I hope distributed is not the new default

I have yet to work for a company that buys me lunch, much less annual ski trips. Hell, coffee hasn't been provided at any of my jobs, I've always had to pitch into a coffee pool just to have it. That's not to even mention getting to go to conferences. If I wanted to attend a conference, it would be coming out of my wallet and vacation time.

If you want me to collaborate, put it in on my schedule and pay me to do it. I'd say that most of these "spontaneous collision of people and ideas" happen during lunch. Guess what, that lunch which I am already paying for, is also unpaid time. Ever since I've been working from home, my lunch hour is mine. I get to unwind, read or watch tv, all while eating a healthy meal.

Finally let's talk about things that would get me back in the office. Shorter days, I have to commute a total of 2 hours a day, so I want my day to be 2-3 hours shorter. An actual office, with a window, door, temperature control, and some kind of noise isolation. I don't like working in those open office bullpens where I get to listen to salesmen screaming on the phone or secretaries sharing the latest gossip. Start screening people for personal hygiene. I get so tired of having to work with a heavy smoker or someone who can't be bothered to shower before showing up to work.

So get the remote team together for a two day team ski trip. With all the money you save on office rent, get the while team together for a whole week of skiing.

> Furthermore, the spontaneous and critically important break-outs (small conversations) that happen at team off-sites or conferences are near impossible to replicate over any remote tool I’ve used

True, but again, remote teams can also go to conferences and have off sites.

> Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted

Maybe so, but team ski trips, conferences and offsite will also be on the chopping block. And the budget is much more likely to get stressed when you have the huge fixed cost of downtown office space in it.

This seems not so much as an argument for office vs remote work but an argument that pandemics are bad. I think a lot of people who didn't work remote before the pandemic have the wrong impression about what working remotely is actually like.

Working from home means my employer gets more productivity, since I can handle "life" things easier without having to run home. They save money on office space, in-office meals, chairs, desks, and such, and I get more autonomy on my personal setup and how I want to work. It also means that people can move due to life reasons such as to be closer to an elderly family member, and still stay working for the same employer.

I could get steps from walking around town, or, I can walk my dog while I'm waiting on a build or at lunchtime. My kid is home a couple days this week because of break for the upcoming holiday, so she gets to go with me and the dog on our morning walk, and I don't need to worry about child care.

I like the people I work with, and have built rapport with them over years of working together on difficult problems. We connect based on our professional mutual work, but we each have our own interests and families.

Remote work emphasizes this professional connection and broadens your ability to work with more varying people due to the limited and directed nature of the communications and interactions. You don't need to worry about the person in the next cubicle loudly talking on the phone or eating potato chips or burning popcorn in the microwave. It makes it easier to focus on positive interactions and tune out the bad ones. If I don't want to hear all the sports talk, I'm not in the #sports slack channel.

Yes, I could operate in an office environment, a lot will probably return to it. However, I've been fully remote for years, and it'd be a hard sell for me to go back.

Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. It helps the environment. It's the antidote to urbanization. It potentially brings money to underdeveloped areas, which helps democracy.

If there's some future where we can mix things up and work in person some times that would be fine. I used to have an office in a co-working space I used just to get out of the house. It was nice seeing the regular, every-day familiar strangers along the way, get a coffee from the usual place, etc.

... but my team was still located all around the world and the office was within walking distance of my house.

I don't particularly enjoy commuting, the dour glow of fluorescent lights, the desks lined up in rows, or working in a concrete coffin.

I like being able to go for a walk in my neighbourhood in the afternoon or spend a bit of time in my garden. I enjoy being surrounded by my books. I like it when my cat snuggles in my lap. I like having no commute.

Some people like after-work happy hours and "team building." Not me. I like to get my job done and go home to my family, friends, and neighbours.

I also think productivity-wise it brings a lot of benefits. The best collaboration happens with people write things down and share them widely. That is often hindered in an office setting where hallway chats and random encounters ensure that the people engaged in those activities control what gets shared and with whom; great for politics but useless for work.

I get the creativity side of it: ideas aren't born in a vacuum. For media work like music it's way harder to work remotely. But I don't think ideas are born solely in offices either. Great ideas come from people collaborating and sharing. This happens more in a distributed team because fewer people are left out of the process. It's way easier in a software engineering team. There's literally no evidence that offices contribute to anything other than needless CO2 emissions and traffic.

