-home, as well as the "maintaining a clear separation between home and work" benefit of on-location-work.
And for me personally (as an introvert), it was fantastic to have people around that I could talk to socially, but who weren't directly involved in my work and who weren't going to make demands of me. Totally removed the feelings of isolation, and formed a bunch of new friendships that didn't rest on obligations to my employer.
The fact that we work on the same thing gives me more reasons to talk. I can't ask random people at a co-working space to help me debug an issue or to brainstorm a solution. They aren't familiar with my project the way co-workers would be. They also are not NDAed to look at what I'm working on
I don't understand. I work remotely and regularly debug issues and brainstorm solutions with my teammates. Their physical proximity is not relevant. Clearly I am missing something.
You're missing that the point of being around people for some of us is to "interact" with them. I can easily interact with co-workers. I can not easily interact with strangers at a co-working space.
Also I work on console games. I can't hand the person on the chat the controller and say "how does this feel?"
It's nice to work on a problem with someone and then go to lunch and shoot the shit afterwards. Or just hanging out drinking some coffee. The key is you have to have some coworkers you like though, which I'll allow that not everybody has.
For me, I've worked in full remote and full in office jobs. I favor a mix personally. Maybe 2-3 days in office and the rest remote.
I recognize that situations and preferences can change, yes. But it would have to be a pretty significant change for me to outweigh 80 minutes on a crowded Tokyo subway, particularly in summer.
FWIW, before the pandemic started, I was not enthusiastic at all about WFH, for various reasons but mostly because I live in a small one room apartment (quite usual here in the inner city in Tokyo). Now, after addressing basic issues to improve the ergonomics of my home office, most of the downsides are gone, and those that remain are outweighed by the prospect of commuting again. Of course, this could easily change if I moved closer to the office (or switched jobs to be physically closer), but considering rent close to the typical business hubs here, that's unattractive financially.
As for isolation: personally, I do a lot of pair programming (whether in the office or remotely), so I don't actually feel isolated at all. If would describe myself as mildly introvert, so YMMV, but I feel like I need to disconnect from people after a day of remote work no more or less than after a regular day at the office.
Yep. When I look for my next job, remote working will be at the top of my list of priorities. I am not willing to work primarily at an office. Covid has been great in forcing companies to figure out working for home infrastructure, though, so I don't foresee this being a problem.
I have a ~ 10 minutes walk commute to work and event I share your opinion, I wouldn't want to go back to the office either
I used to work remotely for a different continent + 9 hours diff timezone and that was as painful as it can get: different hours for meetings, not knowing anything about my coworkers was really exhausting
But with the ability to go back to the office only when I need to and focus on my work much better at home, I don't think I'd ever want to go back anytime soon
I've worked directly across the street from where I live on a couple of occasions, and even that prevents you from being able to travel to another location to work (remotely), just for the sake of enjoying some other location.
Makes me realize that butts-in-seats vs. commute distance are equally valid, but somewhat separate considerations.
I think this is mostly driven by management's insecurities / needs to see their "subjects" right in front of them and their typical need to "show" their activities in an obvious/noisy way. Typical managers tend to be extroverts and find allies in other extroverts or in people who happen to work in/enjoy the social interaction in office. Unfortunately there is not much representation of introverts in the decision making circle so those people will be once more thrown under the "quality-of-face-to-face-interactions" bus. Engineering-driven, low-politics, not-so-large orgs might do things a bit differently.
I would imagine that in Google most managers would be former engineers. If that is true, there might be more to the story rather than introverts/extraverts split.
> in Google most managers would be former engineers
former engineers - that is, they no longer want to be an engineer, but chose the management path. It's quite likely that engineering work is merely a stepping stone for someone like that who intends to advance their career in the management track. I would expect an over-representation of extroverts in this category.
Introverted engineers remain engineers because they like the work, and are only forced out when the pay no longer match their output (but can not move up any more due to the engineering track being "ceiling" compared to the management track).
> If employees want to work from home beyond Sept. 1, they will need to formally apply for a max of 14 days annually
Somehow this sounds to me like:
"Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans."
This statement as quoted is false. I'm guessing it is a misinterpretation of the policy that employees may work remotely from a different country for up to 14 days per year without approval. The announcement that came out yesterday stated that this policy has been reinstated. It does not apply to domestic WFH.
That sounds like a legal thing. I'd guess some countries will require payroll tax withholding, company registration, etc for longer stays, also possibly depending on whether google has offices there, if you are a dual citizen, or whatever else, so they need to consider them case-by-case.
I'm gonna need every Dev who hasn't seen that movie to go ahead and watch it this Saturday. Oh, and if I could go ahead and get them to re-watch it on Sunday too, that'd be great.
What surprises me about this whole discourse is how quickly the narrative has been rewritten.
Read any article from the likes of HBR from 2019 and it's apparent that much, much research shows that offices, and open offices in particular are toxic for productivity - and that the 'water cooler' collaboration effect has been vastly overstated.
Sometimes in an open office you could go several hours without getting anything done at all because someone had decided to hold an impromptu meeting by your desk. And irony of all ironies - you put your headphones in at a loud enough volume to drown out the noise and then get tapped on the shoulder for 'distracting' people.
Fast forward a year and a half and the 'water cooler' myth seems to be accepted as fact, and none of the business press seems to mention at all the harmful effects of open offices on productivity. It's not like good ideas ever came from those interactions - they tended to produce the half baked ideas, and definitely didn't produce the x-functional alignment it actually takes to get anything done in most orgs.
The switching cost of interruption - or even the fear that you could at any moment be interrupted - is a complete inhibitor to deep work. My only hope is that when people are inevitably forced back into the office, people will be able to be more productive because of 40% fewer people being in them.
Maybe everyone working from home has been even worse for productivity than open offices. I know my own productivity has suffered, and I know I am not an outlier. People with toddlers in their home face constant interruptions (daycare has become unreliable -- one positive COVID test can shut a daycare down for two weeks), many people have limited space for a home office and nowhere to put a proper desk, etc. My own team frequently used whiteboards when we were at the office and touchscreens (of whatever size) really are not the same.
I know WFH has been fine, even positive, for some people. For a lot of us it has been a disaster and it seems that Google determined that it is a net negative.
A lot of what you’re describing is a result of COVID, not WFH.
NormaL WFH under normal conditions looks very different for most, and in many aspects.
This happened without much time to prepare for one thing (e.g. suboptimal desk/office setup), and while everyone else was stuck at home with you, for another.
Don’t try to compare WFH during COVID with WFH when kids are back in school/daycare, and we’re not locked down at home trying to stay healthy.
People experience bad things due to being in the middle of a pandemic, and work from home is a lot more difficult when you're perpetually socially isolated, aren't allowed to go places you'd normally want to go, and your kids are also home bugging you while you try to work when normally they'd be at school. Uncharitably, these effects get attributed to "work from home" and people think they're yearning for a return to the office when really they're yearning for the pandemic to end.
I'm a little shocked by this. I thought the big tech companies and Google specifically were leading the charge in "we will allow significant WFH forever going forward", but maybe I wasn't paying enough attention.
Personally, I'm at a small data company, and we're opening a new office for people where WFH is a burden (NYC apartments and all), but is so far voluntary. In fact, I think there are only seats for less than 1/3 of the company. I've been really impressed with how smoothly everyone shifted to all zoom all the time mode, and honestly, my small conference room meetings have been more productive the last year.
For Google, this doesn't surprise me at all. A big part of how they get people to work more is to keep them on campus as long as possible, and on-site incentives like meals, laundry, massage, etc. all serve that goal.
The fact that Google's offices are often referred to as "campuses" rather than "offices" drives that point home as well.
> The fact that Google's offices are often referred to as "campuses" rather than "offices" drives that point home as well.
This. I find it an odd term to use for what is essentially a workplace.
The modern meaning of "Campus" seems to have drifted from a location with multiple facilities where one could actually live, to office with table tennis and free meal facilities.
