My ex-girlfriend described herself this way to me once and I thought it was funny, but it's in fact true of people in general: if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer. It's unfortunate but it's true: you are going to naturally think more about and have better feelings about the coworkers you see every day in person. No, VC doesn't count. I think this is pretty much a human universal; the only exceptions I know are quite far on the autism spectrum. (Even I notice myself doing this, and I'm definitely somewhere on that line.)
Given that, I want to be in the room with my coworkers. I want them to unconsciously think of me as part of their tribe, and I want to feel the same way about them; that means we need to be able to perform regular in-person social petting. This is doubly true of my bosses. It sucks, but there's no way around it.
(Also, while this is less universal, there are plenty of extroverts, even on HN. I'm one. It's ironic, in that I also suffer from pretty nasty social anxiety; large rooms of strangers scare me and choke me up. But lock me in a room by myself for a month and I go crazy. I am happier, by far, when I can be in the same room as people I like.)
> This is doubly true of my bosses. It sucks, but there's no way around it.
So many opportunities in my life have come from casual interactions with my bosses, i.e. they spot something in an email and because I am sitting nearby, they propose it to me or they are coming out of a meeting and mention some corporate goal.
Working remotely, I do not even speak to my boss every week now. I am a microservice outputting work.
This is completely cultural. I had a manager that I didn't meet in person for over a year and he was constantly sharing stuff like this with me, frequently multiple times a day. As the sibling points out, if you aren't speaking with your manager weekly, or really almost daily, then something is very wrong.
I agree completely. Reading these responses, there's a lot of negativity to communicating with your manager. While I've been in times that I completely understand this, I chose my latest job purely on manager. It pays less and I couldn't be happier. He was innovative in using a shared Google doc that gets updated with tasks, goals, and progress by both of us daily. We meet officially on a schedule once a week, but often chat in the interim. Personally, I use the Google doc as my running, living Todo list. It helps keeps thoughts organized, and my manager sees a lot more than he ever could in a daily stand up. Sometimes, here's even able to proactively assist. Which, if you work hard, is an excellent thing. My manager and I would never hang out as friends, but we're both fascinated by technology and business culture and speak on it often. Worry more about positive relationship than specific method, I'd say. And if you hate your manager, job search on primarily that criteria and take a job your want with enthusiasm even if it pays less. You can't quantify peace in dollars.
I use it with my manager to asynchroneously share updates and todos. It's in reverse chronological order, with a big heading for each weekly 1-1. We both write directly in the doc, and tag each other with comments for updates.
An extreme of this, is that some teams (was it Netflix?) basically use google docs as project trackers. The project is described in the google doc, and you talk about it via comments - whenever you want, and as a replacement for meetings (who doesn't love getting rid of meetings?)
In general, the idea with a gDoc is of a central repository of useful knowledge, an improvment over searching through chat messages and endless meetings.
The way I personally use it may differ from my other coworkers, but there's a heading for each day. I start the day by copying everything up from the previous day that wasn't completed, then I prioritize the bullet points and highlight what I hope to finish that day. Each week has an "accomplishments" header that is used at review time. I choose what goes there. My boss rarely adds things other than just prior to our one on one so he doesn't forget. Having a running daily Todo that begins as a copy of yesterday's mind map makes focus so much easier. Then when I have a status update that I don't want to disturb his busy schedule with, I tag him in a document comment or assign a task. I can message or email for urgent needs, but this is a lower percentage occurrence. Hope that gives some insight. Happy to answer any other questions.
Just to provide the opposite perspective, that sounds like my hell. A weekly catch-up, fine, and the rest of the time if I have anything worth chatting about I will. I can't stand the ritual ceremonies.
If I need to speak to everyone in my team daily or even weekly,it means the whole thing isn't working and it would fall apart as soon as I walk through the door. I do trust people in what they do and I don't micromanage. I'm always available if anyone needs help or any kind of support or advice,but it doesn't mean I'd walk around daily asking how's work every day. Again, this depends on a role as well,as for instance, I do spend a lot of time discussing technical aspects with the business analyst.
[Edit]
The above applies to office environment,where I could see all my team in one place and there were lots of 'hints' that could tell whether I need to have a chst with someone: difficult call, challenging situation, too much work,issues at home and etc.All this is almost invisible when working remotely. Casual calls are necessary to check on people and to make sure they are fine.
Fair, it is going to depend on the boss and how your office interactions were before everything went remote.
> if you aren't speaking with your manager weekly, or really almost daily, then something is very wrong.
I am someone who likes a lot of autonomy.
In-office, beyond my Scrum team, I am otherwise trusted to deliver what I need to deliver. That leads to few check-ins and mostly social banter with my boss as I will be in touch if I require anything. No news means all is well.
It is just that remote removes most of the social banter and problems don't pop up for weeks.
There are alternatives. For instance my smaller team has a very brief daily stand up now in a video call each morning.
Our larger department has a Monday check-in and a Friday check-in wherein our boss's boss speaks to each one of us—checks in with how we're doing, whether we need anything, if we're stuck or whatever, and also raises questions to us that have come up in their own work. That is often mixed with more congenial banter and chats. Sometimes we throw in a game of Jackbox or something.
My own team has taken to at least a round of something like Counter Strike for the last hour of the day each week. Sometimes almost every day depending on our work load.
Combined with Slack my immediate manager and higher-level bosses are as reachable as ever.
I'm sure once things can safely open up again there will almost immediately be some kind of meet up for drinks and whatever because of course that can't quite be replaced, but I don't think being remote most of the time has to be such a social handicap.
This is def speculation on my part, but I've got a hunch that these "good manager" types often learn this wonderful communication style from working with ppl in-person -- high touch communication spaces are where ppl learn and hone those skills that they then bring into digital spaces with such effectiveness
Micromanagement isn't about frequency of contact so much as the amount of control the worker has over their work. The biggest micromanager I ever worked for would forget I existed for days or a week at a time, only to come in tell me to throw out hours of work and do very specific, arbitrary things instead because he just liked it better a different way. The most hands-off boss I've ever had would drop by for a chat almost every day, but mostly just to get thoughts on overall direction and discuss ideas he was mulling.
We could speak daily and not have it be micromanagement. There is just not anything to speak about most days. We did good morning in the chat for a while, but that just died after the first few weeks.
"Speaking" doesn't imply "managing" in a negative sense. It's simply a medium to convey information. Is it micro managing to see a direct report in the hallway or at lunch and casually say "Hey, Alice was saying that we could really use a new X, what do you think about that?" That level of discussion would very rarely occur over Slack or during a scheduled 1:1.
> "Hey, Alice was saying that we could really use a new X, what do you think about that?" That level of discussion would very rarely occur over Slack
Out of curiosity, why? I have this kind of discussion in Slack fairly often, sometimes in a (smaller) channel, sometimes in direct messages (occasionally with >2 people in in). A quick conversation about an idea, where people can respond as time permits, seems fairly optimal for Slack.
More just a consequence of an project that is generally going well (or at least was) and a lot of prior autonomy. Plenty of weeks there has been nothing to say.
We had a sprint planning (he isn’t on the development team for that), we completed the sprint, we did it again. Nothing to report.
In the office, it is a nice amount of autonomy to not have to provide yet another status update all the time. The project team already has enough Scrum reporting requirements so it works well to keep the admin burden down.
You just have to wonder if you are forgotten when working remotely.
A good manager should be doing a lot more than just asking you for status updates in your 1:1s. At a minimum they should be:
1) Providing updates on things going on with the rest of the organization that may affect you. Technically this doesn't have be in a 1:1, but is often a good venue.
2) Learning more about any problems facing the team, and discussing potential solutions.
3) Giving feedback on both what the employee has been doing well and any areas they could improve.
4) Helping to set goals that will advance the employees career goals.
While you might be able to get everything done well with lots of autonomy, you're probably still leaving value on the table by not meeting more regularly.
That is interesting as I never would have thought those would be in the scope of what managers did (especially the career goals as that means helping people leave).
I was under the impression that the less your manager needs to deal with you, the better you are doing.
> you're probably still leaving value on the table by not meeting more regularly.
Am definitely going to think about this over the next little while. Thanks.
Yeah, to add to this: the best year of my working life, I got an average review. I just happened to be an expert in a bunch of tech that my team had forced on them, ramped them all up, and generally contributed a bunch. And I failed to communicate with my manager - as in, I went three months without meeting him. He had no real idea how much I'd contributed. Now obviously, that's on my manager as well, but ultimately it was me it affected. Since then I've made an effort to own the communication with my manager more, and it's had much better results career-wise.
Ultimately a manager is judged by his/her superiors by their ability to get the most value out of the teams which they are in charge of. So as a report, frequent communication with your manager discussing whats going well, what can be improved, and ideas on how to do it helps them meet their goals as well as making your life easier. It also is likely a primary factor that will help you with your career progression.
From what I have seen over the years theres the top performers who communicate a lot with the manager in the way described above. Also bottom performers communicate frequently with their manager, but for negative reasons. The middle performers often hardly communicate with the manager, and they are likely not going anywhere (which is fine too, if thats what they want).
At the end of the day, a good manager wants to see their reports progress professionally and personally. They should be helping you get to the next level, regardless of what that is for you. Sometimes that means saying goodbye to really talented employees, knowing that they're moving on to bigger and better things than you can provide for them.
I think some of the replies to your comment and surrounding comments are missing an important point, which I'm going to assume you were making. In a remote work situation, managers need to check in for more than just directly work related conversations.
The comment that started this thread was making the claim that people have difficulty comprehending others as people that they don't directly see in person. So managers (everyone really) should be checking in at least once a day, even if it's just to ask "how's it going" (generally, not a work status report), have a conversation about something non-work related, crack some jokes, whatever. Basically, maintaining that human connection sometimes needs to be forced a little bit, because it's so important and leads to a tighter knit team.
Colleagues does strongly imply an equal level and similar duties, a teamlead's colleagues are other teamleads and not the individual developers whom they're managing (who do a different job) and not their managers who are also doing a quite different job.
It depends.
I don't want to speak to my manager to often, I prefer to do my work without distractions.
And I must say I'm loving this whole pandemic forced WFH on everyone - it means all of us are on the same level, no more speaking with managers/directors over a cigarette or at lunch/coffee. A great equalizer of opportunities and pure work :)
Depends how many people work in the team. But really, most of time you dont need to work with manager and frequent communication typically means the manager is dealing with some problem with you or near you.
One thing bosses are looking for in subordinates isn't necessarily excellence but understanding. Do I know what choice they'd make and would they make the same choice I would when confronted with the same problem.
And the best way to figure that out is to get to know someone.
A lot of my promotions have been good reviews but some have been grabbing beers with the boss.
I see it slightly differently. In my subordinates, I want confidence that they'll consistently make decisions that they believe are in the best long-term interests of the company. If they consistently do that, I can work on anything else (including making sure I help them better understand the long-term interests as I understand them).
That will often mean "would make the same choice I would", but I'm happy if they merely use the same rubric.
Say you're a consultant and you thought the best way to make a client happy was delivering a great product even if it's late and over budget.
If your subordinate thinks the best way to make a client happy is to always deliver on time and budget even if they have to cut a bunch of corners and deliver a buggy product, are you still going to be happy about that?
Are you going to stil be happy with his decision when you have to justify to the client and your boss why it was a good decision to release a buggy version early than a more polished version late? Despite the fact that if you were put in that exact same situation you would have made the opposite choice.
There are plenty of other examples too. You both believe that company goals are driven by great effective teams. You believe effective teams are born out of great morale and shared goal. He believes effective teams are the sum of their parts. There is someone that isn't pulling their weight. You would mentor them because they're always upbeat and positive and it'd be crushing to morale to fire this person. Your subordinate fires them because he believes he's slowing down the team.
In the short run, I may very well be unhappy in those examples, but only if the client ended up unhappy or if the team performance took a sustained dip. Some clients care greatly about budget. Some team’s morale improves when poor performers leave. The people closest to the client/team probably can make a better decision than I can. IOW, maybe my approach would be the wrong one.
