So I've now been WFH for 2 months and honestly I hate it. Work was already flexible enough such that if you wanted to WFH you could. By convention, people would most often WFH on Wednesdays. I liked this timing of people doing it at the same time.
But communication and collaboration is just much harder work remote and you can't change my mind. I'm sure you can work hard to make it almost as good but it's never going to be better (IMHO).
I of course miss the meals and snacks.
Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
Those of you who are claiming this will be some form of revolution I think are naive. I've found that advocates of WFH are mostly motivated by that's what they want to do more than anything else. I mean that's fine but it often leads to thinly-veiled, self-serving, biased arguments and proclamations of the benefits to everyone.
If you need an office anyway you don't really save anything by WFH unless you oversubscribe your work areas (eg hot-desking) and that has its own problems.
All-remote might work best. I've seen this claimed but have no direct experience with it. I do know that mixed WFH and in the office is nearly always detrimental to the remote people and the team as a whole (IME).
I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees can operate this way indefinitely.
Welp, why bother commenting then? Also half remote half in office doesn't work. I've been working for all remote companies for the past 4 years and (asynchronous) communication has always been great. It's "just" a mindset shift.
You say we're naive for thinking this is a revolution. I'd say naive is the one evaluating the viability of remote work by looking at an incredibly noisy dataset (or a single data point in your case) during a pandemic in which companies have been forced into a paradigm that requires methodical and progressive change.
Similarly to asking someone who has never run to join a marathon and be in the top N.
I heard meditation is good, I wish I had some time though.
Yesterday I got blocked in an elevator for 6 hours, so I got plenty of time.
I tried to used this opportunity and tried meditate though.
Didn't work
Those are all perfectly valid points. However, I don't think WFH advocates are claiming that working from home is definitively better. Both options have different trade-offs.
You're right that collaboration is much easier in person, even with the latest remote work technology. But could we offset that with companies that have monthly/quarterly offsites instead? What if they invest their office budget into helping people build better home offices? Ship snacks directly to employees or let them expense meals/snacks?
The worst thing a lot of companies will do is jump into fully remote without rethinking how their culture works. This is not just a way to save money by getting rid of your office. That money has to be allocated differently to make up for the differences.
I 100% agree that mixed in-perform/WFH is the worst of both worlds.
Finally, I would note the last 2 months have been very abnormal for everyone, and it's been nothing like WFH under normal situations. I would wait to when things "return to normal" before making a decision on how you feel about WFH.
Indeed, it wasn't even normal WFH for people who already worked from home for ages and had all things sorted out.
I work in a shed, 20m from my main house; with a red/green sign on it that my small kids learned to obey, good noise cancelling headphones etc.
But as schools over here are closed now for about 3 months now, no amount of red/green signs or noise cancellation are going to save me from the fact my help is needed in several occasions during the day, or that (especially at the beginning of the lockdown) I have to block out 4 hours just to buy weekly groceries, or 1h to buy something in the local pharmacy.
This thing disrupted everybody. I can only imagine how is it for people who live with kids in apartments with no gardens and no dedicated rooms.
Linux (and almost all OSS ), was built from people WFH.
Follow the same processes: be as asynchronous as possible,reduce meetings to a few times a year, rely on tools and build new ones if you need them.
If you are permanently WFH, why are you in a small pad in the city? Look at what you can afford out in the country, or even another country entirely.
Yes, it should be a choice and not forced onto everybody, but after a couple of years of being remote, I get worried about needing to ever go into an open plan office ever again. There are positives to all this, but you may need to adapt to make it work for you.
I live in a city, because I like living in a city. I love commuting through it, looking at all the people and businesses, the architecture and smells of the city. I love taking public transit and thinking of background stories for all the folks on the tram.
When I am stuck WFH for this quarantine, it doesn't even feel like I live in the city anymore. Moving out of the city would just make that permanent.
For a lot of people, especially in this industry, the bulk of the social interaction they get is through coworkers. Wouldn't be surprised if permeant working from home exacerbates feelings of loneliness and other mental health issues.
I'd argue that's unhealthy behavior though. As someone who has less need for daily social contact, having my coworkers leaning on me for their "daily recommended dose" of social interactions isn't healthy for me. I came in to the office because I didn't have a choice not to and avoiding social contact with my coworkers at work isn't really something I can effect without obviously hiding away.
It's not to say that it won't be a problem, but introverted folks have been forced into being in offices even when it stressed them out and caused them mental health issues for years. If the extroverts are getting the other end of it now, there's plenty of room to find clubs, meetups, gyms, and other hobbies. Just because I work with you doesn't mean I'm now obligated to be your social support network.
50k+ employee companies already work remote. They got dozens of offices all over the world, and bunch of projects I did for these large companies involved me coming in to an office so I can be on the call with people in different offices - which is pretty idiotic and can be just as effectively done from home.
And catered meals/snacks are not the norm there either - instead, you smelling microwaved fish Bob brought for lunch, plus Karen is babbling away about how her kid didn't get into the honors program. You don't have an office, you're sitting next to bunch of other people who keep talking, walking, watching funny Youtube videos. The best option is to come in late and work late so you have a somewhat distraction-free workplace to yourself - which again is pretty idiotic.
And the communication is not really that much harder, it's actually gets much easier and streamlined the more you WFH. You learn to focus on what matters, you learn to present your thoughts coherently and in an engaging manner as people need to understand you and listen to you even though they don't see you and no one even knows whether they are listening to you or not.
I think it depends on your work style. I have a friend at FANG who hates WFH because his work style involves a lot of face to face conversations & relationship building.
Whereas my wife and I (also FANG) just like doing our work and clocking out ASAP and we both absolutely love WFH. Video chat is more than good enough to make stuff happen with other people, and without a commute I can save hours of my life every single day.
Everyone can't work this way, but it works great for a portion of people. I don't see why we can't let people individually decide. My only concern is that the WFH people will be such a minority that they'll be ignored in large meetings, but as long as ~20% of people are remote then I think it can work for everyone.
I think the optimum is 3 days of WFH, with the remainder being spent in person. For most people, you're going to have work you can do on your own. You probably only need a little bit of help here and there. The office specific days, you spend on meetings, working more directly with people.
I think this would also significantly reduce stress on employees. You could live in more affordable areas, and take commuter transit for the days you have in office. It wouldn't bother me too much to take a 90 min transit if I knew it was only a couple of times week. It's the day after day that really kills ones soul.
That defeats a lot of the benefit of remote work though. My output in 3 days of work is gonna be a week's worth in my experience. Padding it with face time is mostly me eating a loss.
2 days/week working synchronously with people? Of meetings? I can't remember a time when a project I've worked on needed that to succeed.
I can think of MANY projects I've worked on (and currently working on) where other people are frankly a distraction, and I just need to focus on implementing a few features on my own. But you then need to coordinate a lot in person to figure our the next steps.
I think this set up provides much of the benefit of remote (greater flexibility in personal life commitments) while retaining the necessary components that many often cite for why remote isn't a good option (no face to face meetings). The point however is that it's not supposed to replace either in person or fully remote, but find more choices firms have in their staffing configurations. More choice means there will be greater market fit for both job seekers and employers.
It certainly depends on seniority and experience, the more you have the easier it is to work on your own. You don't need much guidance anymore and you know what communication and planning is needed in advance, so you can do it in batches.
Until you’re senior enough that most of your job is communication, then remote becomes difficult again.
WFH now and maintaining Work/Life balance is really difficult when most of your time is spent sending emails, reviewing code and proposals and answering questions in a global company.
Writing code at night happened occasionally before, but it required leaving my family and pulling out my laptop so it had to be for good reason. Helping an overseas team out over Slack with something at 11 pm can be done from my phone, “it’ll just take 5 minutes”.
In terms of pure work productivity, I disagree. Emailing, reviewing code, and reviewing and writing proposals are all activities that are best done in a low distraction environment, which the modern open office is not. Dealing with questions has a bit more overhead on both the asker and the answerer, but I don't think it's so much that email and Slack don't mostly cover it. For those occasional instances where written communication doesn't cut it, video chat is an acceptable substitute in exchange for the benefits in other areas.
Even for whiteboard discussions, you can buy a literal whiteboard for your work area, hold the meeting over video call, and exchange photos afterward. It's not quite as low friction as walking up to a whiteboard in the office with a coworker, but, at least you know the damn markers will work.
Maintaining WLB is something one needs to be attentive to. Having a dedicated work area as well as maintaining specific work hours (and sticking to them) are key. Other than that, I don't think maintaining WLB at home has to be any tougher than at the office. Kids present special issues, but, if you're a non-WFHer, you already have provisions for the kids during work hours, anyway.
I completely agree - this certainly isn't a configuration I would think works well for management. Meeting in person certainly are highly valued for even the most junior managers.
But for a lot of white collar professionals at an associate to mid senior level, there's plenty of work that you should be able to do independently.
Zoom calls definitely aren't as good as real sitting in the same room meetings, but I aim to be in meetings less than an hour a day anyway. I find that it's plenty good enough for 2-3 person calls, and for one person presenting to a large group of muted listeners. A bit more challenging for 5-10 person collaborative sessions.
I've been working remotely for a couple years, and at some point started auto-deleting recruiter emails for jobs in the city. Commuting 2-3 hours per day is just a non-starter for me at this point. The extra sleep and exercise I get remotely is probably going to extend my life expectancy.
1. communication and collaboration is just much harder work remote: you are probably used to an office culture where communication happens in person and nothing is ever documented. That's understandable. in a remote culture, the written world rules, communication would be much better (asynchronous, no more pointless meetings)
2. Work was already flexible enough such that if you wanted to WFH you could: could you WFH permanently or 99% of the days in a year?
3. the meals and snacks -> if you can't cook, now is a good time to learn. save money
4. Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space -> in a normal period of time, you could just relocate to somewhere better. We are not doing normal WFH
5. Those of you who are claiming this will be some form of revolution I think are naive -> I agree but I also think that you are naive if you think remote working is not superior for information workers
6. If you need an office anyway you don't really save anything -> Wrong. Water, electricity, internet, coffee, amenities, cleaning equipment, toiletries, cleaning services. And of course, the office itself. For workers: they get absolute freedom to shape their home space as they see fit. Oh and the MOST important time, you save everyone their commute (which will get you well rested employees).
7. I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees: do you HAVE to join a 50k company?
Re: “move somewhere better”; this is a flawed argument I’ve seen repeated a bunch. Some people just like where they live and don’t want to move to a bigger place. Bigger does not necessarily mean better. Cities provide more options for entertainment, more people to socially interact with, more unique opportunities (by the draw of the city population for these opportunities), etc.
“Move somewhere better” is naive, because where they live isn’t necessarily bad; just may not be conducive to full-time remote work.
I agree, but my counterpoint would be this: I like having _access_ to the Bay Area, but I don't like how much it costs to live somewhere accessible to SF. If I could live somewhere a little further out to save money, but still be able to visit the City and other places when I wanted or needed, that would be theoretically ideal for me. In practical terms, I'll let you know after I get a chance to try it out. ;-)
3. What if I don't like cooking and can afford to eat out?
4. What's better? Maybe I like living in a big city. Not everyone wants a house with a backyard.
5. We shall see. "Information workers" like to think they're superior to everyone else but people are ultimately social. Work is social. Companies build stuff by having people collaborate and so far there's no collaboration better than face-to-face. That's how you break down silos, for example, in many cases.
6. That's assuming that the company redirects the money they pay on offices to help employees pay for their home offices. I really doubt that.
7. Big companies pay better. Big companies have big projects small companies can't even dream of. There are many reasons to join a big company.
> Why do you consider your arguments against WFH not biased and useful.
The software industry is doing quite well for itself, busily collecting all the world’s money. It doesn’t mean it’s doing everything right but it does put a larger burden of proof on advocates for change.
Considering that the number of total active websites is estimated at over 1.3 billion according to a survey published by Netcraft, that means that around 455,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now, which means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use WordPress.
So I’d say they’re doing pretty well for themselves.
But a big part of how it’s doing that is using technologies to unbundle functions, that used to be bundled for practical reasons, to create new efficiencies and value.
> ok. Why do you consider your arguments against WFH not biased and useful.
Because what I'm saying is objectively true: physical colocation with your coworkers is inherently easier to work with than working remotely and no one in their right mind disputes that. The best you can argue for WFH-first is that it can be made to work.
Your other clue is the choice of language. I said, for example, "I hate WFH" and (paraphrased) "I like having a catered office". These are my personal preferences. You can't really argue that it isn't my personal preference. You can argue that those preferences don't work for you, which is 100% fine and indisputable.
In comparison, so many things I see written about WFH are stated with broad generalizations of "WFH is better because ..." when you can clearly tell that really means "I want to WFH and I'm going to argue my preference as being a general good".
You've had other people in this thread and elsewhere agree that a mixed WFH/in-person team is (to quote another commenter here) "the worst of both worlds". If you take that as true it then means that for people to most effectively WFH they need everyone else they're working with to do it as well. It's intellectually dishonest.
To be clear, if you can make WFH work for you and you like doing it, great. I hope you find an employer who works like that or will allow at least some of the team to work remotely. Prognostications that Covid-19 will lead to some seachange in WFH-first employment strikes me as unsubstantiated wishful thinking however.
Just go and look at all the blog posts and articles written about how to make WFH work. Why aren't there just as many (or more) articles about making WFO (Working From Office) work if the benefits are so self-apparent?
There are certain kinds of work that could be remote and would be just fine to do so but they still generally aren't (eg call center work; apart from obvious offshoring cases, a lot of US domestic call center work is still from an office for some reason). But I don't put software engineering at scale in that category.
> physical colocation with your coworkers is inherently easier
This isn't even remotely objective. It's amusing how people think their personal perspective is the objective one.