I find these "services" that some companies offer degrading, as they decide for me what should I eat or where wash my clothes etc. They should instead pay employees more so they could afford these things on their own if they wanted.
Ok, so I'm a bit surprised by these responses. Google is obviously a company that marketed itself majorly by their extensive offices with perks like free food, coffee, snacks, gyms, etc. Their office design, campus and related perks were always on the forefront of their pitch.
I don't quite understand why you'd expect them to be on the forefront of WFH.
I wouldn't say that. We were sent home to protect us and our community. I don't think WFH execution at Google has been better than anywhere else. My experience on a team that did embedded/hardware work is I suppose an outlier, but Google has policies like "no source code on laptops" and the like that make remote work tricky in many circumstances -- none of that changed. I am however much happier now that I've transferred into a more traditional cloud-based org.
Myself, I am looking forward to a return to the office, 3/5 days a week, despite me having a long commute and driving giving me back pain: because this last year and a bit has not been pleasant at all.
The insistence on comparing going into an office to jail that I see all over this thread really bothers me. This is such an extremely privileged viewpoint.
When you're a minimum wage McDonalds worker, you can get written up for being 5 minutes late. But if you make $350k a year, being asked to come into a physical office to perform work is similar to jail. Okay. I guess the similarity is that they both serve meals :)
Google’s network security posture was ideal for WFH. BeyondCorp[1] had already been widely rolled out to most internal services and most internal networks in offices had been converted to MNPs: Managed Non-Privileged networks.
The pandemic has been a great stress test for finding the limitations and gaps; like figuring out the remaining use cases for VPN and MNP exceptions, and accelerating the use of data center-hosted VMs instead of desk workstations.
None of this had any bearing on the company culture however, which was and is very office-centric. It’s been clear from the beginning that WFH was temporary.
When companies started announcing "permanent 100% WFH" last Spring I knew it would never last. I feel bad for the people who picked up and moved from SV or NYC and now are being told to expect to be back in their old office by June. Though it was naive to think you could move to a cabin in Wyoming with a Starlink and continue to pull an SV or NYC level TC.
Maybe this is the case with companies that announced "permanent 100% WFH", but Google never announced this.
As someone working at Google, there was never any surprise Google did not announce a permanent WFH solution, since it has not been part of the company culture nor did they put out any expectations you would be able to WFH permanently.
> move to a cabin in Wyoming with a Starlink and continue to pull an SV or NYC level TC.
so why exactly shouldn't that be possible!? It's not like the work/output decreased (for the most part). The only legitimate way for compensation to drop should be due to competition - allowing remote should also mean allowing more people to apply for a position, and thus, higher supply of potential workers. This _should_ naturally lower compensation, but not immediately.
Well, the salaries are inflated b/c cost of living (an engineer in NYC is no different than an engineer in Pittsburgh except in salary), but your point of increasing applicants means an increase in supply of applicants for that position, many of which are happy to make $80,000/year in a cabin instead of $180,000. Soooo why would the company overpay? It wouldn’t make sense.
>competition - allowing remote should also mean allowing more people to apply for a position
That's exactly how it would happen, and it would happen very quickly. There are talented software engineers all over the US and the world, SV does not have the only ones.
"with manager approval" is just a decoy. won't work out. if your whole team is in the office it's much harder for you to be remote. it must be set as company policy otherwise just a handful will do it and likely suffer for it as their teams won't take all the measures to make it work well and they'll be at a promotion disadvantage compared to people that get face time.
and "with manager approval" remote isn't really new. there were already people working remotely before the pandemic.
We shall see, but it feels like just a tug in the direction of in-office after 13 months (for the big west coast companies) of things going the other way. I don't think anyone was ever expecting huge FAAMG companies to start selling off their office buildings. I'm mostly interested to see if the guidance loosens for hiring remote employees as well as how much push their is from the top to have managers push their employees to work 5 days a week in the office.
Personally, I'm still expecting to see a much higher percentage of time spent working from home at this time next year compared to the beginning of 2020.
Indeed. Large companies like FAANG have invested heavily in their offices, I can kind of see why they don't want to throw that investment away. Hence why they want people back in those plush offices.
If the employees of these companies want a remote life after the experience of this past year, they'll leave the company. If the companies are experiencing enough loss they may reconsider their remote stance. I think it's unlikely though. More likely than not some employees will leave and the company will hire new employees that don't want to work remote.
I don’t believe that. Everyone else is cargo cutting FAANG. If they go back to no remote then everyone else will follow and if you want remote work it will be as hard as it’s historically been to get it, ie 1:10 ratio (making the particular ratio up) for available remote jobs to remote seekers.
It’s the same as “if you don’t like it here and don’t mind not having a roof over your head, you’re free to quit and go work somewhere else with better conditions”. It’s not as dramatic in SE because we’re in demand but it’s still not trivial to do everywhere. And it’s even worse for less in demand jobs.
Heck, it's not even good enough for 1 day at home per week. It's basically only useful for cases where you need to stay home because of a sick kid or someone is coming over for house repair/maintenance.
Not if you choose to not opt in. If you choose to not opt-in you will still take those days but you will be unable to work from home around whatever emergency or appointment you have.
The article is wrong. The 14 day limit applies only to working from a different country than the one your job is based in. Partial WFH is very much still on the table for the foreseeable future as far as we know.
The article is ambiguous about that. One interpretation is "max 14 days of remote work per year where you can't be in the office 3 days a week" (which is separately mentioned later in the article).
After spending more than a year remote, full remote is difficult ( not impossible ) . Most of us have settled on 3 days at home, 2 days at work, so we can socialize, make new connections or just simply have lunch.
Going back to in office 100% is a thing of the past unless you are a team that has to be there - making hardware etc.
For ex I cant imagine the Pixel team working 100% remote.
Curious, do the members of your team have activities, hobbies, and relationships they are involved with outside of work? From what I have seen the folks itching to get back to the office are the ones that don't have many outlets outside of work.
On the other hand, for many of us who do have significant non work passions (rock climbing for me) as well as social circles around these activities appreciate remote work because it allows us to structure our lives in a way where such activities coexist with work more easily.
The interesting thing is that for work centered people, remote work has reduced social connections, while for more interdisciplinary folks it can do the opposite.
I have personally worked 100% remote for 7 years now, but before that I lived and worked in San Fransisco. I never attended a Friday night work happy hour because every Friday night I would be in the car driving 4 hours to go climbing in Yosemite.
Now, I can work remotely from a town with great outdoor access and spend my Friday nights hanging around with local friends instead instead of in the car.
Remote work has allowed me to have a more balanced life filled with more things I want to do and less I don't. Have the years of video meetings made my professional career less productive? Perhaps, but I have still worked on plenty of cool projects with plenty of great folks along the way. Some of them have even become close friends. And even if it has suffered, its been worth it!
It sounds more like your friends lived somewhere different than where you lived. You were traveling to see your friends and now you don't have to travel because you live closer to them. Remote work can be good for that scenario but you could've also just fully embraced your true destiny to become a dirtbag.
Remote work basically doesn't change anything for the activities I'd like to do. Mine are centered around major cities, require large amounts of tools and space, or have to be done during the day. Remote isn't a huge factor except for the space being expensive in major cities part. If I have a day-time activity I want to do, remote work does jack shit for that. If I want to go skiing 7-times a week then I'm SOL because work hours are work hours and they overlap with the hours that resorts are open. Until the work you do becomes async by nature - not just remote - a lot of alternative lifestyles are not available. I'm sure the same is true for you as well with climbing. You can get lights and go during the night but I'm sure you'd prefer to climb during the day if you had a choice.
You are making some interesting assumptions about non-work interests. I don’t mind working in the office 3-4 days/week, and have plenty of Non-work interests: restaurants, photography, dancing, live music, hanging out with friends. I live, work, and play in the city. I can pursue my social activities within minutes of leaving work.
This sounds like a problem with the location of that particular office, not with the discussuion of in-place work/work from home. I live a nice bike trip from work and I cannot stand working at home anymore. And I'm an extreme introvert: I don't yearn for social contact, it's just that my office is very comfortable.
