Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
fortune.com
fortune.com
* Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute.
* In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the dimension of "we know what we need to do" is actually pretty much orthogonal to the product, size of the company, tenure of the employees, etc. I've been in early stage startups with no PMF that nonetheless have strong product-centric leadership who can set down an unambiguous vision for what they believe needs to be done. And I've been in startups that have PMF yet have no vision, and everyone is standing around in their remote offices twiddling their thumbs on "what to build next".
For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2. I worked at Meta remotely for a year. My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.
TL;DR I think remote work is well set up for companies with leadership that resembles a benevolent dictatorship. I think if you are all-remote and your leadership is effectively "managerial" in nature, NGMI.
EDIT: and so many of the challenges people are running into now are not new, either - companies were incentivized to make remote work work for two decades pre-Covid, and for a while pundits were all convinced that software jobs were all going away overseas as a result, but despite the salary savings the ROI just wasn't there for all but the most basic of work.
If you are talking about cost, then the only factor here is the market.
Can you please expand? I'm not understanding.
More likely is the "prestige HQ" which is deliberately made more expensive than it needs to be for status.
https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/06/05/jeff-blau-to-cla...
In-person has benefits in those situations, but whether or not it's better varies a lot based on the person and the office. I find it VERY distracting to have people talking around me. As such, I get a lot less done when in an office, because I can't concentrate as well. When you add in the other negative (commute time, in person interruptions, etc), going into an office for work can far outweigh any benefits of being around the people you work with.
Not everyone is the same office - it’s a joke
Or sharing a zoom session. Bonus is that I don’t have to commute to an office on another continent to engage in this second modality - more than half of my teammates are in other cities and I don’t see a benefit in the standing next to each other.
Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge. In my experience, having such barriers to doing these things makes new hires much less likely to reach out and put themselves into the situations where they can learn, no matter how much they are told it’s ok to bother people.
To me, this is why remote works so much better at smaller companies with less bespoke tooling and legacy code. There’s no better way to learn than in person and there is a huge productivity boost when doing so. That said, personally, I’m willing to deal with the lower productivity in my work life to get the higher productivity in my real life by being able to do laundry during the day and not sit in traffic.
I think a decent middle-ground between "Document everything" and "Organically relay all information" is to just write "doc-stubs". Just a list of everything out there with no real content. It gives people a jumping off point to ask questions and lets them know what they don't know.
For example, incident handling has been lot more efficient for us with the team looking at different aspects and sharing on a call/huddle than what we often used to naturally do (involving a gaggle forming around 1 person's computer with different people offering suggestions of varying usefulness).
Demos and knowledge sharing I find also work better remote now than they used to in person now that people are used to the tooling.
I slightly prefer onboarding remote also, but that is because I'm the kind of person who gets distracted by wondering if I'm sitting too close or maybe I have not enough or too much deodorant etc.
The only thing that suffers remotely for me at this point is engagement. There's something about physically being with other people that makes their problems and desires seem more important to me, and I don't have any good hacks for giving more of a &"@$.
This feels like a tech choice issue to me. I'm constantly on calls with either slack/pop sharing where anyone can draw on the shared screen, or shared coding session like in vscode where you can see each other's cursors. It... works the same for me as pointing at the screen. Just without it being awkward when it's more than 2 people getting to cram into a a small space.
For me, it's the exact opposite.
Before the pandemic, I always found the practice (and even the idea!) of "pairing" quite off-putting. You're standing behind someone, breathing in their body odor, awkwardly sweating next to each other, bending over if you want to type something... a really weird experience.
Remotely, none of those apply! You each get your own keyboard, your own screen, your own mouse. Both of you are 100% comfortable in your own environment. Using decent software helps as well, I recommend Tuple which makes sharing the mouse & keyboard seamless.
How do you feel about sitting next to someone at a bar?
Also some people wear too much deodorant.
I agree, none of this is an issue if working with clean, civilised people... a few feet away. It can quickly become uncomfortable if you're too close to each other.
I certainly don't agree at all. Home is where all the distractions are. Home is where i can drift off to make a cup of tea and end up spending an hour reading the newspaper without anyone noticing.
I think it would be useful to understand the distribution of peoples' feelings and experience about this. I have seen so many remote work enthusiasts just taking it as read that everyone prefers remote work because they do.
On the other hand, the projects that suffered the most were the ones where folks had less scope and autonomy. If you can't unilaterally make decisions for anything that spans more than a day, and you're forced into some ticket-oriented process where everyone has "their" task to do, communication naturally suffers. If you're all in the office, there's a bit more slack to talk quickly and informally outside your immediate silo; remotely, this takes more intentionality, so the friction imposed by your culture and process has an outsize effect.
So my conclusion has been, pretty much, the opposite: remote works better when people have real scope, independence and autonomy. If engineers and small teams can make decisions over longer time-frames, they'll have the space to adapt and work effectively. They might need somebody to set the example or foster the right habits, but it's fundamentally healthy and effective. The frictions with remote work come up when it's thrust against a less flexible culture that makes it harder for folks to adapt.
At 10+ person org sizes, most people can't have long-term scope and autonomy if the management don't know what it wants/needs, since they're just going to change their mind in a week or two. Once those decisions are made you can start delegating responsibility for execution.
The easy thing to do is to blame this all on poor management, but I think that's too pat. I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem... and one that's often an ongoing, Sisyphean task, where high-bandwidth, low-latency communications are incredibly useful.
> I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem...
Agreed, don't mean to downplay how difficult good management is. I think the key thing I've realized is that in a remote environment, bad management is so much more obvious and detrimental to the employee and organization. In office, if your manager doesn't communicate vision/objectives well you can always tap the shoulder of the guy next to you, or discretely pick your skip's brain in the break room. The rest of the organization can pick up the slack. But that's much harder remotely.
I have a hard time grasping this one. Is it brainstorming ?