I’m also confident that I can work with those hypothetical leaders because they share a common foundational compass.
I can talk about the trade offs of time/budget. I can talk about the trade offs of morale vs peak individual performance. Most importantly, I can be sure they have a guiding framework that pulls us in the same direction, even if the near-term paths are different.
I have two leaders working for me today (one of whom may well read this) who make markedly different decisions than I would. We talk openly about it; they get great results for the company via a different route to the same destination and I don’t try to make them into mini-mes. (I lead quite differently than my own boss as well.)
My team and I are mostly remote, doubly so since pandemic, we are all chatting and vidconfing with our boss and each other daily. It's a nice well connected environment.
But then what's stopping you from picking up the phone and giving him a call? What I noticed was the opposite: instead of having some rare encounters with our CEO( I report directly to him but we are in different buildings so we mainly meet in meetings only) and ending up doing something 'urgent' or distracting, I now have less of these. However, having said that, it's harder to pull out the information I want when on the phone versus when face to face.
> But then what's stopping you from picking up the phone and giving him a call?
Inherently nothing. I could call him, but I have little reason to beyond a social chat as there is nothing to report, so it would be a "hey boss, how is the new baby doing?"
I haven't given much thought to the career implications of remote as I expect it to be relatively temporary in my case so I do not feel pressured to solve the problem.
> However, having said that, it's harder to pull out the information I want when on the phone versus when face to face.
This can actually be a blessing in disguise for him as long as he sticks to 'put it in writing'. Here's what will happen: some won't write and won't ask again because they have no clue how to put what they want in writing.Some will write some incomprehensible thing and it will require 20 more emails to find out that all they want is Comic Sans in Word and etc. Also it will tame some 'motivated ones',who could go on for hours about what they would want.
> Working remotely, I do not even speak to my boss every week now. I am a microservice outputting work.
I've spent this past week rubber ducking with my boss. I think we've spoken MORE since we both started WFH because he's got less distractions now he isn't in the office.
Most 'opportunities' presented to me by my higher ups in casual interactions are just them trying to get more unofficial work done without being called out for it.
I don't think that's true at all. I've worked remotely for years and my coworkers and I get along great. We are just as close as work friends I've physically worked with.
My fiancee is an MD, so she has tons of very close friends all over the country from college, med school, residency, and fellowship that she only interacts with remotely. She's just as close with many of them as she is with friends who live in town.
> My fiancee is an MD, so she has tons of very close friends all over the country from college, med school, residency, and fellowship that she only interacts with remotely.
So she remains close with people she underwent difficult, life-changing, character-forming periods with, who at the time, she was with for quite a few hours a day?
I mean, med school and fellowship people stay with you forever, even if you don't particularly like them. And residency? You're blood-bound, like it or not.
The argument is that without regular in person contact people will forget you exist as a human, this wasn't a more nuanced argument that physical proximity is one factor of many.
> if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer.
Tell me honestly: do you really interpret OP as stating that, if you're not physically around someone, they (restating a little bit to make clear how much this is unlikely to have been meant literally) will not remember that you are a real person that exists? That they will come to think of you as an imaginary thing?
Maybe just give them the benefit of the doubt and engage with what they were actually trying to say. If they meant something more extreme, they'll have every chance to double down on it, but no conversation is enriched by shooting down the least charitable interpretation of what folks are saying. Especially when "least charitable interpretation" means "I will take all hyperbolic and/or figurative language and read it literally." It's boring to read language written like legalese, and it's boring to see people getting criticised for not writing in legalese.
Tell me honestly: do really think that I thought the OP's argument was that people will literally think of you as imaginary.
Of course I don't.
What you've done is to take the least charitable interpretation of my argument by believing that I was using the OP's language of "real human" literally.
The OP's argument is that "if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer."
My interpretation of that is that they won't see you as a real person with whom they can have a real relationship with, and that you can't you can't maintain a social peer relationship without physical contact.
To best way to describe what I, (and I'm 99% sure the OP) mean when they say real person: You read in the newspaper that a man was shot. You know he exists and you may know something about him, but he doesn't feel like a real person to you. His death doesn't cause you grief the same way the death of a friend or neighbor would.
I am more toward your situation (grew up in multiple countries and, as things evolve over time, my closest friend group is a group of guys who used to skateboard together on the streets of San Jose Costa Rica) and remain excellent friends with many people from my past, and some I have not seen in person in many years. Maybe I'm fooling myself.
However, I feel like most people aren't like that, and if I care about advancing my career, I have to think more like OP and less like you and me.
How can this be? The bandwidth and sheer volume of face-to-face time co-located people share just dwarfs the potential of remote. Are you saying that you still do fine remotely or that remote works better than colocated?
I'd also bet your MD does most of her doctoring that depends on deep trust and emotional connection in-person; remote just fails at this in comparison
>I'd also bet your MD does most of her doctoring that depends on deep trust and emotional connection in-person; remote just fails at this in comparison
She does, but it probably has less to do with needing an emotional connection than b/c she needs to physically do procedures.
>Are you saying that you still do fine remotely or that remote works better than colocated?
I'm have closer friends at my current workplace than I did at my last physical workplace. However, there are too many variables for me to say whether remote is actually better in that regard.
I doubt it is, but my anecdote was a counterpoint to the argument that humans require physical contact to maintain relationships. Not an argument that physical contact can in some cases be beneficial.
> The bandwidth and sheer volume of face-to-face time co-located people share just dwarfs the potential of remote.
How do you figure?
Anyway you’re pumping out HTML, not making works of art. Most days don’t require an emotional connection to get anything done, and it just takes a little more effort on both to talk on video and get that connection. Anyway, it’s much easier and healthier to view coworkers like future friends than current friends, especially your manager.
You better double my pay to waste my time in person.
I personally appreciate the people I work with remotely now more than when I was in the office as I don't need to engage in needless chit chat and so every meeting is much more productive.
I think this depends, for me at least. I've had jobs where my coworkers and I aren't that close at all even working together in an office setting. We had little attachment to each other during and after the shared job experience was over.
Then, I have had jobs where we worked in office and for extended periods remote and I feel closer and actually have more of a relationship with them, sometimes for many years down the road when we don't even live near each other anymore. I still see them when I visit town and we talk on the phone.
I work remote with some folks in another project and I honestly feel closer to some of them than some on-site groups I have worked with. I guess everyone is a little different in this.
I have some non-work relationships that operate more like you describe and also ones that don't.
It is a little offensive to hear assignment of people who don't operate the same way as described as being far on the autism spectrum.
I'm not sure I agree. I have many fond memories of friends I have played video games with, even though I have never met them in person. I don't even know what they look like, but there are some I still empathize with even 10 years later, and wonder how they're doing with the few personal problems they had which I was aware of.
That said, I can imagine negative relationships developing in many (or most) work cultures, since it's very easy for every interaction to be adversarial.
Since I enjoy video games, I've before wished to play team building video games with co-workers. Perhaps doing so would be worth while?
Don't get me wrong, I have internet friends. It's just hard to treat them as first-class people compared to those I know in person. It was way easier as a teenager--I didn't have in-real-life friends! Sigh. If you were going to maintain primary internet relationships, close-knit as can be, I can imagine worse ways to do that regular team gaming.
I don't think that all in-person relationships are better. There are people I see in person ~regularly I loathe. (Obviously, most such people I try not to see anymore, but you can't always control your friends' friends, or your coworkers, or who goes to your gym, or...) But they're all more real.
I have the opposite experience; Most of my close friends are online friends whom I met twenty years ago playing online games. It was decades until I saw them for the first time IRL, yet I consider them my closest friends. The only difference between my online best friends and my IRL best friends is that I mostly chat all day with the former, but chat in one long session with the latter (when we go out for drinks).
The more significant question is how these online friends compare in your priority to in person life friends.
I’ve had some great online friendships as well but they always fade when in person life friends start using more of my time.
The key question for work is less whether you boss will value you and more whether if you can effectively compete with Joe Office who goes in every day for space in his mind.
A perhaps more techie way of thinking of it is our relationships are in a mostly-LRU cache. The people we have interacted with most recently are the ones that matter most to us. If you aren't regularly resetting your place within that cache, you get bumped.
What that often means is there are people that you see a couple times and you think you are going to end up being significant in each other's lives, but then in a month or so they fall out of the cache and are effectively dead to you.
A thing I've noticed is we have a few friends that like to get right up to the point where I'm about to write them out of my life, and then they always find time for us and pop back in. Mildly infuriating, but I guess I'm glad to have them around either way.
Out of sight, out of mind is one of the key aspects of human relationships.
> if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer.
You nailed it. I usually work remotely, but always try meeting people physically at the start of a project. There is something uniquely uplifting about being in the same location to create something. That's when ideas congregate. When people meet in the same place, you can feel the energy. Physical meetings create synergies impossible to replicate when you only meet online.
I may get shot down but I was experimenting with VR meetings, avatars created using facial images. We did a team meeting using this tech for fun but it felt much more like being in same room than a video conference call. Not same as in person but a step closer.
If people didn't have a weird aversion to VR and headsets were way more comfortable this would totally be the solution. Once we get comfortable AR glasses with decent resolution, software for remote teams is going to be a huge business.
There is also a shared commitment to a project that you get working in close physical proximity. Your colleagues are more likely to be motivated to help you or achieve something difficult when everyone is working on a project together.
Agreed, I think it is also one of the principles that leads to more success in education. MOOCs notoriously have high drop off rates despite offering all the components we ascribe to positive learning experiences. I think the human component gives students a community of peers that are equally struggling in the course, even if they are explicitly not invested in a peer's progress.
I keep hearing doom and gloom about remote work from people that have been doing it less then 3 years...
After 20 years remote (try getting remote work in 2000ish!), I have had any of the awful downsides people keep _predicting_.
If you're interested in remote work, give it time, get used to the differences between on-site and remote, and plan accordingly...
For instance, if you got opportunities because you sat next to the boss or were the first person he saw coming out of a meeting - 'ping' him with a status update email on something when he gets out of 'the big meeting' - this way, you're the first 'virtual' person they 'see'
That's an interesting strategy, I imagine it takes a lot more dedicated effort than noticing the person sitting next to you returning to a meeting. How do you know when these meetings are happening, a shared calendar?
This is very true. The proof is in the pudding. If someone messages you or calls you, you might dismiss them easily, but if someone stands next to you and asks you “do you have a moment?” Will you dismiss them as easily?
PS: Working with a largely distributed team, I trained myself to treat all of these requests the same. Even if someone walked from the other side of the building to ask me something. The priority assessment before I consider shifting my focus should be the same.
If there was no way to hang up the phone you wouldn't dismiss them as easily. I think this is likely a feature of ease of dismissal rather than one of remote vs local connections
There is also an easy way to not prioritize people at the office. You tell them in a polite manner that what you are doing is a bigger priority and requires your attention. Over time people learn to coordinate discussions when you are free to talk. It is part of learning to say “No”.
If you prioritize the local coworker over your remote coworkers simply because they're nearby, that contributes to the idea that remote coworkers are less effective, because you're making them less effective.
You don’t ignore people who come to talk to you. You tell them politely that you are focused on a task, and to wait until you are free. Over time people learn to send you a message first to coordinate when you are free to talk.
At the company I work for, the norm at the office is to always ask first “is this a good time to discuss X?”. Not even the CTO gets a free pass to interrupt engineers. Actually he was one of the people who coached me to prioritize my focus first and to learn to say “No”.
Not at all. The person asking for attention will communicate what topic they want to discuss. I can then evaluate if that topic is more important than whatever I am working or focused on. If I tell the person that they need to wait, they could tell me why I am not doing my priority evaluation correctly and then I’ll reassess. There is no conflict or lack of politeness. The system works well for our team.
> The person asking for attention will communicate what topic they want to discuss. I can then evaluate if that topic is more important than whatever I am working or focused on.
I think that’s how the vast majority of office communication works.
If you are properly evaluating the request then you are already knocked out of the zone.
It originally sounded like you were saying you would say the equivalent of “Mate, if the buildings not on fire then send me an email and I’ll get back to you”.
Because that’s how remote staff often get treated - with calls etc just not answered.
