I like Sam for the most part, but this is something I entirely disagree with.
Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
251–260 of 399 posts
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#252Senior software engineers: sure. Engineer II or below, terrible. Literally zero productivity, or even negative productivity.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#253[deleted]
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#254Senior software engineers: sure. Engineer II or below, terrible. Literally zero productivity, or even negative productivity.
Are you saying remote work only works for Seniors, or remote work is over for Seniors?
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. If your work can be done in isolation and doesn't require a team to deal with any uncertainty, then by all means work fully remote. However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, then it's going to be more effective to spend time together. I think it's telling that you talk about…
> The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. The article also has no data supporting it. Only feelings. It's very typical for these sort of articles. I am a lot more productive, and even creative working from home, where I have full control of the environment I'm in and not wasting effort on social interactions. Collaboration happens e…
> I am a lot more productive, and even creative working from home
What’s the data to support this statement? It sounds like a feeling. Do you have data to support whether or not your teammates’ productivity are affected by you being remote?
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#256I assume he’s got either direct or indirect links to commercial realestate; as an owner or investor or something else. It makes literally 0 business sense to be forking out anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand per employee per month to give them a space to work, when that can just be avoided. The amount of cost and overheads involved; from insurance to upkeep to rent to OHS - a work space is probably the nex…
Why do you assume this? Sam literally takes no salary or compensation of any kind from OpenAI because he thinks he has enough money. Your bias is clouding your judgement.
Does he own any equity in the company?
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#257Autonomous working has proven to be a game changer for myself and others in my team. I can login and out when I need to (meetings/stand ups I obviously need to factor in) which allows me to take an actual break and go somewhere with my dog when I am feeling bogged down/unproductive. The ability to do this means that, when I return to the desk, I am refreshed and ready to tackle a problem with fresh eyes instead of gl…
> This rhetoric that remote work is bad for business seems to always come from people whom I suspect have an ulterior motive
This sort of perspective is killing any real chance of having a productive conversation about the topic. There's a chance a person very similar to you simply disagrees with you on a very complex topic. There's pros and cons to the office and WFH alike. You clearly do well with WFH, and have good reasons for it. A junior engineer like me did not, so I have a different perspective.
The next exhaustive part of the debate (which you didn't bring up, I'm simply anticipating), is the retort that my team just didn't do WFH correctly, or that Covid was a confounding factor.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#258Most of the companies that are declaring remote work as a failure weren’t able to establish good processes and culture on this new setup. Most of these companies are also control freak with low-trust attitude on their employees. Personally, it’s far from be a failure and being over, and likely one of the best equalizer (democratize opportunities) and productivity booster that happened in the industry. However it’s certainly not easy to adopt and integrate correctly.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#259This hasn't been my experience on a completely remote team that was remote (/ multi-city-office) way pre-pandemic. I think culturally you can just do remote wrong or you can do remote right and the SF-mindset-centric scene around here seems (in my experience) to not really lean all the way in on doing it right.
In that respect this is just clickbait to me.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. The article also has no data supporting it. Only feelings. It's very typical for these sort of articles. I am a lot more productive, and even creative working from home, where I have full control of the environment I'm in and not wasting effort on social interactions. Collaboration happens e…
Do we always need non anecdotal data to support every assertion that we make? I've had many face to face conversations in a room with a whiteboard that couldn't have happened nearly as efficiently if everyone was remote. Now I do think that the push against work from home in general has very little to do with operating efficiency (if companies cared that much about operating efficiency they wouldn't have developers w…
In this case, yes. Because otherwise I will just go with my anecdotal observation that this is just about management feeling lonely and with less control.