> Why aren't there just as many (or more) articles about making WFO
There's an ocean of WFO content on the Internet - everything from leases, to security, to feng shui. I'm willing to wager there's an order of magnitude more WFO than WFH content. And it's all about making office life work (or work better).
Believe it or not, offices are a modern invention. Just because it's been the status quo for several decades, doesn't mean it's the only way to get things done.
Screwing over worker was the status quo at one point, too.
> Because what I'm saying is objectively true: physical colocation with your coworkers is inherently easier to work with than working remotely and no one in their right mind disputes that.
There are countless examples of companies large and small who have found massive amounts of success switching to a remote based methodology. Saying that this is objectively wrong and that these folks are not in "their right mind" makes your argument, that could otherwise be valid, look foolish.
It largely depends on what kind of work you're doing. For software development, I could just as easily claim that it is objectively true that asynchronous communication and a freedom from non-technical people tapping you on the shoulder 10 times a day is objectively easier.
> Why aren't there just as many (or more) articles about making WFO (Working From Office)
Because that blog (or more likely book) has already been written and re-written for the past 100 years. WFH is a somewhat new phenomenon in the age of modern internet and broadband.
> with your coworkers is inherently easier to work with than working remotely
This is so dependent on the coworkers. There's plenty of folks who I can work with remotely OK preciesly because we're remote. Sitting next to these people 6-8 hours per day would be extremely counter productive. I'm sure there's plenty of folks that can take me only in small doses, and 8 hrs/day of working with me face to face would be too much - I don't fault them for that!
Because what I'm saying is objectively true: physical colocation with your coworkers is inherently easier to work with than working remotely and no one in their right mind disputes that. The best you can argue for WFH-first is that it can be made to work.
This is objectively not true for the kind of work I (and many others) do. Physical colocation with coworkers actually makes it harder for knowledge workers to do their work, which is why lawyers and accountants have their own offices even when they're in the same building.
To address your comment about wfo... it works since it’s been the default way that people have worked since the industrial revolution. As such we have institutional collective knowledge and culture on how to make it work. The blog posts about making wfh work are going against a couple of centuries of knowledge, which is why you see the difference.
But to address a finer point: there is still a lot of activity about open vs closed plan etc. So wfo is not a fully solved problem either!
> Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
Could this be the tipping point to a sustained exodus from an urban kind of lifestyle? (spoken as someone who likes/values density)
The idea that this will result in an exodus from urban areas presupposes that jobs are the reason people moved to the urban areas, rather than social, leisure, or cultural reasons.
That's highly arguable. Young people like cities, that's where the girls and the parties are. That's been true for a really long time.
I lived in San Francisco solely for work. If I could work from home 3 days a week, I would have lived in Marin County and done a 2 hour commute twice a week, and maybe spend a weekend in the City from time to time.
Honestly, this is EXACTLY the problem with the current tech scene in SF.
SF used to be a place people moved to because they wanted to live in San Francisco, they wanted the culture, the access to nature and its beauty, the arts scene that was traditionally more cutting edge (citylights, burning man), the cutting edge food and wine scene, the walkability.
Nobody moves to San Francisco for that anymore. They move to San Francisco for work not life. They move to San Francisco to extract value from a job and then leave.
San Francisco is too amazing a city to be relegated to becoming a company town. If there is a positive outcome from this, it will hopefully result in a recalibration and people who want to be in SF because they WANT TO BE IN SAN FRANCISCO will stay and the people who came here to just smash and grab some cash will leave.
I agree with this. I just turned 30, and I couldn't wait to leave SF. Its a great city, I grew up in the Bay Area, but it is nto for me. I am not a city person. I never lived in SF proper, but I would hate it if I did.
So I took the plunge and moved to Washington last October before COVID was a thing. And i couldn't be happier. It was all because my company had a SF and Bellevue location.
I forsee many other people doing the same now that job opportunities aren't tied to location.
I was forced to work in SF because thats where the Jobs were for me, but I never wanted to be so near or work in SF.
Even if there's no exodus, it would still relieve some pressure on those urban areas.
Instead of having to pay exorbitant prices in an extremely in-demand real estate market, people like me could move a little further out and still have reasonable access to those social, leisure, or other opportunities with slightly more time invested without requiring spending 5 hours a day commuting.
Spending 2-3 hours in transit one way to get to work is not reasonable. Spending 2-3 hours in transit to spend the day in the city on the weekend is a little more palatable.
So I've now been WFH for 2 months and honestly I love it. Work wasn't flexible before, so I had to commute into the office every day. In fact, everyone had to.
But communication and collaboration isn't that difficult with Zoom and Slack, you can't change my mind. You can make it work.
I love being able to walk into my kitchen at lunch and make whatever I want.
Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and and that's fine because your home is your space and you can make it work for you
- even with someone else working in the same room as you.
> Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
There's a crowd on HN saying there will be a mass exodus from urban centers. I'm not sure if it will play out quite like that, but I think there will be a premium on locations and housing with extra room for a home office, easy access to open space, and nearby amenities.
Somewhat agree with you, but I think right now is not representative of what WFH can be. I miss face to face for sure. Am having a hard time being motivated. And projects don't really seem functionally well managed right now. But I also think this is an artifact of how the WFH transition has happened. I think it's likely in the long run it will get sorted out.
Also after this lockdown period I suspect there will be a longer period of low% office usage. So we will still be face to face meetings and the like, but less frequently. And that I think will help smooth things out.
I've been wanting a lifestyle change for a while, this might be the gateway for that. I already live rural, but the commute has been unpleasant for me to where I work. I am enjoying not driving.
If this scenario continues, I could see our family moving closer to what we like -- skiing, outdoor recreation, etc. -- and having lower cost of living in the process.
| I've found that advocates of WFH are mostly motivated by that's what they want to do more than anything else.
I've heard endless people state that WFH productivity is through the roof with absolutely no evidence. And lets not pretend that we can accurately measure productivity of software devs - we've all been down this road with agile.
Can only speak for myself. Im far more productive without an hour commute, people constantly interrupting me in my cube with trivia, interrupts to explain you can't do X in the code because the repercussions are X^10, etc followed by a long commute home. But hey, to each his/her own.
I've also heard anti-WFH people state that its a bad idea. No one has any evidence. Just anecdotes.
I think part of the shift is because companies are realizing it isn't as bad as they expected. A friend works for a company that announced they will allow 100% WFH in the future too. The CEO said she thought WFH would cause a 50% loss of productivity. But after 2 months of it, no significant loss in velocity has been noticed. Not just for development work, but for other office work as well.
Here are some numbers... I work at a FAANG and 28-day commits in my division (~5K engineers) are down ~3% from February. Not an exact science but some real data I just pulled for you.
It's an interesting data point, but hard to judge much by it.
Two things:
1. Working-from-home-during-global-pandemic-with-kids-and-spouses-and-roommates-and-not-ideal-setup isn't the same as working-from-home. Undoubtedly some people are less productive today.
2. Commits isn't necessarily a great proxy for productivity to begin with. For example, with greater focus comes less "oops I missed a unit test and broke the build" type commits, or even just more time to interactive rebase and clean up commits before pushing. "Go slower, you'll be done sooner."
My point was that in my org, WFH has been staggeringly successful. 3% drop in the middle of the biggest global crisis in living memory means that there will likely be no loss or a gain from WFH once people get their emotional states back to normal and their kids back in school.
This is also a fairly bad time to try and put a measurement on how effective WFH is. The fact that schools and daycares are currently closed means that parents are having to take care of their children while also working.
It is also hard on people that are used to working in the office to be told that they now have to work from home suddenly. I'm sure a non-trivial amount of people did not have a space for themselves to be able to work and they are trying to figure things out as they go. Not to mention figuring out how to communicate properly while everyone is remote.
There is also not a one size fits all solution. People will be more productive being where they are more comfortable. That may be at home, in a coffee shop, at a library, in the office or any other number of places. People are expected to work from home right now, so a lot of those other options are out of the question.
TL;DR, don't judge work from home when everyone has to do it during a pandemic.
What are the stats per engineer over the past year or 2, including standard deviation? I suspect +-3% is within normal variation. Are you measuring literally the number of commits or number of lines changed? All of these are important metadata.
“ Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation”
If you have a remote first company, it means your employees can actually move somewhere that they can settle down and own a house.
And yes if it’s mixed WFH and on-site then of course the remote workers will lose out. But both Shopify and twitter are doing perm remote for all employees, creating an even playing field.
> If you have a remote first company, it means your employees can actually move somewhere that they can settle down and own a house.
People don’t live in cities just for jobs. I live in the city to go to museums, art galleries, the symphony, plays, comedy shows, concerts, restaurants, happy hours etc. I have no interest in living outside the city and I especially have no interest in maintaining a house.
I really want to go back to my nice office for work.
I also live in the city to go to museums, art galleries, the symphony, plays, comedy shows, concerts, restaurants, happy hours etc. I have no interest in living outside the city and I especially have no interest in maintaining a house.
And there is no way I am going back to going to an office to work.
Right but it requires planning and a “night out in the city.” Meanwhile, I buy symphony tickets an hour before show on a lark because they are cheap on stubhub.
I wouldn’t worry about all tech companies going WFH. Probably most will have a mix.
The wild card is that things may seem easier when people have no choice but to WFH, but once things open up completely, there could be a shift back but inevitably everyone would have already had a taste and some may want it permanently
Thinking about my first job, and how I constantly needed to lean on my coworkers for help for the first month or two. In a work from home setting, where I'd need to instant message them, constantly requesting a video chat or whatever, I'd definitely feel like a burden (compared to just walking over to their desk and starting a conversation). This feeling of being a burden doesn't make a whole lot of sense logically... but human psychology does what it does.
It’s different strokes. I have never been as productive ever in 5 years of in office work. I find picking up a phone and calling people is just so much quicker than walking over to someone’s desk. Couple that with the fact that I don’t enjoy the office environment means that I hate you cletus for typing out this drivel I clearly don’t agree with and care about.
We've been WFH for about 3 years now, and aside from meeting up each Friday for lunch, if you're finding it hard to get the point across on Slack/email or it's taking too long, the best option is to pick up the phone and talk it through. Saves so much time, and of course it's nice to hear the voice of the other person.
>Those of you who are claiming this will be some form of revolution I think are naive. I've found that advocates of WFH are mostly motivated by that's what they want to do more than anything else. I mean that's fine but it often leads to thinly-veiled, self-serving, biased arguments and proclamations of the benefits to everyone.
I mean it's trivial to say you're projecting that on to others. Particularly with the closed minded comments like "you can't change my mind".
The 'revolution' is already happening, but I don't think it will be across every company and every industry. I don't know who does say that.
I could see the whole team meeting in person 1-2 days per week and the whole team working from home the rest of the time. I find lots of teamwork to be way more effective in person, but tons of heads-down work to be way more effective in private.
This is the best summary of everything I've felt about it.
> I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees can operate this way indefinitely.
The other thing is that those-sized companies have made significant real estate investments in their office space. If suddenly their own workforce didn't use them, what would the value of those be? I imagine e.g. Apple Park would not be worth even close to what Apple paid for it if Apple wasn't going to use it.
I'm not trying to be facetious - you seriously can't provide your own meals and snacks working from home?
>> Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
Do you live in that space because it's close to your office? Ok, so now you're remote you can live anywhere. If there was no pandemic you could work from a library, or café or dozens of other places. You could move around each day. Or you could move to a cheaper location and have a nice home office.
Yes, I can prepare my own lunch. But it takes about 24 hours to make a vat of delicious homemade ramen that will feed 500 people. Do you know how long it takes to make a single serving of that same ramen? ...About 24 hours.
Likewise, an office with 100 people can easily have a whole variety of fresh fruit and produce to spontaneously choose and snack from and most will get eaten before any goes to waste. When I buy produce, I have to get exactly what I'm going to eat which means my weekly trip locks me into exactly one set of produce that I'm stuck with.
The set of foods that scale down efficiently is a very small subset of the set of foods that I like to eat.
Also, pragmatically, the free food was a perk of the job that I factored into the compensation package when I took the job. Losing access to the free food is effectively the same as taking a pay cut or giving up a couple of vacation days. Given the state of the economy, I think this is actually a reasonable way for the business to save money right now, and I'm much rather give up lunches than see layoffs happen, but the compensation package has shrunk.
Also, there is real value in not having to come up with new food to eat.
> Losing access to the free food is effectively the same as taking a pay cut
Except now you have the choice of living anywhere you think the cost of living makes sense for you, which more than makes up for this.
> a reasonable way for the business to save money right now
And so is not having to worry about office space, leases, parking, security, and the cost of logistics of running an office. WFH has the ability both save companies money and put more money in workers pockets.
Do you have any examples of major companies that are remote that aren't scaling their remote pay with the COL where the employee is located? Every single instance I've seen of companies announcing "we support remote" has had in small print "we will not pay you SV salaries if you live in the mid-west", so the cost-of-living argument doesn't really win anything as your pay scales with it.
My understanding, is that even with COL adjustment most people are actually saving just as much money after expenses as they did on the SV salary. Granted it's just anecdotal (and mostly from HN).
> > Losing access to the free food is effectively the same as taking a pay cut
> Except now you have the choice of living anywhere you think the cost of living makes sense for you, which more than makes up for this.
We were able to basically just put one car in storage. Car insurance, gas and parking alone are saving me like $650/mo. That alone would be enough for me to go buy a fresh fruit platter every workday to pick through and throw the leftovers out and still come out ahead.
> I'm not trying to be facetious - you seriously can't provide your own meals and snacks working from home?
Of course I can but I just don't want to. This isn't about being cheap or lazy (although I'm guilty of both to varying degrees). The biggest benefit of having a catered office is the lack of having to make a decision about what to eat. I'll just eat what they're serving that day.