I am definitely not knocked out of the zone when someone asks me a 5 second question and I give an even shorter reply. I am confident that in a different environment I would have to adapt the method, but in the physical environment I work on (not now due to Corona), the system I described works.
We have planning meetings in which we determine priorities once a week and everyday during standup we reevaluate priorities. Do you experience these interruptions daily? If a team has to constantly revise priorities in the middle of the day then that is the symptom of a bigger problem. Do you guys write technical design docs before going into implementation?
Isn't that at odds with the whole point of this post (which I'm not even sure I agree with)..?
People want to be in the same space so they can have small, in-person interactions. Those have softer priorities than intentional communications.
Working in offices, people often do "swing by" and ask if it's a good time to talk about something. It's socializing the issue. If you say "no" and they come back later -- or you go find them, it has all worked out.
It is, you are putting your own issue in higher regard just because you don't know someone else’s situation.
When working remotely think ahead and assume your issue/question isn’t as important as you think it is. Because most of the time questions for colleagues aren't as urgent for anyone except you.
You don’t prioritize your personal focus, you prioritize an objective. Most often these objectives are very clear to the rest of the team.
Also I can’t believe you “know” something is “important enough to interrupt them”. I work for a place in which the most “junior” dev is worth a quarter of a million dollars a year. I am not going to tell some dude who is probably figuring out a new way to pack data to save us thousands of dollars a day, to take a minute to listen to me. It better be a fire.
> Most often these objectives are very clear to the rest of the team.
> Also I can’t believe you “know” something is “important enough to interrupt them”
> “junior” dev is worth a quarter of a million dollars a year
So the objectives of what you are working on are very clear and yet your very highly paid colleagues aren’t responsible or sensible enough to understand when it’s appropriate to interrupt you?
When the objectives are clear, we understand our priorities, and there is very little reason for interruption. Today for example, outside of meetings, I don’t think I communicated with a single coworker. I had a few 1-1’s for pair programming, and those were scheduled during standup. Is your organization aware of studies on interruption? It seems nobody understand the problem.
the bad eggs can be in the minority as members of the population, but still provide the majority of interruptions: the good eggs know to be judicious about it, but the bad eggs just interrupt and interrupt and interrupt.
Agreed - so why not deal with the bad eggs individually?
Because at the end of the day most managers aren’t really concerned with productivity - it’s far easier and less emotionally draining to just proscribe blanket bans.
That’s one of the main reasons remote working hasn’t taken off more.
This 100%. Most startups that are getting on the remote-only bandwagon are gonna be in for a big surprise when they start seeing their culture dry up into a crusty spot of resin. Half of the value of working at a modern company is being in the same room as the talented people you work with. I love everyone I work with, and going into the office and seeing them gives me a huge amount of motivation to do good work.
Purely remote work can't possibly be the future for creative fields. Humans are inherently social, and I say this as someone who has crippling social anxiety. All of my salary expectations took this into account. If proximity to talent is being taken away from me, why not just look for a new company? I didn't come to the bay area to not be around smart and talented people.
I imagine if grade-school became fully-remote, that generation would just be much more lonely and have fewer friends than ever. People are meant to be together, work together, and do things together.
> have better feelings about the coworkers you see every day in person.
I honestly don't know if this is true. There are coworkers that I really like to work with, but I'm also happy to not have to spend 8 hours a day in the same room engaging in small talk, smelling their reheated leftovers, etc.
I'd say it slightly differently. The thing I've observed is that the physical closeness creates a bias. You are more likely to give someone you "know" the benefit of the doubt. Someone who is remote is more likely to be seen as clueless or "them not us" even if you'd agree with someone local on the same idea. We as humans long to belong. It is hard to separate them from the rest of the experience. I think the other fact is the hallway and elevator are great opportunities to "get to know" someone when in reality it is just knowing more about someone not necessarily really knowing them as a person. But those are the things that create the familiarity and benefit of the doubt later.
Going out drinking with managers is probably the second most important thing for your career after being good at your job, and might be number 1, in certain companies
this is true about anyone. given enough time and distance, your own mother will become "just another person you know". if you aren't physically interacting with people, you are soon forgotten.
I used to believe in out of sight out of mind until I had my first break up.
Out of sight out of mind is a function that takes a parameter that is not a Boolean. If the person was important enough to you they won’t leave your mind easily.
If anything, the adage exposes the strength of your relationships. In the business case, it will expose the value of physical coordination vs virtual coordination. It’s not going to be clear cut.
But you are probably right in a business context, where the number that’s going to get passed into the out of sight out of mind function will definitely be low enough to return true for just about all of us.
It’s not exactly the world anyone wants to live in, but what are you gonna do.
I hope people view this video, but I'm a founder + the CTO at Loom. I use video all the time to solve exactly this problem: maintaining an emotional connection with my peers in a remote context asynchronously. It's not 100% - you still need synchronous time, but it helps a lot.
I don't care if you use Loom, but, if you're on a team that is any % remote, do this for yourself + your fellow remote teammates. It goes a long way.
Funny how you describe yourself as an extrovert and I've always said I'm an introvert - but we identify the same.
Dislikes, anxiety around large groups of (mostly unknown) people, preference for people we know like work colleagues and family.
To your main point, I think it depends on the previous relationship. Most of these folks had months or years to form bonds with coworkers such that I don't think it'll be so easy to reduce them to the concept of a human just from a few months or a year apart.
Consider the hypothesis you have an anxiety disorder, not introversion. I said I was an introvert for years until repeated evidence (and everyone I know pointing out to me) convinced me that I am just happier, healthier, and have more energy if I'm around other people. That doesn't imply that I (or you!) am _good_ at being around other people, especially strangers.
I've taken several personality tests that identify me as an extrovert / leader, and it's true, I tend to lead well as defined by my subordinates over years.
But it's exhausting. Groups larger than a few can only be handled in deep conversation for an hour or two tops. Also I get crippling anxiety before entering certain social situations, especially phone calls to support lines or in foreign countries where the cultural taboos are potentially around every corner.
Leave me with one person though, especially one I know well, and I can talk for hours and hours at full speed.
I have this too. I'm 40 now and over the years I have come to understand it not as anxiety per se. But more as sensitivity. I am extremely sensitive to body language, emotional content, background noises... Details... When I'm in a large group of people there's so much information coming in that it quickly becomes exhausting. If I've slept well and am generally looking after myself I can do large groups for hours at a time. But if I'm tired, it quickly leads to exhaustion which then leads to confusion and anxiety. I also get classified as extrovert in psych tests. And I do love people, it's just they are generally too intense for my poor overly tuned nervous system. I often think I'd do well with a mood stabilizer/anti epileptic.
I believe this is what's considered as a "highly sensitive person". There's some scientific evidence showing that you can identify even babies based on how they react to external stimuli. Basically your brain is hardwired to react more strongly than others - this makes social interactions with strangers quite exhausting, for example. And there is nothing you can do about it - it's just some evolutionary development that occurs in a portion of the population. I recommend looking into it more if you're interested - there is also the book Quiet by Susan Cain.
Yes, this feels very familiar. I find myself energized, outgoing, dynamic, etc around strangers, and then reliving the conversations over and over in my head days later when the energy is gone. I've got one or two great friends who I feel truly comfortable with, and so I have to rely a lot on them for my "extroversion."
After spending a few years being a solo freelancer and then going back to a j-o-b, my wife has commented that I seem more content, happier.
I chalked it up to the stress relief that consistent paychecks can provide, but perhaps I am anxiety-disordered.
Others have mentioned similar traits: being a leader or mentor, doing thing on your own, tackling new projects...y'all have turned on a lightbulb for sure.
I think you should correct that to "the humans I hang around with / have met". There is a large online community that you may not be a part of and they are quite emotional about each other. Just go on twitch and have a look at how bent up or bent over people get about each other.
Your comment is made from a place of personal experience that isn't equal to that of others, and you generalize it to seem as if it were equal.
I think that's true in the pre-Zoom world. About a year ago I started using Zoom for my remote team. It dramatically improved the effect you described, for all of us.
I run a small company and for the non-technical folks we have lunches twice a week via Zoom. It has worked wonders.
Other than the medical and economic catastrophe that is this pandemic, it has been absolutely wonderful for my company. Hopefully we'll exist as a company in a year from now.
Thanks. I've become closer to my dentist since the pandemic. We've talked about business issues, even though software and dentistry are very different, there are definitely common issues.
The things we share are definitely many and another good thing is getting people to talk that wouldn't normally do that.
So, take care yourself, and thanks for the kind words.
I have friends and we see each other. As for work related socializing: I work from home for last 20 year running my own business making my own products and doing the same for other companies. Sometimes I go to business meetings (not since COVID) but not at any point do I feel that I am missing something. It is totally opposite. I am happy like a clam. I have some people working for me but all remote as well.
This can be a good thing, too. If you're prone to anxiety, you might find that people you once had a tense relationship with are now much easier to get along with. Since their presence is not persistent, their ability to cause you anxiety is greatly diminished.
Everyone countering your argument is basically saying "no, this isn't true; my remote relationships are great". No one is really arguing what your saying about co-located, in-person working better for emotional connection and tribal culture building.
That's because people are countering this argument,
>if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer. It's unfortunate but it's true
and the assertion that if you are different you must be autistic.
The much less inflammatory argument that all else being equal, you are more likely to bond with someone with whom you share physical proximity is probably not worth arguing against.
if this were true, I wouldn't have formed long lasting friendships with people I played videogames online. Long distance relationships would suck a lot more and everyone in the office would be happy.
we just need to accept that different people like different things for whatever reason.
I have never been close to any co-workers. I am friendly, I meet outside work et all, but they are co-workers first.
I love remote work. But I realise that in reality, full time remote would work only for like maybe 20% of the population.
We predominantly pair and mob in our team, if anything I feel closer during WFH as we actually mob more as we no longer have to find suitable mobbing or pairing spaces.
I can relate to this pretty well. I spend a lot of time on IM group chats and people naturally come and go. I often don't even notice when someone leaves and when they come back a year later I remember the profile pic and remember that we were talking in the same group for years but I don't remember a single thing about them or anything we said. I usually only remember someone if they were particularly stand out or we spent extensive time in private messages.
>It's unfortunate but it's true: you are going to naturally think more about and have better feelings about the coworkers you see every day in person.
The people who are overjoyed at the prospect of WFH, thinking they are in the right, are a loud minority. Most people, being well-adjusted social creatures, would feel very alienated if they are not in close physical proximity with the people they work with and depend on for their livelihood.
There has been a massive uptick of WFH articles and how it will be the new norm in the future. I think Dang called it a "cliche". The tabloids are writing cheques basic human needs cannot cash.
This might be flippant to say but I wouldn't be surprised if people who espouse remote work/WFH have a very real lack of leadership skills, because you're cutting your own ability to influence those around and underneath you when you cannot look them in the eyes properly.
This won't sit well with HNers, and I get it, since one of the catch phrases around here is that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Sometimes, its not others who have a hard time understanding - its us.
The remote work group is very niche. People cannot wait to get the hell out of their houses, get back to what they want to do, and work with their colleagues.
>the only exceptions I know are quite far on the autism spectrum.
Perhaps we need to rethink work life balance if we need work to fulfill our social needs.
During the lockdown, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of my house, but it was because I wanted go hiking, out to eat, to a ballgame, or just to visit friends and family.
I agree, but eating, sleeping, working, these kinds of things don't happen every other sunday. It's every single day. Any "work life balance" you bring to this, assuming you're in the 40+ hour/week rat race, will have to revolve around those three things, and not the other way around.
The mistake people make is thinking they can make their work life revolve around their life life. As George Carlin quipped "The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."
So you're there, working remotely by yourself, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. It takes a special kind of left-field to equate this to being in an environment where you're surrounded by people of "your tribe", as the OP put it.
That's the thing, I'm not. Almost no one who is doing knowledge work is getting 8 hours a day of work done. Instead of driving to the office to get 4-5 hours of work in and goof off the rest of the time with a forced group of people, I get 4-5 hours of work done at home and goof off with whomever I choose.