For things like pair programming or specification of a product, having separate screens and independent access to the same documents makes things a lot faster and efficient.
Same way meetings tend to go smoother all participants can access whatever data they need independently from the presenter, and move through the docs at their own pace.
Basically a mix of synchronous communication and access to all needed resources seems to me to perform better than IRL binding of two or more people looking at each other.
This is a part that probably varies a lot individually...I'm a slow thinker, and have a hard time reacting to fully formed ideas thrown at me thrown at me over a table. The other side coming with fully prepared for the discussion, while on the receiving end you need to do your homework realtime also doesn't help.
If it's random brainstorming it doesn't matter a lot. If it's an actually important topics, it feels like a DDOS on your brain when you actually want to take time to understand the implications. Then sure, some situations require speed, but I don't see that many of them in day to day life. "What you think about moving to X framework for our metrics ?" can probably wait for 30 min. and not be a realtime exchange.
> it's very uncomfortable to be on a zoom call for more than about 45 minutes at a time.
I've finding these meetings way more comfortable in remote...someone can be rambling for as long as they need, the effect on everyone's productivity is that much reduced. Same for people who speak very slowly actually, it's a lot less stress IMO and easier to engage when paradoxically you don't need to be 100% looking at them in the eyes.
That's the feature, not a bug. It gives the meeting initiator a better chance of steamrolling their way to approval.
Notice the difference between meetings where people share agendas and docs ahead of time vs those where you show up and they walk you through the doc.
* Remote work is better if the management has a common goal and everyone can swim towards it.
* In-person work is better if the management is adversarial or competitive with each other, or doesn't have a common goal to work towards.
In either case, it seems like the problem is management, not the work location. Am I wrong here?
I do security things, and it seems those folks are all gone from Twitter.
But my hypothesis is that the negatives won’t emerge for some time, at which point something bad happens and everyone will be standing around shaking their heads at how negligent it was.
Although more generally I do sympathize with the idea that most tech companies are at least a little bloated because money has so often been cheap & revenues always go up historically
I Twitter fails due to the mass layoffs it doesn't prove much either since it might be too hard to unwind a mess.
the problem is there is a ton of terrible leadership out there who want to rule by fiat, ignore their employees, and don't trust their employees (who they either directly or indirectly hired) to so their jobs.
What I found to be the best approach is one or two people already established a concept at what to make or at least the image of it, and the discussion can move to the details and implementation plan. And that doesn't need to be in person
This is exactly what I was getting at by referencing a benevolent dictatorship. When remote, it's just easier if one person is providing direction by fiat rather than trying to collect everyone's input and communally make a decision.
Yes, that's why before WHF, people really loved meetings and brainstorm sessions at work /s
In person during brainstorm discussion usually means endless time-wasting and bikeshedding.
More team work versus individual work?
true.
> For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2
Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say?
No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO...
So your in-person experience is you booking a room just for yourself so you can video conference all those people who also booked a room for themselves.
Because every other team is in same situation, finding a meeting room is a challenge in itself.
Take the call from your desk then?
No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.
But at the same time it's perfectly okay to just come up to your busy colleague and pester them about something, because collaboration.
I have this wild guess that if a significant number of companies cut their leases on all those monstrous office spaces that are kept being built all the time, it could hurt some people with important companies a fucking lot, and the ripple effect could prove to be immense and disastrous.
Spice must flow, and the fact that there are parties interested in those office spaces running and bringing money in has diddly to do with whether there are any actual productivity advantages of bringing the office workers back to the office or not.
For enough dough you can buy enough experts and pundits and other talking heads that will overflow the information space with thinkpieces and analyses that go either way.
Meanwhile, the only actual productivity boost is when you have a private office with a closable door within walking distance from your living place. But it’s not like anybody would give you _that,_ plebeian.
It's mind boggling to me. All I can think is that there is a lot of ego tied up in offices for some reason.
I personally prefer fully remote because I hate the distraction in the open office plan and associated pains like having to find meeting rooms, having to share restrooms with others (I admit this is just my personal pet peeve), and not being able to avoid distraction when I am in the zone for working. Most of all, I don't like the commute (I have to commute 1 hour each way, so everyday, I am spending 2 hours; when I worked from home, I started early and end up working an extra hour or two because I don't have to commute; these days, I try to arrive at 8-9am and leave by 5-6pm to beat the traffic and once I get home, I don't do any work). I consider quitting someday soon and am waiting for my wife to complete her training. Once she has done that, we will move to a place where she can find work, and I will quit my FAANG job for a fully-remote one (sure, my income will take a small hit, but quality of work life is more important for me).
>No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.
Individual offices have not been the norm for everyone at large companies maybe ever? Cubicles are "better" but not that much better. (Source: I had one for years--both full-height and then shorter.) And the fact is that lots used to spend a lot more time on the phone than they generally need to today given other communication channels. When I've been in an office I absolutely make calls from my desk and everyone else does too.
I don't think this is really that common. I spent a decade in MTV on a wide variety of teams. I had VCs with people in different locations a handful of times and I never had one by myself. And getting deep focus with those people was so valuable that it was easier to just go to NYC, MUC, or SYD once a quarter than it was to jump on a call.
The downside is it’s hard to get actual coding down because of all the “collaboration”. So my ideal would be 1-2 days in office to meet and then 3-4 days to code ins peace at home.
Do you mind sharing the job title for something like this? Sounds like a dream job.
I created my own job, just with a startup. For a year I had two ostensibly full time jobs. By the end the startup wasn't doing much either and I considered going for three full time jobs.
My anecdotal evidence is different.
I've spent the last 2 years building a large, complex, and ambiguous system working almost exclusively remote, and half of it from another continent. For the first year I never met a colleague in person.
However, all this time I have been working closely with another engineer. Both of us are senior and very tenured, got good rapport and were highly aligned and motivated. We were able to execute efficiently, sometimes spending hours huddling in Slack per day.
