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Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

economist.com

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Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#441

Post by Steltek »

idrios wrote: post #437
Steltek wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a contrast, I think I've had the exact opposite WFH/lockdown experience as you. My quality of life has tangibly and significantly degraded across every positive point you listed. Even if my employer began offering office access, I don't think it will ever be the same as what I had before. I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy, mentally and physically. I got to see…

Similar situation, WFH/lockdown massively degraded the quality of my life. Work became more stressful and metric-driven, social life died as all my friends & coworkers moved to their hometowns and I did too, and I've gained weight / fallen into a rut. I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was…

Sorry to hear that.

Any tips for mentors? I feel peer collaboration hasn't been too bad and honestly I strongly favor remote-style work even in the office. However, effectiveness in mentoring junior engineers has nosedived. There's more to programming than a pull request. Workflows, tools, and behaviors are also things that people learn from others. You don't get that over infrequent screen sharing and quick daily syncs.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#442

Post by macintux »

nicoburns wrote: post #407
macintux wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bandwidth, latency, and resolution of an analog whiteboard beats the pants off anything digital.

Yep, especially the latency.

For me it’s the resolution. No 6k monitor can compare.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#443

Post by sokoloff »

jonfw wrote: post #382
sokoloff wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a round-trip latency difference. Standing in the same room, we can get perhaps 100, but certainly 50, responses in an hour from a small group. Video conferencing might be 15% less and that relatively slight difference is already frustrating. In asynchronous written form, it probably takes 3 days to get 100 “turns” and maybe a week or more if there’s timezone “smear”. The written async responses can be higher qua…

If you're a proponent of written communication- you'll argue that 100 'turns' of written communication will have significantly more valuable discussion than 100 turns in a meeting. Most of the turns in a meeting can usually be avoided by a google search beforehand

Totally true. There are many cases where even 2 or 3 turns of written comms beats 100 of spoken (and I'm one of the biggest proponents of written work and async work at my company).

But there are situations where speed of alignment matters more than the specific direction of alignment and other situations where the nature of humans requires a live, synchronous discussion. I couldn't build a relationship with my family using only written feedback and requests.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#444

Post by wing-_-nuts »

michaelt wrote: post #321
nly wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just gone back to an office (I changed jobs) and I'm shocked how maybe 5 out of 8 of my team choose regular office work over hybrid simply because of the free lunches and dinners. Personally I find standing on a train for 45 minutes each way, and not being able to do small household errands on my breaks, like I can when I work from home, means my entire Mon-Fri is a cycle of sleep-eat-commute-work with no time t…

> I'm shocked how maybe 5 out of 8 of my team choose regular office work over hybrid simply because of the free lunches and dinners. Some people I know are bachelors who don't cook (weird lifestyle, but it takes all sorts I guess) so employers with canteens are a big attraction for them. Other people, I suspect, have reasons for getting back to the office that they're a bit shy about. Joking that you're just here for…

As much as I'm ashamed to admit it, my diet suffered when I went totally WFH. I went from eating a healthy salad 4x a week to 'eating out of the pantry' with grocery runs every two weeks or so. You can't keep salad greens around shopping that infrequently. Granted, shopping that infrequently was a consequence of trying to limit exposure in a global pandemic, but my dietary habits are much less healthy now, lol.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#445

Post by closeparen »

hogFeast wrote: post #157
closeparen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slum is a comment about the quality of the structures. That happens when your civilization is poor and a typical worker’s wages don’t buy much building material. Marginal structures are a thing in rural settings too, only there it’s “rustic” instead of “slum.” Anyway, we are not that fledgling economy anymore. Contemporary high-rise apartments are really nice! Even the mass-produced 5+1s are perfectly comfortable and…

No, it is a comment about overcrowding. The point is: there was no way to move lots of people into these areas to do work and maintain living standards. Buildings also cost labour to produce, now that society is rich, can everyone just buy infinite building materials? Correct, the ones we have now that only rich people can buy and which exist during a shortage of housing. Assuming that this can just scale up to house…

This "assumption" is called Manhattan, where in fact 1.6 million people live in apartments, no more than a few blocks from a train that comes every few minutes. The economic conditions to reproduce this model are in several other places. The only reason it's not happening is our decision to ban it.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#446

Post by tablespoon »

Sodman wrote: post #438
znpy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My social skills are absolutely fine, i can assure you of that. But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason. It's okay if you got a bit lazy during the pandemic and no one is denying that... but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office, you can just go bike or do some other…

Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed. Hope you weren't planning on collaborating using physical media such as whiteboard or post-it notes. Obviously we can do our best to reduce unnecessary meetings, but for those remaining necessary meetings, an in-p…

> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed.

That's actually a good point. Conference speakerphones are garbage, so once one needed person is remote, everyone has to dial in. The experience is really only workable if everyone is using a headset.

> in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.