I work a few hours in the morning. Leave in the middle of the day to walk the dog to the park, have a long lunch with my fiancee, or run errands. Come home do a few more hours of work. Or I work early and take the afternoon off to go hiking etc...
>by people of "your tribe", as the OP put it.
I don't won't my workmates to be the people of my tribe. I work to live, I don't live to work. Our economic system isn't set up to allow everyone to do this, but most of us on HN could if we wanted to.
I've done this for about 5 years now btw. I don't make quite as much as I could if I worked for a FAANG, but I live in a low cost of living area in a medium sized city near plenty of mountains. I highly recommend it over the rat race.
I agree with you again, and yet your statements are bringing up even more uncomfortable questions.
Ever since the "lockdown" started, a lot of people have found they have ample time, and so the thing that has been done en masse is to double down on work. This is mentally and physically (sitting on your ass the whole day) draining, and will lead to a huge burn out in a relatively short amount of time.
Your work schedule is atypical, and in most work environments would lead to eyebrows being raised from management down to your peers.
There is an unwritten rule that you are allowed to work some N number of hours every day that is less than the number of hours you're paid for. But you are there, within the ear shot of most people who depend on you, and if you step out for something they know you will be back relatively quickly in case the world around them starts to burn down.
With this kind of a "I set my own schedule" approach, people would have a hard time trusting you and depending on you. And if you think it's a good career move to let them know that hey I'll be taking a long lunch (every day), well, I've already addressed that.
As MattGaiser put it, it's as if he's a microservice outputting work. That's pretty much what remote contractors are. Nobody _really_ gives a shit about them. It's a hard truth to take in.
I get that there's a huge swath of people who mindlessly browse facebook or twitter or reddit or their favorite ethnic news site at the office, completely not caring about the work because they're mentally drained and it's not 5 o'clock yet, but they are there all the same.
>I've done this for about 5 years now btw. I don't make quite as much as I could if I worked for a FAANG, but I live in a low cost of living area in a medium sized city near plenty of mountains. I highly recommend it over the rat race.
Same, although don't think that it's somehow normal or that because everyone is forcibly remote-working, that it will become the new normal.
>Your work schedule is atypical, and in most work environments would lead to eyebrows being raised from management down to your peers.
At every company I've worked for no one has ever cared. At all. I'm around to answer questions and attend meetings.
>in case the world around them starts to burn down.
I could be back home in 30 minutes if things really got that bad. But since I'm the principal engineer, it's really my job to make sure things don't ever get that bad, and it's pretty rare that they do. I also make sure that I'm not irreplaceable, so that if things go wrong I'm not the only one who can fix them.
>With this kind of a "I set my own schedule" approach, people would have a hard time trusting you and depending on you
Why? I can answer questions from my phone. What's the practical difference between our CEO regularly being out of communication because he's in a meeting that can't be interrupted and me being a 20 minute drive from my computer?
>And if you think it's a good career move to let them know that hey I'll be taking a long lunch (every day), well, I've already addressed that.
Again I'm not optimizing my life for work. It may not be the absolute optimum career strategy but after 5 years it feels like the optimum life strategy. I make plenty of money--several multiples of the median income. Could I be making another $50k a year if I worked 2x as much in an office? Probably, but that's not my goal.
>As MattGaiser put it, it's as if he's a microservice outputting work. That's pretty much what remote contractors are. Nobody _really_ gives a shit about them. It's a hard truth to take in.
I'm not a remote contractor, I manage the technology for the entire company, mentor developers, develop and design projects on my own, meet with leadership about product direction etc... If MattGaiser were working at my company, he'd be talking to me regularly. It sounds like he just has a shitty boss.
But since you bring up remote contracting, I did that for a while and I had even more freedom. I never worked for fewer than 3 companies at a time, so I never had one boss that was absolutely critical that I keep happy. It was great.
1) Is this an off-shore set up where you don't really have an in-house team so you're the principal engineer of a development team that is located another country?
2) What was your setup like at first, ie. before the last 5 years or however long you've been doing this for?
The reason why I ask is because Principal-esque positions often come with perks not available to prole Developers.
>What's the practical difference between our CEO regularly being out of communication because he's in a meeting that can't be interrupted and me being a 20 minute drive from my computer?
Not to sound snide, but the practical difference is - you're not the CEO.
>I'm not a remote contractor, I manage the technology for the entire company, mentor developers, develop and design projects on my own, meet with leadership about product direction etc... If MattGaiser were working at my company, he'd be talking to me regularly. It sounds like he just has a shitty boss.
It would not surprise me that some of these habits, fe. mentoring devs, meeting with leadership, etc, are best cultivated in a physical space before being done online. That's just me though.
Nothing to do with shitty bosses, but not everyone is exactly born with the qualities to check up on people regularly, ready to go out of the gate. Especially in a professional environment. A lot of people are very quiet, reserved, and are waiting to be spoken to, and it takes effort and practice to be a bit more vocal and proactive.
I'd honestly ascribe it to being the exception rather than the norm.
1. Nope, but the dev team is located on the other side of the country from the rest of the company (and I'm in between).
2. This company started as just a client and then they made me an offer that was too good to refuse.
>The reason why I ask is because Principal-esque positions often come with perks not available to prole Developers.
I definitely have a lot of perks. But I had even more freedom when I was a contractor, and I made plenty of money. If someone is a decent developer with good communication and business skills, a similar path is very achievable.
>Not to sound snide, but the practical difference is - you're not the CEO.
When I said practical I specifically meant other than the fact that he's the CEO. My point is that a well run company won't fall apart if the CEO is unavailable for a few hours per day, and a well run team won't fall apart b/c one developer (or their boss) is similarly unavailable.
>It would not surprise me that some of these habits, fe. mentoring devs, meeting with leadership, etc, are best cultivated in a physical space before being done online. That's just me though.
That's entirely possible. But my guess is that if there is an effect it's small compared to all the other variables.
>Nothing to do with shitty bosses, but not everyone is exactly born with the qualities to check up on people regularly, ready to go out of the gate. Especially in a professional environment.
I agree with you there, but I also think those people probably shouldn't be managers until they have developed those qualities, and I don't think this is a remote problem.
Years ago I didn't have those qualities. I was a retail supervisor and I used to sit in the front office and mostly ignore the cashiers until there was a problem despite the fact that I was only 20 feet away from them.
Remote work does require different skills, and managing a remote team probably takes more skill in general, but honestly I wouldn't want to work in house for a manager that didn't have those skills anyway.
> Most people, being well-adjusted social creatures, would feel very alienated if they are not in close physical proximity with the people they work with and depend on for their livelihood.
I would expect well adjusted people to have family and friends out of work and alto to work well with people who are not in close social proximity. The customers or other team are often in another country or at least city. I would not expect well adjusted people to be "very alienated" in work setup that is not exactly just right amount of social for themselves, I would expect them to be adjustable to both work at distance and in person.
Moreover, if someones ability to convince people stands on him being flippant and implying that those who disagree are inferior, it is really preferable to deal with them on distance.
Well adjusted people dont rely on implied insults to make the point.
--------------------------
Well adjusted people also have responsibilities and duties out of work or hobbies. They need to help to aging parents or their children or tend to garden. Well adjusted people around me like the saved time from traveling to work and back, like more time with the family or fixed stuff in houses they had no time to fix before.
Preference for work from home does not mean asocial, it may just mean opposite - the work is not that persons sole social/emotional outlet.
Wow, where to start. To summarize you said I'm poorly socially adjusted and a bad leader. Solid conversation starter ;)
I agree that humans are social, but I'm not sure why you think we all need to get our primary social interactions at work. Even then, there is work social interaction literally all day long on Slack and other tools.
I think it is healthier for people to have their primary social interactions not tied to work. If a persons primary social ties are all work related it makes it harder if they are laid off or move to a better opportunity. I also find that looser work social interactions make it much easier to keep things completely professional. I shouldn't have to like to Joe in order to work with Joe and accomplish our goal.
I can't wait to get out of my house either, but it's certainly not to head back to an office after many years of being remote. I miss seeing friends, going to dinner with my wife, and rolling in Jiu-Jitsu.
As far as leadership goes, I don't subscribe to the dominate method of leading. If I have to stare someone down to get them to do something we have already gone off the rails somewhere along the way.
> Most people, being well-adjusted social creatures, would feel very alienated if they are not in close physical proximity with the people they work with
Most people, being well-adjusted creatures, do not rely on their workplace for their social needs, nor burden their coworkers with that expectation.
See, it's easy to say whatever you want when it's based on nothing.
As one of those who don’t have the leadership skills, as you put it: we couldn’t wait to get as far away as possible from those of you who feel some need to be influencing, leading, and unnecessarily bothering us because you want to “look us in the eyes”! Remote work is indeed going great for us.
At this point I've mostly given up on the concept of promotions anyway. The amount of downwards pressure against promoting people is unreal.
I've seen managers stuck in their level for years and years. Then a new candidate comes in for a Manager role, asks for more money, and (boom!) they're hired as a Director. Fuck everyone else who was already running teams successfully and trying to grow. Same for individual contributors. Best route is the insta-promotion during hiring negotiation.
You want a promotion but don't want to switch companies? Gee sorry your scope isn't wide enough yet. You're doing a fine job --a good job, even-- but you have to understand that this was already the expected job level... we need to "see more."
Every performance-review meeting I've been in, when one manager brings up one of their people for promotion, immediately some other manager will jump in and say "No I don't know about that, someone on my team had a bad interaction with them once... nope not ready for promotion" and that's that. Only once in a blue moon does the room agree that someone should get the promotion. Hallelujah!
I absolutely agree with you, and this tells me one thing: If you want a promotion, get another job. The leverage you have by already having a job is fantastic, if a company likes you they'll give you a better position just to pull you away from your current company.
I understand your point completely. I just wonder how much negativity bias plays a part here. Do we remember these instances of employees being overlooked for promotion more so because they produce strong negative feelings? I'm sure there is some truth to what you say, as I've seen it too.
I imagine there is also some (likely several) cognitive phenomenon happening in the meeting where these employees are considered for a raise. If my boss were to ask me my opinion in front of everyone whether we should promote someone or not, as a middle manager I may be expected to have an opinion, even if it's helpful or not. I also may be tempted to share that one bad memory of that person (negativity bias could be at play here, as well) so that I appear to be insightful and observant.
It sure is exhausting trying to figure out humans, but endlessly interesting. It's just hard when I'm only an "armchair-everything" and lack the data and/or knowledge to figure us out.
> You want a promotion but don't want to switch companies?
This is the current situation I find myself in. In my current company, there's just no way to get a promotion whilst staying in my current team. I can probably get one if I apply for a role in another team, but this honestly feels stupid.
I’m at Sr. engineer so any promotion will have major trade offs. I don’t know if the 20% increase in pay and expectations and responsibility is really worth it anyway. I’d much rather work a shorter week.
I understand your frustration, but also consider, being promoted over your colleagues poses its own risks to the social fabric of a company. Your last paragraph alludes to this kind of rancor.
Bringing in people from the outside (or leaving to go somewhere else yourself when you're ready to make the jump,) has its benefits for what it avoids.
Internal discontentment follows from promotions being so difficult, and it's worsened by everyone seeing new people walking in at a higher level than seems justified. Then, having to deal with the new person once they land and it quickly becomes obvious (in 99% of cases) that they are not more accomplished and don't deliver more results than the internal people they leapfrogged.
My first job two decades ago didn't have engineering levels (apart from Tech Lead designation, which wasn't a formal level). People still fought for raises and the salaries/bonuses were sometimes not perfect, but there was no "promotion" per se and in retrospect it was healthier for everyone.
That sounds healthier for the org internally but I don’t think I’d ever take the job because of the risk of stunting my career growth. Harder to move up the ladder at my next job if I don’t have a decent title at my current one.
In fact, the company I'm referring to did eventually adopt SWE job levels (right as I was leaving) and I was told it was because engineers were being recruited away by companies offering a "Senior Engineer" title.