So my feeling is that remote works in some scenarios and not others, particularly involving new or junior engineers.
Hard relate. Had my first internship WFH at Big Tech during the pandemic. I had expected work to be more on the lines of: there's always a lot of work to be done, and people will let you know about that. Instead it was the opposite, exactly as quoted above.
While it meant I had more freedom, I would have preferred if someone just doled out concrete tasks to me. I felt a bit lost. But then again, grass is greener on the other side.
> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
This is why the other day I ranted about how my actual preference is in office but having a door that I can close. Realistically we shift between these two modes. In the first mode I need to reduce distractions and isolate myself. This is hard with slack and hard with an open office or cubicles. In person let's me even ignore slack as someone can knock on my door if it is urgent! But that's not all the time, so I open the door and communicate that it is collaboration and discussion phase.
I don't know why companies have become so allergic to doors. They are amazing and can let employees be in control of the chaos of work schedules. They'll know far better than anyone else if they're more productive that day/hour/minute in isolation or in collaboration. Micromanaging doesn't help, a door does.
Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then?
It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and millions of examples of projects from company offices that are awful.
The physical geography of the team is not an indicator of success.
while linux or git was created relatively sololy by a single person (at least at the beginning), i dont think you can call the internet a solo production.
(I don't know the history of git, maybe that too though.)
No, although there were certainly co-located or nearby individuals and teams that contributed specific chunks--certainly parts that were hardware or depended on hardware.
Stating that it’s possible is very different to stating which model might be more effective or faster.
Unfortunately we don’t have a parallel universe where torvalds lived on the same street as a bunch of other collaborators to compare
Indeed, searching for "Torvalds remote work" yields this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-l...
> Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."
> "If you spend hours in online meetings from home, instead of spending hours in meetings at the office like you used to, you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse."
Some companies are able to add great new products over time, but I sense that it’s more common for companies to have one great play, after which they either die or merge with another to enjoy better economies of scale.
If you’re big enough and rich enough, you tend to burn a ton of money on internal research groups, but very little of what gets researched is ever a successful product. Doing this as a smaller organization is nearly impossible, which is why I think so many startups just exit rather than finding entirely new things to build.
For me, the extroverts that insist in socializing, gossiping and politicking in person make office work an unproductive nightmare.
OTOH, from personal experience working on-site hasn't really ever helped particularly well in that scenario (which I'mm all too familiar with.)
I used to work for Amzn and the management was totally idiotic about remote work. We had to go to the office to be on call for datacenters 1000kms from the office. Makes perfect sense right?
Beyond the practical scope of this point, we also find the need for mentoring (building a sustainable team).
I would say biggest benefits of in office is spontanious meet/discussion, assisting less senior coworkers etc. If I have a heavy day of work to plow through alone I avoid the office. If I need to sync or work on something with others in-person beats all the tools.
Remote Work is better if
1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have problems with home life going to office to work can help with productivity.
2. Remote work is much better if you are a person who is motivated by love of what you are doing and you actually love what you are doing, if you start to not love what you are doing but you have not left the company yet etc. there can be some slight loss of productivity, not because intentionally goofing off so much but because like #1 above working remotely makes it harder to get focused on something one does for money and not love if you are a love focused worker.
Remote Work is better if
1. You prefer remote work
This always gets to be such a dogmatic discussion that will to someone claiming anyone who likes working in an office has no social life.
It’s just a preference. Remote work is not overall objectively better than office work (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true). Office work is not the right choice (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true).
There are jobs where in-person is just better, full stop. Remote can be accommodated, but it is not always exclusively about what the employee prefers.
Well yeah a surgeon should be working in person, you got me there.
Not sure why this needs to be repeatedly brought up.. I mean it is called "home office" for a reason. If you don't have a real one, remote can suffer.. no surprise.
Not sure why you think a home office is going to solve marital problems or other issues that going into an office and being around other people might allow you to not focus on.
Aside from that then we can add inability to get a home office made to the list of things that can affect whether or not remote work is a good solution
Yes, even in "work office" that focus is not guaranteed, but even there martial problems or other issues will hit me. So yeah, still not sure why we need to bring this explicitly up again in discussion after discussion. You need a reasonable office to work, offices can suck - orthogonal to if home/remote/company.
> add inability to get a home office made to the list of things that can affect whether or not remote work is a good solution
Again, no-brainer, no home office no good solution? shrug
Probably because the reality of remote working was set by the pandemic, which forced a huge number of people to switch to remote work. Remote workers with a proper home office suddenly were, and I think continue to be, a minority.
I’m much more productive working from home; my only qualms are that team cohesion and sense of shared mission seems lower than it has at in-person jobs I’ve had. That may not even be causal.
ok but I know from my own experience that #2 can be really different. And really I don't understand how anyone could doubt it - in the office if you are unmotivated you have a limited range of things you can do to pass the time. at home there is no limitation.
At some point in the office it becomes reasonable to just do the work and get it over with.
If you want to work in an office go work in one. Join a co-working space or if there is sufficient momentum have everyone who wants an office join the same one in your area.
But don’t force it on everyone. Let people choose. That’s the thing I hate about these conversations is it should just be personal choice for the individual. Make async practices and communication better and re-tool the culture if need be, but remote first thinking benefits office workers too.
I think “let people choose” is the right idea at the “choose your job” or sometimes “choose your team” level.
Some of them are
- Async communication. Embracing long form writing is huge here, as is dropping the expectation of "now" in regards to getting responses.
- Holistic documentation & discussions. Processes, cultural values (and what they really mean and are expected to be followed specifically) and really just about anything meant to be repeated over and over should be documented at length, and reviewed consistently. This useful to everyone and has the added benefit of storing historical context and discussion
- Work in the open, whenever appropriate. If people can see whats going on, they can see things that traditionally are the "in between" things. Engineers already do this (PRs come to mind) in alot of ways, but this should extend to decision making as well, whenever reasonably possible. This facilitates the above points too.