We all have hobbies, relationships etc and there is no doubt all those things have improved so much. Not having our long Texas commutes has been great. People with kids love the extra time esp for those that are college bound. I am loving the time with my family and other hobby projects.
To give you some background, we are an IT shop for an Energy co. so there is a big chunk of our people who have to be at work, physically just because of the nature of the work. As others have alluded, we weren't set up with remote in mind.
I would love to hear how being 100% you've built a network, bonds etc with your colleagues. We have a bunch of new people who dont have the rapport with us or finding it difficult to connect ( a few lunches or coffees, or hang out in the common area could help build )
I should also mentioned the 3 off / 2 in office is something of a peace offering to the non IT part of the business. Most of us know we can be fully remote.
I think small teams, one on one collaboration, and interesting projects are key.
It’s hard to get to know folks when sitting on a big zoom call, but I find working one on one works well for developing a bond.
Once you spend many hours over many months working closely with someone, a bond develops and there is plenty of opportunity to get to know them along the way.
In fact, you can do this just over slack - spend enough time hanging in a chat and people’s personalities are bound to come out.
To be fair, you may be less likely to make a very close friend with a remote employee. But a friendly, productive working relationship is certainly easy to develop, and that’s all that’s necessary for most teams to function well.
This strategy probably wouldn’t work with big teams where folks float in and out, or for roles where you have to meet new people all the time.
Remote work is great for companies that have a work life balance. But remote work is a bummer at places that expect more than a 40-hour work week. At those places social activity happened over lunch or dinner. Then suddenly we were all locked down with no pre-existing social circle to fall back on.
> From what I have seen the folks itching to get back to the office are the ones that don't have many outlets outside of work.
Not just that, many of those normal outlets have been heavily restricted or even not allowed for the past year. I expect if that wasn't the case, people wouldn't put so much of their unhappiness on the work part of being at home all the time.
I'm a senior manager and also a hardcore introvert. In my many years of office work I would actively avoid having lunch around anyone from the office as much as possible. Lunch is my only alone time when I'm crammed in an office all day.
Super introvert as well, I like my solo time in the office, but some times to make new connections, learn about a new part of the business these small distractions are a good break from the regular.
Lunch time is a me time for me as well. People no longer ask me if I go with them. Many times when I found colleagues eating in the same restaurant, I would just say hello and still eat on my own at a different table. When I have too much social contact my mind goes into overdrive and I cannot focus on anything, so I need time alone to "decompress". At some workplaces it was difficult for people to understand that unfortunately.
Work is hard. Dealing with people is tiring, but I am also skilled at it and it is tremendously fulfilling to help people grow and achieve their personal goals. Some days I really really don't want to have my 1:1s, but that is okay. Being an introvert doesn't mean that I hate interacting with people. It just means that it is somewhat tiring.
I am an introvert and absolutely hate group behaviors and nonsensical smalltalk around lunch time.
However I have no issue being a manager and talking to people on 1:1s or with a clean agenda and subject to discuss.
I also basically never had a lunch with anyone. Only when everyone travels somewhere as a team building event, but then I do not talk during lunch. Not even as kid with my family, I would always read a book during lunch rather than talking
I completely agree. I have to talk to these people all day, now I'm supposed to talk to them while I eat? Never mind the fact it isn't socially acceptable to actually talk while eating.
I just want to walk, read something interesting and eat.
My friend works as an assembler for a company that does small scale electronic devices and anyone who wanted was given by the company all equipment necessary to complete assemblies at home. He had to sacrifice a part of his living room, but he has all the tools at home soldering stations, microscope, oven etc. company send him parts weekly and collect finished products weekly as well. He seem happy with that, but of course his wife doesn't like that they no longer have a living room, but on the other hand they have more time for themselves.
Not something I have direct experience of, but don't most engineers, designers working on hardware projects spend a similar amount of time working at a computer with a screen, keyboard and mouse as software people do? I assume that the vast majority of them are not in a fab/laboratory/solder station on a weekly basis.
It’s pretty common to have local hardware that you’re talking to, e.g. flashing firmware, programming FPGAs, testing fixes on early stage devices.
There’s various ways to create tunnels for remote services to talk to local devices, but it adds latency and complexity to an already complex workflow.
I see that it is sarcastic in form, but it doesn't address the meaning of the initial comment, which was about sitting down for a meal and chatting, not about food.
As someone who's worked only remotely for several years, this makes sense. I know many will disagree with this assertion but in my estimation in-person collaboration is far better than online-only.
I think the best balance is at least a couple days per week in the office and the rest remote.
> but in my estimation in-person collaboration is far better than online-only.
Being able to talk to others in person and quickly is certainly useful, but its a double edged sword as that quite often results in your stream of thoughts being disrupted and focus gone in a flash. This is one of the reasons I love WFH as a developer. I can get right into my zone and focus on solving problems or being creative without someone walking up to my desk to ask if I read the email they sent me.
I've been 'remote' for... 12 years now, but do travel to offices sometimes, and do enjoy being able to do some face to face time with folks, even sometimes for multiple days or weeks at a stretch. The core matter is who decides when I need to be in an office. If it's me or mostly me, it's great. If it's solely at the discretion of others, that's where problems often are (regardless of whether it's full time or not).
Personally, I'm over 20 years WFH now and love it. The last 5 years have been working with people on other continents, and I actually had the choice of time zones to work (I usually work nights for this, as I'm a night owl and it lets me sleep during day time when Arizona summers get hot). I haven't had any of the issues people seem to encounter. I don't work to socialize, so I don't miss lunches and such. For programming or devops stuff, you can definately do 100% remote. I understand people have different tastes, so I find it funny how polarized people get about it. In-office to WFH is a spectrum - just pick the spot your comfortable on it.
> In-office to WFH is a spectrum - just pick the spot your comfortable on it.
Yep. It's the autonomy part that is the problem in nearly all cases. Choosing your own spot on that spectrum is the key part. And your spot may have to change over time, based on other parts of your life. Being forced to spot X is where all the contention comes in, it seems.
I did miss occasional lunches, dinners, break room chats with folks, but now run a coworking spot in town. I have most of the socialization aspects I missed, without them being tied to work (no office politics with these folks, just... socialization).
Luckily, I think the autonomy part is on the rise...At least for tech workers. I basically no longer entertain positions that aren't 90+% WFH (so companies do quarterly or yearly get togethers, which aren't so bad), and there seems to be more of them all the time. In an industry where working with 'offshore' dev. groups is fairly routine, it seems especially silly to require 'local' resources to come on-site.
I have worked with 50% remote people for decades. There are all sorts of ways this can be productive. The most obvious, which may or may not appeal to the majority of HN’s demographic, is people with families.
If you’re 50% WFH, you can structure your parental life around the remote days. It’s not that you work less on those days, but the time you would otherwise spend commuting is time you can spend on weekday family things.
Another scenario I’ve seen is people who want a "remote home.” Fed up with the prices for living in a major metropolitan area, or perhaps because they prefer a smaller town and/or living in a rural area, they buy a place with double their usual commute.
That can be brutal, but if you only do that a couple of days of the week, and can structure your F2F work on those days, the total number of hours commuting isn’t so bad.
If you're only coming in a few days a week, you don't need to live as close to the office. Like the difference between a 30 minute commute twice a day five days a week versus a 90 minute commute twice a day once a week.
It's certainly better than nothing. I agree that different people like WFH for different reasons. For my job, anything that lets me move farther from the Bay Area would be better. 1 day WFH per week doesn't let me do that, but maybe 3 days WFH per week would. My current commute is 4 hours, so maybe Id be willing to do an 8 hour commute if it was only twice a week. A week per month would be even better: I could move out of $tate and just fly to the South Bay once a month.