I've recently moved back into private sector, and it's been pretty surprising to me just how little of the business world has to do with actual business. There are the expected things, such as relationship building, empire building, fiefdom building, etc.
But, it also seems that a lot of the actual effort people expend doesn't have very much to do with the business. For example, we had an executive whose passion in life was clearly just to speak in front of people. He never did real work, but made sure to take every opportunity to ensure he was speaking in front of people. It's clear that he should have been a public speaker.
I don't mean to pick on this particular executive, but it seems like there's a lot of this here. A lot of people, engaged all day in things that don't produce work. They're more about building some special, separate social hierarchy: determining who is in charge, who has influence, who matters. That seems to take up a lot of time in the private sector. I'm sure it's not universally true, but this has been my ad-hoc experience.
And, I get it: this is what people do, and what people value. We're social creatures, etc. But it sort implies that everyone's engaged in a joint lie. That lie being "we're here to work and we're all hard workers. We're primarily interested in advanced the business." It seems like a more literal truth might be: "We're here to take part in a social hierarchy, and forge friends and enemies, and do enough actual work that no one minds how inefficient our business is."
Good point, and I used to actually hold a stronger belief in things like that because to me they represent a larger-picture type of work that seemed more interesting.
BUT, ever since I exited out of that game to start my own business, my beliefs have been shifting. Now I can see exactly how successful businesses come together and make enough money to fill payroll, and there's no getting around the fact that real, valuable work needs to get done. And that only once the real work has been done, do you then get to have the nice byproducts of success which is to do public speaking, culture building, and etc all those extra-curricular things. But the existence of these extra-curriculars are predicated on having a successful business in the first place. And no matter how cynical anyone gets, you won't have a successful business based on /JUST/ bullshit empire building alone- you gotta do real work and provide real value.
I can also see more clearly now that if society doesn't have the right balance between doers and talkers, we're eventually gonna have nothing valuable to show for anymore, and the fallout from that won't be pretty.
When /everyone/ DESIRES to be talkers, instead of just a small minority, it's a worrisome trend.
I think that's very fair, and to be clear: I'm not necessarily even suggesting this is a bad thing, just that I was surprised by it, and that it seems to run counter to what people publicly espouse. For certain, some businesses are more efficient than others as well.
My boss keeps repeating how he’s impressed with how much we achieve, but I keep thinking we could do so much more.
I feel it’s cultural though. I feel in Japan people are very much in a company to just have some sort of occupational therapy, but in the Netherlands people are very much together to do work.
Yep. Promotion? WTF. No, you weasel your way into duties "above" your pay grade then go get the job you've been doing, with accompanying title and pay, someplace else.
Or you can wait around for an opening in your company and hope the right people know your name so you get it. If you prefer gambling. But jumping ship works better.
[EDIT] OK in case anyone uses this as a playbook, be aware you may need an intermediate step at some company desperate for [your new role] with below-average pay so you can have The Actual Title for a while before moving to a place with normal pay, but the good news is below-average for your next step is probably at or above what you're already making anyway, so NBD. Just be sure their pay's below average because they're a funded-but-not-crazy-funded startup and not because they're terrible, though. For whatever reason low pay also seems to go with shitty working conditions and overwork. Go figure. And make sure they're likely to stay in business minimum a year, with two being better.
> Shopping your resume around will be the new promotion (similar to pre-covid career growth).
I graduated in 2015 and at that point it was well established this is how you move up. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the overwhelming sentiment for most people in my generation.
No kidding. Unless you’re in a “tech for tech’s sake” kind of job, you need to get up to speed on the problem domain and the business. That usually takes _at least_ 18 months and if people bounce just as they’re getting proficient you’re throwing money into a black hole.
Alternately, the software industry could go the way of the electrical and mechanical engineering industries and just not hire people unless they already possess relevant domain knowledge. It was a bit of a shock to me when I transitioned from EE that I could get hired in this industry with little to no domain knowledge on what I was being hired to do.
I do wonder if this will happen. I reckon there will be some sort of catastrophic programming error which brings in a level of certification akin to other engineering disciplines. I've seen jobs advertised nearby for a nuclear defence company that have the same requirements as a web dev agency.
Or killed a bunch of people undergoing radiotherapy, or exploded an Arianne rocket, or required years of remiedial work before 1st of Jan 2000 ... the list goes on and on.
I was thinking something more extreme, although I wonder if that software bug had caused a plane or two to crash into a US city would there have been more of a response.
> you need to get up to speed on the problem domain and the business. That usually takes _at least_ 18 months
I have always wondered about this as businesses do not seem to care. Everyone knows devs are getting large raises to move but what business is working to counteract the problem? Not many.
Domain knowledge seems to not have much value as far as the people signing your paychecks are concerned.
This also depends on the company and in the same time it depends on the people applying for the job. I wouldn't feel any motivation if I would just go to company X because of their great technology, but the business is something that says nothing to me, and same goes the other way. That's until somebody pays you more than enough to drop the idealism. :)
I have never been promoted at a job and my longest tenure was 3 years right out of university. I've gotten a 10%-50% increase in every job I've taken when I've jumped ship.
Staying in the same job for longer than it takes you to learn how to do it is career suicide.
As a small point of data against this, I've been promoted twice at my current company. Starting salary was 100k, promoted to level C engineer at 110k, now level B engineer at 125k.
If you want a promotion, move to another job. Most companies make it incredibly slow and painful to evolve in their own walls, while giving big rewards to new comers.
Unless you happen to work at the legenday ones that do care about you, don't play according to their rules. Those are here for their benefit, not yours.
Highly recommend this.
I'm a consultant, and I got offered a $12,000 raise after working with my company for two years and working for three seperate extremely high value clients.
I put in my two weeks notice the day I received an offer from a competing company nearby that I'd applied to for a total renumeration package roughly equivalent to a $45,000 raise at my old job.
Shop around. Always. If you don't, you'll never know.
I like to think of it as someone losing out on free stuff. It costs nothing to write up an updated resumé and throw it into the abyss of companies that are hiring. Possible gain by doing this? A lot. Possible loss? Maybe an hour of your time that you spent applying to the job.
You will start to see many articles degrading remote work. Remote work is too efficient to this economic system. We need to spend time on traffic and restaurants.
As we saw Jorge W Bush at the moment of crisis asking citizens to consume, I would not be surprised to see politicians asking employees and companies to reduce remote work for the good of this economy which is based on exponential growth such as this virus
There was a point in my life when I hated work as commute, lunch breaks, even outside noise disruption and other things at my workplace like bathroom breaks were enjoyable escapements.
Then I started working from home and now I am very happy
I work on some interesting side projects at my home and this has improved my productivity on boring company tasks.
But why I don't get interesting company work? Mostly because boring task pays well.
Working remotely can be amazing. Today I spent 2 hours driving, 1 hour each way, to go snorkeling off a black sand beach. I did that in Tuesday also. Then I got home and started working at around 3p. That beats commuting 2 hours in traffic during peak daylight hours, only to collapse from exhaustion in my evening hours.
I’m a remote employee and have been making my own schedule for the last 7 years across 3 companies and 3 different roles.
The key is finding companies that are entirely remote. Not hybrid.
Answering emails all day sounds awful. I’m fortunate enough to be able to almost entirely ignore email. Out of curiosity, what do you for work? You said technical, but sending emails for 7 hours per day sounds more like sales. I’d highly recommend quitting and finding a remote job that doesn’t require you to do idiotic busy work if you’re interested in doing things like snorkeling and hiking in the middle of the day.
La Palma, in the Canary Islands! This place is simply wonderful. Here's a video taken on Tuesday by Lisa, the wonderful operator of https://www.oceanologico.com/ ...
If you're wondering what I'm doing in the Canary Islands during Coronaverse shenanigans, I was visiting when quarantine started, decided to stay here, and am still here. I felt Spain was taking Coronavirus more seriously than the USA.
Mar 12, 2020 / Observatorio Roque De Los Muchachos (including GranTeCan, the world's largest optical telescope at 10.4m in diameter) -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/JcD1bCUb1asU9VcE8
I agree with you, remote work has many problems and one of them is the possibility to become tiresome the interactions at a distance.
It can however have several ecological advantages, and if well managed it can be a way to strengthen family and community ties.
My point is that although it is more efficient, it is not as productive as putting everyone to work in big cities. It doesn't produce traffic, maybe people feel less need to buy cars, it doesn't generate so much real estate speculation, etc.
We should certainly scrutinize certain industries more than others, such as the auto industry or those who otherwise benefit from having the masses commutes.
Emails and conference calls work just fine, no videoconf required. Unless you absolutely need to be on video, don't, it's just unnecessary stress. If your org requires you be on video constantly for every call, leave for a better org when you can if they're unable to budge on unreasonable requirements.
We don't require video but it's the norm with most of the groups I communicate with--especially with smaller calls. If I'm on a large group call that I'm sort of half paying attention to in case there's something I should know about, I'll just turn my webcam off. But for calls I'm actively participating in, it is more engaging if people are on video. I'm not sure why we'd want to have less engagement especially at a time when there aren't F2F meetings.
(And, yes, it does force you to be a bit more present than an audio call does. But that's sort of the point.)
> I'm not sure why we'd want to have less engagement especially at a time when there aren't F2F meetings.
More engagement doesn't necessarily translate into more value.
For example, I can focus more on the task at hand if I’m not having to worry about everyone judging my video feed. Do you need to see me if I’m still adequately communicating? Cognitive load is a thing.
Personally, I'm not convinced things would be any better if I were on audio calls all day--although it would let me tune out more. But, at that point, maybe I just shouldn't be in those meetings if I'm just treating them as background noise.
I admit that I'm more accustomed to the video chat thing than many. I work for a heavily remote global company and I'm very rarely in an office (even though I'm officially associated with one).
At my place of work, I’m audio only 90% of the time, except for “social meetings”. It’s actually great fun to be able to walk around, tend to my plants, or do dishes while listening to or talking through a problem. I think if I had video on in these meetings, I would always be out of frame, and would make people feel ignored!
For me, keeping my hands engaged helps me follow conversations much better. If I’m at my laptop with the camera on, I personally find the urge to write or read (both of which are linguistically distracting) too strong.
My coworkers all know this about me and are totally on board with it. Maybe we’re not corporate enough for it to be a problem? :)
That's fair and I probably used to walk around more with a Bluetooth headset during calls when slides weren't involved. Being on video has probably become more normalized the past few years. I still do it sometimes but not as consistently.
I don't think remote work is necessarily efficient in every case. Yesterday I filled an order with my mail order pharmacy, a call that takes about 5 minutes per month. This call took a very non-efficient 30 minutes, and the worker revealed to me they were working from home, and apparently her computer was extremely slow (the audio quality was also not great, presumably it was a bad VOIP link). I didn't dig deeper, and of course we know of a number of reasons why that could be, and potential fixes, but my takeaway is WFH isn't a panacea - there's work to be done, and it may not be useful in all situations.
Connection speed is a solvable problem. Good internet is cheap relative to a salary. So while there'll be a transition period where people discover their Comcast cable connection isn't enough, when people take it seriously those'll get fixed.
Solvable, but not quickly. Even in the Houston area, you can live 30 minutes away and be in a pretty rural setting. Someone may have made that choice intentionally, not thinking they'd be required to work from home one day. Imagine owning a Prius as a UPS driver, and then being told you need to start using your personal vehicle for deliveries.
I agree, but also Comcast cable IS enough 99% of the time. He said she was having trouble with VOIP. You can run VOIP on almost any kind of connection. Definitely every modern cable connection is designed for that. And if it was "her computer" i.e. slow webpages, that is probably just a broken web application if it doesn't work remotely, or one that was designed (poorly) for an intranet.
This is far too simplistic and cynical a view. You are not being charitable to people who have legitimate criticisms of WFH and I don’t think you can flat out claim WFH is more efficient across the board
Some legit criticisms I have of WFH (I’m not “anti” WFH, mind):
If you rely on colleagues/get blocked by them, they can go AWOL for extended periods and block you harder. Some people are straight up much less productive even if they don’t have kids in their house, probably because they need the structure or get distracted easily at home.
