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Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

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Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#281

Post by dapperyapp1234 »

ReDeiPirati wrote: post #258

Most 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 ce…

Remote work was an astounding success!

Every company, big or small, was able to leverage MS Teams or Zoom just fine. It is only in manufacturing and similar sectors where you need on-site due to the nature of the work. Software Engineering for Web, Desktop, etc. is easily remote-friendly.

The problem goes beyond "low-trust" attitude or productivity. Guys like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are Lord Farquad/King Joffrey in real life. The typical corporate setup is a pyramid and these guys have placed themselves on the top. What on earth is happening in the office that is going to magically improve company performance? Is it the slow internet, the persistent disruptions (... i mean collaboration?), the long tiring commutes, or the power-hungry management? Oh yea, its the power-hungry management. Ya see, we work in their castle but the kings don't feel important unless we send them praises (unwillingly) and endure them breathing down our necks. How can they assess our performance without monitoring us?

Tbh, its not even about remote work. You can have miserable remote work experiences too. But it makes it so much harder for these psychos to abuse you and get anything out of it when you're comfortably sat at home. I wouldn't mind going to the office if the concept of a boss ceased to exist. Make it opt-in and arrange with your coworkers what/when/how you'll deliver.

Edit: In Sam Altman's case he is saying early stage startups/products need people to grind together more closely. Again, that's true for physical products but not for Web/Desktop/Software.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#282

Post by 8note »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #257
makingstuffs wrote: post #119

Autonomous 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 goo…

It's an easy one to rectify - the decision makers can be clear about what conflicts of interest they have about these decisions, and shareholders need to push them on it.

There are pros and cons to RTO, and benefiting your investment portfolio is one of them

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#283

Post by 8note »

cariP84944 wrote: post #136
chris222 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical office real estate is a major liability in 2023. All of this noise is about people not accepting that fact.

Let them make noise; they’re the ones that signed the leases, not me. There is a lot of resource intense duplication to provide office spaces, office furniture, office computers… oh look I have that stuff at home. Information loss due to generational churn is societies entropy. The elite are just people. This reality does not put a divine mandate on me to serve some people who happen to be alive when I am.

you however, signed an employment contract with them.

if the lease brings down the ship, youll need to jump. rather than push for wfh at your current job, i think youd be better off moving to a wfh competitor instead?

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#284

Post by 8note »

flappyeagle wrote: post #165
_s wrote: post #21

I 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.

Where is his money though? If it's all in real estate, he's not going to make choices at openai that put that wealth in danger

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#285

Post by 8note »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #223

Why can’t anyone see this for what it is? It’s about power. The problem these organizations have is not that they have people working from home - they don’t really care about that, the problem is that the type of person who runs a company craves the power, and they don’t feel like they’re wielding it when everyone works from their laptops and over zoom. It’s not about the money nor is it about the product. Very few t…

There's certainly other factors.

They have to make big financial decisions about what to do with office buildings, for one, and need to make sure that if they pay for the offices, that they get value from them.

It's risky to drop the buildings and then need them later

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#286

Post by baremetal »

anonzzzies wrote: post #182
jochem9 wrote: post #142

Earlier 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. That used to be my feeling as well. As much as I don't like Zuck in general; we hold our meetings in VR and for us there is no (measurable) difference from being in the office for creative work. While we really struggled on Zoom. After I tried a Quest 2, I decided to just get 15 of them for…

This reads like an advertisement for Quest 2.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#287

Post by dapperyapp1234 »

iandanforth wrote: post #276

I kinda agree that very early, small teams, should be in person. But OpenAI has ~375 employees. They're 7 years old. A team of that size has hierarchy, it has middle management. There's plenty of room to have people working remotely in that size of an org. Especially when it increases your hiring pool so much. If you just need hackers, throw a net in Palo Alto and you'll catch 5. But if you need the best person to im…

Its dangerous to say "should be in person".

That team should decide based on their needs at the time whether meeting in-person will help them ship faster. It could speed them up or it could slow them down. Some work is just throwing a prototype together to demo (in person might help flesh out the right idea). Other work is investigative/diagnostic (multiple people staring at a screen, searching for a root cause will slow them down).

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#288

Post by edmundsauto »

flappyeagle wrote: post #243
edmundsauto wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time zone is not a moat, I promise you. It may not be a moat, but it does serve as constant friction that adds latency. Sometimes you can plan your way so latency doesn't slow things down too much - but anything that requires operational coordination is going to be very difficult.

It may be difficult. It may be better in some cases. Around the clock pager support might be much easier. You can ship some features quicker by working on them around the clock. You only need 2-4 hours of overlap to cover the majority of meetings.

Good callouts, those are definitely situations where distributed time zones work better! Not sure about running 3 shifts to ship a new feature, but I have no experience in that area. What I am currently experiencing (working with half my team in the same tz, half is 10-12 hours off) is that it adds complexity. For example, when we coordinate handoffs between time zones, we have to be really explicit about dates and times. Delays tend to be more costly - instead of 1d delay, things become 2 if someone is out sick and doesn't deliver their critical path dependency.

It's a tradeoff, does require additional coordination and thinking things through. It's somewhat similar to remote work, tbh - it adds complexity but you also get benefits. Depending on each situation, the value added/cost parameters change.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#289

Post by makingstuffs »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #257
makingstuffs wrote: post #119

Autonomous 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 goo…

IMHO that is where the autonomy comes in. If you personally know that you perform better within an office the onus is on you to express that. Granted it does pose the bigger question about a cohesive solution which meets everyone’s needs.

When I was in my previous role one of the engineers and I would literally jump on a video call and just leave it on while we worked. If he had a question it could be asked naturally and we could also have the workplace chitchat.

One of my close friends is a firm believer in hybrid working and we discuss this a lot. I think the important thing is communicating with each other and trying to provide an environment which enables your staff to do their best work.

The complexity is added by the fact someone like myself going into the office would be less beneficial to a junior.

This is solely as the WFH preferring employee would not be in the best place to provide advice due to them feeling like they are not being given the working conditions they require.

It’s a tough balancing act.

For me, personally, I am happy to go to social meetings and make it known to everyone they can message/call me on slack anytime — even if I am offline give it a crack.

Workshops are another tool which I feel bridges the gap. Instead of forcing people to go to the office on the off chance they might have a conversation with someone, make a day of it. Provide the grounds for those conversations to happen.

As we dive deeper and the debate is opened it will be interesting to see how it all pans out but I know a lot of devs/engineers are not going to budge on this one.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#290

Post by frumper »

8note wrote: post #280
frumper wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly we differ on how we feel about approaching people. I’d rather get a simple message. When people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say. And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is t…

> when people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say. This is the bad part -- the best stuff to learn from has been filtered out. Text is written with a specific audience in mind, and that audience generally isn't students. You can write a second document sure, but that requires dedicated tome to writing a second document, and even then, the author may not know which details are most…

Hey, are you busy?

Or

Can we chat about a problem I’m having with the dev server?

Or

When do you think you’ll have free time?

Those questions are all direct and to the point. They didn’t start out with “hey, see the raiders game last night, it was crazy. My dog was so excited from all the yelling she jumped on the table and started eating the chips.”

To be clear. We were talking about reaching out to coworkers.

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