I'm a big believer in decision fatigue [1]. Don't make me make decisions about things I don't care about and what I have for lunch is one of those. For years I worked in offices where I either had to bring in my own lunch (never gonna happen) or I had to go out and buy it. I'm fine with the cost of it. I'm not fine with choosing where to go and what to order when I get there. I'll end up finding something I like and just getting it every day until I get sick of it because that's let cognitive load than having something different every day.
That's why I like a catered office.
> Or you could move to a cheaper location and have a nice home office.
I live in NYC because I want to live in NYC. I chose the job because it's in NYC where I wanted to live. On a side note, I think this is the fundamental difference with the Bay Area. hardly anyone wants to live in the Bay Area. They want to work for [Google|FB|Apple|...] and to do that they need to live in the Bay Area. Most other places people have decided they want to live there and then look for work options.
So yeah, I could buy a big house Georgia but... why would I want to?
>They want to work for [Google|FB|Apple|...] and to do that they need to live in the Bay Area.
This doesn't check out. All of those companies have large offices elsewhere. I agree with your take that you work in NYC because you want to live in NYC so that's where you work but your bias is showing that you can't consider that people feel similarly about the Bay Area.
As one data point, I chose San Francisco when I had the guaranteed option to work for the same exact company with proportional pay (stupid high relatively speaking) in my hometown. People with options move where their quality of life is maximized -- that's the beauty of having options.
In my experience it's been extremely competitive to get a spot in the non Bay Area offices within FAANG. The New York and Seattle offices are generally highly sought after, and there are typically many, many less teams operating outside the Bay Area. You don't exactly get to choose, especially coming into a more junior position.
I think it's a pure numbers game. Smaller offices will have fewer open positions so there will be relatively more flow to the big offices and HQ. There also needs to be critical mass for a team to develop in a new location so you can't just be the first person on a team for a product that's centered somewhere else unless you're a very senior person. It's a bit less flexible and expansion tends to happen in waves.
It doesn't make NYC sound very appealing if working from your home in NYC is hellish.
Working from my home in the Bay is actually quite nice. The best part is getting an hour of my day back because I don't have to commute to work. That 1 hour commute probably added more stress to my day than any other hour.
I love my home in SF and have been deeply enjoying the COVID-induced work from home life. Many people don't invest in making their home comfortable and enjoyable to be in and it shows when it comes to these types of conversations.
This is a bad take. SF didn't have any tech industry before the last decade, and yet still had the second highest population density. Majority of people live in SF and Bay Area, because they want to live there
Also, can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN generally? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261569 is another example. We're not here to cross-examine each other or make each other look bad. We're here for curious conversation and to learn.
Take it easy. He brings up a valid point about decision fatigue and the reason why these perks became popular. It's not that people making $100,000s can't make these decisions or that they can't afford paying for lunch -- it's just an extra thing that they don't have to worry about when working in a centralized location. I think it's a weak argument for preventing remote work but it is a valid one.
Agreed and will further observe that cletus isn't even trying to prevent remote work. At most they're saying that it's not something they're interested in doing permanently.
What difference does it make if we're comparing apples to apples? I don't think a company that offers free lunch deciding whether to go fully remote or not has any effect on another that doesn't offer free lunch. Privilege or not doesn't make my opinion any more or less invalid.
My point is that "decision fatigue" is not a valid point to begin with since most people don't deal with such issues therefore it's not really relevant in the grand schemes of remote-first discussions.
It does when talking about companies whose offices provide perks that potentially improve quality of life, productivity, happiness, etc. The decision between working at home and working in an empty warehouse is different than home and the brand new offices of companies like Stripe, Dropbox, and many others.
> I'm not trying to be facetious - you seriously can't provide your own meals and snacks working from home?
for me, at least, it's about the contact with other people and the talk during the lunch break. face to face human contact. i honestly can not comprehend how can people wish to be isolated... but maybe it's something different with me.
> it's about the contact with other people and the talk during the lunch break. face to face human contact. i honestly can not comprehend how can people wish to be isolated... but maybe it's something different with me.
Between meetings and misc. things that come up I had human contact all day. Lunch was the one time I could have to myself.
I’ve seen this take a lot but it’s missing a really important point. We’re discussing the trend towards WFH. If it continues suddenly your partner/housemates/friends will all be WFH and you can have lunch or work with them as opposed to the people who happen to be employed with you.
I think it depends if you're extroverted or introverted. For introverts being bombarded with endless phsyical contact on a daily basis is draining. Add a nasty commute to that and well, you come home dead beat after work.
When I get up from my desk and walk to the kitchen, I have to open the fridge and decide what to eat. In contrast, when I was visiting on-site at the office, each day's lunch was pre-planned by someone other than me, made by someone other than me, and all I needed to do was walk up and add food to a plate. Not having to expend much thinking on food was such a luxury, even if it didn't also have the benefit of chatting with coworkers.
you’re assuming that people can work in libraries, cafes and other places. these places are barely ever conducive to jobs that might require you to hop on a call at a moments notice (which is far more common when in remote) or handle sensitive data.
moving to a cheaper location also usually means giving up a lot of things that urban life comes with as well. you cant expect that everyone is going to be happy with that decision
I think most companies already have workers who do work from home, even if they're not remote friendly. So most corporations already have secure email / vpn / firewalls etc etc if data security is crucial.
As for tech companies, don't we all push commits from home every now and then? it's already been happening for years.
I'm a pretty big foodie and love going to restaurants and trying new things.
That said, I've had catered lunches at Google when visiting friends, and that's way better than eating gum restaurants every day.
The decision fatigue is real. But also, there are relatively few options that are genuinely good in the area, especially if you're trying to eat somewhat healthy. You get very bored after a while. Lunches provided by an in house chef are very good, tend to be healthier, and more interesting. I think - like I said, I mostly ate a meal here and there.
(and if we're comparing to cooking at home, obviously that incurs greater time cost)
Not OP. I've been providing my own meals and snacks working from home (like I'd imagine most people are?), but the free food at work is usually better/more expensive than I'm willing to make for myself for any given lunch, and I'm not big on spending money on snacks. The free food + the social interaction + the increased productivity I get from being in an office all make working in an office most of the time way better.
Is it going to be a thing on HN now where the top thread for every announcement of a company embracing Remote Work will be from someone complaining about not liking Work-From-Home and 50+ replies discussing about "WFH vs office" or discussing their own personal preferences? I am starting to be astonished by the amount of supposedly-intelligent people who are completely missing the forest for the trees.
What we are witnessing might be a historical shift as big as Nixon re-opening with China, and the top comment is really complaining about some missing perks? How about start thinking of how many people who live in these big tech centers only because of their jobs and how many will just leave these cities once it is become accepted practice to work at a Canadian company while you live in the Caribbean? Or maybe start thinking that people who used to complain about H1B workers bringing the salary down now having to face competition from some random guy in Romania who can code circles around you and can accept a job at one quarter of your salary? Or how about we discuss the opportunities for startups that will come from this?
Also, start thinking if you are a VC and soon you will actually have to leave Sand Hill because no one will be crazy enough to move there to sleep on someone else's dishwasher hoping to make it big.
Personally, every announcement from an established company that is moving to a Remote-First (or Digital by Default, call it whatever you like) mentality is thrilling. Is anyone from Shopify here reading HN? I was already planning to apply for them but this announcement made me even more interested.
Yup I get frustrated at this too. Tectonic changes taking places but there is always 1 dickhead going "I don't like working from home" that seems to dominate the discussion.
I have a funny feeling the people that don't like working from home are the same dickheads in the office that everyone else hates working with.
I do not agree with the name calling but I do agree with your feeling the majority of people who want to return to the office are the same who cause a lot of disruptions.
Where my wife works there are two types of people who want to return to the office; the old school "we only trust you if we can see your butt in a seat" and those who need the social aspect of the office.
The first group I couldn't care less about. I hate the attitude that I am good enough to be employed but clearly not mature enough to be able to work without being monitored.
The second group are more interesting. Personally I mostly dislike the social aspect of the office. Sure it is fine during lunch but I hate the interruptions at my desk either directly (i.e. someone walking over to ask a question when an IM would be far better) or indirectly such as the conversations of others.
My hope moving forward is that working from home won't be seen as something "special" the few are "rewarded" with for a day or two a month but that it is a choice for each person without prejudice.
For those that want/need an office fine let them go in. But for those of us who function better working from home we can do that.
It doesn't have to be a binary option for companies moving forward of "our company is only work from home" but instead a mixture.
> now having to face competition from some random guy in Romania who can code circles around you and can accept a job at one quarter of your salary
This is true to some extent, but there are companies that pay well. Currently I work remotely in a country where the very top salaries for engineers are around $20K, and I make close to $80K.
Oh, hey! First of all, kudos for already having the career site reflecting the transition to "Digital by default". Just yesterday I was looking at the site and there was still different sections based on location.
My question is about the "Expression of Interest" positions that are listed. Are they used mostly as way to collect CVs from no-exact-match candidates, or could this be the channel for someone that, e.g, is working on an open source project that might align well with Shopify's interests?
If you prefer to answer by email, feel free to write me, lullis at google's mail.
"My company had to move to full remote during a self-isolation pandemic situation for the last two months, where I couldn't even go sit in a coffee shop when I wanted to.
Here are my new thoughts on the future of working from home...."
That the experience that many of us are having, where companies had to rush into supporting remote work by necessity, and where your home and personal life are affected greatly by factors other than not working in an office, is not necessarily a great indicator about whether the general idea of "working from home" is a good fit personally or professionally.
And all of the medium.com thinkpieces and "COVID made me realize I don't like remote work" comments are based on a an experience heavily colored by these other factors.
My person preference is having flexible work-from-home a couple of days per week. Often on those days I compensate by taking more walks, or going to a coffee shop for a snack and some time outside the house.
The last couple of months of working from home AND having additional societal restrictions, spouses and kids in the house, stores and restaurants closed, and limited social interaction outside of work aren't representative of what working remotely might be like during normal times and by choice.
Heck if you were a full time remote worker by planning, you might choose to life in a different place less constrained by the highway commute time to your office. Somewhere closer to walkable shops and restaurants, or on the other end of the spectrum somewhere with yard space where you can have a garden outside.
On the professional side, a company that mostly worked in the office that had to pivot and adapt to remote work in an emergency situation is not going to be the same procedurally or culturally as one that has been based around remote work from the beginning, or adapted to it long ago.
Edit: If it wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with your original point that the naysayer comments on every WFH related discussion are off track, repetitive, and lacking context.
Right, thank you! (It was clear even before your edit).
One interesting thing to observe is how different cultures are reacting to the pandemic.
In Europe, it feels that the memories of two world wars are still recent enough to make people understand these are extraordinary times, and that the best way to return to normalcy is by collective effort and making the fight against the virus a top priority. It is hard in the beginning, but people promptly change their behavior until the problem is solved or controlled. Only when the war is over is when people start trying to go out on the streets to reclaim their lives.
In Brazil and in the US (where I lived and have friends and family) it seems they can not accept the reality changing so rapidly in front of their eyes. Even today, when I have my older relatives learning about a friend or acquaintance of theirs getting sick or dying, their reaction is "They were in the risk group/not taking care of themselves/did not take magical-pill-X". They are struggling so much to accept the risks and want so much to return immediately to having some sense of normalcy that in the end they are probably gonna end up worse than the Europeans - a lot of lives lost and still no true recovery.
Because Shopify is announcing they are going Remote First. Remote Work is NOT the same as Work-from-Home. Work-from-Home assumes that the employees still live close the companies headquarters and occasionally go to the office. Remote-first companies DO NOT have headquarters. Your office is anywhere you'd like it to be (it could be at your home, but it could be any other communal space if you prefer so)
I can see why it happens though. Imagine you are somebody who thrives in an office environment, perhaps your social and political skills are stronger than your technical ability. Then you may well feel threatened by these sort of changes. We aren't just talking about a change of environment but a much larger shift in the types of people companies will be valuing.
As an introvert who has had to deal with working with extroverts I'd be lying if I wasn't feeling a little schadenfreude right now.
Remote-first is the future. I'm not sure why anyone would be against it. No one is forcing you to work from home. From a compliance and operations perspective a remote-first company is effectively forced to do a lot of things many companies do not or will not undertake:
- Make meetings accessible to everyone
- Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the adventurous types)
The main "downsides" of working from home (which is not necessarily remote-first) - not seeing your colleagues in person, life <-> work separation, etc. will be a new industry that will end up resolving itself. I've seen office space costs. It would be cheaper to fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party than to maintain an office space sized for the same amount of people by an order of magnitude in a large, popular city (NYC office space is approximately ~$100/sqft/month - a desk sized for two monitors, a keyboard and writing space is about 2 x 4 minimum, so 8sqft, or $800/month just for a single person in a nice space)
In other words, being forced to do anything - whether that was working from home or from an office - is an oppressive activity. Remote-first simply gives back that freedom of choice. Companies can maintain more minimalist offices for those who insist, and coworking spaces will grow for those who don't like the office and want separation, and finally those who have the space in their homes can work from home.
I'd be curious to hear a good argument against all organizations that can be remote-first being remote-first.
(I posted this in another thread, but it's also relevant here)
As a new grad, I'm terrified of a transition where WFH is the default. I recognize that I still have a lot to learn, and that I can't do it all on my own. Casual interactions with coworkers and the ability to passively absorb new information in the workplace are essential for entry-level employees like me.
Plus, personally, I find the social aspect of work to be crucial to my mental well-being. I feel a stronger sense of purpose when I can see that the people around me are all invested in the same project I'm working on.
While your feelings are valid and I too would feel terrified to begin WFH as a new grad, I have faith many companies establishing good remote first working cultures, especially organizations that hold their engineering organizations in high-regard.
