I have a strong dislike for remote work and will only work at companies with offices where people are expected to go to the vast majority of days.
I absolutely understand that it's the opposite for some people.
I absolutely understand that it's the opposite for some people.
There’s hardly anyone around in the office and frankly I couldn’t care less about the free stuff. They pay me enough that I can go out and buy my own snacks.
What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’ll never work somewhere 100% remote or where employees don’t have an expectation of at least 3 days in the office.
Mind you, being able to spend a day a week at home vs full week in the office is quite nice.
Open source work is a infinitesimally small proportion of *work*. No I don’t think it results in teams that are closer at all, I think (and can present no data either) that it’s just as likely to result in bickering and infighting. Guido leaving Python might be a good example.
So do, and I have also worked for scrappy 100% remote startups. The 100% remote startup had better team cohesion and better knowledge transfer with more opportunities to learn.
You might get those things in the office, but pre-pandemic, at least my office environment provided none of those things. Don't conflate a good team dynamic with an office environment. I used to pair program with a guy for four hours a day and I never met him until we both left the company.
I’m not sure what your role is but zoom calls really don’t mean anything as an IC. Not unless you’re responding to or handling an outage and debugging on the fly.
What you produce and how well it works is how you’re measured. Documentation and written communication is equally as important.
I find that a really sad, if not completely rational, outlook.
See I don’t want to work with someone who outputs great work only. I want to work who can share a joke, help out, bounce ideas of, experiment with new things and fail/succeed.
In other words, I like work to be joyful and productive.
This is in stark contrast to my wife, who had worked in the office before the pandemic and continued with the same philosophy during remote work. She finds my way too cold, and I find hers too wasteful. I would dread working on her pseudo-remote environment.
Reading all the responses it seems there's advantages both to being at home or on site and the trick is to find the balance.
Good in-person collaboration, sometimes accidentally overhearing someone else, is invaluable. At the same time, people can get off task and chit chat becomes a hindrance.
Sometimes we all know our role and what has to be done, we just have to get it done. Sometimes we don't know how to solve a problem.
Some employees don't have a good work environment at home. A Ph.D. student with a young special-needs child felt horrible ignoring his daughter while working on his dissertation at home (where his wife was caring for his daughter), bit coming into campus was far better for him, productivity-wise and psychologically.
I think the balance might be a dynamic one, in that what's best can change over time and task and stage of a task and stage of a person's career. And by employee, and by task.
Being a good manager must be immensely difficult, but also being an employee also requires adapting and compromising between all of these trade-offs.
There’s little camaraderie though or sense of shared ownership. interactions are more transactional, deliberate, thought out.
People maximise what’s best for their OKRs only. If this months it’s John on zoom or Jeff and if Mary was replaced with Sue, does it really matter?
There’s a reason team events and off sites etc exist. It helps people see beyond the professional façade to the human behind it.
I've been remote for 10 years and before that worked on a bunch of distributed research teams and it is perfectly possible to have a highly functioning distributed/remote team that really takes ownership. I mean look at open source projects.
Further office culture tends to favor a bunch of young people who all live in the same city and have time to go out for drinks after work etc. I'll take a bunch of crazy odd balls scattered across the globe doing their own thing any day.
This isn't hard to fix; it only requires upper management to recognise the issue. If a goal is easy to reach, it's a bad goal.
I've found a better approach is to focus on key metrics or KPIs and empower people to go after them without a heavy planing cycle. Like if your app is slow and buggy the OKR process tends to favor waterfally quarter long projects like "rewrite X in Y." A better approach is often to get good at monitoring and prioritize cycles spent on maintaining, optimizing, and refactoring existing stuff with a possible incremental rewrite.
I guess it depends on what you want out of work. If you’re the type who wants work to be _only_ work and absolutely nothing more, then I can see how the forced interaction at an office would be beneficial. Otherwise a strong culture around people and collaboration makes the office largely irrelevant. Yes, you do miss out on the random hallway interactions, but there is no perfect solution and I happily trade that for no commuting, hanging with my dog all day, mid-day naps, my own office, throwing in loads of laundry during the day, private bathroom, better coffee, etc etc etc.
My experience talking to a lot of people both for and against wfh has been that people with shitty teams hate being remote, because it's hard to do when everyone is putting in zero effort to make remote work "work." The other big group that wants wfh to end are the "my coworkers are my only friends" people. Good for them, i guess, but personally i think that's not a wise way to structure one's life. I understand why companies love it and want to foster it though.
A very small number say things like "I find it difficult to collaborate with anyone over the internet."
I like working from an office and I like informal interactions with colleagues — from chatting over coffee to peeking around and seeing who is free to whiteboard a problem.
I don't know anyone who likes hybrid teams though.
Eventually I suspect we'll end up with a mix of remote and in-person employers, and workers who have a strong preference one way or another will just have to filter potential employers accordingly. There might be a way for larger businesses to have certain teams work remotely while others go into the office, but I suspect it would be difficult to manage.
When at all possible, they work from home.
It is funny who we know. Not at all a representative sample.