Meetings are more efficient ways to relay medium-large amounts of information than async communication like email/messaging. And video meetings are still quite awkward and may never be able to be as good as in person.
It’s much harder for managers to do their job (understand the state of the team and communicate that upwards, track progress, manage wellbeing, help where it’s needed) in environments that are more closed off.
I’m sure many people are more productive when WFH but it’s certainly not everyone. It’s not at all “too efficient”. I have directly seen how it harms individual and team productivity and communication
> Meetings are more efficient ways to relay medium-large amounts of information than async communication like email/messaging
Absolutely could not disagree with this statement more. Meetings are where productivity goes to die. Information should be throughly documented, annotated, and shared. Async feedback + RT collaboration is how value is created.
You could build a multi-billion dollar business without ever going into a meeting.
Meetings are a crutch. A bad habit of legacy forced-commute workplaces that simply want to give the appearance of work. It’s the ultimate form of the art of not working.
It all depends on how the meeting is moderated, whether people can excuse themselves out of them when they are not relevant and so on. I think that key is culture where it is ok to say "I dont need to be in this meeting, have a nice day".
The written discussions take awful amount of time compared to moderated meeting (whether online or offline one).
It may be fruitless, but we have to talk about it. We have a growth addiction that threatens to deplete the planet's resources.
Real solutions like working from home, working less, putting real taxes on externalities, reduce the scale of economies are not really taken into account because they reduce GDP, or generate fewer jobs.
We have to think of a post-growth and also post-work society
I am not buying that. Smaller scale, less working hours and "green economy" equals more work to be done
(less efficient) by more people and would lead to more jobs, right?
E.g. buying small farm ecological fruits need more work by the farmer and you to pay for it -> higher gdp.
Although working fewer hours can mean more work (or at least a greater distribution of work), producing on a smaller scale is much more efficient than producing on a larger scale.
This is due to Borsodi's law which states that as the cost of production decreases due to centralized operation, the cost of processing and distribution increases disproportionately [1]. For example, if a greenhouse produces one type of fruit for the entire continent, its production costs are low but distribution costs will be much higher e.g. the costs of transporting the fertilizer to the site, and those of transporting the goods as well as cooling, packaging, marketing.These distribution costs will be much higher than in several decentralised small-scale regenerative agriculture productions.
All waste on gasoline, packaging and fertilizer (much of it synthetic) enters in the GDP. In fact the GDP is not a good measure of progress at all and this discourse to clarify why [2]
At the moment in developed countries you have 2% of the population working in agriculture and 40% in distribution. Even if you increase the number of jobs in agriculture (for example to 10%) this would mean a fairly large reduction in employment in distribution.
We have to solve our social and environmental problems even if it does not provide jobs. Employment is a means to an end and not the end in itself.Previous generations created infrastructure unimaginable 100 years ago and that is the reason why there is no employment. To insist on full employment is not to value what has been done.
I leave here a quote from Ralph Borsodi:
"It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life. Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind's most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve -- the two things which he should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort. When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them.
When he produces more things than are necessary to good living, he wastes both of them; he wastes time and he wastes material, both of which should be used to make the world a more beautiful place in which to live, and life in it more beautiful than it is Today".
I understand, and I would continue with this strategy if it were possible. However, it is not, everything that grows exponentially will eventually collapse.
The Club of Rome, a multidisciplinary group of scientists, published the book "Limits of Growth" in 1972, with various scenarios. In the "Business as Usual" scenario, the one of maintaining exponential growth, aims at collapse in the beginning of this century.
But as in all addictions, it is easier to find excuses and not face the problem head-on.
This book introduced me to the discipline of systems theory. It's awakened a lot of interest in this disciple that appears to be very powerful.Sadly, it has also aroused much concern.
There are solutions but they involve having the courage to change the paradigm.
I have a feel most articles against it aren't based on anything substantial and are simply made by people who personally don't like remote work. "If I don't like remote work, then how come anybody can?"
We seem to have a lot of self-centered people floating around in their own spheres of interest. "I had this experience, I'm most people, so most people should agree".
I thought HN would be different from reddit, but it those differences seem only superficial.
A lot of the WFH discussion on HN goes something like this:
“I’m a senior SWE working remotely for ten years, I make $200k+, never work if I don’t want to, wake up whenever I want to, go hiking during the day etc. It’s so great!” (Obviously an exaggerated simplification here).
Well great that it works for you, but that will not translate for a huge swath of the working population.
I do agree that for SWEs and others who are able to and enjoy spending their time working independently, that WFH is likely a godsend.
HN self selects for those types of workers, so it makes sense that is the most prominent opinion here on the board.
I think we're headed for a different economic system entirely by the end of the decade.
Most millennials / Gen Z fully realize that "perpetual growth capitalism" has to end in our lifetimes. Even ignoring climate change, we simply have to consume less because we're running out of things to consume. At best, we're looking at holding global economic output relatively flat in perpetuity; at worst it will decline across the board.
Our political and economic systems are not designed for that reality over any significant time span. We will need to replace them with ones that are, and that process will be neither pretty nor peaceful (the left is starting to bring guns to rallies too).
While access to resources is not evenly distributed (not everybody can consume equally), life itself is a consumption mechanism by design. We're currently only consuming 1 / 10,000th of the energy that reaches Earth from the Sun every day.
I'd be hesitant to paint a future whereby consumptive expansion isn't feasible or possible. In this past decade alone we turned automated prime factorization into a currency just to have an excuse to waste energy.
From my perspective the growth potential globally is massive, the majority of people on earth live on less than $2.50 a day. This can't be where we stop the wheels of progress.
I'm not sure about any sort of radical change. I recognize the issues, but I also bought a house and have meager retirement savings in the market. Millennials and Gen Z are going to sink further and further into these systems, especially as the baby boomer money and homes come free and start drifting into the next generations. I doubt we'll run out of things to consume, we've already found the solution to that - digital media, with no real world substance, has a ton of value. If you can create items to consume out of thin air, you can never run out.
This is why certain countries don't promote quarantine
The powers at play want consumers to keep their businesses alive.
That combined with their governments inability to do contact tracing and keep order with their castrated police.
It's all a lot of work, and work is costly. Powers at play don't want all that unless they can profit from it.
Having more time on our hands can reduce consumption, for example, we can make our food instead of going to the restaurant or take away. We may have more time for the family and thus spend less on nursing homes or kindergartens.
This is just my opinion but it can also reduce conspicuous consumption. Remote work makes it less necessary to be in the centre of a city or surroundings. This reduces the consumption used to define social status. For example at the moment the fashion business is in a strong decline.
Maybe businesses will have more incentive to produce actually 'fun' stuff for people to spend their money on, rather than more and more unnecessary status items.
I think you underestimate the human desire to consume. Making food at home suddenly makes you want to invest in higher quality ingredients, better tools. Maybe even a bigger kitchen!
How did you come up with remote work increasing savings? It's more of a fact that in economical uncertainty savings will go up.
Since I work from home I spend my extra time to cook healthy affordable meals. I barely drive and try to use my bike pretty much everywhere. Having the time to really do what I want gave me the opportunity to spend way less money on "idiot materialistic consumer things".
Definitely. But as a general trend my money will be spent on more meaningful "things" or experiences and not on the mindless stuff that I used to sometimes spend it on during my previous busy life. What I mean by this is I will buy less of fast food, gas, fashion, bars and more on experiences, travels and other hobbies.
The headline doesn't distinguish between remote work at companies that are remote-first vs. companies where remote is simply an afterthought or tolerated option. Promotions, raises, influence, etc., are no issue for remote workers in the former kind of company but certainly can be in the latter. Even though the article mentions Gitlab, a remote-first company, it doesn't tease out the distinction. Given market pressures, I expect the best remote workers to gravitate to companies that are remote-first, not just remote-available.
> Promotions, raises, influence, etc., are no issue for remote workers in the former kind of company but certainly can be in the latter.
FWIW, remote first companies are not automatically immune to these dynamics. A few examples of how they can still emerge:
* A group of folks that all live in the same city informally decided to start working from the same co-working space. A clique emerges.
* The CTO frequently travels to SF to talk to customers, regularly has lunch with a local employee who later gets promoted over better performing peers.
* Same but while the CEO goes to talk to investors.
* Same but the whole leadership team meets in the same airline hub city twice a quarter because it's easiest for everyone to get to. Employees in said airline hub city have better outcomes.
* You live on one coast, and your supervisor lives on another. People in the same timezone as your supervisor get more virtual face time.
There are definitely more opportunities for this dynamic when some people are remote and some are in a shared office. But I'd be wary of any organization that tells you this can't happen to them just because they're remote-first.
These dynamics can emerge in many ways, and if an organization doesn't realize/acknowledge this, there's a decent that they could fall prey to it, or may already be in progress.
TFA, being in Wired, appears to be focused primarily on the tech industry. At the risk of being pithy, the best way to get a promotion in tech has--for a _long_ time--been to get a new job. Even if you do score an in-house title bump, your pay raise is likely to be a single-digit percentage above inflation, when jumping ship can easily net you 20%.
If more people going remote makes this more visible, fine by me.
This is not just true of remote work, it's also true of "remote" offices.
I work in Ireland for a US company. When I started in the company, I was constantly surprised with the competence of people I work with in my local office, in NY, in D.C. & in Asian offices, compared to those I work with in SF (our HQ).
But after a while I realised it wasn't that people in SF were less competent or people in other offices were moreso. It was simply that the levels were different. PoCs for a project who were at a similar "level" to me were clearly less experienced in SF, due—seemingly—to the promotional ladder just being so much more accessible there. Because those responsible for promotions are present in person.
I don't think this is an easily surmountable problem with humans, but I do hope that WFH becoming more common will make people generally more aware of the challenge.
I’ve seen the opposite from a company overcompensating. There was a remote office and some complained about promotion opportunities. There were promotions alright and then there were several complaints about the competence of some people there. Nothing was done for a long time other than blaming the people who complained about not working with them better. They didn’t try to argue that the people were actually competent since there had been multiple complaints from multiple people. Furthermore, there were obvious issues. The remote office basically formed a remote clique. They eventually got reorg’d out of existence as an individual group due to incompetence.
I think it just depends on the particular situation. It can swing either way.
I've worked remotely for almost 30 years now, my take on it has always been: "it's great you can avoid most office politics", followed by "you always lose at office politics"
It's happened at every company I've worked at - in general you need to have a manager who will have your back and represent, and have to be able to not worry about the small stuff
Remote work means companies can get the best people for that company anywhere.
Remote work means life changes can happen and you can retain the best people for that company. With jobs and life, changes happen, people move, have families, want to be close to family, want to change scenery, get a new significant other, go to school, buy a house, all of these things can mean you might have to quit if you have to physically always be in the office.
Even when companies have remote/different city offices, virtual communication is very important anyways.
Clients and customers are almost always remote with some sprinkled in meetings but mostly virtual communication and communication through the work.
Companies would be wise to switch to remote first thinking and processes with a focus on virtual communication and a nice to have of physical meetups, integration sessions etc.
Remote work helps companies focus on their external view not just their internal machinations.
For truly unique talents and workers, location has never really mattered.
The world is virtual and remote now, the companies that perform well in that and with their external view, not internal view, and do the best virtual communication will win, and not just in tech.
Remote means not building genuine relationships with any coworkers. Remote means not sharing a meal, getting coffee, building friendships, or growing past an automaton that gets work done.
>Remote means not building genuine relationships with any coworkers.
I would argue most relationships with coworkers aren't genuine. You might have a different metric for this, but mine is that when you change jobs, these relationships evaporate.
FWIW, I've worked remotely for 10+ years and some of my good friends are remote. We live on opposite sides of the country, and in one case the globe. But we catch up with each other, know about each others families, etc. And we haven't worked for the same employer in years.
> I would argue most relationships with coworkers aren't genuine. You might have a different metric for this, but mine is that when you change jobs, these relationships evaporate.
True, my relationship with my coworkers is scoped to my work environment, but I don't think that makes them not genuine. Rather, they are circumstantial, limited, and probably have a time limit on them. I don't value them any less for what they are. In fact, I embrace them for what they are: a meaningful aspect of the large chuck of my life that I spend working, even if they never exit outside of that realm.