Having worked full time remotely before this pandemic, I struggled with the social aspects and being left out of casual conversation and left for a job with a dedicated office space. Now that I find myself again working remotely, but with a forced remote-first attitude, I prefer it. It's a different ballgame when all workers are working remotely.
i feel you. it's definitely easier to absorb things when your coworkers are right next to you, more so if you're new on the job or new to the industry as a whole.
but, if you do find yourself accepting a remote position, perhaps renting a coworking space would mitigate that downside a little? i've never used one, because i've never worked remote before now, but i do see the appeal.
I would argue that absorbing new information would be much easier in a remote-first environment (such meandering conversations would be available for everyone to see, not just the participants of a given conversation). The rest of what you said is not unique to new-grads in any way. Also, a remote-first company could still have an office - albeit reduced. If all your friends were at remote-first companies wouldn't you have a better time working in a coworking space with your friends?
In any case, remote-first doesn't mean WFH-only in any case, so you could just go into the office, no?
New grads, almost by definition, have absorbed whatever they can from reading, the internet, and education; what they need is attention. How to interact in a professional environment; the details of the company, industry and role; the office politics... all are "unknown unknowns" to a new grad. I learned about them from mentorship, 1:1 conversations, and by reading the body language of people around me. It would've been a LOT harder to do that over Zoom...
(That said, anyone smart enough to be concerned about it is also probably smart enough to seek out what they don't know so I'm sure the author of the parent comment will be fine.)
I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. When I was a new-grad (6 years or so ago now), I really appreciated being part of a really excellent work culture and environment, and built a lot of strong relationships and friendships that I hold to the current day!
The impact of these kinds of things seems to get lost in the convenience of working from home / remotely. Don't get me wrong, I like working remotely, but only for 2 days a week at most. Now that I've been forced to transition to full work from home for the last 3 months, it's been a much poorer experience overall and has severely hindered or completely stalled my relationships with pretty much all of my coworkers, despite frequent zoom meetings and the like.
These are also former coworkers that I've joined at other companies because we like working together. I really believe that this kind of relationship is impossible to build if you're remote-first.
One big issue is that more experienced employees will be the ones to choose work-from-home as their default, while the newer employees seeking to learn the ropes will opt to come to the office.
Perhaps a solution is to somehow formalize some of these implicit knowledge transfer mechanisms in the workplace. Explicitly assign mentors to new employees, etc.. But I just don't see how it could possibly compare to a normal working environment if I have to do it all from home.
Some other complications:
> A lot of the benefit of in-person work is asymmetric (I benefit more from casual conversations with my manager than he does).
> I learn a lot by observing my coworkers interact. Remote work makes this very difficult, because it's not really possible to "overhear" workplace conversations, or to casually drop in on water-cooler chat. It's also not really possible to have brief side conversations in a team-wide zoom call, which is one valuable aspect of in-person communication.
> New grads tend to live in small apartments rather than a house in the suburbs with a spacious home office. I started my first full-time job remotely this week and I'm working from my dining table. Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day.
Again remote first does not mean offices do not exist. Once you start working you’ll see that there’s already a lot of collaboration over the internet. It’s nothing like school
For one, I can ask my coworkers to keep the noise down and they will politely oblige. Offices have pros and cons. My stance is that the pros outweigh the cons enough that we shouldn't eliminate offices entirely.
I can be, and am, pro-office but anti-open-office. I would much prefer an open office to 100%-remote work.
I understand that stance, but the current trend in tech companies, at least in the Bay Area, has been almost exclusively open offices. Saves money for mgmt. and so forth. Perhaps with WFH or at least mixed-WFH policies, with fewer people in the office there could be more available space so that there can be more individual offices?
At any rate, I brought it up because the fix for both noisy neighbors at home or in an open office is the same pat answer: get noise-cancellation headphones.
Because nonverbal communication is very important. There is a reason why people have to put /s on some posts [to indicate sarcasm]. In some ways emoji/gifs try to fill that niche, but I don’t think they are a sufficient replacement.
Take an extreme example: consultants, in order to be colocated, routinely travel ~8 hours twice a week AND convince their clients to pay an extra ~2k/person/week. Why? Shouldn't firms that don't require travel have outcompeted firms that do, if it's such a costly activity? why has the industry standardized on crazy levels of travel?
(1) Personal relationships & trust - it's very, very hard to build strong personal relationships without face-to-face contact. Impact often requires trust that's hard(er) to build remotely.
(2) Casual serendipity - New projects (innovation) are hard to identify in a vacuum. It's the lunch-conversation "huh, maybe that could work" that often drives impactful change. MUCH harder to do that remotely.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323798104578455...
(3) Fewer meetings - if every interaction of substance (read: not an easy slack message) has to be a scheduled, there are a lot more meetings. Admittedly, this is just my experience, but I've seen it more than once.
Note that all of these are long-term trends. Maybe they get resolved as people get used to working remotely and new patterns emerge. But at least for me, this is why I wouldn't think most companies should go remote.
Consultants are forced to travel primarily for marketing value rather than for productive value.
Yes, you want to travel to meet your client in person, maybe to do some big planning/milestones, but for every day work, the consultants are in person to give the clients the perception that their money is being put to good use. This is especially important as the top consulting companies hire undergrads fresh out of school (who don't know anything except how to put in the hours and do powerpoints/excel) and bill them out for several hundred dollars an hour.
Yes, definitely some marketing there too. But there's a reason that even ex-consultants (who, presumably, would be "in on the secret" if it were empty marketing) pay for THEIR consultants to travel too.
I may be wrong about the reasons, but I still believe the example of consulting - and entire industry built around paying a high cost to colocate - suggests a value to colocation.
Imagine being the only employee on the team who wants to work in the office. That could be a problem. You’re young, maybe just out of college, and moving to a city hoping to form new connections with people. Yet, everyone’s now working from home. You don’t have any real opportunity to build relationships with your coworkers. Work becomes a much more dreary experience at that point. No one to each lunch with. No interpersonal culture. You’re just there to output a product and collect a paycheck.
It’s hard for many of us to say we need other people, especially when you compare it to all the confidence benefits of working from home, but it’s absolutely true. Being alone for long periods of time really really sucks (that’s what I’m going through).
Maybe we’ll see a rise in social clubs that will revitalize everyone’s social lives. But even with that, most people who are working remotely are going to be alone for 8+ hours per day.
I live in a tiny, crappy, pre-war apartment that gets cold in the wintertime, next to loud, obnoxious neighbors, and I prefer working at my company’s spacious, modern Manhattan office.
But presumably you live in that apartment because you needed to be within commuting distance of the Manhattan office? If you don't need to be so close to Manhattan I would guess (not really knowing anything about your situation) that you could afford a mansion in a town or village instead.
Some people like living in big cities, and are ok trading off a bigger living space to make that happen. I love being able to walk out to a bunch of different restaurants, having easy access to entertainment venues, etc. The idea of having a giant house in the middle of nowhere has very little appeal to me. This is especially common for younger people and those with no kids.
There's a whole world between big city and the middle of nowhere. You can live in a small town with restaurants, culture, coffee-shops, a theatre, social life.
I suspect if WFH becomes the norm, then people will flock to big cities even more, because suddenly you live in a massive suburban house but can go days without ever seeing a new face.
At least when you had a central office there was a place where you would meet some people and be in the middle of some sort of hustle and bustle.
Big cities might become even more attractive in a WFH future .
Don't you have towns and villages? Like a sub-urban area but only a few miles across and then you have shops and community in the middle within a walkable distance? I live in a town and I work from home but there's a coffee shop, a sandwich bar, a pub, a little club, a theatre, a gym, and I meet people from the community here. I'm married but I'm sure people date here as well. I thought 'small town America' was a big part of the culture?
If you don’t need to be near Manhattan you don’t need to live there. Or maybe your loud neighbors won’t need to live there. Ceteris paribus working from home kinda sucks, but if you think about how many systems will change, I think it’s gonna get better.
I used to do something similar when I had to go into an office. Then I started working from home and moved to a quiet neighborhood with a high walkability and bikeablility score (sadly, our transit score is still terrible, I wish I could have gotten all three; this according to https://www.walkscore.com/). I wouldn't have had this option if I had to live near the office.
The whole argument starts with a definition of what "work" is, obviously.
For people that use a particle accelerator or make scrambled eggs work from home is nonsensical.
For people who produce computer code as their entire work output and rely on very sophisticated digital collaboration tools already work from home is mostly interchangeable with work from an office.
And then there's a really vast grey area in between. What about lawyers, or architects, or film and television executives, or whatever else you can imagine?
The answer is that it depends. But, even limiting ourselves to the subset of work where it's even plausible that it could all be distributed there are some important things to note:
A pretty relevant data point is that when there has been a genuine choice between fully remote and mostly in offices the mostly in offices approach was way more popular. To the point where Silicon Valley real estate spiraled out of control, or literally everyone with deep knowledge of cutting edge electronics manufacturing ended up in the Shenzhen region.
In any another context we'd call that a "market" and say pretty definitively that the invisible hand of that market decided that this is a more effective way to build companies.
It seems we're going to get another experiment, whereby many companies begin the experiment all over again. Perhaps something has changed, perhaps virtual technology has advanced to where this makes more sense. Perhaps the culture is at a tipping point.
Or, perhaps there's some advantage to people all being in the same place that will make companies that do it outcompete companies that don't.
It's quite plausible that this is what the market will decide, in the future. It's also a really important data point to note that it is not, in fact, what the market had decided up until now.
Your estimates are even a bit low - we don't have a grid and drop employees in from above.
With each 8 s.f., there is additional overhead for hallways (minimum width prescribed by ADA in the United States), bathrooms, and other necessary fixtures. If you counted everything in an office, it's probably at least 25% higher than that.
It turns having an an office space into a gig like economy where the burden of maintaining the benefits of an office space is on the worker. A possible result from this would be having an actual company office in a desirable location to work from turning (if it isn’t already) into a perk.
So all of the negatives of working at an office (distractions, commute, etc) with none of the perks (free food, good tech, access to coworkers). I enjoy the office as a perk (with wfh an as needed thing rather than a regular thing) and consider it part of my comp. I'd would want a substantial raise if Im going to be expected to outfit space on my own to serve the same purpose.
One of the biggest challenges with Remote-first are Tax and Compliance issues. In the US for example, the moment you have out of state employees even if within US, you need to do a lot more paperwork in terms of taxes, payroll etc. How will we handle for example Workers Comp. A lot of questions need to be answered.
Also, Remote domestic or Remote International ? That changes things drastically as well.
How will local governments adjust for loss of tax base as it is likely real estate values for office properties will drop and in turn the cascade effect on businesses which serve them; from restaurants to small services.
Companies that own their own head quarters and other facilities may be less willing to have people work from home. Some companies put a lot of pride in their head quarters and other facilities.
How many companies who do swing to this type of work will expect reduction in salaries as compensation? Would you trade a percentage of your salary for the guarantee of working from home? How many days would you be willing to meet at a central site or would they even be a thing?
Personal experience, it took till COVID19 for where I work to make quarterly meetings available to those who are remote. For the most part they have done pretty well in this regard to even offering streaming of past events and presentations normally done by phone to using survey monkey to gather questions to be addressed.
> fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party
Please don't! I love working remotely; but I don't want to travel for work. I don't need a party. I don't need a fancy offsite. I don't want to spend a week with colleagues in some ridiculous tropical destination.
I want to quietly work from home, deliver quality work, get paid for it, and enjoy my life. Being forced to travel is the opposite of enjoying life.
This was my stance before the era of COVID-19... Now, I'm definitely not boarding any kind of airplanes.
I really hope this doesn't become a bigger trend. Shopify was a company I was seriously considering working at in the future, but this would probably disqualify them. Working from home once a week sounds great to me, but doing it full time would drive me insane. Virtual meetings are awful for me, and you miss out on so much of the discussion that happens outside of the meeting - I think most of the important discussions I have with people are informal, either walking to or from meetings or just sitting in the office and talking for a few minutes. Communicating over video is also a lot harder for me since you miss out on a lot of the nonverbal cues that come across a lot better (and with lower latency) in person.
Outside of just being harder to communicate virtually, I really need the change of scenery and social interaction that comes with an office. Sure you can get that by joining different social groups outside of work, but that requires lots of intentional effort, and I actually enjoy hanging out at work and going to lunch with my coworkers. And the office has lots of perks like snacks and meals which can't be easily replicated at home (I mean I don't mind cooking, but I get much better lunches at work than the sandwich I would make for myself). I can't think of a working situation much better than going to an office where I have all of the food I need, a properly set up workstation, and coworkers I am able to talk to in person and go to lunch/dinner/social activities with. To me that is far better than sitting in my home alone all day (and I don't even have kids, which would be a whole other set of distractions).
I really couldn't disagree more. While I understand the desire to work with your coworkers in person, the benefits of working from home are huge for me.
No commuting, which on its own is reason enough for WFH since it's such a massive waste of time. Commuting would add an extra 10 hours to my workweek, and I don't get paid for it. Add in things like control over your own workspace, no "open office" nonsense, access to your own kitchen/bathroom, together all outweighs the benefits of working from the office.
The ideal situation for me would be WFH by default, with the option to work from an office if you want to or for specific situations.
I think that is totally reasonable - for me the benefits of WFH don't outweigh the cost but for a significant percentage of developers I'm sure they do. I think where you get problems is cases where a company only has a minority of people WFH, or working in an office. Whenever you have a team that is primarily in an office, with only a couple of people remote, the people working remotely seem to miss out on a lot of important discussions and don't really feel as much a part of the team, at least in my experience. Ideally you would have both types of work fully supported, Stripe having their next engineering hub be remote [0] sounds like a good compromise to me. I'm interested in knowing how managers and PM's find working from home, to me it seems like being in management would magnify the problems you have with working remotely, but I've never been a manager so I don't really know.
Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH. Not always of course, but chores like a quick grocery trip, laundry, cleaning, errands in your immediate neighborhood no longer crowd your weekend.
I don't want this to come across as overly harsh. But a helpful rule of thumb to understand what life is like after having kids, is: there is no free time. None! It's like being in the military, where you wake up at 6am, shower until 6:30am, do calisthenics until 9:30am... and so on, with every single hour occupied, until bedtime, promptly at 9:00pm.
If you tell a person like that 'just watch a movie during your free time,' they'll look at you blankly and say, 'I don't have free time, not on my schedule.'
Why are things so different? Because not only do you have another person(s) making messes who do like 0% of the cleanup, they require much more care than adults. So free time trends to 0%. There's no 'weekend' in the sense of no work (there's always housework), in a sense there's no 'after work.' There's only work, as far as the eye can see.
So for example, with commuting, I don't have enough time to do housecleaning, so the house stays in a permanent state of ugly messiness. Without it, I can apply that time to cleaning, so it becomes only moderately, to slightly, messy. There's no big block of free time - nowhere - where I can do stuff to bring back the time that's lost by commuting.
> Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH
I am saying:
> If my commute time is removed, some amount of necessary chores cannot get done. I can't do chores in any time other than the commute time. There is no real 'weekend' or 'after work' time, when I can do them 'later'.
All time is accounted for, and removing time necessarily knocks some items (like 'morning/midday rooms cleaning') off the list permanently.
I'm now left even more confused. Are you saying that you do a certain number of chores during your commute, and that you wouldn't be able to do these chores if the commute time was removed?
There is an hour of my morning and night, 2 hours a day, which I am calling 'commute time.'
I can commute during 'commute time'.
Or I can WFH and stay at home during 'commute time'.
If I don't commute, I can do chores during that time.
If I do commute, those chores are never done, and are permanently knocked off the to-do list. The house is just that much messier as a result.
I can clean during the weekend, but I would have cleaned during the weekend anyway.
During the week, the house looks trashed, because there isn't enough time for chores as it is; the time that is available will instead go to even higher-priority chores, like washing dishes and clothes.
Basically if 'commute time' goes towards trekking to the office and back, it comes out of the chore time budget, meaning a really, really messy house during the week.
I will just point out, in closing: 2 hours a day is a really big amount of time to subtract out of the time budget. It can't be recovered.
Even if I don't play games and don't do anything 'fun' - I don't, incidentally - there's no compensating for that loss.
Just to clarify for you because you're not getting the point:
People are getting confused because your reply is structured like you disagree with him, because your comment is written like a rebuttal and your tone is derisive.
However, in your original reply, you're not disagreeing with the above commenter. You're agreeing with them, and ALSO, you take issue with another small thing they mentioned, the comment about how this person would do the cleaning on the weekend.
---------------------------
To your original point I say this- lots of parents have free time. My mother had hobbies in her free time. My aunt has hobbies has hobbies in her free time. I'm sorry you don't, but the fact that you don't does not mean much about young people that do.
Wait a sec, who takes care of your kid when you are away? Most ppl with kids would pay for day cares or they have school as well. I’m not understanding how your day can be occupied unless the kid is 0-1.
This is a recipe for disaster, at least in my experience, chores pile up and before you know it's 4pm and you still short on hours worked/output emitted..
Not in my experience. I'm not saying disappear from work for 3 hours to clean the whole house.
When I'm in the office, I often take breaks - 20-30 mins. Sometimes a longer walk during lunch time. I'm simply doing the same here but instead of being on my phone I'm maybe doing a quick vacuum sweep, trip to the bodega for some hand soap, or dropping off my laundry somewhere.
I do have friends that work for companies that expect them to be "online" all the time so this may not work for them.
Do you have so many chores that you spend every day until 4pm doing them? Of course not. Because when you worked at an office, you also did not spend that much time on them. I love to mix chores with work, because your mind gets a break and you're still doing something useful. And most of the time, in the back of your head you're unconsciously still solving the problem that you were working on. So when you get back at your keyboard, you can continue right away. How can anyone not like this enormous productivity boost?
I think that working from home will stay and that some kind of work discipline will be a skill people are just required to have. You know, like being able to communicate professionally and to keep promises.
I actually can't believe how many people are crying because they miss talking with their coworkers. Sounds to me like they're the office distractions ruining everyone else's productivity.
You may like your office conversations, I like not having to commute to work, not being distracted, and making my work space mine.
Try picking up a phone or hop on Slack instead of attempting to sabotage WFH because you're a social butterfly.
I agree completely, but wanted to emphasize something regarding: "and you miss out on so much of the discussion that happens outside of the meeting."
IMHO, ALL of the chat services make this problem worse, not better. None of them let you easily and fluidly say "I'm interested in this topic for the next few days" or whatever. They hide, rather than render discoverable, important discussions, either (due to GUI structure pushing people to do it) threads moved to 1:1 chats or just lost in the sheer volume of text scroll.
The future of UI is bounded attention: "alert me for xxx _for the next { hour, next few days, this week, through next week, this month, for quarter, as long as ..., forever }" attention filtering. UI right now assumes that the doesn't change and that users actively correct it. But we aren't even at the point where that basic level of automation even exists.
I couldn't agree more. Remote meetings are useful, but I would quit if my company made it the default. I've done fully remote for a total of 3 years. I found it stifled communication and limited my ability to develop friendships and personal connections with the people I worked with.
Even as an introvert that enjoys my alone time, fully remote would be a deal breaker for me.
BUT I want the flexibility to WFH 3/5 days a week. I don't mind living within an hour and a half commute, and coming in 2 days a week. Going every day... painful.
In theory I could WFH before, but as things weren't really set up for that, I only did it once a week if that.
So in that regard, I welcome this kind of thing. If companies can work out the logistics.
The issue I see here is that because of that one day per week you will need to still be in commuting distance from the office which limits where you could live and increases your cost of living dramatically. In other words the company saves on office spaces but you still need to pay a premium to have an office at home.
Going full remote with trips to the office once per quarter for example allows you to live wherever you want. That's the way I see this working well in other companies. Remote first and once per quarter everyone gets together for a couple days.
Different tastes. With all due respect, for every guy like you who doesn't want to work there, there are 10 that do.
I understand that remote first doesn't work for everyone, nothing works for everyone.
You are quite delusional if you think the ratio is 10:1 in favor of WFH. One thing that the recent lockdown and forced WFH experiment has revealed is that while people are strongly in favor of flexibly WFH the ratio is closer to 10:1 against having no office at all.
The current situation isn't a good barometer for WFH for two reasons:
- Companies that previously laughed at the idea of WFH were forced to implement it without much time to prepare. Their technology, culture, and processes are bad.
- We're in a pandemic, so I can't go hang with my friends after 5pm at a bar or do any outside hobbies. This slight cabin fever is making people dislike WFH which is ironic because usually WFH means you have more time to go outside and do fun things.
You might like it or not but that's the direction the tech world is going. A lot of people hating WFH hate it because they always worked in an office and don't want to change what they are used to.
In 10 years you will have a whole new generation of engineers that always worked from home and by then I would be surprised if the ratio is only 1:10.
As another comment mentioned, this current pandemic makes you hate a lot of aspect of life, regardless if you worked from home or from the office.
The world is moving in that direction. Adapt or become extinct.
Do you really think that with the world being more connected than ever, so many collaboration tools being created over the last years and VR evolving non stop, the office is still going to be a thing ?
I would be very surprised if in 50 years the concept of an office even exists anymore.
Im in a smaller company of a few hundred employees. We had the option to go back to the office this week. Exactly 3 people are in the office, the same 3 who have remained at the office the entire time. Everyone else chose WFH until it is mandatory to go back to the office.
I don't know what the preference is for the general developers public; obviously someone who is 40 with 2 kids and lives in Ohio isn't the same as someone who is 23 and lives in SF.
What I do mean, for a company like Shopify, they can do what they want. Tons of people will want to work there, whether they are 40 or 23.
yeah, I like having the option to WFH, but I definitely don't think I can WFH permanently. At least, not right now. If a person is living in an urban city, I doubt they have space to have a proper WFH setup to begin with. I had to move my desk from my bedroom to my living room, which is fine when everyone is social distancing, but I definitely don't have space it for under normal circumstances.
It's really not fair to describe the current situation as a "forced WFH experiment". We're trying to work and be even remotely productive during an unprecedented global pandemic, and also happen to be working from home.
Sure, everyone has different preferences, which is why I think it would be ideal to both have a substantial amount of people working in the office full time, and also have a substantial amount of people working remotely full time. From the tweets I have seen, it does not seem like this will be the case at Shopify, since they said "The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup."
Unfortunately, this creates two classes of workers, with in office workers being better politically connected and preferred over remote workers who are treated akin to contractors.
I'm biased as a remote worker; I want more orgs going remote so there are more jobs to choose from, and commutes are soul sucking. If you want an office, rent a coworking space near home (with an employer picking up the tab, with a reasonable ~$300-500/month coworking stipend). A local library near me offers one for free, coffee, desk, wifi, printers, and free parking included.
My office (small site within a big company) sent out a survey
about working from home.
The majority responded that they didn't want to WFH. There was a question that had several options for which composition of WFH vs WFO people wanted in the new normal. Only 25% of people picked an answer where they would WFH more often than they'd WFO.
No, but I would do a half hour commute for it. For some people I'm sure remote works great, but it's not for me, and I am fine with paying higher rents in order to live close to the office and have a short commute.
Am I the only one who enjoys my commute? To be fair, I bike or take the bus in the winter, but I listen to audiobooks, podcasts, music, and get a good amount of exercise.
I certainly don't. The bus I was taking was a double-long that ran every 3 minutes and I'd still end up standing outside in the rain while a half dozen buses went past before I could get on one because they were all full. And once you get on, you're on a bus that's ass-to-crotch packed for an hour. And that's never mind the actual behaviour of the other people on the bus.
And this was after I modified my work hours to take the bus during less-peak time.
So now I drive. It's about the same time, but in mostly stop and go traffic. I can listen to podcasts and don't have people literally sitting on top of me, but I also have to deal with being constantly hyper-vigilant because (1) people drive like fuckwads and (2) traffic patterns in a lot of places are really screwed up and being in the wrong lane at the wrong time can wind up easily adding 30% to your commute time and (3) the cyclists have this bad habit of trying to weave through moving traffic instead of using the bike lanes and following the traffic signals and then physically assaulting you if you don't notice them and give way.
I tolerate it. BART is hit or miss. Sometimes it's nice, and sometimes it's hella crowded, and there are those assholes who blast their music without headphones. I do like my reading time, though.
I got a new job right before the pandemic, with a big enough prior notice that pushed my first day into the pandemic. It may be related to the fact that the company I now work for wasn't doing any remote work before, but it now feels so impersonal working. In an office I can easily chit chat, get to know my coworkers, but remotely it seems so hard. I could see it happening more easily in the kind of place that has a casual channel on Slack, but most workplace doesn't push that kind of things. I may try to push some kind of virtual 5@7.
I would personally trust Shopify to do it right, to allow that kind of social interaction remotely.
It's possible there will be a shift from offices dedicated to a certain company to offices where anyone can pop in. You still get the social experience, although you do lose the ability to have in-person meetings with your actual coworkers. The upside is that people get more freedom.
Yup. It's "digital by default" not "digital at all costs".
Seems they'll keep their current offices but reformated as spaces for people that really want to work amongst each other physically, instead of expecting the majority of workers to come in every day.
Well just like Open office plans became trend without anyone asking employees working in them. If permanently working from home or away from office becomes trend it will be only because people who control payments for office real estate decided that way.
The people who like to work in offices will still work in offices. There will be more of them, they will be smaller, and they will be wherever their employees want to live. Some will be official, and some will be coworking spaces.
Yeah, I concentrate a lot better at an office. I hate being in my home all day every day. The little distractions are what make me love a job, some of my best memories are the random interactions and happenings with my coworkers
People are going to change their tune once the paycuts start coming. There is no reason to pay SF money to someone living in the Midwest. $80k a year is comfortable most places. I hope remote first people like the suburbs and country because there is no reason to live in the city with no office.
The real truth though is most people are far less productive remote because it requires proactive communication and self discipline that just don’t appear because now you are working remotely.
This is to virtue signal and get out of expensive real estate in Civic Center SF in Twitter’s case. That area is a zombie apocalypse.
If you are fully remote then anyone in the world can do your job. Supply goes up prices go down. I bet execs will get paid the same though.
Right now, there is _zero_ reason for companies not to announce permanent work from home. It gets them positive attention and makes them part of the buzz. They are already paying the comp they are paying.
Putting aside the fact that these policies can change on a dime (it's really "permantnet work from home _for now_"), what's really crazy is that people are seriously planning to take companies at their word and are considering leaving the Bay Area and are assuming they are taking their Bay Area comp with them.
Ok, cases:
1. company does NOT to geo-based adjustment to any current employee, but DOES use adjusted salaries for new ones (in other words, path-dependent compensation). Two people, same job, different compensation. This is not that unusual in other industries but can be a source of serious resentment. Suppose a bay area employee moves to India..
2. company uses relocated employees to establish new comp packages for those geos - this will only go so far. many cases will be employees moving to less expensive areas.
3. company sets a "standard" compensation package world-wide that everyone gets - this is impossible to really execute on, or it will be very low relative to peer companies.
and so on. Employees who end up in a case 1 situation will find that after AVERAGE_TENURE they go looking for a new job and end up geo-adjusted. From a company perspective, this is a no-lose golden handcuffs situation and anyway the problem resolves itself quickly.