+1. I was surprised by myself when deciding between competing offers recently. Even after enduring a year of isolation, and beginning my search with the express goal of joining a team on-site, I chose the fully remote position. I found the on-site guys tended to be old-school (not meant as a compliment). Also, in such turbulent and uncertain times, I realized that mobility is a major benefit. If my city turns even more Mad Max this summer (the jobs aren't coming back, people are pissed...), it will be a relief to be able to "bug out" with zero ceremony.
It still allows employees to work uninterrupted while managing their own time on the other days, and allows the company to save roughly half the office space (unless everyone comes in at the same days). It also spares you a lot of commute.
Sure, it doesn't allow other things like working from a beach somewhere in Spain. But it's a compromise that keeps many benefits from both solutions.
The problem is that everyone (in the team) needs to be in the office the exact same two days. That’s difficult to synchronize, some people may want to be at the office on Fridays, while other may prefer Mondays or Wednesdays or...
I solve hard problems for a living. This doesn't even register.
My post-vaccine plan is to have a "mulmen day" where I set the expectation with my teammates and stakeholders that I am in the office and a "float" day where I come in to align with someone else's day who I need to work with face-to-face for whatever reason. If everyone works this way then we can meet most scheduling needs. If we expand this to two float days a week then it is trivial.
There's no reason for the whole team to be colocated on the same day on a regular basis. Those kind of team-wide meetings never benefit from whiteboarding or any other in-person process. In fact the limitations of remote work make that kind of collaboration better because you have to actually prepare your thoughts and material.
Even pre-covid getting calendar time required a week of notice. Office hours were once-a-week and required at least 24 hours notice. Personally my office hours are on Wednesday. If someone books a session I come in, if not I don't. Nothing changes.
In Covid times I have had the most productive period of my career while my team grew by 50%. I have no problem getting coworker time ad-hoc, even remote. Communication is not difficult. We got better at using tooling to write documents and draw diagrams. We don't use whiteboard analogies.
I honestly see no downside to the remote work and a long list of personal, professional and environmental benefits.
Currently in a 2 days WFH scenario atm where everyone just picks whatever random days they want. I'm not a fan. There's almost no consistency even though people set which days they are at home. Hard to describe, but it's mentally impossible to keep track of when starting a meeting if everyone is in the meeting who is supposed to be because I can't keep track of everyone's days, so I don't know if they're just not on the call yet, or forgot about the call and need to ping them, or are in the office but grabbing a coffee before coming to the meeting etc.
If it's all the same days that'd be great but doesn't seem like it's work for everyone. I know certain days/times where I can't have meetings at home because the space is otherwise occupied and I need to keep quiet etc.
I'm sure that's confusing, but it occurs to me that it'd be a lot less confusing if you just assumed that anyone who is late needs a ping, even if they haven't actually forgotten. Even if they're only late by 1 second. Just ping them. If they're grabbing a coffee, they're still late. Non-emergency reasons are not an excuse to hold everyone else up.
I see that behaviour starting to emerge, but you're right. I think this should just become the M.O.
Maybe also by waiting to start the meeting we're enabling it all too?
I find it all too much to keep track of, so perhaps simplifying it to "meeting starts at X, be there or be square" is all that's needed and behaviour will adjust accordingly?
Food for thought.
I've seen some comments that WFH and it's variations (full remote vs partial) are a skill like anything else and need to be developed. I'm not strictly speaking a fan of it all really, but that's just me, and I think the "more productive vs less productive" debate is actually a ruse and that the real argument we're all getting into is "this makes me feel better vs this makes me feel worse" which you simply can't logic your way out of, so I get that it truly does suit some people.
I think I just need to take the mindset that it's a skill I need to develop a little further and some of my gripes with it will ease or melt away.
Seems like, at least in my neck of the woods, 2 days WFH is becoming a standard benefit touted by companies to attract candidates now.
It's easier, I agree, but I would not say its better. Collaborating online requires documentation, its more effort, but the artifacts you produce can be a lot more useful for everyone involved.
I feel like ideally, in say a 3/2 scenario, most people would be in the office on the same days. But I wonder how that would be accomplished. Everyone's reasons for wanting to stay home certain days might be different.
As what would be described as an aspergers person, I find offices full of people playing bizarre political and social games with each other that I don't have any particular interest in and the workplaces themselves to be extremely unproductive. I hate working in offices with people often appointed due to nepotism or just because they are like the person hiring, that I would rather be poor then work in them.
The entire concept of workplaces, how they are run, and what people do is created by the normal person and for the normal person. This is completely irrespective and often counter to what produces the best outcome. It is about the social needs of these people, not the needs of the product.
"What produces the best outcome" is doing a lot of work in that last paragraph. Having a nice culture and enjoying the work is a pretty essential part for most people. This may or may not disturb the raw productivity, but still leads to a better outcome in the form of teamwork, resilience and retention.
Yes, but that's an illusion to be believe that political games, nepotism etc would disappear without offices. That's just how working in a corporation is, sadly.
That's interesting, since my assumption is that Google would be fairly data driven. I'd be curious if Googlers feel like this is because they are really seeing reduced productivity, or if there's a different motivation.
managing a small product engineering team. I have to say WFH has a considerable impact on productivity. Coding is actually fine, but the problems are:
1. Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
2. Personal relationships are difficult to grow, especially for newbies. Usually those things got grown via coffee chats, launch meets, ad-hoc talks, but those are all gone. You know, a lot of cases, whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot. I don't have a word to describe it precisely, maybe "lower team coherency".
3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Those are things may not be easily tracked from data, but really harmful in the long run. I cannot imagine how to manage effectively after another year of WFH.
This depends. The problems we've been working on as a team are really too big to work out on a whiteboard. I think for my team, WFH is just fine. I'm nearing the end of one of the most complicated software projects I've ever worked on and don't feel like any of our issues were related to WFH.
Over the last year I've actually started to connect with my team. We have weekly video chats and spend hours socializing. As an older engineer with bad hearing, video chats are far better than crowding around a big table in a cavernous, modern office.
My only complaint is the environment I have to work in. Silicon Valley real estate is sub-par and high priced. I've been looking for a new apartment with a spare bedroom for months but the only units available are far away or run-down. If I knew I could WFH forever, I'd have left already. Here I am, waiting, because I have no idea when I'll be required to go back to work.
Heh.. I can sympathize. I find voice chat with a decent head set makes it SOO much easier to hear/understand people. And it basically eliminates multiple people speaking at once - the 'muddle' that turned into used to drive me crazy.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Everyone in my team does literally just that on Slack. If I can say something, I can type something. If I can close my laptop in the office, I can close my laptop at home just the same. Or close Slack. Or just sign out of the company's workspace.
Working remote is a skill. Like other work-related skills, it takes effort and attention to develop it. It's likely most people haven't made that effort in the last year, since the situation was seen to be temporary.
I've worked full remote for almost a decade now. It was hard at first, until I realized there were solutions to the problems I encountered and it would take conscious effort on my part to get it done.
It's definitely possible for remote developers to achieve at least as much productivity as in person devs. But it's also understandable if people/companies don't want to make that effort.
I think this is very subjective. When I carpooled to an office my personal life lost commute time and arriving early or leaving late to coordinate with rides or buses. Gained an extra 8h a week when I went remote.
I've found that 3-4 people doing the initial design for something is usually too many. One person on their own or two people so they can bounce ideas off each other seems to be ideal. After the first rough sketch of the design is ready (it shouldn't have too many details), it should be presented to a larger audience so they can take feedback and course-correct if needed.
The personal relationship stuff is tricky, and I think junior folks, and especially fresh grads, got hit pretty hard here. On the flip side, I joined a new team around the time we all went remote last year (with several people I'd never met or heard of before), and it turned out just fine. I wouldn't say I'm buddies with all the new people, but I think we all feel comfortable with and respect each other. I joined in more of a technical leadership role, though, so I can totally get that someone who has to also deal with receiving mentorship could feel a bit overwhelmed and lost.
