Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4

Here's my anecdote.

When the team was still intact -- the people who were WFH were the same people who had been in the office together -- things were mostly fine.

Now there's been significant turnover and it feels like we're imploding. Management has no idea how to onboard people remotely; the team culture is completely gone. Communication is horrible. People who used to be dependable are now half-assing things. A 40 hr/wk job has become one where people are working 55, even 60, because the new people can't see us all physically leave the office after 8 hours to be able to trust that yes, really, it's just 40 hours. All of this is a huge personal tragedy for me; you can even see my profile where I've had a number of comments talking about how positive the working environment has been historically. It's all changing though.

It just feels like a disaster. Everything hummed along fine for the first several months, but as churn has happened something has been lost. We never spent time and effort looking at how to become a remote organization. We simply told everyone to WFH.

I've been reading about some of the downsides of fully remote work for over a decade, and I'm just seeing them in spades now. Even teams who were built to be remote from the ground up have (pre-pandemic) write-ups talking about the challenges of communication, team bonding, trust building, and so on.

What I see in my circles is a bunch of people who say how much they love not having to leave the home. What I don't see is a ton of people arguing that it makes their team better. Let me be clear I'm not discounting the value of being able to be at home; I know it's a huge benefit to many parents, for instance, and I know there are some who used to have a 2 hours commute. I'm just saying I haven't actually heard any arguments supporting the idea that it is a net improvement for the team -- and when the team becomes dysfunctional, people's mental well-being and happiness begin to suffer for other reasons.

These are all obviously just personal anecdotes. I would not be surprised, however, to see companies start walking this back slowly over the next few years, especially the non-tech companies. I think we will see increased inefficiencies show up as churn continues, as well as people with even moderate extroversion getting fed up of the isolation. Further, there is a strong tendency for people to want to work with other people "like them," and so I don't see local/regional companies being open to hiring nationwide for very long. Google hiring nationwide is one thing; Regional Health Insurance Corp, with business 100% focused within a half-state-sized region, is something completely different.

I could be completely wrong. I hope we can sort of collectively settle on some sort of moderate state, one where WFH days are liberal, but you don't have organizations of 1000+ people who never physically see each other. For instance, I feel somewhat stuck at my current position because the thought of trying to grow trust with an entire new team of people over calls and internet chat is horrifying to me.

In my experience, offices have simply been judgemental, time wasting, lacking in proper equipment/tooling, and quite frankly just uncomfortable. Granted, it's been a lot of mid-size enterprise/corporate places, but it's been backed up by a lot of middle/upper management that don't bother to think through why such criticism would come their way.

I'm all in favor of a GOOD office to come to, but until then I'm spending no more time on the property than required. Our white-collar culture and urban areas are too dysfunctional for hybrid and remote options to not be normalized. (In the US) If we're going to be "right-to-work", then give us the right to be remote.

Remote work has many upsides as well as downsides when compared to working in office.

What's interesting to me is, that many of the upsides of home office (which are also the downsides of going onsite) seem to be pretty much inherent and unavoidable.

Companies doing home office can hire from a larger pool, have less expenses for offices and onsite services, no commuting allowances, etc.

Employees working in home office have no commute, less car costs, more food options, are freed of open-plan office distractions, etc.

At the same time, most of the downsides of home office (and thus the upsides of onsite work) do mostly concern communication and organization and should be solvable.

Online Meetings suck, because all video/voice chats are crap.

You can't get in touch as quickly as tapping someone on the shoulder - because messengers are crap.

And so on, and so forth. So basically, all our tools for online-collaboration are not able to adequately replace in-person communication. Something is obviously getting lost.

It's kinda interesting, that Google does not seem interested in figuring out what the problem is, and improving upon their tools. It would seem to me that making Google's online collaboration tools better to overcome those problems and provide a remote work experience that doesn't suffer from all those drawbacks, would be a great business opportunity.

Instead they are basically throwing in the towel and admitting that they are unable to make it work well, right?

>>> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.

And that's what is wrong about being in office, especially as a software developer I hate having my focus interrupted because someone can't send an email

Quick naps are hugely underrated. 20 minutes of sleep in the afternoon and afterwards I could do my job while juggling knives (figuratively).

A manager I worked with once pre-pandemic had his idea of "business hammocks" for the office repeatedly shot down. He was a genius though.