Yesterday I went to the office for the first time in a month. I hated it.

First I spent over 1 hour commuting each way, which felt like a massive waste of time. We moved to a town out of the city because here we could afford a better living space for us without having to spend half of our income in rent.

Since I left in a hurry I forgot to take my lunch with me (that I cook at home daily), so instead I had to go to a takeaway around the corner and spend 25$ for a dubious sandwich and a snack. Coffee from the big tub in the lobby is so bad that makes me wonder how someone can botch coffee so badly. After lunch I got sleepy as sometimes happens, but instead of a powernap like I have at home, I had to bumble through my code until I sobered up. I ended up getting back home late and exhausted.

Some of the arguments from OP are quite curious, such as the number of steps. In my case, rather than spending 2 hours sitting in busses, I could spend 1 hour in the gym and 1 hour walking my dog, and come up ahead.

By the way, why is bonding with colleagues such a big deal? I had to leave my family and lifelong friends behind due to moving to another city. What if WFH had been the norm when I started my career? Doesn't hanging out with your family and friends count for anything?

Again I recognise each person's circumstances are different, but after having a taste of remote work (after 12 years of in-the-office career) I don't think I'll ever be able to go back.

* ski trips and the like build good rapport

* chance encounters with colleagues are valuable

* steps make you healthier

The world is realizing that these are so much easier to solve for in remote-first work than it is to solve the problems associated to office-first.

As a person with three children and a working spouse who's busier than I am, and as a person managing a distributed team, the notion of convening my colleagues in one area for a team-building event is stressful. I recently have been given budget to do so and have been volun-told to organize such an event. Many of my direct reports are eager to meet up in-person. I value their happiness so I will to oblige them. And I'm not going to lie, it sounds like fun - I really do like the people I work with. However, being away from my family for days is a hardship for my children and my spouse, who already has enough stress and is unaccustomed to being the day-to-day caregiver. Since those are the people I value most highly, it's hard for me to justify the time, expense, and effort involved with traveling for the sole purpose of socializing with my coworkers.

Most corporations are single-minded AI's with strictly zero loyalty to any worker without title =~ /^C..$/. The instant some spreadsheet cell turns yellow upstairs, you're out.

Due to the human firmware drive of expected reciprocity, people often forget this and make enormous sacrifices for $work, uprooting their families, working long hours, missing family events, etc. When making this sacrifice of loyalty, they expect the AI to reciprocate in kind with loyalty but THE AI DOES NOT HAVE THAT FEELING.

I recently joined a hot fintech only to have several offices closed and people sacked 5 months later, in order to keep an IPO route looking shiny (it wasn't).

My advice to juniors is do not sacrifice for that machine.

Why can’t work just be work? Do you really want to spent time with your coworkers outside of work? Some of us have families to care for. And some of us have actual friends that we like to hangout with. Coworkers aren’t my buddies or family. We are a team to get things done for a price.

Don't force me into the office for a majority of the time, and give everyone a travel budget to meet once a quarter.

IMHO this is a great balance, moreso that the "hybrid" of 3 days a week.

When you are in control, you are in control of everything. Means that if you need to get exercise everyday, you need to make it a habit to go and walk outside during your remote working day.

As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with.

It reminds me of ML where the bottleneck is often the bandwith between the GPUs.

And as expected working side by side / living in the same house dramatically increased productivity. I couldn't imagine a remote employee being as motivated.

TL;DR -- startups need a certain workaholic mentality / intensity. In-person work can provide this.

In defense of remote: We didn't have a commute, which saved us at least 1.5 hours a day.

And all that after having worked in the Chrome codebase, whose devs are from all over the world.

The type of work I do doesn't translate well to JIRA tickets. It takes 3 whiteboard sessions, 5 meetings, and a water cooler conversation to come up with something resembling a work item that isn't a complete waste of someone's time.

Remote work is great for workers who can pull work from a queue. It's terrible for the people trying to fill the queue with quality work items.

So I guess it all depends on what you want to do with your career.

Or, how to say you don’t read hacker news without saying you don’t read hacker news.

I don’t disagree that offices have their benefit, but I do know where to find internet pundits who do!

In short, i do not believe that having an office-centric culture is a bad thing, nor that a remote culture is a bad thing either. It's just that there are people who will always lean towards one or the other and that's where the incompatibilities begin.