This isn't just a side effect of WFH, offshoring/distributed teams force it too. Even before the pandemic, most of my co-located team's meetings were online, since we almost always had to accommodate someone who was based at another site.

To go a little off-topic, there are a lot of good arguments against open office plans, but weirdly the one that seemed hardest for advocates to shrug off was the difficulty of having a bunch of co-located people joining the same call, and having to deal with echo. I think that's because it challenged the assumption that work happened mainly in a very particular co-located way (e.g. like a bunch of people sitting at consoles in a mission control center).

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#447

Post by wing-_-nuts »

hogFeast wrote: post #37
closeparen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi hour commute is, truly, insane. But that’s more a comment about our collective housing and transportation choices than something inherent to showing up at work.

Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared. Even if you have great transportation (Tokyo, London, New York), the commute is still pretty brutal. The only real "solution" that was ever presented to this problem was to create smaller garden cities that would have…

>the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem

One thing that I've found absolutely fascinating is looking at the Soviet sphere when it comes to residential housing. A lot of housing got destroyed in WWII, and the soviets realized that the best way to house a lot of people in a hurry was to build apartment blocks. These blocks were designed to have everything one needed, shops, schools, etc, within reasonable walking distance. The commute to work was handled with public transport.

Now, I'm not saying everything was perfect, but I do find it interesting as an approach to residential design, mandating a mix of essential services within walking distance of housing is unheard of here in the US, and really only exists in cities that existed pre-car.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#448

Post by decafninja »

sbarre wrote: post #363
evenhovercraft wrote: post #349

Very grateful that my employer has committed to remaining flexible with remote work. Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual. Full time remote has done wonders for my health - instead of a 2 hour commute I get to exercise. Instead of coming home stressed, annoyed, and sitting in front of the TV, I go outside for a solid hour+ after I close my laptop. I travel more liberally now…

> Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual. I feel like this is the key thing. Instead of mandating blanket policies (whatever they are) that might not make sense for every team, trust your employees to self-organize in the way that makes the most sense for them and the way they work. I'm in the same boat, and like you, doubt I will want to work any other way again.

The problem is that in many cases, the pro-office people, despite saying otherwise, probably do need everyone - or at least most, to be in the office with them for them to personally gain the benefits of the social office environment. The benefits of you WFO depends on your coworkers.

If you are a pro-WFO person on a team that offers flexibility to WFH or WFO, but nearly everyone but you is WFH, then what do you do?

In contrast if you are a pro-WFH person but the rest of your team is in the office, you probably don’t care as much because the benefits you gain from WFH aren’t dependent on your coworkers.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#449

Post by tjr225 »

adamors wrote: post #99
tjr225 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked with someone in Bangalore? No offense my Bangalore homies, but I’ve only had bad experiences. Same with Bulgaria. Weird communication issues and bad work. This was especially the case in customer facing work. Ive had better experience with people in the NL but still obvious communication issues, bad experiences with Australia and Asia. For better or for worse(I think worse) engineering culture is heav…

> obvious communication issues Have you considered that you are the one who is a poor communicator? You wouldn't be the first: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161028-native-english...

Communication issues are inherently a two way street. Unfortunately for workers in Bangalore, Bulgaria, etc the vast majority of my customers are in the US, UK, or Canada.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#450

Post by loudtieblahblah »

evenhovercraft wrote: post #349

Very grateful that my employer has committed to remaining flexible with remote work. Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual. Full time remote has done wonders for my health - instead of a 2 hour commute I get to exercise. Instead of coming home stressed, annoyed, and sitting in front of the TV, I go outside for a solid hour+ after I close my laptop. I travel more liberally now…

I'm a parent. I've had 2 employers in the last 7 years, switching in June of this year.

When covid struck initially, I kept my kid home with me. My job, aside from a daily standup and a weekly meeting, could be done while juggling my child. I worked really odd hours, bc I could. Early AM, later at night. But I got to protect my kid and my family from a disease I didn't know much about, for 15 months.

My new job disallows me to juggle him but it's still WFH. He started school anyways.

I exercise more. I meditate more. Go outside more - get little chores done, cut the grass on my lunch break rather than cutting in on family time.

The lack of a 45-115 min commute each way has been a lifesaver. Going to the doctor is faster and less time consuming bc my docs are near my home and not near my work. I can jog in the morning and still be to work "on time" rather than having to get up earlier and trade exercise for sleep.

And what's more.. When I do break, I get to see my wife. Or talk to my parents on the phone. At lunch I can catch up on a TV show, a podcast, a YouTube vid, that I'm interested in but my family might not be.

It affords me more ability to access my personal computer for things I might not do on a company machine.

I can do training videos and obligatory but time pointless and wasting meetings that never ask for my participation while in my "poor man's sauna" (hot bath + space heater in the room) or on a exercise bike or while walking around the block.

I miss being around people I like at work.

But alas.. I don't like anyone at my new job even a little

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