Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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> You either choose to be fully digital, and make digital communication the way work gets done, or you harm people out of the office.

I say this as someone who managed mixed distributed / WFH teams: If in-person conversations are an advantage (and they are), no company is going to willingly surrender them for the sake of catering to the people who aren't in the office.

That doesn't mean teams can ignore the remote team members. It's everyone's responsibility to communicate and share information. However, there's no sense in reducing the efficiency of in-office employees just to level the playing field.

The strategies that worked best for my teams were to structure the hires and the workloads according to who could work best together. For example, having an in-office back end team combined with a WFH front-end team works well, because the communication is naturally segmented across team boundaries anyway.

On the other hand, if you put one of the front-end devs in the office with the back-end devs while everyone else is WFH, you need to be prepared to make that in-office person the team lead because they're going to become the primary communication point whether you want it or not.

I love my mixed distributed/WFH teams, but I'll never deny that in-office communication still reigns supreme. That said, distributed can be made to work as long as you do your planning and structuring around the natural communication lines rather than trying to fight it.

I’m not sure I completely buy that in-person conversations are a net positive. Constantly being interrupted with drop-in conversations definitely hurts productivity. The vast majority of the time those conversations could have been an email and our two minute chat is going to take me ten minutes to get back in the zone of what I was working on.

It's a matter of etiquette, and of boundaries. In-person conversations are definitely a net positive if your coworkers are well-mannered.

Also, there's this new invention called "doors" that I wish companies would get on board with. I hear that "opening" one's "door" can be used as an invitation to chat. :)

In retrospect, having an office was one of the few redeeming perks of academia. They were so far behind the times, they may have been ahead of their time.

I've had a lot of jobs in academia and only had an office once, for about 6 months, because nobody else needed it.

Not a contradiction in any way, but you reminded me of the dark side of academia and offices with a story I heard from my local university.

They had a new building constructed, including a very coveted corner office. A student organization was absolutely delighted when they received that corner office, and thought it was a sign of growing appreciation for their work. Turns out, it was actually a way out of a political quagmire: professors had fought for that office so bitterly that it had gotten to a web of "ok, I will accept that you're not giving it to me, as long as X doesn't get it either". The student organization wasn't really hated by anybody enough to be part of this web, so they got it just as a way to avoid pissing anyone off too much.

Moving from the academy to tech right now and dreading open office.

>Also, there's this new invention called "doors"

Must be very new since our office had none bar for the meeting rooms.

Same. Two to four person office where I can commute by bike? Sign me up. Sitting in a 30+ person open office with >1h one way commute vs working from home? Thanks, I‘ll work as long as possible from home.

You have evidence?

Indeed. And everything must be documented anyway, before you start building, otherwise all you're getting is n different recollections of the same meeting causing problems, whether it was in meatspace or not.

The decision-making process much (and by high margin) more effective in-person. Email is too slow, chat is too frustrating (too many back-and-forth messages just to make sure everyone on the same understanding level). The simple questions (how to do smth, where to find smth and so on) are better and less disturbing - via chat. You can always answer later, when you have time. And good co-workers know how to distinguish one from another and use right way to discuss it.

You put this very nicely, thanks. There are different ways of doing things for the different purposes.

This reminds me the time I was working at the office. We had an open floor plan, and so no doors (except the CEO).

It was sometimes nice to talk to people, but there were times when I was deeply in code, and someone asked a small random question from me. It was clearly because he/she wanted just to talk. This would have been better to ask through Slack as I could then continue my work and answer later.

So what I usually did was a) stayed home for deep work hours or b) put on my headset and listened to music to indicate that my "door" was closed.

And yes, with the CTO the physical door was an indication: if it was open, we went in and discussed something, and he was always happy to do so. When it was closed, we didn't interrupt him, and when we did, you could feel that he was feeling indeed interrupted.

I like you are having success here, and the key item "natural communication lines" which I very much agree with. We will always deliver conway's law.

I am curious on 1) the size of your teams, and 2) your opinion on how this would work with E2E product domain based teams (mixed skill sets) vs skills based teams e.g. User engagement team (front and backend devs covering sign on, emails, etc) vs Backend engineers (maintain all backend systems, etc).

What if a front-end engineer wants to switch to back-end (or vice versa)? Do they need to stop coming into the office, for example?

No, anyone who can come into an office should come into the office. We have very flexible work hours with some core days/hours where everyone's schedules should overlap. FWIW, most people I've worked with prefer in-office to WFH unless they have extenuating circumstances like a long commute. Having a good, quiet office with respectful coworkers and management makes for a great environment.

The organization will never be perfect and stay perfect, but as long as you pay attention to it when hiring and designing teams then it can be close.

> there's no sense in reducing the efficiency of in-office employees just to level the playing field.

There is no sense in not teaching high level math to gifted children, yet it is still happening in the name of equity. Just watch and see in person meeting getting banned in the name of equity as we progress from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism.

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