Personally, i'd want a 100% remote position and doubt that i'll be going back to spending my time commuting just to sit in an office. For others, the opposite applies - they might not be able to wait for being able to properly return to offices soon enough. Each of us might have our own valid (at least subjectively) arguments for pursuing these approaches. Hell, with slightly different life circumstances i might change my opinions (e.g. having kids around the house) or vice versa (wanting to travel more or move and not be bogged down).

It is when the guilt tripping and peer pressuring as well as brainwashing starts, with every team/company/culture advocating for their own "normal" as the only proper way to work that the problems start appearing. Everything from virtuous articles in favor of a particular approach or against another, to trying to gaslight or convince those easily swayed to conform to whatever they want.

That, in my eyes, is disingenuous and there will definitely be a lot of people looking for different jobs in the coming years, the so called "Great Resignation" (albeit there are also other factors to this, especially in other industries), after it became apparent that people can switch jobs without always relocating, something that's taken advantage of by many.

But what's the end result of this? Plenty of people quitting and taking the domain knowledge with themselves, which will make things worse for others in the short term and long term - but that's usually just a case of documentation/knowledge transfer/bus factor being bad. I do hope that the current circumstances allow more people to find jobs that are suitable for them, whatever those jobs may be.

Well, it does. Just not for the right reasons.

At home, if you slack me and you’re not my top priority right now, I can ignore you or politely reply that I’ll be with you shortly.

In the office folks can simply walk over and tap me on the shoulder. Due to social norms, I cannot simply ignore you and most like will need to devote my full attention to your questions.

Essentially, my actions throughout the day make a subtle shift from proactive activities to reactive.

If I’m not the only person to experience this, I wonder what the macro effect is on an organization?

Yep. This outweighs all the benefits of being in the office that are mentioned in the article.

Startup #1 decided to do full-remote from day one. After a year, the founder of the full-remote startup had little progress: they ended up figuring out how to work, had to fire people "not cut out" for remote work, and then realized they really make meaningful progress after week-long retreats as a team which they now do on an adhoc basis.

Startup #2 stayed in-office even during the pandemic in the same location - following local guidelines on COVID rules as with all businesses. They did this because this was the way the founders knew how to work, and they knew that full-remote would be a steep learning curve and slow down their iteration speed as they are rushing to find product-market-fit. They only hired for onsite 2-3 days a week, and paid very well in return.

Startup #2 found PMF in year 1, and now are at ~30 people, ~100 paying businesses, growing strong, ready for their Series A. They have engineering, product, sales and customer support in the same office. As this startup grows, they are putting remote-friendly policies in place as they realize they'll have a hard time hiring and retaining without. But their core culture is collaborating frequently as in-person.

Startup #1 is looking for PMF and are still learning how to work efficiently as a full-remote team. In this sense, they are well ahead of Startup #2. In product progress, they are behind. For runway, they are about the same, as Startup #1 runs with a smaller team than #2.

In my social media feed, almost everyone advocates for full-remote work, as from a personal point of view this is the preference of most people. No commute, more flexible work hours and choosing where to live and where to work from are all undoubtedly huge benefits for any individual.

Still, my observation is that working full-remote or full-distributed has a learning path that takes time and effort. There are people, managers and teams are not there just yet. And we might learn that certain team phases, team dynamics and business environments are better fitted for full-remote or fully distributed versus one that has more "in-office" contact.

Actual issues came mostly IMO because of:

- lack of real distributed org and practice

- bad policies and tools

- the sense of being in a short transitory phase so no one really need to invest in such work form

In the end transports are and was for the entire human history the most expensive thing we need, if we can have many advantages of being together without the transport and physical presence need that's so good we need to work around issues as much as possible.

[1] before the horrendous idea of a Borg's queen of course, because the Borg represent a PERFECT society despite the light S.T. draw on them, a fully integrated and egalitarian society where individual are really peers, all decisions are made in a pure Democracy and they can even makes memories of any individual survive in the community

This seems to contradict the argument for offices. Companies save money by having fewer offices, so their budgets should be improved. Also, if companies do not see the value of employees periodically meeting each other then why do management largely prefer face time in offices?

“Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization”

Much of this article focuses on the workplace fulfilling out of work needs or out of work meetings fulfilling at work relationships. Why do people want and expect so much from their jobs? Why is that the place to fulfill ones social needs? Pursue hobbies and interests outside of work and meet people not tethered to your employer. These relationships are stronger and transcend work ties. Avoiding terrible commutes provides some of the time to pursue such ventures too.