I tend to believe companies will walk this back as soon as covid-19 dies down, if not right away then as part of executive transitions where someone decides to "transform the business." But in the end it makes no difference - the long term trajectory, if it sticks around, is probably case (1) or some blend of (1) and (2). For developed nation engineers, case (3) is dire, the end of the career.
My office (small site within a big company) sent out a survey
about working from home.
The majority responded that they didn't want to WFH. There was a question that had several options for which composition of WFH vs WFO people wanted in the new normal. Only 25% of people picked an answer where they would WFH more often than they'd WFO.
> it requires proactive communication and self discipline that just don’t appear because now you are working remotely.
My experience has been that people that struggle with these things are just as unproductive in an office, they just hide it better.
By far the most productive teams I've been on as far as getting work done are remote teams. When you're remote all that matters at the end of the week is how much stuff you can concretely show you have accomplished.
In an office you can get credit for doing nothing very easily.
So yea remote work is going to be rough for people that are currently using office culture to hide, and in some offices that is a very large number of people.
I've worked from home for about 15 years. I have some friends that work from home. My brother does too.
The answer to this really depends upon the person. I've worked from home since I graduated from college, and initially I would eat, sleep, work, and play games all in the same room, because I had roommates. And I was fine with it.
Some people can't do that. Some people need a dedicated workspace. Some people need to get dressed. My brother works from home, and he still wears a tie everyday. Because that's what he needs to do to get into "work mode".
I'm not saying any of this will work for you. But just wanted to let you know that while this is a thing for some people, you still might be able to get that feeling when you work from home.
Salaries are what the market will bear (on both sides). If more companies are remote then first class remote engineers will be able to get more offers when they're on the market and thus will be able to command higher comp.
Separately, if you're undifferentiated then of course anyone will be able to do your job if you're colocated with headquarters or not. The trick to selling your time for more money is to differentiate yourself in a way that creates more value for the company hiring you. Your career is a business that rewards a continuous growth and sales process.
"If you are fully remote then anyone in the world can do your job. Supply goes up prices go down."
I work for an all-remote company and wages are based on the NY labour market. Anyone on the planet can apply sure, but I've not seen salaries reduce (if anything they're highly competitive outside of SF!). If you can get $150k and live wherever you want I wouldn't complain!
> I hope remote first people like the suburbs and country because there is no reason to live in the city with no office.
I feel like these kinds of blunt "no reason" statements are meaningless, just like saying "work from home sucks" or "work from home is always the best."
I live in a city and work from home, and I will continue to live in my city even if the entire industry goes to primarily work from home. There are a lot of reasons to live here, several centered on "driving sucks, according to techsupporter." I would hate to live in a suburb or out in the country, places where I've lived before and have moved away from.
This is my fear as well. Not only will I no longer have face-t-face interaction, and the break-up in my day that and office allows, but pay will probably decrease across the board.
Coming from a non-coastal state, I honestly do not understand the superiority complex a lot of coastal developers have. There are good developers everywhere, and the ones living in the southwest or the midwest are willing to do the same work for less money. But, you can be willing to bet the execs will receive a pay bump for their "cost-saving measures".
If anything it'd raise the wages for people in the low cost of living areas and eventually equalize out. You can get one person making $500k in SF (plus office costs) or hire 2 or 3 people making $165-250k/each in Suburban America with no office costs. Doubtful that people will go entirely offshore due to time-zone, quality and other cultural differences, we tried that in the early 2000s when everything went to India only to see it come right back. There's a ton of really good engineers who for one reason or another don't want to move to SF and work in Corporate Enterprise America instead. Those people are probably already at $130-150k+ in Corporate America but will job hop to Remote BigTech Company for $165k and more interesting work. Corporate America will have to compete and will raise wages. Meanwhile devs previously making $500k in SF will have to take a $275k gig as more work goes elsewhere, but rent costs should come down as well.
I have been telling my coworkers and friends for years that these salaries are not sustainable for 30 years and everyone called me a pessimist.
It's not hard to see that the "good times" and "gold rush" can't last forever. The fact people lied to themselves thinking it's permanent should teach them something about themselves.
Probably, but this is exactly what main street America has been dealing with for the past 40 years: buy a house close to your great job, but now your industry has gone elsewhere for cheaper labor and you're now underwater on your mortgage and even basic city services are going downhill.
I am curious about the sustainability of work from home for truly team-based work.
I get to develop features independently, so if I am given the spec, I have no need to speak to anyone for the rest of the day except for a couple messages with QA. For me, it is great.
But I am essentially a microservice with defined inputs and outputs. For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.
Anecdotally, while productivity seems to remain at a high level, a lot of that seems to be enabled by employees working more hours and being always available.
The things you're describing don't go away with a remote team. It's not like going remote means all your employees just never talk to eachother in favor of working independently. It just means you use technology to solve in-person problems rather than being in person.
I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
I think about (and struggle to value) point C often. The disruption can be very annoying but the knowledge transfer often has a huge multiplier attached to it. One person's small piece of knowledge can give an entire team major traction. This model also promotes tribal knowledge and weak documentation...which is acceptable for a small company, not so much for larger companies where people are spread out across geographies.
I wonder, is this a proxy for remote teams? Will large companies have an outsized advantage in this space? Or does the lower overhead favor small companies?
I think that it's just a fundamentally different way of thinking. Having a distributed team means you have to remove the "I'll just walk over and ask" mentality from everyone involved. You must resist the temptation to use slack as an alternative to in-person communication. Communication must be frequent, documented and public - someone else needs to be able to see the decisions you made.
But your description of (C) reflects a presumption of what I would call working independently. In many work cultures, and on many kinds of projects, that freedom is important and mostly unavailable in a culture where people have to stop to put on pants and hop on a call.
> Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
If you are the kind of person to think that way and spend most of your time working at your desk, your work is probably relatively independent.
I am thinking about communications people who normally spend most of the day in a boardroom or developers who also have a hand in requirement analysis.
Can you describe why you couldn't spend a day in a boardroom _virtually_? Or how developers involved in "requirement analysis" need to be in the same room?
It isn't impossible, just more difficult, mostly based on human factors.
Say you have developers who don't like confrontation. During an in-person requirement analysis, you might see their irritation in the in-person meeting and extract their opinion. Hidden behind screens, anything no matter how absurd, might get approved. They might also clarify requirements less. This is happening on my team, as we developers challenge far less and are used to being asked their opinion.
On the comms team, the mostly use Teams and a lot of their work is detail oriented. Problem is, chat systems aren't great about making sure you see everything so a lot more time is spent correcting errors in understanding.
I think that blaming remote work to mask people/team problems that existed in person is unwise. If your team isn't comfortable being legitimate and honest during requirement analysis, is it worth having? If, in person, the process breaks down into "What the team lead can notice about the team's body language/behavior during requirement analysis", I would probably suggest that there needs to be a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of that meeting. And this is why, I think, the problems being blamed on remote work are usually much larger/harder problems that can get swept under the in person rug.
I don't see it as a fundamental problem with remote work, but remote work requires that many things work a lot better than they on average do. You can try and fix everything from team dynamics and documentation or drag everyone into the office and have the problems kind of be fixed by default.
You run into this issue with documentation too. A lot of the "go chat with X" really should be "go read Y on the wiki." But fixing that, especially after long periods of neglect, is a project likely to fail.
> For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.
I work in a Support Engineering group, where we often need to collaboratively debug. Remote forces us to clarify our thinking (you get better over time at writing your thoughts that way) and video calls work solidly well for most of the world. We have new hires that have come in and have said "people are surprised I work here remotely, because I like to talk to people but actually I talk to people ALL DAY."
The style changes a bit due to the technology, but you can choose the fidelity as needed. It's not for everyone, and sometimes remote slows things down, but even then, you get ruthless at prioritizing, because sync time becomes valuable.
Exactly what alexbanks said, at least in my experience my team does a lot of team work that you mentioned that requires us to be in sync. For that we use remote conference tools to discuss and sometimes pair program and it has been working really well.
It also removed a lot of distractions that we had in the office yet we miss the "coffee breaks" we had to discuss and unofficial align what tasks we should address next and the best way to approach these. We are quickly adapting to these.
Also our team has been working together for a while so can work from home without too much interruption. But its changing, we have some new guys on the team and no one wants to train them. People are trying out new things but coordination is a mess. Morale is bad but maybe that is just virus and economic related.
This too. We have a new guy and he is having trouble getting up to speed. Normally they would just hover our someone's shoulder for a while. That can no longer be done.
I advocate for remote pair programming where the less experienced person is in control of the keyboard and sharing the screen and the more experienced person just explains what he has to do and watches him learn and apply that knowledge.
My team and I have been doing this, I have been in calls with a more senior team member that was helping me (I even got some Vim tips alongside with the explanations I was getting for completing the task).
I also recommend doing pair programming with people on somewhat the same level as yours as you can help each. You can divide a task in two and work in half the task yourself while the other person just watches and comments and then the other way where you watch and comment and the other person has all the keyboard and mouse control. This helps with reducing distractions and it offers the same advantages of Code Reviews but in real time.
Do not do this every hour or even everyday as this is more mentally intense then focusing alone and I think focusing alone also offers great improvements in learning. A balance of the two is key!
I'm hopefully that remote presence tech (VR, etc) will really step up to make up for all the subtle things we lose when we work across the digital divide <3
Right now, I find WFH pretty tough, and in my experience so far, I get markedly depressed and collaboration challenging without all thes social cues of meatspace
Yeah, after going through forced WFH for extended period of time, I think I see the point that Nadella is making on the impact that this may have on mental health.
Work from home could be harmful for employees, warns Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
But what about the mental health of people sitting in traffic hours a day, in a loud open floor plan office? Seems like a pretty terrible excuse to me.
Really big companies like Microsoft use their massive campuses as a recruiting tool - which obviously means nothing if you're remote-first.
But back to mental health: I've been doing MUCH better since I started WFH years ago. Going to an office every day was just too draining. Everyone would walk to hang out after hours, take extended lunches, etc.
I'm glad a few companies are being dragged kicking and screaming into the XXIst century. I have had to turn down attractive job offers because they wanted me to relocate to do a job that can be done just as effectively -- more effectively even -- remotely.
I spent 7 years working purely remotely with a globally-distributed all-remote team for a mostly remote company. I'm not impressed by armchair arguments of "it won't work" because I've done it and it works great. Nor am I impressed by the argument of "I don't like it so no one should do it" because I don't like commuting or working in a rigid office regime so my counter is "I don't like it so no one should do it" right back.
Also, I spent a year working in the building beside Shopify's head office and the 1-to-3 hour commute (each way) and downtown parking fees would be a big incentive for me to choose remote work if I was an employee there. So good on them.
Consider the domino effect of these decisions. With WFH culture rising:
(Disclosure, I'm 100% in favour of WFH and been doing it for past ~5 years)
- Commute time is reduced to seconds/minutes
- Driving or taking public transportation plummets
- Fuel consumption is vastly reduced, taking care of Pollution as well
- Rush hour peaks flattens. might still have traffic, but it won't be because of volume of cars. like from accidents or road work
- Cook/eat at home vs. going out for lunch solo or with colleagues
- Work from home or sometimes go to nearby cafe, the rise of nearby desk options
- Dressing up for work, replaced with pijamas! Who needs a suit or any formal wear?
- Suburban expansion, city planning project have to be completely revised.
- Location becomes irrelevant, housing/rent costs will displace huge amount of families
- Office space occupancy plummets and thus impacting commercial real estate. Might see a plan for retrofitting office buildings into residential properties which will increase the inventory of homes and reduction of housing costs in major cities
- Group meetings and gathering going digital, will also prevent spread of viruses and general sickness, impacting health care industry and pharmaceuticals
- and so many other direct or indirect dominos I haven't mentioned or considered...
= Conclusion: Savings are huge for both employees and employers but other in-direct industries will have to reinvent or disappear.
On a practical level, I agree, working from home is better in many ways. However, you can't forget to think about this on a human level. We are social animals after all. You may not agree but I feel that so much human interaction is non-verbal and it is very difficult to replicate this very natural form of communication over video link. Meetings are great but so many great ideas and initiatives (valuable to your employer or not), friendships, romances and what have you arise from informal and off-the-cuff discussions that take place in offices, at the tea point, at lunch, at 4pm when you are mentally dozing off and the guy next to you starts to talk about how he is remodelling his kitchen. You miss all of that by working from home. The sponteneity, the organic and unplanned human interaction that makes life so great. That being said, I do enjoy working from home but I also like being in the office. Perhaps a more hybrid solution is the future, rather than working from home being the exception, or vice versa.
> You may not agree but I feel that so much human interaction is non-verbal and it is very difficult to replicate this very natural form of communication over video link.
Maybe this will be the killer app that VR/AR was waiting for. Not entertainment, but enterprise.
It's interesting that most of the organisations these announcements have been coming from take the opposite approach when it comes to interacting with their customers. It's almost impossible to talk to someone in person unless you are spending millions.
Yeah but apparently there are people who can't make their own sandwiches because that leads to decision fatigue, and as such remote work sucks. Anyway, sarcasm. I totally support WFH due to less commute time, more money saved, increased productivity and overall higher quality of life, oh and it's much more environmentally friendly.
Square flew under the radar compared to Twitter coverage but it too is on the same policy as Twitter given Jack is CEO of both. Noteworthy because it has a similar number of employees, an even larger market cap, and HQ'ed in the same location.
As Shopify? 35b (SQ) market cap vs 86b market cap (SHOP), SF vs Ottawa HQ, guess 4000 vs 6500 employees (based on linkedin numbers) is fairly close, but Square and Shopify are quite different.
If I had a really nice detached home with a wife & children then working from home permanently would be the dream.
I don't. I live in a flat and live by myself. The only physical people I talk to are cashiers or delivery drivers.