- For socialization, its important that people have several avenues to get to know their co-workers. I think this one is possibly the least understand part of it, but its more than just "random lunch with co-workers if you join this channel!" there are ways to do remote team building exercises, to setup meaningful interactions between teams and departments etc. For instance, a positive thing I've seen people do with remote first around this is having product and engineering have Q&A with each other once every 2 weeks to just talk about stuff, it doesn't have to be related to what is going on right now. It can even be non work related if that is fitting to the people at the time, but it exists to just share things with each other, talk through ideas etc.
Unfortunately, these are things that aren't common in the work place currently. Most companies that have remote workers right now haven't moved beyond the "message eagerly or start a call" phase.
But if that's not the situation at the team/company level, you need to either figure out some compromise approach (like getting a co-working space or even just picking up some non-work social activities) or move on to an environment more in keeping with your preferences. At some point, if a situation just isn't to your liking, you should probably stop hitting your head against the wall.
Of course if your spouse also works from home, it's important to have a home with more than a single room. Not everybody has that luxury.
In my experience(i have worked from branch offices most my career) the differentiating factor is literacy, ie how comfortable/confident are the organization with recorded text vs private spoken word and the more the organization writes the more effective the remote staff will be.
And one of the side effect of a written culture is that a lot of the informal conventions/conversations become formal structure so the same level of top down planning can look very differently based on weather the culture for disseminating it is literate or oral.
I'm curious how often anyone actually finds this situation to happen and improve the feedback loop. I feel like it's more of an illusion of productivity then actual productivity because it's a pile of constant interruptions.
Like the given example with Meta doesn't seem like it would be better in-person, it sounds broken regardless.
Similarly, what career stage one is in? Young workers who are in 0-1, and to certain extent 1-10, remote really does not work.
The FAANG I work for now similarly has lots of 0-1, 1-10 type work (at least for my team), and a fully remote team. It works fine too.
The part about more junior employees is _more_ valid, though we had no problem on boarding juniors in either of those two situations.
Ultimately whether remote work is successful depends on whether the people doing the work have sufficient self-discipline to get the job done, and whether the hypothetical office alternative is set up for success. Most offices are not remotely set up for success, but optimize instead for middle management (toxin or cancer? [1]) being able to view their fifedoms.
[1]: https://www.talkfrom.com/video?name=leadership-without-manag...
She left there in 2011, after rising through the ranks to the level of division director.
They did almost all their business over email and Skype, because at the time, Skype was still the best voice/video conferencing software available without dedicated hardware.
If it was possible then for a small group of non-tech-focused people, it's certainly possible now, over a decade later and with an entire pandemic forcing the rapid improvement of all sorts of remote-work technology. That doesn't mean it's for everyone, but boldly stating that it's a "non-starter" is just unsupportable.
That just sounds like poor leadership to me. If you've got a holistic sense of what needs to be done, please share it with the people who need to be doing it.
That, or cut it up into concrete chunks and tell people to build that. But telling people to "figure it out" and then not sharing the overall vision, sounds incredibly dysfunctional to me.
People who have been in the industry and with a company for a long time largely have a network and don't really have problems connecting with people. (And at larger companies that network is often pretty distributed anyway.)
But the--admittedly not universal--consensus is that new folks struggle with onboarding and generally making progress in their careers. And even coming into an office doesn't really help if their managers and more senior co-workers are mostly not there. It's certainly hard for me to imagine graduating school and working remotely.
If you start raising future generations to be, you know, adults, instead of mentally stunting them into being eternal teens well into their 30s, and companies make an effort not to have a horrible onboarding and rely on 3 year tenures (and paradoxically do nothing to keep said employees that long), the problem is far less prevalent. Heck, most CS students are expected to do far more complex things at school without any assistance these days.
And with many travel budgets so squeezed at the moment (and COVID of course), you have teams with people who have never met anyone else on their team in-person in their whole multiyear tenure with the company. And to your point about short tenures, maybe they never will. If I'm honest, even though I've been around for ages, I'm less connected with co-workers than I've been in the past.
Once upon a time, it was considered the norm to find a job where you were, because you lived in a community that was part of your support system. Over the course of the last century, this norm eroded and was replaced with the norm of moving to wherever you got a job. More recently, the situation deteriorated even further, with the disappearance of the "job for life" assumptions that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century, in favor of an expectation of changing jobs every 2-5 years—with a high chance every single time that you'd have to move.
One inevitable result of all this is the aforementioned splintering of local communities. Changing the employment norms so that a much higher percentage of people never need to move to work in person at a job would make it much easier to begin to restore local communities, and provide a much better chance of good socialization outside of work.
Now, there are caveats. This still relies on people not working too many hours, and while it would still help for the people who do work in person, and move in order to do so (those communities existing and being more prominent, and sustained by the people who stick around, makes it much easier for others to find them, too, even if they'll have to keep finding new ones every few years), it doesn't help them quite as much as the ones who can stay and grow their place in the community over many years.
I'm not gonna pretend that every project had 100% coverage and up-to-date documentation, but you should overcome fear of appearing weak/dumb and just ask a question, not even waiting for the next daily meetup. If culture is good enough, people are gonna realize it isn't you dumb, but docs and processes suck ass and will do something about it, maybe even asking you to participate. If not, just leave when the next offer lines up, I did that once when people straight up refused answering to my questions directly, and instead nagging that I didn't ask them properly.
Building up network is obviously more reliable when meeting in person, but it doesn't defeat the idea of getting to know each other through daily interactions, retros, 1-1s, whatever. And moreover if you appear professional and capable in eyes of colleagues by getting shit done, they're would want at least keep in touch
I restarted my software career doing remote work. I didn't have a problem finding things to do because my responsibilities were clear (read: I had a good manager) and I was self-taught so I already had a muscle for seeking knowledge on my own.
