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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

#371

Post by viraptor »

jwestbury wrote: post #365
viraptor wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction Having spent a considerable number of hours in the last year explicitly doing work with / training junior staff... That's just silly. Start open streams of your work. Give short presentations. Invite junior people when you do something interesting. It's really not a lot of effort and in-person is definitely not required.

I spent a couple of pandemic years at Dropbox, working fully remote. My team regularly started up Zoom calls and invited junior engineers to participate in design conversations, troubleshooting, etc., because it helped them to both feel invested in the product and to grow as engineers. The trouble is that this takes explicit effort from senior engineers, whereas in-office teams don't require the same consideration. S…

Why do you think that requires any more explicit effort? In my experience that works the other way - in the office I would need to know if people are coming and organise appropriately large room / do bookings, etc and the whole meeting changes a bit if there's 5 more people observing. Now it's as easy as a slack message "we're talking about / working on Foo at (link), feel free to join (cc @potentially interested people)".

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#372

Post by orwin »

viraptor wrote: post #355
danielbln wrote: post #320

Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a venture based on it. Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them. Uh huh right, discovering hidden talents, not micromanagement, no sir!

> Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction Having spent a considerable number of hours in the last year explicitly doing work with / training junior staff... That's just silly. Start open streams of your work. Give short presentations. Invite junior people when you do something interesting. It's really not a lot of effort and in-person is definitely not required.

Open stream of you working on an interesting part of the project (even the tedious parts) is a great advice.

And you get questions that you would never get in person about your configuration (the last one was about passing our oidc provider in the terminal without having Togo to the web page), your plug-ins and your methods.

Sometimes you learn more than you teach. Which is a bit harder to do in open spaces/cubicles (my only experience with real office with real doors was when I was a junior and to me, the experience is as good, or even better than WFH if you do not count the commute time.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#373

Post by andy_ppp »

jemmyw wrote: post #363
andy_ppp wrote: post #352

I am so tired of people in this community making vague and unbacked up feelings of how things are... In any other industry this sort of magical thinking would be called out as completely unscientific. You have the money to do actual studies and even hoards of startups to be able to test it. Release the raw numbers and do the study, don't just make things up based on your theory and a quote or an essay . I'm willing t…

How would you study it exactly? Start-ups fail all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with their organisation or even execution. And if you prove that some succeed with it and some fail with it, as you suggest, then you've proven nothing. My hypothesis is that it doesn't make any significant difference once the startup has grown beyond its founders (and they can work however works for them). No idea how to…

If it can't be measured does it exist? Back to magical thinking again. Maybe you are right there are too many variables at play to make pithy statements about any of this either way.

I think YC could at least release anonymised data about all the companies so that people could at least do some analysis to see if statements like this are at least in line with the data. As we know human beings are extremely good at spotting patterns and even better at fooling themselves.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#374

Post by orwin »

viraptor wrote: post #371
jwestbury wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a couple of pandemic years at Dropbox, working fully remote. My team regularly started up Zoom calls and invited junior engineers to participate in design conversations, troubleshooting, etc., because it helped them to both feel invested in the product and to grow as engineers. The trouble is that this takes explicit effort from senior engineers, whereas in-office teams don't require the same consideration. S…

Why do you think that requires any more explicit effort? In my experience that works the other way - in the office I would need to know if people are coming and organise appropriately large room / do bookings, etc and the whole meeting changes a bit if there's 5 more people observing. Now it's as easy as a slack message "we're talking about / working on Foo at (link), feel free to join (cc @potentially interested peo…

If they had personal offices big enough (we were 2 in relatively big offices for 3 years at my first company), it's effortless. Since then I've worked with big bank and big oil, in cubicles/open space, and it's indeed way harder than it is remotely.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#375

Post by ilyt »

Clubber wrote: post #339
senttoschool wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the point. The point is that companies with people who care and developed culture is expected to outperform companies where people just feel like they're mercenaries. There is no question that companies with motivated employees who care about the success of the company and those he/she works with are more likely to outcompete companies that don't have same time. Good companies mask the fact that yes, every…

The vast majority of companies' politics / culture is absolutely toxic. Everyone can see through it but pretends they can't because they are mercenaries. Office Space and Dilbert have resonated for decades for a reason. Who wants to play office team building games with some random office supplies? Nobody.

> Who wants to play office team building games with some random office supplies?

That's the first time I heard term "office supplies" used to call co-workers

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#376

Post by taylodl »

onion2k wrote: post #325

The full quote is a bit narrower than the title implies; > "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn't need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. "I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people c…

I bet he also advocates for open office plans as well - after all, you need to maximize the team's communication and collaboration in order to maintain your level of creativity. Of course we all know this is rubbish.

We also know there's a need for teams to be able to come together. We've discovered it's best to have set times and of course ad-hoc times to collaborate - to essentially come together the way we did back when we were in the office. And yes, today's tools allow us to do that. Being remote and never coming together save maybe for a daily standup is just as bad as working in a cubicle all day and never interacting with your team.

Either way, remote teams work and work well - even in startups. In fact, prior to the pandemic the environment in which I saw the most remote teams was in startups. It's strange people are now saying that's the worst environment for remote teams. Makes me think they have another agenda.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#377

Post by matwood »

AHOHA wrote: post #358
matwood wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of productivity (I think it's been shown to be better for WFH or at least equivalent), companies do not like WFH because it gives some power back to the worker. Culture and relationships can absolutely be built remotely, but it does require leadership to be deliberate. Another thing highlighted by WFH is just how bad leadership was/is.

Spot on, wfh is the practical answer that managers are useless for the most part, and most workers can actually work together and be productive without the circus that a lot of companies do as a “team building” activity. But wfh took some of the power play that companies used to do, and they want that back.

Not sure about the generic 'manager', but leadership is not useless. In person allows a lot of bad managers/leaders to just skate by b/c everyone is in the same office, and things sort of get done by virtue of location. Remote highlights poor leadership.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#378

Post by pgeorgi »

ambicapter wrote: post #340
onion2k wrote: post #325

The full quote is a bit narrower than the title implies; > "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn't need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. "I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people c…

> He's suggesting that there are problems with remote work for creative teams, but rather than think of ways to solve those problems I hate this mindset (and I enjoy remote work). It's not his job to solve remote work for everyone. He probably (definitely) has other topics he's more interested in.

> It's not his job to solve remote work for everyone. He probably (definitely) has other topics he's more interested in.

Interested enough to chime in on a debate that he can't contribute anything meaningful at any rate.

Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

#379

Post by pgeorgi »

Lio wrote: post #364
jxf wrote: post #336

Asking a CEO for their opinion on remote work is like asking a feudal lord their opinion on democracy.

"How can I effectively employ my Seagull Management[1] style if everyone is working from home?" - 1. Swoop in, make a lot of aggressive noise, shit on everyone and then fly off to the golf course.

You forgot "eat all the sandwiches". If everybody works from home those folks would have to order their food via one of their delivery startups like any ordinary pleb instead of getting company-paid catered food.
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