If your life is further on than others or you have a nightmare capital commute then I can see WFH being the way forward. But personally I like to go to the office for social interactions and the banter that happens within. Just going to the shop for lunch with a colleague makes my day. That burger that you all decide to go for in the pub around the corner and have a cheeky pint alongside, even better!
This permanent WFH is already making me feel separated and even lonelier than normal.
I definitely see where you're coming from, but remember, the current situation isn't normal. I used to live by myself in an apartment working from home too. I still went out to lunch with friends and business associates. I could meet friends for drinks after work all over the area and didn't have to worry about my commute home. I'd work in co-working space, at coffee shops, on vacation, or anywhere else I wanted.
That being said, if I was in a new city with no friends or family, I would 100% want to have an office to go to.
I feel you. I took a job this year for a fraction of what I earn as self-employed, just because I wanted to go out and be among people. I was later laid off because of the virus, but it was nice to go to the office, talk to people face to face, have lunches together. Now, back to being self employed, I like it more, but I think I'll be looking for some coworking spaces.
Before this job I worked from home for 2 years. When I wanted human interaction, I could go to a restaurant, the gym, a hockey game, or a friends house. You can't do any of those things now.
Once things open backup, I think a lot of people find that WFH is a lot less lonely.
Thanks for tracking. Maybe commercial real estate will have to become residential to survive the shift in demand? Economics of a skyscraper vs. residential are different, but the building still exists (I can see how not opening could be cheaper, but still, I'd like to ponder this situation.)
Whoa there silver. Just because a few tech companies are giving up their space doesn’t mean commercial office space is doomed. There are still plenty of non-tech companies and local businesses (like law firms) that I doubt will be going away.
Tech companies have a huge incentive here - they can now start hiring engineers at non Bay Area prices. Which, if enough companies do it, means your salaries are at risk. Nobody cares that it’s expensive to live here, they only pay because they all insisted on in person offices. By going remote they can stop paying Bay Area rents and compensation levels.
Interestingly the law firm our company uses has converted to permanent remote only just now. So it's not just tech companies.
I think, once the boss gets a taste of working from home, they too want to enjoy their fancy homes and spending times with their kids instead of sitting in traffic all day. And Covid now provides them a generally acceptable way to push that change through.
I agree this not a private sector overall trend, but seed for the thought experiment.
Recent news and surveys do indicate significant change expected in remote work changes and real estate footprint changes.
"Large companies already expect more of their workers to continue to work remotely and say they plan to reduce their real estate footprint, which will, in turn, reduce the foot traffic that feeds nearby restaurants, shops, nail salons and other businesses." [1.]
This is part of data from a deport by Deloitte [2.][3.]:
> "In a year, 75% of CFOs expect more of their workforce to work remotely and nearly half expect a smaller real estate footprint."
> Which, if enough companies do it, means your salaries are at risk. Nobody cares that it’s expensive to live here, they only pay because they all insisted on in person offices. By going remote they can stop paying Bay Area rents and compensation levels.
There would be a transition period, probably on the order of years to even decades, before they would cease considering the cost of living in where their remote workers live. Hopefully by that time, rents in the Bay Area will have dipped as people slow moving in/start moving out because of flexible remote work situations.
Hard to know what net impact will be. They aren’t getting rid of space, just allowing digital first. Fewer people in the office, but Covid19 may result in people in the office getting more space per person than previously.
The productivity gains of WFH might be only in comparison to awful open office plans, and may disappear when compared to more private office layouts. There are still major questions about long term impact to new hires and their growth, where retention takes a hit (employees feel more like free agents and consequently switch jobs more frequently), etc.
It seems incredibly short sighted to be making these decisions on the basis of a 3 month experiment with confounding factors (to say the least!).
The biggest positive to companies going all digital especially at Spotify's scale is the cost savings.
The problem with companies that have started in Urban centers is that many of their employees don't have the "extra" bedroom in their house to be able to accommodate for this new work from home scenario.
This is especially true in NYC. Where apartments are usually significantly smaller than anywhere else. And if both adults in the house hold are working from home, often times one of them ends up in a closet taking zoom calls.
As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
People have commented the impact of this shift on SF/NYC etc, but based on this announcement the impact on smaller tech hubs will be even more devastating. Why would you now open a office in a smaller tech hub when you can hire someone from anywhere ? The impact of this in Canada can be huge
How does corporate security handle permanent work-from-home? It seems that there would be vastly more risks added.
E.g. When Joe Employee walks into the office, we know it is him and what he does and where he works. At home, Joe Employee might have a friend who looks over his shoulder at the project launch document he is completing, at the financials that are being submitted to the CFO.
disclaimer: I work for Shopify as a lead on our "corporate security engineering" team (not real name of it).
Shopify follows the the zero trust networking/Beyondcorp model, and we never had the physical office spaces as part of our threat model. Not much can be done for shoulder-surfing (aside from privacy screens, and our security training), however we have built out robust systems that build trust modeling out of identity and device security.
The security risks aren't any different in permanent work from home vs "once in a while when I have to watch the kids" work from home, and most companies have long since allowed the latter. You just don't give sensitive documents to people who can't be trusted to protect them.
For some of the large clients I have, they require (and pay for) an independent company to come and audit my home office to make sure it meets their standards. The auditing company was provided with a litany of requirements from our shared client.
The first time it was a little odd, but it's routine for those companies who have sensitive IP.
Nearly all companies allow you to access documents remotely, so you could do the same thing over a lunch, in the evenings, whatever. Or he could memorise the key points and tell him/her on a call!
Bad actors will always be able to get round these controls imo.
Well, many Joe Employees take work home, so how is that different? And also, Joe Employee can be decide to take interesting docs/info for his own use, I don't see much of a difference.
> Canada’s tech darling Shopify—the online platform used to sell everything online, from wallpaper to roasted almonds—has just moved into their new King Portland Centre digs. The quickly growing company (they currently have 700 employees in Toronto and have committed to doubling that number by 2022) has taken over the top nine floors of this 15-storey, Hariri Pontarini–designed tower. Shopify will be keeping their Spadina and Wellington office and plan to add a third location at the Well once that development is complete. This new office at 620 King Street West will house around 450 “Shopifolk,” which is what the company calls its employees.
Seems like permanent remote-optional is rapidly becoming the competitive equilibrium in tech.
As tooling improves, there is some point at which gains from expanded recruiting pool + real estate savings outweigh coordination/culture costs of remote. Beyond this it will be irrational to force physical presences (for many roles, at least) and there'll be no going back.
Revenue is king. Yahoo pulled it as a last ditch "I don't know, maybe this is the problem" attempt. If companies going full time remote find that they're struggling to perform they'll probably switch back. I think if they just continue the same or improve, definitely not.
I disagree with this. I think anyone who came in to the Yahoo CEO position when Mayer did would have been absolutely insane to allow the work from home policy to continue:
1. It was obvious from the data that tons of people were taking advantage of WFH at Yahoo (e.g. never logging into the corporate network)
2. Easy to make the argument that the problem was Yahoo management didn't manage WFH well, but even if one takes that as a truism (I'd say especially if one takes that as a truism) seems like the fastest way to fix that would have been to at least get everyone in the office.
WFH can work great, or it can be a total failure, but the worst in any case would be to come into a specific situation and not make decisions based on the data for that company at hand and instead base them off some broad "industry trends" standards.
It's possible. Lots of people don't like working remotely. They might lose a lot of valuable employees. I suppose over time they might also attract people who prefer working from home exclusively, but they would be losing many older employees with valuable knowledge. One way or another, there's going to be some kind of pushback. Many people threatening to quit, many actually quitting.
The cynical part of me thinks this is a way of trying to save costs (of renting offices) and pass this as some kind of politically correct virtue signalling. We so care about your well-being and we're so forward looking!
In my experience, team effectiveness in different remote vs in-office scenarios plays out like this:
Most effective - All of the team physically together in the same space.
2nd most effective - All of the team remote.
Least effective - A mix of in-office and remote team members.
Most companies that try out remote work start with the least effective option (the mix). I don't know enough details of Yahoo's attempt to say if that's what they did, but I expect so.
The 100% remote option can save some office space cost, but some of that gets eaten up by increased travel. Even 100% remote teams can greatly benefit from getting together sometimes.
But one less-appreciated possibility opened up by 100% remote is the ability to draw talent from a much larger geographic area. We had engineers from all over North and South America. On balance, I think that makes it easier to retain older employees with valuable knowledge, who might want to have a house in the suburbs in a non-coastal state, instead of limiting your hiring pool to people willing to tolerate the congestion and cost of living in a big city.
> Even 100% remote teams can greatly benefit from getting together sometimes.
I guess my take is the hot one, but if a remote team is routinely travelling to meet, I do not think that is 100% remote! It's just mostly remote. I recently had a 'remote job' that required 6-8 cross-country airline flights per year. The stress from those trips dramatically decreased my productivity in the weeks leading up to the trip (via increased personal costs not covered by the company, via harassment at airport security, etc). When hired, I was told it was 2 trips per year. This was okay with me, but the increase was not.
Perhaps some teams who work remotely can and do benefit from frequently meeting in person, but I honestly do not count that as 100% remote. It just...isn't 100%.
Will they? In my little view of the world I see younger workers who use the office for a social atmosphere as the ones who want to go back. Those of us that are older with older kids/wives seem more content at home. At least that's what I'm seeing in my current company.
Long before I ever even considered starting a family, I've always preferred working from home. I very much prefer keeping my social life and my work life separate. I'm close with a few people in my industry, but only the ones I really enjoy spending time with, personally.
I also have a great deal of respect for my teammates, some of whom I've worked with on multiple projects and companies over the past decade. But I'm especially glad not to complicate our relationships beyond our work together.
The cynical part of me thinks this is a way of trying to save costs (of renting offices) and pass this as some kind of politically correct virtue signalling.
100% this. Will be interesting to see what employers do when workers start requesting part-time coworking space.
For those seeking the office experience, it will feel a lot different when everyone is maintaining 6 feet of distance. Not going to be the same experience people were fond of, IMO.
Is any of this forced? I can't read the article (paywall) but it sounds like work-from-home at Shopify will be optional right? The employer is 'letting' it happen, not forcing it, correct? Why would this make so many people so angry that they would leave? Or am I misunderstanding?
It sounds to me like the office is simply closed for remodelling and cleaning and will reopen at partial capacity in a few months. This is the vibe I get from the intro, can't read the whole article (paywall)
I don't know if they will, and don't even know if they know, but I think you are 100% right that they are leaving that on the table privately. There is really nothing to stop them from undoing the policy or altering so that particular teams (which end up being a large portion of the workforce) need to come in.
For now, it saves tremendous costs as it could be over a year before their typical engineer wants to come into an office.
I doubt it. I'm betting that the unstated parts of this is that the office isn't going away completely, it's just going to be downsized and shifted to something like hoteling.
If I were to bet, it'd be that this is a knee jerk reaction to feeling helpless currently with everyone forced to WFH / lack of clarity on timeline and won't become the norm.
I can't find anything about mandatory no-office-work in that tweet thread anywhere. I see that the offices are reopening in a few months, with reduced capacity and an expectation that most employees will want to work from home. I don't see anything stating that you will not be allowed back in the office. Maybe I misunderstand. I don't know.
It's not just real-estate to consider. You need security guards, facility/maintenance personnel. Utility costs, including raised flooring for your in-house networking/data center. Phones for each desks, office furniture. You need Becky down in Accounting to be the person ordering the office furniture for new hires. Sally in IT keeps the VoIP phones working in-office. Bob in Networking runs cables between floors so Marketing can have better WiFi and uses top of the line Cisco WiFi repeaters. Sam in the Maintenance department assembles those sweet mesh chairs that Becky orders and also makes sure the vending machines and break room is stocked full of snacks. Karen, the contracts vendor just signed a new long-term agreement with a local ISP for full gigabit fiber connectivity to the office.
In reality, it's probably 3x savings on top of just real-estate.
This feels very much like a shock response, not a choice. I would expect in 5 years a rediscovery of a more office centric culture:
“Informal whiteboarding saves me so many meetings!” “It’s great to get to know your coworkers as people!” “Relationships with colleagues actually matter!”
(Though i can’t see going back to pre covid office centricity)
To add some counterpoints to the WFH criticism here, my team's also been working from home for the last two months and I'd honestly prefer to never go back to the office.
I have a unique situation since I can't hear well, and everyone being on WFH has been a huge benefit for me: since everyone's got their own microphone/camera/etc, they come through clearly enough that my captioning app can actually understand them well - typically I get captioning as live CART through a crap conference room phone. Being able to hook my captioning app on my phone up to my laptop's audio out and jump on a Teams call with just a few minutes' notice has also been a huge benefit in easily being able to collaborate with my team and talk through problems.
I'd worked from home before, but never in this kind of remote-first/remote-only scenario, and now that I've gotten a taste of it I kind of never want to go back. I understand that other people are more extroverted than I am, and can hear normally, and it's not an ideal situation for them - but it's been pretty awesome for me.
I hope this mindset carries over to other companies who are committing to allow employees to stay home. There's more to remote working than staying at home. The whole culture of the company has to embrace it.
What is the long term downward pressure on salary and compensation with all these companies going full remote? It’s true many companies are paying SV salaries for remote work, but how long will this last when the labor pool opens up?
So Twitter, Square, Coinbase, and now Shopify. I wonder how many other companies will allow this and what this shift will lead to. I imagine this will lead to an exodus out of the Bay Area and possibly to places like Tahoe, Santa Cruz, Marin, and a corresponding shift in real estate prices. No real advantage to living in a tiny apartment in a city if you can't go to concerts, bars, restaurants, and now can WFH where ever you want.
My question is how companies will handle cost of living differences and if salaries will be adjusted based on locations? Or can I take my California salary to Seattle and pay no income taxes?
