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Shopify Goes Digital by Default

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Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#151
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF anywhere near Market or Mission is a 3rd world country. I just moved to Seattle. The QoL difference is striking.

Yeah, it sucks. From my few visits to Seattle, it seemed similar in parts but I haven't spent enough time there to make a confident assertion.

It might just be the current situation but I have seen maybe 4 homeless in 3 weeks in my day to day and I take a lot of walks. Could just be looking in the wrong spots but there were literally 20 tents on my block near Bart in the Mission so its an upgrade.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#152
This feels very much like a shock response, not a choice. I would expect in 5 years a rediscovery of a more office centric culture:

“Informal whiteboarding saves me so many meetings!” “It’s great to get to know your coworkers as people!” “Relationships with colleagues actually matter!”

(Though i can’t see going back to pre covid office centricity)

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you're describing don't go away with a remote team. It's not like going remote means all your employees just never talk to eachother in favor of working independently. It just means you use technology to solve in-person problems rather than being in person. I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people…

I think about (and struggle to value) point C often. The disruption can be very annoying but the knowledge transfer often has a huge multiplier attached to it. One person's small piece of knowledge can give an entire team major traction. This model also promotes tribal knowledge and weak documentation...which is acceptable for a small company, not so much for larger companies where people are spread out across geogra…

I think that it's just a fundamentally different way of thinking. Having a distributed team means you have to remove the "I'll just walk over and ask" mentality from everyone involved. You must resist the temptation to use slack as an alternative to in-person communication. Communication must be frequent, documented and public - someone else needs to be able to see the decisions you made.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that absorbing new information would be much easier in a remote-first environment (such meandering conversations would be available for everyone to see, not just the participants of a given conversation). The rest of what you said is not unique to new-grads in any way. Also, a remote-first company could still have an office - albeit reduced. If all your friends were at remote-first companies wouldn't yo…

New grads, almost by definition, have absorbed whatever they can from reading, the internet, and education; what they need is attention. How to interact in a professional environment; the details of the company, industry and role; the office politics... all are "unknown unknowns" to a new grad. I learned about them from mentorship, 1:1 conversations, and by reading the body language of people around me. It would've b…

I don't understand why all of that can't be conducted over the internet. I mean, we're having this conversation over the internet, right?

Plus, again remote first does not mandate working from home. One could still go into the office so the qualms are moot.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#155

I really hope this doesn't become a bigger trend. Shopify was a company I was seriously considering working at in the future, but this would probably disqualify them. Working from home once a week sounds great to me, but doing it full time would drive me insane. Virtual meetings are awful for me, and you miss out on so much of the discussion that happens outside of the meeting - I think most of the important discussi…

I agree completely, but wanted to emphasize something regarding: "and you miss out on so much of the discussion that happens outside of the meeting."

IMHO, ALL of the chat services make this problem worse, not better. None of them let you easily and fluidly say "I'm interested in this topic for the next few days" or whatever. They hide, rather than render discoverable, important discussions, either (due to GUI structure pushing people to do it) threads moved to 1:1 chats or just lost in the sheer volume of text scroll.

The future of UI is bounded attention: "alert me for xxx _for the next { hour, next few days, this week, through next week, this month, for quarter, as long as ..., forever }" attention filtering. UI right now assumes that the doesn't change and that users actively correct it. But we aren't even at the point where that basic level of automation even exists.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#156

Remote-first is the future. I'm not sure why anyone would be against it. No one is forcing you to work from home. From a compliance and operations perspective a remote-first company is effectively forced to do a lot of things many companies do not or will not undertake: - Make meetings accessible to everyone - Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the ad…

The whole argument starts with a definition of what "work" is, obviously.

For people that use a particle accelerator or make scrambled eggs work from home is nonsensical.

For people who produce computer code as their entire work output and rely on very sophisticated digital collaboration tools already work from home is mostly interchangeable with work from an office.

And then there's a really vast grey area in between. What about lawyers, or architects, or film and television executives, or whatever else you can imagine?

The answer is that it depends. But, even limiting ourselves to the subset of work where it's even plausible that it could all be distributed there are some important things to note:

A pretty relevant data point is that when there has been a genuine choice between fully remote and mostly in offices the mostly in offices approach was way more popular. To the point where Silicon Valley real estate spiraled out of control, or literally everyone with deep knowledge of cutting edge electronics manufacturing ended up in the Shenzhen region.

In any another context we'd call that a "market" and say pretty definitively that the invisible hand of that market decided that this is a more effective way to build companies.

It seems we're going to get another experiment, whereby many companies begin the experiment all over again. Perhaps something has changed, perhaps virtual technology has advanced to where this makes more sense. Perhaps the culture is at a tipping point.

Or, perhaps there's some advantage to people all being in the same place that will make companies that do it outcompete companies that don't.

It's quite plausible that this is what the market will decide, in the future. It's also a really important data point to note that it is not, in fact, what the market had decided up until now.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#157

People are going to change their tune once the paycuts start coming. There is no reason to pay SF money to someone living in the Midwest. $80k a year is comfortable most places. I hope remote first people like the suburbs and country because there is no reason to live in the city with no office. The real truth though is most people are far less productive remote because it requires proactive communication and self di…

This is my fear as well. Not only will I no longer have face-t-face interaction, and the break-up in my day that and office allows, but pay will probably decrease across the board.

Coming from a non-coastal state, I honestly do not understand the superiority complex a lot of coastal developers have. There are good developers everywhere, and the ones living in the southwest or the midwest are willing to do the same work for less money. But, you can be willing to bet the execs will receive a pay bump for their "cost-saving measures".

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#158

Remote-first is the future. I'm not sure why anyone would be against it. No one is forcing you to work from home. From a compliance and operations perspective a remote-first company is effectively forced to do a lot of things many companies do not or will not undertake: - Make meetings accessible to everyone - Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the ad…

I live in a tiny, crappy, pre-war apartment that gets cold in the wintertime, next to loud, obnoxious neighbors, and I prefer working at my company’s spacious, modern Manhattan office.

I used to do something similar when I had to go into an office. Then I started working from home and moved to a quiet neighborhood with a high walkability and bikeablility score (sadly, our transit score is still terrible, I wish I could have gotten all three; this according to https://www.walkscore.com/). I wouldn't have had this option if I had to live near the office.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#159
post #141

So I've now been WFH for 2 months and honestly I hate it. Work was already flexible enough such that if you wanted to WFH you could. By convention, people would most often WFH on Wednesdays. I liked this timing of people doing it at the same time. But communication and collaboration is just much harder work remote and you can't change my mind. I'm sure you can work hard to make it almost as good but it's never going…

I loved work from home until I wasn't allowed to outside for almost 2 months. Then I felt like a caged animal. Going outside is my offset to work.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#160
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it sucks. From my few visits to Seattle, it seemed similar in parts but I haven't spent enough time there to make a confident assertion.

It might just be the current situation but I have seen maybe 4 homeless in 3 weeks in my day to day and I take a lot of walks. Could just be looking in the wrong spots but there were literally 20 tents on my block near Bart in the Mission so its an upgrade.

Found this: https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/unauthorized-encampment...

I do recall some Seattlites mentioning one specific area that is particularly bad by name but don't recall that name.

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