The work-life balance thing I find very puzzling. Many people (especially in the bay area) have gotten 1-2 hours per day of commute time back from utter waste (though I guess you folks at Google have the buses). Sure, things get blurred when you work at a desk in your bedroom, or at your kitchen table. But this is something that you as a manager need to be on top of by setting an example for the team. Keep reasonable hours, and disconnect outside those hours. Don't hold your team members to deadlines that require them to work excessive hours. When you sign off at 5 or 6pm with your "gotta go, chat tomorrow", make it clear that you expect the rest of the team to sign off pretty soon as well.
Having said that, I do know people in my org that work too much. But they're the kind of people who weren't great at balance back when we were in offices, either.
> 3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
You can only blame yourself for that. When I'm done working for the day, I log out, lock my screen and walk out of the room. And if the time to go happens in the middle of a chat, then so be it. My boss can tell me he's gotta go, and I can tell him I've gotta go, and that's exactly what we do. There is no blurring of work and life because I don't blur them.
1. All you need to do a remote whiteboard is a microphone and a mouse. This is a great opportunity to create new softwares that actually help collaboration and improve the design process rather than being stuck forever with a pen and a paper.
2. What you call "personal relationship" is, at the end of the day, employee relationship and politic to be promoted. You are in a long term position of power on your employee, which allows you to impose your point of view. Stop pretending to be benevolent. Most new hires do what you tell them to do, it doesn't change with work from home.
3. I think that's just because you are not a good manager (sorry), or your own managers are bad. If you actually cared, you would respect people time and have clear rules that show it. You can send a "have a good afternoon" at 6PM, no one would find that awkward
For (1), I’ve found the opposite. The ICs end up having smaller meetings, and producing more coherent designs.
Then, they’re forced to write their designs down, people read them, and there is a larger meeting to discuss (which usually is only needed for big course corrections).
1. This is your strongest point. I've missed the whiteboard a bit. But you just need to find other ways to sketch out your ideas. Even a google doc, which is pretty primitive as these kinds of things go, it pretty easy to use instead.
2. Personal relationships require investment and deliberate choice. Schedule some open mic time. Keep a zoom room open where teammates can interact but with the expectation that they needn't be 100% engaged. This is a substitute for talking over the cube walls or the random break room interactions. Also spend time in non-work conversations via slack or talk a bit about non-work stuff before or after normal meetings. You'd do this in the office as you walked to or from a meeting room. It isn't as easy to just accidentally build these social relationships. Working remote you need to build the habits that support them.
3. Keep your work space and your personal space separate. Set some time boundaries. Encourage your team to put a cap on their daily work. Remind them. You have to learn set and stick to healthy boundaries. Too much time on the job leads to productivity drop in the long run. Keep your team productive and happy by helping them be aware of the issue. As a manager, watch out for perverse incentives driving overwork.
There are zillion little moments of ad hoc communication that happen face to face. Now that their absence has helped you discover that they are valuable, ask yourself when they occurred and how they worked to your advantage. Once you have some idea what you're missing, then you can start to engineer a replacement. As a leader, it's important that you model these behaviors for your team.
>...whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot...
I was kind of hoping the remote work experience would help folks make that sort of inside baseball less important. There are real equity concerns to consider, but practically speaking, you end up with narrower and less open decision-making processes in general.
It's definitely a complicated subject, but maybe some folks are partly missing some privilege that they need to learn to let go.
It goes both ways though. Up until now the nice chat zone was limited to people on the same floor. With WFH we got people in other countries joigning the chats on equal footing.
The info density difference also seem to be compensated by everyone being more open and comfortable (not packed in noisy office for the day)
There's definitely less random chats, it's more formal and less intense, but also broader and the hurdle is lower.
I think for companies above some size it's not better or worse, just different.
The problem is that the person in the office in another city, or perhaps even on another floor of your building, probably doesn't get to have that nice chat, ever, due to the lower likelihood of running into each other.
Why should my requests get better prioritization just because I happen to work on the same floor as a person in a key position?
This was an area that improved hugely at my workplace, because we're spread across multiple buildings in multiple cities anyway; the pre-COVID dynamic was that people were in the habit of including only those in physical proximity. COVID has made cross-city collab instinctive for people.
The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.
When we were in the office it was rare to speak with anyone who wasn't on your floor, whereas now it's no harder to work with someone in Stockholm or Berlin than it is in London.
Doing Zoom calls before was always a massive pain as we have an open office (like almost everyone nowadays) and there weren't enough private spaces.
I genuinely wish more people held this attitude. Is it really worth 10% (or even 20%) productivity gains if the price is that your employees have to waste 1-2 hours a day sitting behind the wheel of a car?
To the executives and bean counters, yes, it obviously is. But from the overall perspective of society and mental health, hell no, it is absolutely horrifying to put people through that.
>Disclaimer: Googler
>... Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
It just seems honest and pragmatic to me. There are nice collaboration tools, but there will always be a gap vs face-to-face. I think you just have to make other areas of remote work offset the lost value of that unfixable gap.
> Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
What's stopping someone from just... grabbing a whiteboard? They ain't expensive. Yeah, maybe not everyone can write to it, but everyone should be able to read from it. Designate someone as the writer and you're good to go.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
What about "Sorry, just broke for $MEAL, let's put it on the calendar for tomorrow"?
Xoogler here, left pre-pandemic. Google has always been very data-driven. It just seeks data that support management's ideas of how they want to run the company. Despite ample evidence showing that cramped, loud working spaces both decrease productivity and increase sick days for coworkers (because flu and the common cold, and other reasons), management went for densification to meet growth targets and cut real estate outlays. Google workspaces would have been the absolute perfect super spreader spaces for COVID. TBH I feel a bit of schadenfreude for their deliberate choice to create that environment, and this article saddens me to see that Google hasn't learned much.
I, for one, hated the densification and tight working environments, but I didn't have the "data" to make a hill of beans difference.
(Googler, opinions are my own) I don't think Google has really justified why the return to the office is necessary for all employees, beyond saying that it's a key part of the culture.
Obviously the office is a part of the culture, and most employees want to be in the office at least some of the time. But to me, that doesn't explain why you can't offer a remote option for the employees who want it.
A charitable explanation might be what we've heard from execs: we don't want to rush to go remote, we'd like to dip our toes in and slowly explore broader options. Thus the hybrid 3/2 model. A less charitable explanation might be that Google has spent a lot of money on real estate. Or simply that leadership is out of touch and can't relate to the reasons why employees might want to be remote. I imagine it's a mix of both types of explanations.
Or even simpler: execs own super expensive real estate in the tech hubs and the only thing that supports the prices is the hoards of employees that have to live in the area.
This is the true answer. A lot of people have moved into far away (cheaper) bedroom communities to save money.
Also Google themselves would have a huge issue justifying their own real estate if people aren't in it "post covid". They are a publicly traded company so they would be forced to sell it off to appease investors.
All in all I think Google has shown it's true colors here. They don't have a damn about their employees. This reeks of boomer micromanaging 101.
I think that to fight this stockholders should push Alphabet to sell of their properties now. Should do the same with Amazon as well.
Google has some of the best offices in the world. They’ve built up these offices as a clear differentiator from their talent competitors. It’s lead to many companies offering free lunch and other perks tied to their physical space.
Giving it up would mean changing the culture and the value prop of working there. I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t want to do that.
Yeah, I do agree. It's odd that FB are doing so differently from them, though. When I worked in a FAANG, they had lots of issues with senior level engineer retention. Generally loads of people left when they wanted to start a family.
I guess FB must have seen the same thing, hence full remote for senior engineers. It's odd that Google haven't experienced this issue.
Sadly that culture changed long ago. Even prior to covid a lot of companies were downscaling their perks as they offshored jobs to Asia, thanks to our previous administration.
Can you give specific instances of this happening? I feel like offshoring tech jobs has been the bogeyman that has never delivered in our industry for a really long time.
Yeah, it's very easy to pick and gain metrics to support whatever view point you want to espouse. We see this in politics all the time, sometimes even multiple politicians using the same data set to push wildly different proposals. Why would Google be any different?