I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is and how much you innately know about what things your role is responsible for which can be propped up or replaced by seniority. I also suspect that new grads don't have muscles for finding/seeking internal and external information on their own, which feels powerless. There's ways to solve all these things without treating all of these folks the same.
Frankly, I think these are all the problems you and I relate to, but what's really solved for the business by returning to an office isn't productivity or happiness. It's a real estate problem.
I suspect the people on here who like to hate on managers either have a bad one or just don't realize how much crap they're being shielded from--a lot of which is inevitable in a large organization (where you can't tell everyone "hey figure it out on your own").
Some managers are given wide latitude in controlling their teams work. Some managers execute on that, others don't.
Some managers are given a lot of control over hiring. Some execute on that, other don't.
Some managers are given wide latitude over reviews. Some managers execute on that while others don't.
The reason managers are perceived to be less useful in tech usually, in my experience, boils down to where they spend their time and political capital. They either spend it on their team and enabling them or on themselves and enabling themselves. All of the above are ways that could go either way and the feeling is generally an accumulation of those decisions over time. I guess I could surmise that there's just a lot of "bad" managers in tech, but I don't think that's a useful sentiment without knowing why.
There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold.
IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.
The only reason big corporations have a chance of pulling this off is the overall state of the economy. Once we see recovery their RTO antics will fail if the shift is not completely done.
What I find fascinating about the remote vs on-site flame war are the _stakes_ though, I don't think we see anything like it in dynamic vs static typing and all the others.
If remote loses, remote workers have to figure out how to relocate their entire families to a place they don't really want to live in, or accept severely limited job opportunities - on top of having to work in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
If on-site loses, people who are fetching large salaries and bought a house in an area with insane real estate prices face a future where their house value shoots lower than the credit they took to buy it (more towards the national average), and where it's increasingly difficult for them to prove that they earn that large salary they're getting. That's on top of working in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
Both sides have a lot to lose if it all goes either one way or another, that's unlike any other flame war I can think of. I wonder how much of this is at play at Google. Certainly seems to be escalating if someone feels the need to pull a stunt like that (with the performance reviews).
For the politicians and influencers, however, on-site work is vital (especially if they are good looking or charismatic). They need meetings to shine optically and verbally and dominate the real workers.
This parasitical category of people usually has the most influence, so the move to return to on-site work is not surprising.
Some people are better at creating (real or fake) value face to face. I've seen what you describe in remote/distributed setting as well, in internal message boards for example. Some folks are shy and/or incoherent in person and master manipulators in writing.
You nailed it. Ideally, both employees and employers should have the freedom to choose whether to work onsite or remotely, based on their preferences (again, this is subjective and not scientific). I believe the market could self-regulate in such a way. For instance, if the demand for remote work exceeds the supply, a savvy employer with a fit for remote work could take advantage of it by attracting better/more/cheaper talent through offering remote positions.
However, what needs to be debated and critizised is when employers change the rules midway through a game. It's unfair to hire people for a "remote role" and then force them to work in the office. This creates real-world hardships for individuals, such as the need to relocate.
Using your analogy, it would be like initially giving your future employees the choice between Emacs and Vim, but later giving Vim users extra points in performance reviews.
That analogy doesn't quite apply to this Google situation.
Google has a distinction between "full remote" and "hybrid" employees. Attendance will NOT be considered in the performance reviews of full remote employees.
Not that I'm antsy to get back to the office, but that scenario is not an "everyone wins" scenario, it's just another version of remote work. Onsite is only onsite if everyone is onsite. If it's some people in the office and some people at home, the people in the office are just working remotely from the office. All your meetings will be virtual, you don't get the benefits of onsite like being able to gauge someone's availability by just looking at them, you're gonna be screen sharing instead of just pulling up a chair next to someone, etc etc etc.
Both employees and employers should have the freedom to choose whether to work fully onsite, fully remotely, or hybrid, based on their preferences.
Also not an "everybody wins" situation, since then what you can work on is limited by where and how you work. But that's not what it's about in my mind. When people with different preferences want to collaborate it's about finding compromises. Personally, I started to place more value on who I work with than what I work on, so for me this flies. It's not as easy as it sounds to pull off though, since it requires people to accept that some of their colleagues work best in a way they personally find wildly unproductive. Takes quite a bit of trust.
And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, run test calculations and "interact" using existing technology. Companies either trust their staff or they don't and the staff should act accordingly.
Hasn't every study on brainstorming found that it's not a good way to generate good ideas? With having people breathing the same air in a small space believed to be a contributing factor to that.
Per https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1194301106584616960:
> People in groups self-censor and anchor on each others ideas, reducing creativity.
Also can be anti-inclusive when "anchor on each other idea" is a euphemism for that guy repeating what a more shy person said, but louder, stealing credit.
With remote, usually comes a more doc-driven culture, where someone's original idea can be easier to identify and make sure they get credit.
1. Brainstorming questions, not ideas (then go answer them)
2. Soliciting responses anonymously and quietly. This avoids both hierarchical biases and "Loudest person wins" bias. And not to excessively disparage verbal processors (I am one myself). But it's important for them to realize that the constant talking can drown out others' thinking, or their sharing, or their will to live.
I am a fan of hybrid (people can choose whether or not they're in the office).
However, you want to be able to collaborate effectively at any time and not have to wait for quarterly gatherings. I've got complex problems to solve together with my team mates!
Full disclosure, this is at a company that is hybrid and not remote-first. But I’ve seen the pattern repeated enough times across various teams that I don’t think my experience is unique. And I say this as someone who personally prefers to work remotely- I’m just not unaware of what’s lost in that environment.
This is not the dichotomy you make it look. There are lots of other tasks to do, and for those I personally would often go in a cafeteria or public space, since I didn't mind the distractions -- reading code, doing code reviews, reading docs, writing docs, responding to emails. "Coding" was a relatively small part of my day as a SWE at [FAANG].
