231–240 of 921 posts
I'm an employer, but my opinion would be the same regardless. The script is something like this: Person1: Arg! This thing! Person2: What ya working on? Person1: is giving me trouble. Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out on this interaction. Also, WFH is also just too…
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…
I thought it sounded great. Spent most of my time out of the office for the first 3 weeks. Quickly felt the downsides and got back in the office for the remainder of my next 2 jobs. Networking alone was more valuable for my career personally than anything that we actually accomplished in the office by being there together.
I don't know that the company benefited, but I felt like I did.
At the larger company though (business telecom), it was a lot easier for them to secure the network by controlling all of the devices and endpoints in the office, including camera access and building access. Dealing with all those employees on remote devices over a VPN would have been a huge security headache IMO.
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…
Digital hallways exist in the form of private messages.
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"There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes." I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that dire…
Same. I don't really collaborate in the hallways, I don't think IT people tend to.
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> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.
You're making some really huge assumptions.
* There's significant rise in burnout rate and LOTS of people looking for professional help with psychological issues. Many times more than in previous years. Some returned to the office and got significantly better, because they simply lacked human interaction (both their and surrounding opinion).
* There's group that prefers to work from the office for various reasons (people, work/life separation, small/noisy home).
* Both groups make significant part of our teams. Due to that some additional people decide to join as they feel they are missing out on part of the discussion and team interaction. This tends to snowball.
* Then there's elephant in the room: I know some people (personally, but outside of my org), who will hire at a few places (three or more) and bluntly lie about being full-time dedicated to each of them. They'll actively delay work giving false reasons, to maintain that illusion. Some employers will react by implementing group responsibility, when they find out.
Disclaimer (I had that discussion before): if you have steel-strong psyche, prefer people from outside work, have great communication skills, can sleep 2h a day and work 16h or have negotiated terms of employment that allow to be hired at a few places - good for you. This comment is mere observation, not attack on your life choices.
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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…
I’m a Sr. Director. There is nothing but non sense in any claims that say random shout outs as people are breezing between one unnecessary meeting and another are useful. It just doesn’t happen. 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 i…
That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.
And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably invisible to you because you don’t take the time to get to build a relationship with your fellow workers.
I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly spe…
> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12 Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location. Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key s…
What data do you have to back this up? Top 1% engineers who have all the options? sure.
80% engineers? You will be paying double local market rates already and you will find you can trivially out-talent for the same budget.
Will this change over time? Sure. But reality on the ground is you can hire someone of equivalent talent for half the cost in Europe/LATAM/etc. vs. the US a the moment. In quantity.
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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…
I’m a Sr. Director. There is nothing but non sense in any claims that say random shout outs as people are breezing between one unnecessary meeting and another are useful. It just doesn’t happen. 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 i…
But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.
One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their offices in order to facilitate random meetings between people:
> However, almost as many fruitful interactions described in the book can be traced to architectural features. Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate the building were included intentionally, so that chance encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:
> In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to investigate the effects of inter-office communication. They convinced their employees to where sociometric badges for the duration of the experiment and identified three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by about $200 million.
I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way, companies definitely should play around and see what works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.
I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly spe…
sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too