To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help.
The culture of communication needs to change when people work remotely, that's the main difference. It's nice because now you can't just interrupt people with a tap on the shoulder, you need to ask for their time to interrupt someone.
So public by default, private by choice.
The way to get these is to basically ban private conversations. Have everything as a thread in Slack or somewhere, create topic channels where people can actually join these conversations
It would help if there were an easier way to convert a short 1:1 chat into a public thread with a consent click on each side though.
If there were better communication tools than slack I think I'd enjoy WFH more but I find that the commonly used tools dehumanize the process - there's 0 adjustments (like this one) to accomodate psychological safety and the tools are built around transactionality.
We are not machines that convert money (or food/coffee) into code. Social contexts matter, there are personalities behind each face. If you understand the context of your co-workers then it's easier to understand online communication (since most non-verbal communication that happens in person is lost over online channels). Meeting in person sometimes just makes online communication more effective.
Often people will default to DMs for things, which makes it appear like no one is chatting and isolates these casual chats to 1:1 DMs.
If you encourage these kind of conversations to happen in channels (Public or private), other people can jump into the conversation.
I've seen the difference it makes when everything is done in public channels instead of DMs. Everything feels more lively and you interact with your team a lot more. Everything in DMs feels isolating.
Most people are super duper slow typers.
Remote is less efficient unless most/all of your staff can touch type at a high rate of speed.
I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned.
Do you require formal touch typing explicitly, or a certain minimum wpm (how fast?), or both? Do you include iportant charcters (for coding) in the test?
the important thing is that they can type at a high rate of speed. i personally type at around 120wpm which is excessive, but anyone who doesn't type 40-50wpm is obviously not sufficiently skilled as a remote worker.
Sometimes I think remote workers could use a new kind of watercooler. Maybe an online game everyone can drop into and play for bit while communicating over voice and chat? I guess not a lot of companies would be happy to install a bunch of time wasting network games, but I've worked on teams that ended up doing that while in the office anyway and it was great for getting to know people and talking about random things. Productivity obsessed people might hate it, but is hanging out in a FPS or MMO any different than standing around distracting others talking about sports with your buddy for 40 minutes every afternoon? Virtual workers need virtual spaces to gather at and a reason to want to go there.
Yes, at cost to latency, bandwidth and meeting time (you don’t as easily make 30 second video calls as you nag the person across the monitor).
> conversations about topics tangentially related
Not just that. Conversations about topics that are the responsibility of your colleagues but you still need to understand and challenge.
> communication needs to change when people work remotely
It’s totally possible, but requires a level of written clarity that few programmers can bother. FOSS is fully remote for the most, and it depends on a lot of textual protocols.
The more your job is cut out, the more runway your employer has, the less important you need quick communication.
In any R&D, being present is really beneficial. And office chatter is at the same time insanely annoying. Stand ups that drag into half hours, “let’s break everyone’s flow for a group announcement”, people who wanna smalltalk.
Best of both worlds is a mixture, when the circumstances permit it.
Wearing headphones and avoiding eye contact does wonders — my boss really picks up when I don’t want to talk.
Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet?
Sure, the office costs nonzero dollars and so does commuting - but framing it as morality is misguided. A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly.
Are you willing to do the work to drop Google services because they want to work from the office and do all that bad stuff?
If you aren't, making people work from the office is the easy choice, their product gets marginally better for very low marginal costs.
This is not how businesses act in reality.
That's very context specific. In many cities, employees commuting by public transport to a central location, rather than all individually heating/cooling their houses, is a plus for the planet and wealth of employees. For many people (including me) it's also good for mental health.
Yes, but the commute is a huge cost.
I spend 80 minutes in traffic every day.
During this time I listen to podcasts, music, call people, and think.
I will be happy to have a remote-friendly job, e.g. when our systems are deployed in dozens of physical locations throughout the country, the DevOps role is essentially only possible as remote. But remote was just not a high priority for me this time. I really enjoy showing up. I'm not very social outside of work.
Similarly for people - young employees in 0-1 or 1-10 career stage cannot thrive in remote.