201–210 of 921 posts
1) Managing remote employees is harder. Managing in person is easier. Both are doable, but managing someone remotely requires either the manager and/or the employee to be really good at remote comms. 2) in person spontaneous collaboration 3) my experience is most people get less done remotely. Some do more, but most do less
My experience is quite the opposite.
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ. In the before tim…
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? > Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as…
People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a time. Especially those with children.
Couldn't one say the same about getting people to come to an office 250 days per year?
But if work wants me to travel for a week, it either means my spouse has to pick up all the stuff I do at home, or I have to find someone I trust to stay at my home for a week on an ad-hoc basis.
It's much harder to find ad-hoc babysitting than regularly scheduled babysitting.
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ. In the before tim…
To be fair, most of this doesn't happen in the office either. I don't see any real mentorship going on in my 10 years at the company. Comany culture is a joke in my experience. Management doesn't really care about the culture as long as it facilitates getting work done and keeping people in line. Networking might be easier in person, at least for some people. I personally think networking is toxic since it effectively means that outgroups remain outsiders and potentially promotes cronyism.
Real estate.
What do you mean exactly? Is there a conspiracy from people who own commercial real estate to force people who lease that space to renew their leases? Are employers stuck in a sunk cost fallacy where they just can't conceive of letting something they paid for go to waste until their lease is up?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.
Biking 10-15 minutes to work on a protected bike path is an order of magnitude better experience mentally and physically, speaking from personal experience.
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ. In the before tim…
> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.
Pandemic royally fucked over that lifestyle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? > Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as…
Depends on the environment. If your team is open to casual conversations and comfortable going off topics, then this likely isn't an issue. But, if your team is very metrics focused, you may not see levels of casual conversation that build rapport and build on ideas that come up on conversation. Sometimes a casual conversation is all it needs to hook a random thought into successful action. I like having casual talks…
The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly.
Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company that can do it should be and any that isn’t should go the way of the dodo.
The company caved because they depended on city approval for some licenses.
The person who told me this was an analyst tasked with cherry picking data to justify the decision that had already been made on political grounds.
(This was after a few drinks and has not been independently verified)
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ. In the before tim…
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes. I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments? > Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as…
Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've implemented in companies comes from employees having beers together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things should be".
I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and another person who wasn't really in the conversation overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.
As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire buildings were built with this in mind.