Some of them do, like you say, slip through the cracks and do become friends outside of work.
As an analog, I spent about 5 years traveling and working remotely out of a backpack. I met A LOT of people, and I had many genuine and sometimes perspective-changing interactions with people. Most of them I don't keep in touch with anymore, but that doesn't devalue the time that I spent with them, even if we knew from the moment we met that we would only ever interact face-to-face for a few months.
Transactional and/or circumstantial and/or scoped to some time-bound aspect of your life != genuine
In the years I have worked in an office I have never built a genuine relationship with anyone. And not from lack of trying. I talk to them every morning and share interesting things I found / projects I have worked on / hobbies. Usually I get a little bit of conversation back but I have never gotten to the point where I would invite someone from work out to the pub on the weekend. I haven't ever seen anyone else get to this point either.
Not really, most work is virtual even at an office, or with another office, or with a client, or with a partner company, or with a friend that you see on occasion but always in touch online.
Remote work allows relationships/lunches with friends as well, maybe not work friends but friends, networking, local groups in the same focus/area, it isn't just automaton. We rely too much on work environment rather than our local environment. Remote work allows freedom to dictate your day more and allows for more opportunities to meet people if you want. Co-working spaces for remote workers are also nice.
External product/brand view is the most important thing companies need to learn today.
Even within the office when people go in, most communication there is email, communication/chat, video etc.
Remote and virtual communication is now how most business is done, even at physical offices.
Offices that have ability to do meetups or have integration sessions are nice to haves as well. Even when it comes to shared desktop pair programming, you can get to know people not having to stand next to them. The lunches and other things are nice though, but they have little to do with work and better external products though.
The best products come from people that have time to do research and development and more open mode versus closed mode, that kind of work is really hard to do at a modern office.
Some jobs cannot be remote, the ones that can are usually in fields where most work/communication is virtual even in the same office and maybe even the same room.
First, I think your premise is flawed. I've been WFH for almost five years; I frequently share meals, get coffee, and build friendships with people with whom I've never shared a physical space.
Second, work is where human beings are referred to and treated as resources. The only way to be "genuine" at work is to embrace the reality that you are essentially an automaton. Any relationships built along the way happen in spite of, not because of, your job.
This sentiment is precisely why I have returned to an office job (now remote like everyone) after years for working remote as a full-time employee.
I have specialized in a niche which made employers allow me to work remotely since they could not find local talent. Being the sole remote (tech) employee, or one of the few, means you will not get promoted. Remote-first is a different ballgame.
I now turn down all "only you will be remote" positions that are sent my way. I no longer work in my niche since there is no demand locally, but I will not be the sole remote person again.
>
Zuckerberg said Facebook will reduce salaries for people who move to cheaper places
>
If company X moves manufacturing to a lower cost company, it doesn't suddenly discount its product. The CEO's mindset is: if I can provide the same value for a lower cost, I get to pocket the additional (saved) margin.
But when an employee provides the same value but at a lower (personal) cost, the boss wants to clawback the savings.
The aspect of social interaction definitely has an impact on promotions, but what's more important, at least in my company are results. We act on leadership principles similar to what they have at Amazon and employees are getting rated against that.
In my team, at the end of the day, everyone is sharing what they did throughout the day work-wise. You can still list things that are non-engineering related. What I also do is tracking these notes in an application and tag the notes later for a self review. In the end, sharing these notes gives the team some perspective of what the others are doing and because of the random stuff everyone is doing from time to time we had awesome conversations / ideas because of that.
You have to be 100% remote. No functioning hybrids exist.
Most tech companies should be 100% remote with no exceptions. That doesn’t mean small satellite offices or co-working space for a group of employees. It means literally everyone from the CEO to the lowest paid IC works remotely.
This is the only way it can work. When you start mixing in-person and remote you create a political monster.
Counter point: I’ve gotten three promotions (one of which included a significant change in my role) while only seeing my bosses in person about 2-3 times a year.
I also, in contrast with other commenters, talk to my direct boss 2-3 times every week in a standup. We have weekly 1:1’s. My successes are recognized, my failures are managed.
Getting (or not getting) promotions is a function of your communication, not proximity. Those two-three yearly returns to the office don’t include any more (or less) communication than I had previously.
Promotions are overrated in a remote work world IMO.
Do you want more money? Get a better remote job anywhere else or do something else for money or keep good investments.
Do you want more prestige? For what exactly? You're not seeing any co-workers regularly to pull rank on them and there is no corner office desk with a window to fight for. If you want to be respected in your industry commit to some charitable projects or give talks.
Do you want different responsibilities? Ask, and if you don't get it go find a more suitable job.
The reality is that a lot of promotions and opportunities are simply based on getting attention and it is a lot easier to get attention in an office than remotely.
An email is easy to ignore. The boss's boss will at least know my name if he sees me every so often.
This article (similar to the several others that have been posted on remote work today) didn't touch at all on how working remotely may affect companies' ability to combat implicit bias vis a vis promotions. From conversations I've had with folks in tech, it seems that many managers believe remote work will improve the fairness of their promotion processes because it removes vectors for implicit bias like how social a person is, what a person looks like, etc.
But it also removes what I've experienced to be a low-barrier opportunity for those who are quiet or unlikely to promote their work to do so—in person in a one-on-one setting. Without the opportunity to learn by example in-person, I worry that less experienced people (especially shy ones) in technical career tracks will not self-advocate. In turn, due to implicit bias that will inevitably shape manager-employee relationships, I fear they'll stall.
It's really not a solution to say that managers should be offering the conversations, because of course, managers inevitably will fail to do so in many corporate culture.
We are going remote-first from the jump, but as we scale I am pretty concerned about how to combat this phenomenon.
I have been remoting for over ten years now. The only rule I have now is to work with remote first teams. If there's an office where a big clique meets, you'll eventually feel left out.
My cynical self loves the headline of the article. Pity it is only mentioned once in passing.
All my career I have been moving to increasingly more expensive places chasing after better jobs. So far I have very strong feelings about what I call 'the satellite office effect'. Anecdata shows that my colleagues at the head office get promoted at a ratio roughly 3:1 compare to my (remote, smaller) office.
Amid this pandemic and many companies looking at full remote, I decided to move to the US to a yet more expensive city. I love the idea of living in a low CoL area and working remote, but for the sake of my career I feel the need to work at the main offices. Even if one day I decide to make the switch, I would never consider working for anything else than a full remote company.
My last role was remote. I was only promoted after a big onsite meeting that went really well. If that in-person meeting had never happened, it would have been really hard to get that promotion.
I’ve seen a number of these ‘for and against’ conversations. One aspect that I often see overlooked is the relationship between managers and direct reports. Managers use the ‘ass in chair’ as a proxy for work load. What time did you arrive, what time are you leaving, how often are you in and out of your chair? Rightly or wrongly, the 40 hour work week is only flexible in only one direction. If you improve your ability to complete your job duties, new job duties magically appear. To that end, it’s allowed the average manager to ‘outsource’ direct management. I’m curious how this relationship will change and I’m hoping the 40 hour work week will change with it. The crux of this question is, Why is the average employee not able to control the incremental value of their time? Is it possible to move to a task-based compensation system? and/or remote work have a positive or negative impact on the compensation structure – reducing work creep, Etc.
Just load on more work until they burnout, then hire fresh new blood. Particularly desperate graduates. Burn them out, hire offshore. Rinse and repeat until the economy itself burns out and we're all delivering organic food to each other on bicycles until people get angry enough to start shooting.
80% of jobs are filled through networks anyway, so unless that changes, it doesn't really change a lot except for those just entering the workforce or those without a strong network.
A lot of that 80% of jobs being filled through networks is 'X that I don't work directly with but enjoy having lunch with and happen to know is looking for...' and 'Y whose actual contributions I'm unable to audit who always strikes me as smart and perceptive in watercooler chat'.
It also means you can do your job from anywhere. You could live somewhere less expensive.
This is especially meaningful to people with kids. Two working parents have to pay for childcare. If they can move closer to parents, that cost may disappear.
It's really important to work at a place that rewards based on meritocracy. I know that where I work, not all managers really pay as much attention to each employee as desired, but there is a culture of employees that will email managers with emails who's content is essentially "you should consider promoting xyz, they totally made my work easier because of abc...".
This is incredibly important for managers of large teams and contributes to a really great culture of people who appreciate each other rather than people who are in competition with each other.
I personally have received several of these emails since the lockdown. It's not enough to act on, but it's enough to ask peers some questions to help establish a 360 degree view of an employee's performance.
People who write these articles assume that remote work will be "Secondary" to office work. Wake up, it's already primary work, and it s going to stay that way for about a year due to health concerns. Afterwards, when half the people return to the half-empty office, companies will prioritize remote first, office will become secondary, and soon after a liability. Until a month ago , remote workers were the rare exception, now everyone is already a remote veteran. Past remote work experience is a very bad predictor of a remote-first workplace.
Lots of people are working remotely, and it looks like the #RemoteBacklash has begun because... well, everyone is different. But I don't think I've met a single remote worker who thinks that literally everyone can and should work remotely. It's a totally made up argument.
This article is made up, too. It's totally speculative, cites nameless studies about "trust"(however you're supposed to measure that), and seems to believe that the rest of tech operates like Twitter and Facebook.
For me, remote work is a promotion so long as my salary isn’t adjusted. If I can take my same salary and move somewhere (within reason) my salary goes further... that’s a pretty huge perk.
It depends on how valuable you are. There's no substitute for being an amazing value proposition to your employer. Everyone onsite company wants onsite resources until they can't hire then locally. Be invaluable remotely, and if you don't get that promotion, find it elsewhere at another company. This is basically similar to the advice that the easiest way to make more money is to take a job at a different company.
I am pretty senior and remote now. I would agree that the potential for promotion has gone down a little due to lack of visibility. My strategy is to carve out a niche for myself where I can produce high value stuff that usually doesn't get done in the rush of the office but can be done because I am out of sight. I think this works for me and fits my work style but I don't see myself moving up a lot.
Promotion or Responsibility? If a remote worker is trusted, gets things done and is an important cog in the wheel then limiting their growth would be an unwise decision and ultimately cost the company a great employee. So why would remote work be an issue with a promotion — maybe remote work is also a filter for below satisfactory people managers. Either way, HR will have a lot to rethink how they run.
This implies a rationality that I have not often seen in my professional life.
The places I have worked, HR has typically let the hiring manager decide if they want to promote an existing employee or start a new search. I don't expect remote work will change that much.
Given that, it comes down to the hiring manager and I wouldn't feel comfortable that they are this level of rational either. They may have some pre-existing opinions about remote workers and those opinions may not all be reasonable.
I think there's also reason for concern when a remote person has to "compete" with an in-office presence for the position. Qualifications and job performance aside, the person who is in the office every day, I suspect, has a real advantage here. I do think it is easier to form relationships in person, rather than over conference calls or Slack.
I suppose there could be some sort of astroturfing conspiracy associated with the "reopen" movements, but I suspect it is just that, when WFH-everywhere first started, it was of the biggest relief to the people who want to WFH, and now that it has been going on for many weeks, the people who don't are really getting fed up with the situation.
I chalk it down to the pendulum swing. When it was mostly offices, some people wanted to work remotely. Now that it’s mostly remote, some people want to work in offices.
Articles that are upvoted (which I largely associate with “people who identify with the sentiment of the article”) show up will reflect the current state of the pendulum.
At the moment there's essentially zero debate that having as many people work from home as possible is beneficial to the people, the environment, and the economy.
These articles are introducing FUD so that when companies start recalling employees, the opposition won't be as universal as it would be otherwise.
maybe it was fun and games to get a few days of working from home, but now that its a hard reality, some might not like its effect on their way of life. if people no longer have to flock to certain cities for great pay, pay will probably go down as the accessible talent pool increases greatly. So if you dont like that SF lifestyle and pay, pushing for full remote work everywhere, might be shooting yourself in the foot.