Kinda seems odd too because the only metric that you would think matters (stock price) would have heavy consideration (~90% growth since March 2020).
Yep, and then employees have a harder time challenging it - because how is an employee without the power of HR, facilities etc. going to gather the almighty data?
As someone who has done it for over a decade, in software, it's totally doable providing your org has all the infrastructure and has a culture that successful business requires treating their employees like humans who need to socialize, communicate, and slack off a bit like they would in a physical office. Usually online work turns into a push to maximizing efficiency and minimizing time you'd normally be "wasting" at an office. People then hate it, informal socialization doesn't happen, and hidden business processes that live in those informal social interactions that keep things moving don't happen.
They can happen online, the most difficult part of building trust with others to create positive cohesive relationships.
I think you'll be looking for a while if your standards for an employer is that you have arbitrary access to the data they use to make decisions. There are a handful of radically transparent employers out there but it is the vanishing exception, not the rule.
Well the trouble is if you tell everyone that you are data-driven, and do so in most cases, then people are definitely going to ask about what data you used to make a decision.
If you're explicitly HiPPO based decision making, this tends not to happen.
Googler, but opinions are my own. A lot of employees like me would like to go back to the office, but would also like to have a few days at home for personal reasons (exercise time, kids school events, etc), fewer hours of exhausting commuting, and even just to have lunch at the restaurants in my own neighborhood. This would reduce the exhaustion one can feel at the end of a 5 day office week and leave you feeling fresher next time you come in to the office.
The 3-in-office/2-at-home week referenced would work well in this regard.
I don’t think it’s possible to be completely data driven about a company-wide cultural change that you can’t a/b test. A year or so after they make the decision, though, I’m sure they’ll have data on whether they have a spike in losing employees to competitors like Facebook that are more remote-friendly.
Datapoint: long ago (decades) I worked for a large well known valley software company, for several years. During that time I worked with many colleagues who were somewhere on the same campus, but I never physically met them. Obviously I was around my team mates, manager, and I attended many cross-group in-person physical meetings, but the number of people I interacted with online only was large. This was before video conferencing existed, just email phone and IM.
This focus on returning to work or a hybrid model really seems like a missed chance to pivot the economy in a new direction. It would be great if these companies let employees work remotely full time if they choose. That'll allow people to have more freedom in where and how they live, and also distribute the economy more evenly. Right now, working for big tech companies means having to live in one of a few big city centers, that all share virtually the same cultures (socially and politically) and lifestyles. Haven't people figured out how to make remote work successful in this last year? Anecdotally, it seems like most people are just as productive.
This also proves that the climate change initiative is a wash. They can't take co2 emissions seriously and at the same time demand 100k employees to spend 1 hour a day driving to offices. That's like what, 100 millions gallons of gas per year, or 1 gigaton of co2, burned needlessly, only to improve some corporate metrics.
In most places, buses are not substantially better emissions-wise than private cars. Typical deployments have them travelling empty or nearly empty most of the day which negates the savings of packed rush hour trips. Trains are much better of course but only exist for a few routes. Both are substantially worse than working from home.
Yes and this is exactly the problem with buses! You and everyone else rides the bus on the core routes at the peak times, but the buses run for long hours and the routes cover more areas than the core, so the average utilisation is very low and pollution per passenger-km very high - although the average passenger experiences crowded buses.
Deciding to switch a solo peak hour journey from a SUV to bus might help a little, but the bus will still be driving empty outside the peak times & routes. Working from home takes a passenger out of the peak times entirely, and with a reduction in peak time travel then demand-responsive transport becomes more attractive than huge buses blindly following rigid routes, and eventually maybe we can dream that sustainable transport like walking and cycling might be deserve a safe place on the street.
I am an introvert and I am never going back to office. If I won't find work in a forward thinking company I'll do something else, but never in the office.
Because of the time gained by not communing, I was finally able to do my hobbies and researching my own business that hopefully I'll make happen next year.
Even if they wanted to pay for time spend on commute, no thank you.
I realised the time I would be losing is priceless. You won't ever have it.
If that means I'll earn less or nothing at all? So what, I'll be happier.
Also - we should start demanding that companies will pay for use of our homes as their office.
How come paying rent to some rich office owners is fine, but if a worker wants to be paid for use of his or hers home is not?
In my mind this past year of pandemic work from home hasn’t been an accurate depiction of normal (non-pandemic) work from home because of the forced isolation in the hours outside of work. It seems like the pendulum is swinging back too far too fast to in office work.
I like work from home and get to focus more effectively than the open office. I’m pretty deep on the introvert side of the scale and this pandemic has been too isolating for even me. Which is to say I don’t think work from home should be removed because most everyone is socially needy now. I’m looking forward to being with friends again. But I do not want to go back to working in the office. I’m hoping my work has max one required office day for meetings a week, but not more, and hopefully less.
I agree with you. Under normal circumstances you’d be able to meet people, go out to eat, take a trip, etc while WFH. For many people it’s basically been “house arrest” for over a year now.
I have a permanently impaired immune system and had a corporate job for five years. There are things that can be done to help make offices less of a health hazard even in the face of something like covid and most people don't cope well with remote work.
It takes a lot of practice to get good at effective emails in place of face to face conversations.
I actually tended to email my immediate boss my questions. With my eyesight issues or whatever, I seemed incapable of figuring out how to show up at her cubicle with good timing like other people routinely did.
When I and two other people on my team were moved to a newly created troubleshooting team but kept the same technical lead, my work life hardly changed. I continued mostly emailing my questions and getting what I needed.
My two coworkers who had been dependent on being able to talk with her face to face were blowing a gasket now that their desks were too far from hers to conveniently slip into her cubicle like they were used to doing.
I can handle remote work. I've spent a lot of time doing things online for a lot of years.
But I'm not surprised that it's been a tough work year for most people and productivity seems to have generally been down. Working remotely takes a different skill set and many people simply don't have it, even people who work at a computer all day.
They would have to prove negligence of some sort, and I guarantee Google has enough lawyers on payroll to make that absolutely impossible without the most egregious evidence (like multiple videos of your manager walking up to you and saying "look at this nice bottle of pure COVID-19... be a real shame if I drop... OOPS I SPILLED IT ON YOU! ahhhh!!").
Remember, this is a company that has had senior executives have extremely real and credible sexual misconduct allegations made against them only to see them sent off with million dollar golden parachutes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
You will not win a legal battle against Google, period.
My understanding is that's not the case, that the 14 day limit (which I haven't heard about, actually) is for only WFH full time over an extended period.
The article is poorly researched and is not explaining the 14 day thing correctly. I'm sure that the actual email will be leaked at some point but since it is listed as internal only, just know that it isn't what is described in the article.
To me, after reading the article, it seems like Google saw all these offices they have and realized all the money would go to waste if people don’t use them.
And then there’s the middle manager aspect.
Google made these offices with the idea to make people feel like the office is “home”. Snacks, food, bring your dog, etc all screams “why go home when you have everything here?”
The cynic in me believes that is exactly their aim, to keep people at the office longer and middle manage.
That said, I do believe that a lot of people have a hard time not working in an office. These people should still have the choice, though, and these offices should not feel like home. Because it isn’t.
But this is still something that many companies will take advantage of; it simply costs less to not rent an office. Yes, they should also pay for part of the rent and internet bills for the employee, but it would still cost less than renting a huge building. Especially in Silicon Valley.
There were reasons they invested heavily in offices in the first place; there’s a strong belief (perhaps justified, I couldn’t say) that innovation is more likely to happen with everyone in the office and partaking of amenities in common spaces were serendipitous conversations occur that spark the next billion dollar project.
I’ve heard this theory as maximizing the odds of such a lucky conversation. Increasing the innovation “surface area” by having more people having more chance encounters.
There’s probably other reasons to it too, but there’s also reason to believe that same type of innovation doesn’t happen as readily online.
It’s the same theory why industries tend to cluster in certain areas; not just access to a pool of ready-trained employees but also a thriving innovation scene due to the proximity of all those experienced, motivated people.
