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Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Same here. I currently work at a very prestigious tech company and I’m surprised by how boring it actually is.

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.

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> currently work at a very prestigious tech company

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 on my second highly-collaborative, fully remote team and I'm always learning a lot and challenged. You're "teacher's pets behind zoom calls" example is very oddly specific and not a thing I've encountered.

I think it’s to do with everyone getting along and working well as professional colleagues but not as a team.

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 believe this is a problem with OKRs more then with remote work. It is too easy to game the OKR process by choosing easy but showy OKRs, doing the bare minimum and declaring victory.

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.

> It is too easy to game the OKR process by choosing easy but showy OKRs, doing the bare minimum and declaring victory.

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.

That only kind of helps ... and can lead to micromanagement.

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.

Our experiences are very different then. We do 1:1 personal zoom calls, we’ll play board games online, we have a drop-in company-wide hang out every other week, and we pair quite a bit and very often through a zoom link in slack asking for help.

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.

Is this a bad thing? I understand that it might be for some people, but others like me think that's great. I don't work to make friends; I do it make money and build something interesting in the process. The fact that remote work allows me to minimise social interactions while still being effective is great.

These sound like separate problems. Your coworkers being more interested in perf than work will not change just because you force them all to commute for two hours a day.

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."

Is being in the same physical place the requisite for being 'a team'? Open-source work traditionally has been distributed, and I bet it often results in teams that are closer than the ones from work.

Is a comfortable car with plenty of fuel a requisite for a long road trip? No, you can go by foot, horse, etc. it sure does help though.

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.

People quit their in-office jobs all the time too.

> 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’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 totally understand your pov and it’s often the one shared by full remote folks who enjoy it that way: “I produce good work nothing else matters”.

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.

I have family and friends to be joyful with. I want my coworkers to shut up and do their job.

I completely agree. I've always worked remotely. This separation is all I know, and I can't imagine why someone would want something different. As a manager, I don't conduct "team building" exercises. I try to ensure that collaboration is flowing, but I don't care if team members are only talking about work or if they develop some social relationship.

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.

Being able to feed off each others' expertise can be more than the sum of individuals also.

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.

I have times and tasks for which I'm more productive at home, and times and/or tasks where I'm more productive at work.

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.

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