A technological revolution that changes how we need to do things is going to take away some of these secondary effects. But it will have it's own. Some of them will be positive and some will be negative. But overall we don't do things how we do them because we get to lay in beanbag chairs (at the office) or on the couch (at home) while working, we do them how we do them because they're the most efficient and reasonable way to do them. Commuting was once the most efficient way to do information work. With worldwide high bandwidth networking this is no longer the case, therefore we will stop commuting. Inertia slows this but it doesn't stop it.

How much value do you actually get from those chance encounters? My experience, after years in everyday in the office, is very, very little. It's like playing lottery everyday, there's not much you earn under all probabilities.

Spend time with your real friends instead of your coworkers, get out of the house on your own, nobody is forcing you to stay inside just because you don't have to go to an office. Work from a coworking space, distributed/remote doesn't mean everybody at home.

It's crazy to see how unhealthy people's life can be when work is the only thing they have.

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-work-can-be-done-f...

I guess I've missed out, but in 20 years in the industry I've literally never had any critically important break-outs from office or off-sites or hallway conversations.

Important work is intentional, and rarely accidental.

We don't have to be 100% either.

We do need to build human trust and relationships, and you can't do that with remote easily. Also, communications are slower and full of paper cuts that will make any task requiring to gather a lot from different people harder with remote.

Those 2 things make onboarding much harder.

Young people are also the one that are paying the most cost from remote:

- they are the ones with the less autonomy, which makes remote either very unproductive or make the task super hard.

- they don't learn anything about politics, which remote hides from view, and maybe reduces a little, but doesn't remove.

- they are already deep in the culture distractions, which is incredibly tempting in remote.

How course, remote work has so many benefits it may very well offset all that. Time will tell I guess.

The idea that this is only possible in meat space is such an antiquated mindset.

Think outside the box. There are a number of companies offering tools, one we use is Donut. https://www.donut.com/blog/ Once a week, I am randomly peered with someone for a half hour coffee. It's been great and I meet people not just in engineering.

This only works because the enterprise is a COVID baby, and so the “base load” workflow is totally remote, we’ve never known anything different. This makes being in person pleasant and useful but almost never strictly necessary.

I hope it scales because I love it.

I don't even mind the commute as much. What I absolutely hate is open offices. I want my own office where I can have some privacy to think and have space.

I question really only the last claim. Integrated doesn't beat distributed every time. Rather, spending money/effort beats hoping for the best. Every time.

To that end, if we will see this work, we will see ways of increasing effort in the area. My gut is that this will be by getting more ways of encouraging inefficient encounters. Think of it in terms of hits. You can try and ensure your one effort is a hit. Or you can do what you can to maximize the effectiveness of an effort, while also increasing the number of efforts you make.

Incidentally , academics have been used to this distributed mode for decades, with conferences purposely organized to provide opportunities for meshing mixing and friction.

I’d like to see this revisited once VR / AR is more mature. Apple’s and Meta’s new headsets are just around the corner.

in his post, looks like OP wants the team to have occasional meetings and more in-person meetups.. sure I'm fine with that, covid permitting. BUT

if a Remote lifestyle allows me to check in code, manage teams and be productive while at the same time caring for my family, extended family, save commute time, or if I have the means, to sit on a beach or in a forest and do my work, why shouldn't we prefer that flexible way of working, at the expense of some added communication overhead ... why do we need to enforce the ritual of the office at all -ie, lets DOWNSIZE the office. make it less relevant, sure we cant give it up completely for many organizations or projects..

And especially for those of us who work in shitty companies (and there are many of us) we know that some workplaces can be like this: https://youtu.be/jg047oJf1B4?t=58 -anything that lets people work remotely or gets away from the hell of being a wage slave should be an option..

I struggle to recall a single memory of my remote working career older than 4 months old. But my head is full of memories of my in-person work because, while sometimes grueling, was often full of fun, surprises, bonding experiences, challenging conversations, war rooms etc.

Most of all I worry that our younger employees don't know what they've missed out on. I hope they can find a way to develop great memories of their own in this brave new world.

Ed Zitron’s Substack has been following and reporting on the remote work propaganda machine for over a year.

https://ez.substack.com/archive?sort=top