> if your company is purely remote Pure remote companies are likely to be rare. But we may see a proliferation of hybrid companies that maintain office spaces but allow certain roles to work remotely most of the time. I think your analysis here is one-sided and is ignoring all the major problems with 100%-work-in-office cultures. Housing costs are absolutely out of control in major urban centers, and newcomers are sa…
I think you may be misinterpreting me. I am not advocating for pure in-person, I am only advocating against pure remote. I believe a hybrid approach is best.
Well, your 2nd paragraph does imply no-remote. Your 3rd paragraph softens the stance.
I think they’re missing the point that remote work is just another step in the direction of a massive trend toward distributed work. If you work for a big global megacorp, your entire life is passive online meetings with way too many people invited from across the world and across the hall. You go into work just to sit in a conference room with one other person or fight for a private phone booth by yourself, but inevitably take calls at your desk and annoy everybody else around you. You have an advanced degree in whatever, but your workplace resembles a multilingual call center and you’ve never spoken to your cubicle neighbors. There are social spaces to make the place look hip, but the latest trend is always social avoidance. They’ll allow 1 or 2 days per week remote and people will make is 4 or 5. The effect of the pandemic is to normalize remote, but more importantly, scatter all teams so that in-person is impossible. I don’t think productivity is measurable in an environment of massive economic chaostimulus, but commercial real estate costs are, and now you have high-salary workers arguing against their own best defense from offshore outsourcing. Now that offshore workers can join any team directly, managers will dedicate their budgets to packing their org charts with cheap workers to justify promotion to second level. I expect a lot of visa workers will return with their higher-salary jobs secured remotely, and engineering will gradually shift to asian hours. So this all just looks like acceleration to me, nothing new.
Hopefully we can get some legislation to correct for this. It seems like the sort of thing the labor market should balance out eventually, but... the labor market is pretty irrational all over the place, so I wouldn't trust it.
TBH, I don't think companies will fight it - its still cheaper to give an employee a budget and let them kit out a home office then to pay for cubicles, desks, etc. Office furniture is dam expensive! Oh! can't forget conference rooms! Those tables ain't cheap either.
Although it might be badly incentivized
If they give the employee a budget, it is a wage, and they have to pay social security fees on it (?). If they buy stuff for the company office, it is an expense and tax deducible.
> For something you're going to spend your life doing, it's a horrible prospect to not expect to make friends at work. Yeah well, as they say, life's a bitch and then you die. On the scale of things that are horrible prospects "not making friends at work" strikes me as something very privileged to be concerned about.
Jesus that's dark. Everybody needs community, there's nothing privileged about that. Through the ages we have bound ourselves to our profession and the people we work with and for in our community. Is that some far-fetched ideal to strive for? And I'm not meaning some buddy-buddy friends, but at least making good acquaintances. You can't really go much farther than that unless you have developed a good personal rappo…
Some people have very low social needs, very little desire to socially interact and are very picky. In that regard, I agree with GP. Personally, work is work and I don't go there to small talk with every single person who is incredibly unlikely to mesh well with me. Worse is when they come out with the "but you can change" arguments, when I'm fairly satisfied with the few great friends I have outside work.
I too find the need to be friends with everyone quite privileged, and worse, trying to force one's world view onto others. Some people just don't have the luxury of surrounding themselves with people of a largely similar mindset they can bond to in a work environment. Friendship is not something I wish to lower my standards for. Maybe the definition of what constitutes a friend is just different, too. I have high standards for a friend. An acquaintance, not so much. You could be an acquaintance just by saying 'hi' every week.
I think it's worth looking into "theory of the firm" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Why should employees even exist? Shouldn't firms just sack everyone, then hire contractors? I often hear advocates of remote work talk about "presenteeism" and how managers need to just focus more on outputs. This is fine, but if they can do that why not sack everyone and just hire contractors and pay for the outpu…
> if you're otherwise stuck in an office reading email to look busy, but not if you're at home and you can turn on the TV or walk the dog. The opposite
Pre covid is occasionally go to “the offie”, usually for a big meeting and socialisation once a month, sometimes as I was working in the data centre.
During the day, interruptions would be so high that I wouldn’t bother trying to work between them - as bad as if I try to homeschool the kids.
> My productivity probably doubled when I moved to remote working last year. Everyone who claims this is lying to themselves.
> Everyone who claims this is lying to themselves. Certainly not everyone. At my employer a VP produced a report for 2020 showing how his division had increased both productivity and response times across the board by a non-trivial margin due to WFH. Doesn't mean this generalizes across all teams but certainly at least some are seeing such data.
Working together in person has to be 10 times more effective. Major doubt that anyone thinks remote working is actually more effective from the companies perspective. The only argument I ever here is that antisocial people prefer not seeing other people and getting their work done alone.
Working remotely does not stop collaboration. I have been working primarily remote for the past 12 years. I meet with my team every day for standup and am in constant contact with team members throughout the day, sometimes pair programming or helping to debug issues. This is not much different than working in a colocated situation, except my coworkers don't have to smell my B.O. The tooling available these days makes…
Even back in 2000 we were using ICQ to chat with other developers sitting nearby. It was faster and less intrusive.
I think hybrid approach will be the best for most people. It's good to see co-workers regularly, maybe once or twice a week max. It's nice, though not a requirement for tasks that require high level of collaboration, and at least for me helps avoiding certain feeling of detachment from my work.
However, I would never want to return to working from office 100% of the time. When I really need to concentrate alone, I find home to be much better for that. Having to go to office every working day is also way too limiting in terms of where I can live - the hybrid model allows people much more freedom to choose where they live, long commute is perfectly fine if you only do it once or twice a week.
#1 is because Americans spend way to much time at work, so much time that it's difficult to find time to socialize out of work. People are social animals so they'll increase their interaction there (also lowering productivity in office). I think WFH coupled with reduced hour days or 4 day weeks would be a much better combo for high productivity in the office.
Americans also start work really late. 9 to 5 takes up the whole day. Where I am at most start at 7 or 8.
Start at 7 means getting up really early, so for a good night sleep you have to go to bed halfway through the evening.
The hour you start at makes no difference to how much you work.