Really? what does it bring that you can't do remotely? I can hardly think of a problem where "being in the same room" is a requirement to have a productive discussion
Picking up on social cues. Bouncing ideas around using a whiteboard. Speaking quickly without that ever so slight lag on Zoom which means you struggle to get a word in without potentially talking over somebody. Having food or drinks before or afterwards to unwind and build relationships and kick things around informally.
There's lots more.
Sharing meals during this time together also helps build relationships and trust within a team. I mean as you work, or even offsite at a restaurant - go out to breakfast or lunch during the work day.
That's not work. That should NEVER be part of work, even.
Also, please don't cross into personal attack on HN.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Obviously, the "pros" of WFH are massive. No commute. Comfortable office. Food in the fridge. Daytime exercise + showers. Etc. etc.
I found however that too much of a good thing, is bad. For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I wouldn't have been able to really tell you it for the first few years, but I was slowly moving toward being mildly depressed.
Returning to office restored my excitement for my work. I credit my colleagues and the process of working toward a big goal with other people. We really underestimate how important this is for mental health.
If you're in office and you now what I mean, show some love to a fellow co-worker. You gotta admit it's nice to see each other.
Not everyone, of course: I had a peer once who absolutely couldn't stand his family, and he would be at the office before everyone, staying until late at night. Volunteered on weekends too. Almost all of his contributions were the sort of thing that could have been easily automated, but he was happy just wiling hours away. Mileage varies and everyone's situation is unique.
Then of course there's the change element itself being a temporary boost. Turn the lights down and productivity increases. Turn them up and productivity increases. Return them to the normal and productivity increases. Having a varied life is essential. HN's history is littered by posts of people who changed some element of their life and This Changes Everything...at least during the initial period. Then it fades and they abandon it.
None of this is to diminish your personal experience that you obviously enjoy.
Do you have a source on this? I’m both curious and skeptical.
(And ironically, for many in Europe and Eastern NA/SA it’s the work day right now.)
On the anecdote side I do know that within the past couple of years I saw a discussion on here about how many visitors someone gets from a top of the front page on HN. The numbers were absolutely miserly compared to what I experienced getting the same repeatedly years earlier. Like, 1/20th or less.
Maybe it's just HN that declined, but if so where did the tech news community go? Digg? /. Reddit /r/programming (to some degree yes for the last one, though still it is nothing compared to what once was).
Everything is much quieter and more restrained than it was.
And sure, there are time zones circling the globe. But generally on the English tech sites, the US/Canada are going to dominate the demographics and have an outsized effect on spikes.
As it is it remains conjecture.
(Aside, this thread now has 300 comments after just 2 hours. HN’s purported slowdown in the WFH era feels grossly exaggerated.)
As to how many uniques you can expect from a front-page on HN, go ahead and search. Pre-2020 you can find countless people detailing 30,000+ uniques in the first few hours (my own, personal, direct experience was 50,000+). Now, if you average out more recent reports, you can expect about 11,000 over the first 24 hours.
And sure, the most inclusive possible discussion gets a few hundred comments. Everyone wants to put some paint on the shed. There is a 4 hour old submission on the front page with 2 comments. Eh, guess it doesn't represent much.
Aside, my personal anecdote is that this lack of decorum is why I rarely comment on HN anymore. So perhaps you are right.
Anyways, hope you have a good day.
This is basically the essence of life
It’s sometimes called Hedonistic Adaptation
And it’s also almost the same concept as the endless arising and passing, the source of “suffering”, in many eastern spiritual traditions
I would suggest that it's possible to interact with people outside of work. It's genuinely sad to me how many of these "if I don't go into the office I have no one to interact with" posts I see.
People are often in a weird headspace at work too and a bit guarded. I don’t know why that as a social setting is inherently healthier than surrounding yourself with people outside work.
I have a circle of friends and a habit that we keep since 20+ years: every Friday morning we meet for a coffee in a physical coffee shop. Location varied along time, I lived as close as 2 minutes walk from my apartment to (now) 1 hour drive (because of the traffic).
It's not a religious thing, people miss meetings. Got other stuff, or just not being in the mood (like I drank till 2 AM, no way I'm waking up at 6 so I can be out the door at 7 so I'll be in the coffee shop at 8, stay an hour then back home). But the habit has stuck and we kept our friendship. Some people have left the group (one died), others joined it. It's easy to expand a group once you have a stable kernel: just go out for some coffees at day or drinks at night and talk to people.
I get along well with work colleagues as well, mostly I'm asking the question: if I leave this company, will I be ever talking to these guys ever again? If the answer is yes (stay in touch through WhatsApp and the occasional beer in a bar) then they're more than acquaintances and useful connections in case I need a job. Like recently got laid out (whole office closed, some 200 people fired), found a new job in less than a week. Connections, people.
So office has some value but it's far from being "the whole world".
When you go into the office, you can build quite a history with people over time. I have good friends that I've worked with (off and on) for over 25 years. And we are not just "work friends". I've also felt much a part of a "team" working in person than wfh and those connections and trust can manifest in the work too.
I think that we need to continue to acknowledge that this is a human preference. And we all have quite different history, goals and situations.
It’s not that I don’t see friends and family outside those hours, it’s just that those hours constitute like half of the awake hours of my life, and the grind sucks when I do it alone.
I really wish the powers that be would put some data to this. You and I are complete opposites; paying exhorbitant rent, transportation, and living costs usurped much of the enjoyment I could get out of going to an office. I build infra products and in an office setting I usually get a lot of interrupts because product folks generally lack some amount of knowledge/background to fill in gaps on how to use products like mine. When I'm remote they have to follow a support queue, read docs, learn more about infra basics, and attend talks on infra. When I'm in person they can just stop by my desk.
