The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers • Hacker News Board

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#141

Post by MattGaiser » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:19 AM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #128

ren_engineer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. This speech from Richard Hamming about Bell Labs sticks in my mind, especially the segment about open vs closed office doors. I'd say remote work is objectively better for pure productivity in terms of getting things done, but you run the risk of limiting innovation I think https://www.c…

Most companies are not graciously funded laboratories so to me the argument for "let smart people chat randomly" is moot. Those companies have plenty of creativity-killing processes that make sure people never looked beyond what they have to do today and maybe tomorrow.

Or just the reality that most employees don’t have a big picture creative role.

I suspect most developers don’t really have a meaningful hand in shaping what they work on.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#142

Post by taneq » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #93

midasuni wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on It seems normal mow to move job every 3 years so that’s not a concern

That’s a very Silicon Valley tech influenced meme.

It’s true across most industries in Australia. The old social contract of employment, “work for us your whole career and we’ll look after you your whole career”, disintegrated in the 90s when companies started treating all employees as disposable. Now it’s everyone for themselves and loyalty between employees and employers is a shadow of what it was.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#143

Post by kobieyc » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

AndreiCalazans wrote: post #9

Unintentional by accident remote work shouldn’t be considered the baseline for such comparison. This research does at best find results at Microsoft, thus it could be titled “effects of remote work at Microsoft” to not induce the sense of generalist research. For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with strategies and tooling. Nevert…

I agree that the title of this paper is misleading. I'm seeing more and more studies lately that try to extrapolate results conducted in noisy environments (microsft) to even noisier environments (all companies). Dunno wtf people are thinking.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#144

Post by MattGaiser » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

wombatmobile wrote: post #65

aaomidi wrote: post #25

Here's an anecdote. I left because Microsoft was being weird about long term remote plans and I wanted to actually be able to plan ahead. They lost me because they couldn't give me a straight answer if I can continue working there if I went fully remote or not.

"If there's one thing in business that's certain, it's uncertainty." -- Stephen Covey "It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man." -- Richard P. Feynman "There is no such uncertainty as a sure…

But the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty. That’s the trade off.

Employers must then offer more for uncertainty.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#145

Post by IlliOnato » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

My experience is a bit unusual; for many years I was switching from working in the office to WFH and back every few months (basically I was going back and forth between the country where my family was and a country where my company was located).

Most of the rest of the team worked at the office, but there were a couple of other remote workers would come to the office once a week or so.

The company also had a tradition of "company retreats" where we would meet for the whole day in some nice surroundings, and do a mix of strategical planning, brainstorming, social interaction, walking in the woods, and even some silly "team-building" activities which occasionally turned up to be a lot of fun. We would be mostly off-line, won't even look at the automatic test reports.

Having this experience, I believe that such retreats are much better than usual meetings or water-cooler conversations at building team cohesion, disperse knowledge, etc. (Thet don't replace impromptu white-board sessions, though, but I think in reality these are not happening as often as people claim they are).

I only felt we did not have them often enough; Covid killed them, of course, which for me was the biggest directly work-related impact.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#146

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #121

Salgat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.

I was going to say. Academia is relatively dispersed, compared to the few tech hubs around the world. Creative people will be creative wherever they are. And there are plenty of cool open-source projects, from k8s to jupyter, that have been built by dispersed teams.

Academics heavily leverage in person meetings and conferences to exchange idea. Much of my conference time was spent chatting with colleagues rather than attending paper sessions. We don’t get that in a virtual conference setting.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#147

Post by newbie2020 » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

rybosworld wrote: post #53

missedthecue wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, it's just hard to build and maintain relationships from afar. Any kind, be it business, platonic, or romantic. Humans are social creatures, meant for in-person interaction.

This is more or less the same train of thought that people first had about online dating. "It won't work", "it's not the same", "it's weird to meet someone online" etc. I couldn't disagree more that remote relationships are more difficult. On the contrary, technology continues to make it easier to stay in touch with 500 friends, coworkers from your last 3 jobs etc.

It still is harder to date online. Developing a relationship in person is still way easier and more fulfilling

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#148

Post by mensetmanusman » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

If most all of the productivity gains accumulate to the 1%, who cares if we are a little less productive when quality of life is so much higher?

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#149

Post by momirlan » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

Rubbish. Office based work is conducive to loose knowledge sharing and too much personal "touch". A lot of time was being wasted in office silos. People need to make the shift to formalizing processes and knowledge sharing. Only then a new era of productivity will be unleashed. Remote is the future.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#150

Post by dcposch » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

A lot of discussion here about productivity and flow of information.

For me, the biggest downside of remote was something less measurable: it's much harder to build rapport with people you can't hang out with. Even more so with people you've never met.

From the article:

> Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts.

You could ascribe this clinically to "communication patterns" etc, but I think the deeper reason is that many of those "bridges" were friendships that stopped happening. This is a huge cost that goes beyond money or anything else you can put a number on.

--

Early in Silicon Valley history, there was a bar in Mountain View called the Wagon Wheel. Engineers from Fairchild Semiconductor, from Intel, Apple, other pivotal early companies would get beers after work. How many ideas do you think were hatched there, shared across department lines or between competitors? The Atari guys reportedly beta tested Pong by bringing it to the Wagon Wheel and watching people play.