As someone whose been in an awfully designed office at a "thrifty" company, I can't imagine how returning to that office would be a gain for me.
I was put in a row of desks literally next to the open kitchen/conversation area. My day had constant distractions and I had no control over how I wanted my work environment to be.
Working from home, I'm incredibly comfortable AND productive. The noise level, lighting, etc are all how I choose them. I dont have this tension around other people getting to decide for me how I want to work.
If you work in a FAANG type of office environment, the above probably doesn't apply to you. Your office is professionally designed and cost many millions of dollars. You are given high quality equipment to make you comfortable. Your office has amenities that make being there easier.
"Your office is professionally designed and cost many millions of dollars. You are given high quality equipment to make you comfortable. Your office has amenities that make being there easier. "
My house is nice, and is custom-tailored to me. The amenities are exactly the amenities I want and use. The equipment is exactly what I want, not equipment that a distant person contracted out to a firm to mass produce for a general office.
I understand that not every person is in a situation like this, but if you're working at a FAANG you should be making enough money to set up your living situation nicely.
People should have the -option- to come into an office. Working at home gets lonely. But there is no reason that a FAANG is necessarily better or even good at providing an optimal work environment.
It makes sure that people who are aligned with new ways of working have less reasons to work there. It also sends a strong signal the PHBs have taken over.
Thanks for letting me know, so I know not to apply.
I find this interesting that the new economy Google is so set on office work where as Shell (at least in .au) is planning on staff having an office / work from home mix. They have even reduced overall office space so that they don't have enough spaces for all employees to work from some local offices.
It would be interesting for someone to look into the value of the commercial real estate holdings of the big tech companies in any examination of why they are declaring the end of permanent remote work.
It's not true. The article is not correctly describing the policy. I don't know if the journalist just didn't get the entire email from their source or if they put this out too fast but what is written in the article isn't correct.
Someone above referenced 14 days in a row, working from home. In other words, they don’t want you to rent an apartment in Bali for a month while not on vacation.
My company is located in a place that's pretty difficult to reach via public transport. It's common knowledge that owning a car is expensive. We are working fully remote since november, and I realized that I just own a car for the sake of getting to work.
Don't get me wrong: I like to drive "somewhere" on the weekend or visit family and friends, but for that, an older car would be fine enough. Heck, I could even persue my dream of a convertible. I just own a decent car to have a reliable way to get to work. Every. Day.
IBM expects >80% of their employees to be spending at least 3 days per week in the office post-pandemic. Parents will be allowed to continue to WFH until schools re-open in September. And they're labeling THIS as a "hybrid model".
Even though it's clear that to each their own. It's amazing how hard people can make life for themselves. I'm totally for you working at an office if you feel you're more successful and happier that way. But given you are somewhat forced to do something else, try to make it work. Of course there are exceptions and that people may have really dramatic households that make all of the below impossible. But, how many are there, really? I think it's mostly a matter of communicating and setting expectations properly.
a) I'm interrupted at home. Communicate, talk to your kids and rest of the family (works from ages 4 and up, before then you need to agree for a partner/caretaker to handle kids) and let them know there are times they can't interrupt you but the key here is: offer times where they can! You can't expect to be left alone 8 hours a day in a row in this new arrangement.
b) I can't work without pressure. Communicate, talk to your teammates and have a virtual room where you just work, without talking unless there's a question. There's also focusmate.com if you are afraid of your coworkers. Also, create a routine for yourself. Be unafraid of asking for help.
c) I don't have friends or family. Will an office really change that? I know that the friends I made working at an office I still have, and that I've made friends working remotely too. As well as having the friends I made when young.
Finally, many workplaces are not enabling workers to be successful remotely, becuase they don't know how to or they don't want to. You need to encourage async, reduce (not increase!) meetings, and offer more freedom to accommodate for the above.
If any Google employees are reading this thread and don't agree with this move, it seems like the kind of issue that the Alphabet Workers Union would be in a perfect position to help push back on. Join up: https://alphabetworkersunion.org/
The union is probably the reason. Pretty hard to have a strong united culture when everybody is at home reading the NYT about how Google is evil.
It's easier to think of Google as good when you face your coworkers, but when they are behind avatars and just text, it's easier to fall for the propaganda of the NYT et.al
I exaggerated with the union comment, but my point was that Google is now having a very divided workforce and having them work remotely is not going to help, especially when the outside world they read (e.g. NYT) is all about blaming Big Tech for everything.
Everyone keeps saying, "There are so many good things about WFH". Ya, good for you. People who make these decisions don't care what's good for you. "But I'm more productive when I'm happy" you say. They don't care how productive you are. They care how profitable you are with is the ratio of how productive you are to how much you cost. If they can hire three miserable people to do what you do at one fifth the cost they'll do it. You being a happy is incidental to what they're doing.
"But they don't have to pay for office space". Sure, but you're totally discounting the amount of power that they gain by having control of your physical body. I get to tell you where to be, when to be there, and what to do. I have cameras and badges to verify you're there. You're also physically close so you're buying a house with a mortgage, putting your kids in school. If I fire you your only choice is something within a 100mi radius. I'm a member of local business groups so there's a good chance I know where you're going and maybe even play golf with the companies CEO. You better not burn any bridges on your way out or I might shake my head and make a face when I mention your name on the back nine.
I guarantee you that some people will be allowed to work from home. Others won't. Right now they're busily working to determine which ones those will be where it's best for them. The outcome will be you'll always get the worst deal. The ones that are fungible and I can cut costs to the bone? Sure work from home. The ones that I need a little more leverage with? You're coming into the office. I'll even buy a foosball table and put some snacks in the kitchen if it makes you feel better.
That’s a pretty uncharitable way of describing all of Google’s software. There’s a lot more to Google than just the YouTube ranking algorithm, if that’s what you’re referring to.
It’s also not in the least different from pre-pandemic, and there wasn’t much of a retention problem then, either, as far as I know.
There’s also plenty of offices in places that don’t have the very highest cost of living, and Google committed to expanding those as well.
Perhaps this will trigger a number of employees to leave for other companies with more flexible policies, or more interestingly, trigger a new wave of start-ups.
Price it in. 8h work + 2h commute means minimum 25%+ higher comp to come into the office. We now know it's not necessary for the majority of work.
Managing salaried employees by optimizing their productivity as hourly labourers is essentially abuse.
The secret is to always maintain an opportunity funnel and a pipeline of potential job opportunities that you can convert into interviews or jobs within a few weeks.
Executives likely have data showing that wfh doesn't work. From a cost perspective, most executives would prefer wfh because
1) the talent pool is greater
2) they can save on facility expenses
3) they can dramatically reduce compensation
Over time (1) and (3) could see compensation easily halve as supply of developers becomes more easily globalized
What nobody is saying is that covid is not going away. This is highly irresponsible of Google given they have all the research in the world showing that. They already have the ideal situation set up to mitigate the risk of getting and spreading it. The vaccines aren't and never claimed to be 100% effective against covid, and as new variants have emerged, it's looking more like covid is going to be the next annual flu, except with all of the worst symptoms of covid, which can include death.
Our administration needs to pass legislation to prevent companies from forcing people back into offices. This is rediculous.
This. In some jobs I was forced to procrastinate in the office and then finish work at home because I just couldn't focus in the open plan. When at review I asked for a separate office (company had this ability) they said I am not a manager so I can't. I left them soon after.
Instead of being thankful to employees for increasing Google stock price by 50% in the last 12 months, Google now try to repress the staff. Another reason not to use Google services.
Howabout we get this raging pandemic under control first, and then companies can sort out how to get back into offices. There is far too much hubris and suicidal optimism at the idea that in a month everything is safe to share air with others again. Over half of the country is surging in new cases for a potential huge 4th wave, we're starting to see some vaccine breakthrough cases including unexpected hospitalizations and deaths from fully vaccinated folks, and children are still totally unvaccinated for at least the next 6-12 months. We also have only begun to verify mRNA boosters will work and be feasible to adapt to the ever-changing variants. All of these problems are surmountable and I fully expect to see them solved, but not in a couple months.