My hypothesis is that folks who like going into an office generally fall into a couple categories:
- people who get/enjoy a substantial amount of social interaction out of work and work adjacent activities
- people who work on public facing products who don't have many internal customers
- people with disruptive home environments
The thing that upsets me is that we're being treated the same and that most of this is to save face for their real estate investment. Not to mention all the half-truths/gaslighting about the universalness of productivity.
I can go to an office where we can schedule room to have a video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.
I can stay at home to join the video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.
I don't know what this mysterious in-office inspiration cycle is. It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk.
Offices exist for companies where management has sufficiently removed the ability of the people they pay to make decisions. Now you need to come to them and ask to be allowed to do things, so your manager can ponder whether that thing makes sense in whatever weird inter-department power struggle they are working in.
A lot of 'management' doesn't build communication or workflows more advanced than that. And when people are never more than a short walk away, they don't have to.
Slack is just the online version of that. A noisy conversation always within earshot. One that you can usually ignore, but should still be a little aware of what's going on overall, and occasionally you get pulled in to the larger conversation.
It turns out slackers will slack, be it at home or at the office.
Over a few drinks they will also tell you stories of the old days where you would leave your jacket on the back of your chair and go to the pub at 11am come back to the office at some point in the afternoon.
But kidz these days...
I’ve talked to junior employees (in 2023) for non-tech companies and you’d think they work for Amazon warehouses - I’ve heard people say they get criticized or called out for spending a long time in the bathroom “probably on social media”. So there’s probably some cohort of people that truly experience that level of oversight.
I don’t know about going to the Pub at 11, but I’ve definitely seen plenty of ways to slack off in person. My manager was buying a new laptop last month and spent 4+ hours measuring random books and objects trying to get an idea of the dimensions of his future laptop… as if he didn’t already spend the day at the Apple Store and didn’t already place the order.
You see someone doing this and think: "slacker"...?
I come into the office around 9am and leave at 3:30pm to beat traffic and get a quick gym session in without the crowds. And then I hope back online to do some work. Am I slacking?
My understanding is that everyone has to get approval even people who are currently remote. For those who are near an office, they are being told to expect to be asked to come in frequently.
What changes is that new approvals will be "by exception only".
(not everything is in the US)
The dev logic is "fuck you I've got mine, you go get yours" but only as long as "line goes up".
NOTHING about unions prevents an individual being rewarded for their individual merits or jumping from job to job.
Unionized companies don't grow according to the stock market but according to profits, sales and customer orders, so you never see mass hires because the stock market went up, you also don't see mass fires because the market went down.
That's why there isn't a huge salary difference between a senior and a junior, at least not like in the US where seniors can make 4-8 times as much as a junior.
Unionized companies here also look down on job hoppers (people who jump ship for more compensation every 2-3 years) and tend not to hire them.
So yeah, from historical evidence we have so far, from my PoV, unions and crazy compensations that also grow like crazy in sync with the stock market, are mutually exclusive. Do you want uniuonized slow stable growth that lags the stock market, or do you want to make money in sync or above the stock market? Pick one.
This is absolutely another form of layoffs. Google get the double benefit of 1) loose head count 2) only keeping dedicated* people.
They do loose people with the highest agency as they will be the first to leave.
* Those dedicated people could also just be most in need.
There's absolutely a rational reason: many people in management went into management because they enjoy having power over people, and they can have more power over employees who are physically in office.
that's superficial power
Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.
> couldn't afford living in SF
I was going to ask on an original thread, what is to stop people simply swiping other people in on their badge to pretend that they're in the office more than they actually are?
* Cameras recording faces near badge swipe points, and | or
* Campus wide mobile phone services that also log SIM cards and other locale data.
You can imagine some data analyst being tasked with trawling logs to look for inconsistancies.
There are, of course, other meta data logs and sources that could be used.
"For context, Fortune, WSJ, FT, etc. have all been consistently over the past 2 quarters churning out several opinion articles on the topic of remote work."
It is an obvious concerted effort to shape public opinion in order to save commercial real estate investors who were caught with their pants down now that several companies are not renewing leases.
"A separate internal document showed that already-approved remote workers may be subject to reevaluation if the company determines “material changes in business need, role, team, structure or location.”"
Sorry, I mistook this topic for the one referencing the CNBC version of this story.
There are many people at Google who are splitting their time between their desk location and somewhere else. Some are supercommuters - moving their families to a home in another state and coming back periodically for face-to-face meetings. Others are digital nomads, working remotely part time and on-site part time.
It's unclear if there's a tenable solution for those people.
That is, I can see some reasons to want more visibility into what people are working on. And when. That is exactly what they pitch OKRs for solving, for as long as the goal is getting achieved, you don't have to measure other things.
Instead, this is what happens when you have bean counters look at the system. Everything starts looking like a bean to be counted. You can't, with a straight face, tell me that attendance counts, but lines of code doesn't. Or all sorts of other countable things that we all, as an industry, claim to agree is a bad idea to count.
> Google is the latest company to tighten its return-to-work policies to get workers to commute more often. In an internal email, the company said it could make office attendance an element of an employee’s performance review if they did not comply with the three-day minimum for in-office work, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Why, yes: if you don't come to the office as often as your employer wants you to, you'll get in trouble.
Out side of tech people who want to work in the office 5 days a week are in the minority along with people who want to work at home 5 days a week. The vast majority of people want the _flexability_ to decide when to go in. They'll go in for a change of scenery, to socialise with colleagues (not necessarily after work but idle chit chat in the office) or to informally speak to a few people.
Demanding and mandating people come back to the office is a real shitty move, and does nothing but cause stress and anxiety to everyone.
Weirdly it also doesn't make sense to give people full flexibility to pick when to be on-site, though - at least, not from the point of view of their role within the larger organisation. Yes, you want them to be able to choose to be on-site when someone they need to work with is there, but also there needs to be a mixing function: as their boss you need to be ensuring that they are physically proximate to functions they haven't previously interacted with. You don't need much of this, but the main benefit of on-site working is discovery, not collaboration within an existing framework. And without a certain amount of curation that's unlikely to happen by accident. When two people get chatting in the kitchen, you need one of them, at least, to have that spark of recognition that says "Ah ha! Your thing is relevant to my thing!" because that's the fundamental innovation and discovery driver.