Non-compete clauses are illegal (or at least not enforceable) in California, but they're legal in Washington state. The savings from state income tax (bulk of your taxes are federal anyway) are not enough to account for the non-compete clause.
Salaries will almost certainly be cut. If you can go 100% remote someone in the Midwest can do your job on $80k/year. All the places you listed are still expensive and if you are remote you don’t need to live there.
As a college student just entering the job market, this trend will be an absolute nightmare if it continues to its natural terminus (all tech companies permanently and primarily WFH).
My current internship has been WFH for the past ~2 months and it has drastically reduced how much I actually enjoy my job. Talking with my coworkers and the office atmosphere in general was a large part of why I enjoyed my job, and that has been reduced to a daily standup over Zoom and a handful of strictly work-related Slack messages when necessary. I understand there are some people who simply like to clock in and clock out but for people like me for whom the office is a large source of regular socialization, working from home is incredibly lonely.
It seems as though a large amount of people pushing for WFH situations are more senior engineers, especially those with children or other concerns at home. For a moment, just put yourself in the shoes of a junior engineer or fresh grad who is new to the job or the industry in general and remember your first day on your first job. Probably the only thing that relieved some of the stress or anxiety was a friendly coworker, or the ability to grab a mentor to answer questions sitting just a few feet away. WFH, no matter the technology, cannot create a substitute for this.
First, please do not confuse "Work-from-Home" with "Remote Work". These are very different beasts, and the situation you are going through now is neither of those.
Second, if you can avoid entering the market now, do so. There is a lot of data showing how entering the job market in an economic downturn can be worse than a few years of unemployment. You will thank me 25 years from today.
Third, understand that Remote Work (not WFH!) will also allow you to separate the choice of place of where you live from the place/activity that makes you money. You don't have to live in a big faceless city. It will be okay to try spending 3-6 months in different places of the world, meet different people, find different ways to belong to your local community, whatever. If in the end you still want to do Remote Work in an environment that resembles a company office, it will be possible (again: Remote Work is not WFH)
Fourth, if the office is your largest source of regular socialization, I'd seriously recommend you finding ways to change or mitigate that regardless of your working conditions. As friendly and cordial your relationship with your colleagues is, they are still just colleagues. You are not in school anymore.
Lastly, things are changing for everyone, not just the juniors. Even the seniors will have to figure out some of the new protocols and processes when dealing with the upcoming challenges. But finding a way to communicate and exchange some thoughts with your colleagues will always be necessary and recommended. There is no reason to feel more anxious about it.
Remote-first is the future. I'm not sure why anyone would be against it. No one is forcing you to work from home. From a compliance and operations perspective a remote-first company is effectively forced to do a lot of things many companies do not or will not undertake:
- Make meetings accessible to everyone
- Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the adventurous types)
The main "downsides" of working from home (which is not necessarily remote-first) - not seeing your colleagues in person, life <-> work separation, etc. will be a new industry that will end up resolving itself. I've seen office space costs. It would be cheaper to fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party than to maintain an office space sized for the same amount of people by an order of magnitude in a large, popular city (NYC office space is approximately ~$100/sqft/month - a desk sized for two monitors, a keyboard and writing space is about 2 x 4 minimum, so 8sqft, or $800/month just for a single person in a nice space)
In other words, being forced to do anything - whether that was working from home or from an office - is an oppressive activity. Remote-first simply gives back that freedom of choice. Companies can maintain more minimalist offices for those who insist, and coworking spaces will grow for those who don't like the office and want separation, and finally those who have the space in their homes can work from home.
I'd be curious to hear a good argument against all organizations that can be remote-first being remote-first.
I find this strange as they've just recently opened brand new fancy offices in Toronto. As I've visited these offices, you could see through the glass windows of meeting rooms, people brainstorming in groups on whiteboards and presumably working together on solving interesting problems. I'm not sure if working from home is conducive to this type of group problem solving/brainstorming sessions.
What's surprising isn't that a company like Shopify is going remote-first.
It's that it was ever not remote-first in the first place.
The now-passing era of startups and big tech companies centering their workforce around physical offices will be looked back on as one of the most strange and illogical aspects of early 21st-century business!
WFH makes a lot of sense when you have a team of people that are used to meeting in person and are on the same time zone.
Daily stand-up meetings? Easy.
Weekly team and one-on-one meetings? Easy.
Knowing when your coworkers are working? Easy.
My team is mostly remote, diverse location, diverse ages/demographics. Getting everyone on Slack was hard enough. Having people report when they are actually contactable is impossible. And now that Slack removed presence from their API I have to rely on every more metrics to measure my team.
I should be using many metrics all along? No that's stupid, the reason I have employees is so I can build relationships with good people. If everything was metrics and work whenever you want that's called programming, not managing.
I really enjoy working from home however I have realized that I have become increasingly unhappy with the communication on my team. Getting answers to simple yes/no questions takes hours. Someone will ask me a question, I'll reply within a few seconds asking for clarification and then radio silence for the next 90 minutes. Personally, I also feel that I'm learning less in some areas.
This is not a commentary on WFH in general but I think most people who endorse 100% remote work do the type of work where they get their assignment and then go sit in the corner and bang it out with headphones on and not the type of work that requires active communication and collaboration.
If a prerequisite to making progress on your work is getting an answer to a simple yes/no question within minutes, that's a fundamental problem with how you're planning your work, not some commentary on the nature of 'active' vs 'passive' jobs.
Expecting instant answers from others is the WFH equivalent to "I love being able to walk to my coworker's desk and ask them questions!" Sure, because being able to do that lets you off the hook for needing to break down large tasks into parallel chunks, plan phases of work in advance, juggle multiple plates for when you are blocked, etc. It's making your job easier at the expense of everyone else around you, by basically outsourcing part of your job.
Most going this direction are, rightly, treading WFM as people treated travel reductions. Few are saying you never work face to face for any reason ever... but it shouldn’t be the default without any reason. For better or worse the days of just turning up at an office everyday by default are likely over in many places.
Same with travel. Default should be a Zoom (or similar) but if an in person meeting or workshop is warranted then do it and just be prepared to justify the travel cost. Offices are very expensive so rightfully so companies are re-evaluating how much commercial real estate they truly need to execute their mission successfully.
I know a lot of people like working from home, and I like the option, but I'm personally more of a fan of being in the office. I feel more productive and I like having the ability to talk to my coworkers.
I've seen a lot of people saying that working from home is objectively better, and I think that that is a bit of a radical claim. I rent a room in a beaten up house, so I have about 130ft2 of personal space, a shared kitchen, and a shared bathroom. There are other people like me who also feel like they're stuck in a bubble, especially now that they can't see their friends and family, or even strangers at a coffee shop.
Even tho all those companies are shifting to perma WFH, still it's utterly impossible to be considered if you work from Europe, relocation must happen anyway. Wondering if this will change at some point as well :)
Great news. I am looking forward to a decentralized society, where people can choose to live where they want to live. Not everything has to happen in San Francisco or Seattle. Many will cherish the freedom to live near friends/family elsewhere, or in a different political climate, or with a more rural lifestyle. For forward thinking companies that lean into remote work, it will be a huge pull for talent away from companies that may not make this change.
The number of people in this thread seemingly fine with losing 1-2 hours a day for their entire working life simply commuting is just astonishing to me.
>we now have the opportunity to be joined by a whole lot of incredible individuals from around the world that otherwise couldn’t because of our previous default to proximity.
Wow, so they'll be hiring non-Canadians by the majority now?
Interesting. I wonder how this will affect the economies of places like Ottawa, with Canada not having the type of Tech Sector the US does.
Well, Canada has a robust tech sector, equivalent to the US but proportional to population size.
The question is whether Americans can compete in a global marketplace against the rest of the world who don't expect SV-level compensation and also don't need US-level private health insurance. I'm trying but failing to see the value proposition to hiring American outside of the USA.
This is huge because Shopify is a big company and will likely get much bigger in the next few years. Most fully remote companies are small. We cannot know for sure if it will stick. I remember Yahoo telling their employees to return to the office. But looks like this time it's going to be different.
Sometimes I wonder how long "permanent" will be for these decisions. Off topic, but if the permanent work-from-home trend continues, I cannot imagine what is going to happen to commercial real estate. Convert to residential? Is this equilibrium needed for overheated housing markets?
I have been crowing about this for years now. WFH by default could easily relieve pressure from the housing market at least in places where there are lots of people who have a job where they can WFH.
I would absolutely live 2 hours from an office if I only had to go in once every week or two. I'd live further if it was once a month.
Some commercial real estate will be leased out as individual offices to people who have WFH jobs but want to have an office (don't have space at home, etc.).
If the glaring problems with SF were fixed, this is still one of the best places in the world to live quality-of-life wise. Weather, accessibility to some of the best nature in the world, great food, entertainment, etc.
It might just be the current situation but I have seen maybe 4 homeless in 3 weeks in my day to day and I take a lot of walks. Could just be looking in the wrong spots but there were literally 20 tents on my block near Bart in the Mission so its an upgrade.
I think I heard Pioneer Square is bad, just walked there the other day and it's not anything like SFs bad areas. There could just be better options for homeless during the shutdown here than SF though. I will reserve full judgement until things are back open.
People are going to be surprised by the state of the FiDi in SF when things open back up. Many tents have gone up there with everyone gone and WFH. Going to be interesting when people go back to the office there.
Definitely true, also the anything near 16th Street Mission Bart is out of control. There are definitely nice parts of SF, usually on a hill, but the bad parts are BAD.
Sure, not denying that, but I think it's uncharitable to question why anyone would want to live here. There are many reasons. You personally may not strike that ideal cost-value balance but it's certainly there for many people, especially if the biggest reasons why people leave SF are gone -- cost, homelessness, and possibly politics (mostly related to homelessness and cost).
I think you might see companies considering hiring people who live in Bakersfield, Sacramento, maybe even Nevada instead of San Francisco, but there's a vast difference between "usually working from home", and "Needs an international flight to get to the office" and "Literally works in a time zone that doesn't share any office hours with their boss".
Governments should offer tax incentives to companies for work-from-home. It reduces traffic snarl, pollution, accidents, health issues from sedentary commutes. Its a public policy and environmental win across the board.
It's interesting to see companies do this so soon into the WFH experiment. There are still lot of open questions around long-term planning, communication, mental health, and productivity.
This has been a solved problem for many years. Many or most larger remote-first employers do. Here's an example from Automattic (https://automattic.com/work-with-us/):
> Home office setup and coworking allowances. Working from a coffee shop? You can use your coworking allowance for the requisite latte!
> If you don’t enjoy working from home 100% of the time, the company will give you up to $250 per month to rent a coworking space. Also, if you don’t want to have a permanent place to attend, you can use that $250 to pay for whatever you drink while you’re working from a coffee or similar places.
> You can get a completely equipped home office on the company. For example, I got an Aeron chair, an Ikea Bekant standing desk & a desktop lamp even before my first official day in the Automattic.
The cost of a home office setup is pretty negligible relative to a Shopify employees compensation, so I don't think it would change anything if they did. But I would be surprised if they didn't give them anything towards it.
In March, Shopify offered a stipend of $1000 (which is quite low) for workers to convert from office to home, with a note that they should take home their office workstations and install them there.
Presumably that implies that, at the very least, new employees will be offered the same measly one-time $1k payment. Hopefully their restructuring of offices will include a more appropriate reallocation of that spending to cover the true costs of remote working.
There is a trend among companies that have established themselves as a monopoly of sorts in a niche and stopped innovating.
They can work 'remotely'. Of course they can - they are hardly doing anything :)
Twitter, Basecamp, Shopify - what do all these companies have in common? They don't need to do anything and even if they could, they haven't for so long, that working in an office or remotely changes nothing. They're in maintenance mode - you can do maintenance mode from home while cutting staff/costs. Good.
"A survey of senior finance leaders by research firm Gartner found that 74 percent of organizations plan to shift some employees to remote work permanently. Consulting company Global Workplace Analytics estimates that when the pandemic is over, 30 percent of the entire workforce will work from home at least a couple times a week. Before the pandemic, that number was in the low single digits."
This is kind of terrifying. I started working from home a few months before this mess, and i've found that work-life balance hasn't really improved. Yes, my day is more flexible — i can spend a few hours in the morning with my kid and make up lost time in the evening when she's down — but the days stick to one another, and i'm having trouble disconnecting completely. I used to get home from the office at 4:30, hang with the kid, get her to bed, and then have a few hours to either write or go to the gym or hang with my wife. These days, work is always on my mind to some degree, accompanied by low-level anxiety — and not just because of this surreal and disorienting pandemic.
I've found that my work-life balance has simultaneously improved and worsened - I have more free time to relax, but I still end up working at like 10pm because I end up spending too much time binging Netflix or whatever and have to quickly make up the work. It's like I'm slowly reverting to my college days
Actually this is good news for rework and other co-working spaces. Many of the employees of these companies will prefer working from a co-working space, myself included. Most remote companies are already paying for it.
But communication and collaboration is just much harder work remote and you can't change my mind. I'm sure you can work hard to make it almost as good but it's never going to be better (IMHO).
I of course miss the meals and snacks.
Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
Those of you who are claiming this will be some form of revolution I think are naive. I've found that advocates of WFH are mostly motivated by that's what they want to do more than anything else. I mean that's fine but it often leads to thinly-veiled, self-serving, biased arguments and proclamations of the benefits to everyone.
If you need an office anyway you don't really save anything by WFH unless you oversubscribe your work areas (eg hot-desking) and that has its own problems.
All-remote might work best. I've seen this claimed but have no direct experience with it. I do know that mixed WFH and in the office is nearly always detrimental to the remote people and the team as a whole (IME).
I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees can operate this way indefinitely.