It seems foolish to rush things as cases are once again back on the rise, which means deaths will likely be rising in about 2 weeks. And why are cases on the rise? Because people are, once again, pretending we are getting back to normal and going back to their old germ transmission daily life. How many times do we need to go through this Grand Opening / Grand Closing cycle before we learn?
I'm guessing they are looking forward to the point at which "everyone that wants a vaccine can get one", at which point safely opening an office building should be doable.
(Fully) Vaccinated people spending time together seems safe enough though, so the choice to work in office is probably fine (whereas requiring it is premature).
I'm guessing they found that employees aren't as productive when they not obliged to show up to the office every day. Not to mention when they're not provided with a steady stream of free food and coffee.
Fourteen days a year seems pretty limited--weren't Googler's working from home more often than that before the pandemic?
That's quite speculative, considering how open offices are terrible for productivity but the companies still require it. Most likely it's just management bias.
Isn't your post about Google offices being terrible for productivity exactly the same amount of speculative? And likely just your personal bias towards your preferences?
Found that my productivity - and that of the team I'm on -has gone through the roof since WFH. I'm on a fairly small team though (2-3 devs). I suspect that productivity changes are different in larger, more corporate settings where it is less conspicuous when a worker abuses the circumstances.
Same, my team has gone way through the roof in productivity, delivering more than ever. At some point we actually ran out of stories to do even with more work and had to come up with more.
As a note, over than half the team already WFH'd at least 1 day a week in normal conditions, and there was sufficient team trust that everyone would do the right thing, nobody minded if you ran out for errands or lunch unannounced - people would quickly check if any meetings were scheduled usually before running out, items were completed ahead of schedule. I've been doing a 30m-1h nap in the middle of the day and that's helped a lot too.
I've also managed to not catch a cold or flu for the first time ever.
My previous daily commute was min 1-2hrs each way in completely stopped traffic on a standing room only bus/train with multiple transfers and involved waking up even earlier than that to not be refused entry to an overfilled bus.
I've seen a teammate or two be playing actual games (ranked apex legends in this case) during meetings but honestly, they were still responding, answered questions, and that meeting could have been a slack thread but some other teams are not nearly as competent at reading README.md.
The typical googler is a 20 or 30-something that has close to zero life interest outside work. I would not expect them to want to stay remote as their social life revolves around Google.
Sadly, from what I have seen most people with a good work life balance want to stay remote while people with few other life interests want absolutely go back to work.
I predict that in a couple years this will be part of the culture of each company. You will chose a company based on your desire to become close friends with your colleagues or live a great life outside the office.
Granted I didn't ask if that was standard interview prep for them prior to interviewing, so this is partly my own biases filtering through, but I didn't get the sense that the seasoned 30-40 yold engineers were on leetcode for 6 months to pass interviews. I'm not saying none of them do that, but I found the Google interview process pretty standard fare for any place that has a similar quality bar.
I remember my interviews with Google & Facebook as a new grad & they felt far more grueling than as a senior engineer (that & 10 years ago they were still asking those brain teasers like find the voltage between two points of an infinite lattice circuit).
At this stage in my career, I've found the interview questions are all about how to design large pieces of software with the coding aspect being a smaller piece of the pie to make sure I'm not BS'ing.
Some people leetcode for ages to get lucky in interviews. But loads of people just interviewed and are highly skilled and qualified. I think I did a week of prep ahead of my interviews.
Some people also get lucky. Luck is a huge factor in FAANG interviews. I've seen people who are definitely no more intelligent or better at LC type problems than average Joe just get lucky with their interview loops - while others who have won competitions just get the inverse luck and don't get an offer.
My whole team is basically dads in our 30s. Most of my broader colleagues have fully realized lives outside of work. Your stereotype doesn’t ring true to me.
On the other hand, some younger workers might see remote work as their best opportunity to ever afford a home. Older workers have had better chances to buy in the Bay Area, as they presumably had more time to accumulate wealth and could buy when prices are lower. Younger workers will need to save for a long time, even at FAANG salaries.
it's true though. They are a publicly traded company with over 100B in office assets. If they can't get people back into the offices, they would not be able to justify they cost of keeping said property and would have to sell it to appease investors. Please use a brain cell next time.
Yikes, please don't damage HN by responding that way, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. This is how we get downward spirals into hell. Think of it this way: you may not owe the comment you disagree with any better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it.
I worked at a place with a historic, beautiful, downtown office. It was great ... for a while. Then they expanded but the location could not. My enjoyment dropped rapidly once we were five to a desk. The question of remote work came up and upper management was heavily invested in on site ICs. And this around the time they promoted some semi-remote folks to be our managers. It was weird. Possibly some trust issues from past contractors.
EDIT: Forgot to mention they did specifically call out the expense of the location and parking privileges as a reason to disallow remote work.
The worst time I had was when I got to manage a team of 5 at a remote location. All 5 guys were sitting together. There was only one conference room equipped with videoconference gear. I tried maintaining at least one meeting a week but it had to be booked a lot in advance and I was frequently preempted by higher management because this was the only one room. Usually at the last moment (and I had once been evicted in the middle of the meeting).
There was no budget for me to visit them at the office so all in all I saw them in person twice. Not twice a month or even twice a year. Twice. Total.
Google has signed like 16 year leases in some offices and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into them already. For the playa vista office alone at least.
As a person who has first-hand experience working with dedicated Google managers - this is great news. I used to be able to get answers very quickly, but even the simplest issues nowadays can take up to 3 weeks to get resolved. "Everyone is remote, you understand" - is the usual reply. I can any guess how terrible it's for regular businesses that don't have assigned dedicated account managers.
Remote work is terrible for productivity especially if the company was not already remote first. In my employer, we've noticed a 30-40% productivity dip across the board. Not only that, but people are reporting more stress and are working unhealthy hours. Replying to emails at 9pm, etc.
The communication breakdowns are constant. Previously you'd absorb information through osmosis, but the watercooler chat about projects and upcoming initiatives has outright stopped.
If in person meetings are 10 in terms of information bandwidth, video calls are less than 6. They're just terrible. Oh, I accidentally interrupted someone yet again because of lag despite us all having fiber internet. Amazing.
In the last 21 years, I've worked 2 years in an office, for Google. Those were by far the least productive I've ever felt. I resorted to getting into the office at 5:30 am to have some quiet time before the obnoxious group next to us in the office arrived and started joking around and flying RC helicopters in the building.
I'm another one with 20 years WFH... Its amazing how much controversy it engenders. I think a good part of it, might be having consciously made the decision vs. having to 'fall into' it during the pandemic.
Interviewing for my last job, I asked if I could bring in a pinball machine, and they said they just moved from a shared office where they had to steal the ping-pong balls from the other occupants so they could work.
I didn't bring in the machine, but it was a nice work environment.
Are you sure the elevated stress and lowered productivity are due to remote work, and not other environmental factors (i.e., a global pandemic, lockdown, etc.)?
Oddly at the place I was with we saw literally the exact same metrics but inverse: productivity increase by mid-30%. Everyone hated the office so that makes sense.
My philosophy on it is that management is key. If butts-in-seats gives management the illusion of productivity then they will likely find out they are dead wrong. You can practically objectively measure productivity with remote work. Collaboration is more challenging and therefore surfaces many efficiencies you can make in your process.
You should never assume businesses, corporations, and people are rational actors. Corporations make irrational decisions all the time, often to their demise. Why do we think Google is exempt?
At my employer we have some pockets of embarrassing leadership like this, but thankfully I haven't seen it in anyone senior enough to make global policy like this. My department is letting go of remote teams and only hiring in a handful of cities around the world, while ramping up office space spending. It's more expensive, less flexible, and less productive... and everyone knows it. But I guess it makes some people feel important, and it's how some others remember developing when they last did it 20 years ago. So it's happening anyway, and many of their best engineers are now on the market.