What's happening is that the bosses are leaning on random chance to do that curation job. I think that for most organisations it's very, very unlikely to be doing a good enough job to compensate for the downsides, but it also explains why the 37Signals approach of getting everyone in the building together at once works for them. That's still relying on randomness, but it's stacking the deck. Or rather, un-stacking it. If you allow people to pick which day a week, say, they come into the office, you'll get the Monday people, the Thursday people, and ne'er the twain shall meet. With everyone on-site at once, there's at least a chance a natural Monday will meet with a natural Thursday and produce an outcome that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
I think the fact that Google isn't yet worried about cost more than productivity is a good sign that they're still a ways away from that.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/cash-on-hand/....
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2023-02-...
But yeah, the point stands either way.
So, "in ruin" may not be right, but there is some kind of big shift coming. The conditions they've enjoyed for a long time aren't going to hold.
Are we all going to just drive somewhere, sit at a desk and not talk to our co-workers cause they actually in some other office, then drive home?
I could have been fully remote, but I wanted to be in the office most days because I liked the routine and liked talking to the people who did want to come in. And my commute was short.
I would have to zoom most people on my team for meetings anyway because they live all over the world. (This is, btw, a good thing: it means we had people working on the project 24/7, each with access to different resources. I was online with the video team and could ping them with any questions, my teammate +8 hours away was online with the majority of infra folks and could get extra support with deployments. etc)
If you have to zoom people anyway, why would it matter whether they live near you and decided to stay home, or live on another continent?
I got both benefits of: 1. Getting to be social in person with other likeminded people and 2. Having happier teammates who didn't have to sacrifice 3 hours every day commuting and were that much more alert and efficient for it.
Pretending that there is a functional business requirement for 6 of the 10 person team to be doing the morning call from their office desks as opposed to their home desks is dishonest at best.
Embrace the reality and the benefits you yourself see and create working spaces that are better than someones sitting alone in a spare bedroom.
Though an interesting question is whether people who took a pay reduction for remote working "somewhere cheaper" will get an IMMEDIATE bump in salary due to now having to move back to SF? Like if Google is gonna uplift the entire lives of its workers, then it's gotta be prepared to pay for that to happen.
But companies are companies, so I think we all know the answer to that unfortunately.
So Google really had two types of remote workers for the last couple years:
- Those who were "officially" remote: these people went through the process of converting their job title to "REMOTE" and took a pay cut in exchange for a different location (unless they were moving from a low cost to high cost location).
- Those who were "unofficially" remote: they just didn't show up in person often (or ever) but were paid like their local counterparts. Sometimes these people moved far away from their assigned site. Managers were often cool with people rarely showing up as long as they hit their KRs.
Right now Google is explicitly limiting new additions to the first "officially" remote group and trying to eliminate the second "unofficially" remote group.
So, until they start trying to eliminate the "officially" remote group, they won't have to adjust pay. But they will likely have to if/when they go after that group.
It will be interesting to see how the workforce responds to what appears to be a Google increasingly convinced that their employees are dependent upon them for success.
The leaders talked a lot about pressures from other execs on wanting to go back in-office even though they knew most employees wanted more flexibility. I think most companies will go back to 3 days a week in office and 2 days remote. Remote companies will continue to hold an advantage on attracting talent.
We've recently improved our remote filter on Levels.fyi Jobs - give it a try and lmk your feedback as well: https://www.levels.fyi/jobs?workArrangements=remote
If the argument was about discovery rather than collaboration I'd have far more sympathy, but "we need to force our employees into physical proximity so they'll work together" - which, when you unpack it, is all that is being said - is a more revealing position than the pro-office-mandate crowd might want to lead with.
What’s one of the measures they use to establish performance? In-person attendance.
Why? Because it… improves… performance?
I mean, that’s just like testing to see how warm a house is by seeing how often the heating is turned on. Except some houses are in Cuba and some are in Siberia. It’s the wrong approach.
But meh. The largest company I’ve worked for had 0.5% of the staff Google has, so who am I to say what does and doesn’t work as a metric for them? It’s an entirely different ballgame, and not one I think I would enjoy being a part of.
If they does well, remote work are acceptable since they has some additional score to be deducted?
I guess it means there will have many underperformance co-workers in office?
I'm still waiting for the fucking data Zuck.
None of these CEOs "have the data" about remote work, or they would beat us over the head with it over and over. I would be seeing graphs and pie charts all over the financial press.
It's 3 years and nothing. Every employee should be demanding this data as proof before setting a single foot in an office.
* side effects may include mild psycopathy
This is too funny.
Does anyone know if the level of new hire training and onboarding is the same?
My experiences with onboarding is you generally sit with someone for a week, all day - and sometimes for two weeks.
Usually the productivity hit of doing this is swept under the rug. When working remote, are managers still designating mentors? In places where this happened unofficially, does that style of onboarding still happen?
To fix this, use "the process". Create a ticket for the job for this person and if they want the job done right now, get them to up to priority themselves (presumably with their and your managers' approval).
"See, look! The people are using it. They love it."
(Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)
Outsourcing/offshoring is old news.
If that happens to every career, I guess I’ll become one of the managers making those decisions.
Stay on top of change, don’t be victimized by it.
Because there are as many people who need to manage programmers as there are currently hired programmers? The number of jobs would certainly go down, or there would be no point.
> Stay on top of change, don’t be victimized by it.
Sometimes you can ride change, sometimes you cannot. You focus on being one of the 100(?) US programmers who becomes a manager. Good luck. I'll just continue advocating return to office before that happens. Since the C-suites seem to want to return to office, I'll just enjoy that for now.