Promotions are the wrong goal. Organizations seem to want you to think it is and stay put no matter what. Don't. You should keep moving. I would argue that remote working makes it possible for the employee to not be emotionally over-invested in work/employer and to target for better economic outcomes for themselves.
Offices are corrals in a way. Dont allow yourself to be herded.
I see a high likelihood that being assigned or allowed to work in the office becomes a status/power thing, similar to the old office vs cubicle divide. Who is worth letting into the sanctum? If proximity becomes a more limited commodity it will become more precious.
There was a term I would hear as a kid professional attainment management, it is what people sent to remote posts would talk about. The need to go to HQ either regularly and/or a few years every decade to be part of the culture.
I've often wondered what would happen to the jobscape if employers spent more to keep people then they do to hire their replacement. If jumping ship was always a pay cut, what would that do to both the company and employees?
You promote peoole that strive towards the common goal, that are decent and loyal. You dont promote someone just because they live next door. Computer technology is superior for communication. The problem is the organisation.
- a space large enough to comfortably work remotely (or the money to afford a bigger space)
- a partner, kids, or both, which makes extended social isolation more livable
- a rich network for career growth and opportunities
God forbid some people want to live in big cities and don't make their choices solely based on reducing costs and bottom line expenses (ironic since every other day people here rail against big corporation bean counters). Example: Facebook's latest internal polling - the majority of people want to be in the office sometimes.
People suddenly waking up and realizing the office is a huge scam is the current du jour opinion here. But time and time again the HN demographic only speaks to itself.
And of course people will reply with that it expands choice, but that doesn't stop those from cheering that companies going full remote like its a universal good thing for everyone.
And on top of that, my observations are anecdotal. No need to point that out.
edit: Going full remote is a huge cost savings to companies. A cost that is now hoisted onto employees. So unless employees are receiving some equivalent compensation for blowing out my utility bills and refitting my office, be careful who you're cheering with.
I fully agree. Another thing I'm somewhat surprised to see is a lot of influential people talking about the trend of urbanization being reversed.
To me there are more factors than "the work is there" (at least in more developed country) to move to a big growing metropolis. An anecdotal observation I read somewhere here on HN was something like "have you logged on to tinder in a suburb of some smaller US city?".
Another big factor is the environmental one, sure if we can reduce the commute for a majority of people that would be awesome, however people will not stop moving around (restaurants, entertainment, socializing). What alternatives do we have if people are going to leave the city? Public transportation is for the most part only viable in highly dense areas. Electric car is of course going to grow their share, but medium term expanded public transportation is an extremely important part of the equation.
Since America has no problem with authoritarian measures that are meant to 'protect' us from ourselves and each other, at this point we should just forcibly take away everyone's vehicles and make them ride bicycles.
It is illegal for me to do things far less dangerous to myself and others compared to driving a car, and as someone who has no plans to own a car again, I neither want to breathe in exhaust fumes or risk getting hit by a vehicle just because others feel entitled to drive. If we're going to live in a nanny state, let's actually maintain a consistent framework for measuring harm and stick to it.
>Going full remote is a huge cost savings to companies. A cost that is now hoisted onto employees.
Commuting, lunch, tons of cloths/uniforms, (likely more stuff I am not thinking off) is also a huge cost to employees.
I know my mortgage payment is due if I go to an office or WFH. My car, on the other hand, requires loads more fuel and maintenance when I work in the office.
Electricity bill goes up slightly.
Heating / cooling costs goes up a bit. I was already heating and cooling my home though but a schedule made it so I didn't heat or cool as much during business hours (when I was not home).
For lunch I am not going out nearly as much. Mostly because my home is not well positioned for a quick trip for lunch.
Seems to me there are savings on both sides here. I could be convinced otherwise though - I have not read any proper studies where the dynamics here have been fleshed out.
I feel like I am saving lots of money and a fair amount of time with WFH.
You missed a big one. Choosing where to live. If you live near downtown SF, you might get a 15 minute commute to work, which is pretty great, but it'll be super expensive and maybe more urban than you like. Or you could live like 2-3 miles away and have an hour commute to work, but live where it's a little more residential, cheaper, and close to the beach and GG park. The nicer one is somehow cheaper! Prices are a huge function of commute. In the near term, getting to work remote lets you benefit from price arbitrage to live somewhere nicer for cheaper. In the long term, getting to work remote might spread the housing costs over a large enough space that people can get the not-crazy-dense housing so many want and municipalities might keep up with demand. If we're lucky, it could lower the average price per person at the expense of maybe raising the average price per square mile.
It would be only a little cheaper and you would save some time commuting. If it was that nice before covid-19, it would have been expensive already. There was just that much demand for housing.
Where do you think all the tech people with kids moved to? And they are probably dual income. And the couples who don’t have houses were saving up for houses so that the percentage devoted to rent was limited anyway.
The beach and GG Park are mostly in the fog belt. Lived near both places. Nope. Must be thinking about one of the few really warm and sunny days. Not that nice unless you like surfing. If you are thinking the Marina area, well that is very expensive already.
Generalizing, the really nice areas in California are already pricey. You need to make a trade off for things to work out such as if you love snow and skiing, then go to Tahoe. You trade that off for food choices that won’t be nearly as good and meagre entertainment options.
The number of people in an area drives up prices but provides a quality of its own. One prime example is the variety and quality of food. So does the infrastructure/wealth of the area lead to improved education, health care services, etc...
It’s as if the wealth is mostly in the people rather than the geography and concentrating people creates more wealth.
You're totally right that everything's already super expensive all over california, and I was trying to only mention stuff within the city for a more obvious comparison, but if you leave the city, say an hour to an hour and a half from downtown, you can get an amazing house for like $2M that would cost over $6M in SF. $2M is still expensive, sure. But it's amazingly less expensive.
Fair enough. Unfortunately, the best potential neighborhoods are lower income neighborhoods that you can easily gentrify. It is sad that long time residents can no longer live in the neighborhoods they grew up in.
I had not really considered moving because WFH is an option, other than the digital nomad dreams that float through my mind. :D
In my case, I live in small town WV (pop < 2500) and work outside Pittsburgh, PA. Living in WV basically means you can afford a house with acres of property IF you can make more than 60k / year (which is a big IF for most around here).
Back to the original point - The choice to live in one place over another, shorter or longer commutes, etc.. Is not the company shifting its operating cost onto its employees. is it? Do I misunderstand still?
Seems to me, if anything, this is an opportunity to continue to live the way you did before with slightly more free time and potentially more money OR, as you say, move a bit more out of town and save even more money.
This change should decrease costs for the employee, open up the labor market for the employer thus lowering costs for them as well.
Shedding office space is a great way to save money anywhere in the country - Let alone in a hyper expensive place like downtown SF.
I am still failing to understand how this is pushing the cost of business onto employees.
I also feel like I am saving mountains of money from work from home. I have been getting takeaway from the local restaurants and pubs almost every night now and my spending is actually still down from before. If I did this for long enough I feel like I would save money on clothes as well since I can wear clothes that are too worn for public use but still perfectly fine for home use.
Does it just cool down that much in the evening? What about the weekends?
This is fascinating to me. I've lived in the rural Midwest, NYC and Texas and always had A/C everywhere I lived – only question was central or window unit.
Most older (pre-1980s) buildings in SoCal lack A/C. It all depends on how far you are from the coast, but the evenings in the summer are mostly tolerable with a fan and some open windows.
Nobody except masochists really stay inside a stuffy apartment mid-day in the summer though. The reason you pay so much in living expenses is mostly for the good weather, so people spend their weekends out and about. As a kid in the summer, I remember walking around shops in the mall just to stay cool during the hottest hours of the day, and going to the beach often. My parents would do their grocery store shopping on Saturdays and Sundays mid-day if it was going to be hot. As I got older we'd go catch a matinee, or hit up a restaurant or a bar.
I imagine workers in the L.A. area will largely flood into cafes and co-work-esque places as businesses start opening back up and remote work becomes more dominant.
Coming from someone who is a complete an utter pansy when it comes to humidity, 100F with almost no humidity is a lot more bearable than 75F and 100% humidity
Can't speak in LA, but in Switzerland where almost no one has AC it definitely does not cool enough during the night. During the summer even if I keep the windows closed all day I cannot get the temperature below 26-27 degrees. The main difference though is that I was not trying to work in this conditions as my office had AC.
I had coworkers at Google who lived without AC. Absolutely mind blowing to me. Older buildings just don't have it, and it's only really bad for a cumulative couple weeks in CA.
Yeah, once sun goes down it's actually quite cold. Tho depends how close to sea you are as well. Weekends it might be that you can actually enjoy being outside.
I live in Boston, which is relatively mild over the summer, but it still gets pretty hot, at least for me. The switch to running AC in my study room has been one of the biggest shifts for me. Since now I cannot use the AC in my bedroom. I moved it to livingroom so I can cool myself while working. But then I can't sleep well. Looks like I will have to get another AC and install it in my bedroom. WFH definitely had many unexpected short comings.
I live on the east coast and I’m sort of guilty of it too. Nowadays I open my window but I have to mute myself when I hear loud traffic about to pass by. I didn’t get an A/C because I didn’t want one more heavy object to move again.
It's a very good point. I live in central London and had a very short commute to my office and I enjoyed coming to office most of the time. Now during the lockdown I am stuck working from my small studio apartment which is just not suited as a working environment and it is starting to take its toll. Working basically next to my kitchen corner and bed is not ideal at all and I feel I would be more productive if I were allowed to work from office again.
While this is true, I'm pretty sure the referenced poll was conducted well before that was announced. In fact, I've heard internal criticisms of the opposite direction.
The prospect of a full time shift to remote was not communicated as context for the poll. Employees answered the polls thinking they were talking about how they'd go to the office given COVID-19 (a lot more people saying they'd do 50/50, when in reality, that just reflected their lack of comfort due to the disease).
Companies should be sure not to confuse actions people are willing to take due to a pandemic to be what they'd do in a post-pandemic world. Same thing with productivity: just like we don't know the long term impact of this disease, we also don't know that employees will remain as productive as they've been so far.
This is a very biased interpretation. Your salary may not be adjusted if you work in a similar CoL area. Only if you move from HCoL to LCoL (and vice-versa!)
Too many people assume remote work always means working somewhere far away from a major urban city.
For me I'm happy to go to office as long as I live near it, and working hours are flexible.
Unfortunately a lot of industries outside tech do not provide those. The cost of transport, especially the drainage of energy after squeezing into a crowded train / bus definitely outweighs utility bills.
However, if a company provides both options, remote workers are usually disadvantaged because of the reasons stated in the article and the comments.
It's a tough choice, and I think the division should at least be team-based for a fair competition.
The top comment(s) are only representative of that subset of readers who both a) agree and b) bother to upvote.
I skim read the top few comments then minimise them, or minimise them immediately. I'm looking for what's different to my current understanding, and the top comment(s) almost always are perspectives I'm already familiar with.
I was also annoyed with all the pro WFH rallying on HN pre-quarantine. But now I am happy with it consider:
- I don't want city overflowing (and price-gouged-by) wannabe suburbanites
- With a sufficiently high carbon tax, hopefully WFH can mean towns not exurb hell by those that insist on leaving the city
- long commutes are bad and denormalizing than as an exceptable part of modern life (in the USA) can help us make our land use less shit
- We should all work less, and making work as socially isolating for the upper classes as it already is for many lower class jobs will help move things in that direction.
> a rich network for career growth and opportunities
This is a I think the most important one, but the ultimate solution is to simply make "career" less important be making a decent quality of life available to most everyone. I know it's great us here that in the last 20 years society has begun to value intellectual work more, but the scarcity that caused this culture shit is just unsustainable.
In short, don't discount the urbanist accelerationist argument for WFH.
I think the OP is referring to the fact that exurbs are currently hellish because everyone living there commutes downtown. They'd have a stronger sense of community and identity if residents spent their lives actually living there, rather than sleeping there: the neighborhoods would become more like "towns" and less like "exurbs". Some NYC examples would be Yonkers, most of eastern/central NJ or the western half of CT.
Anecdotally, I've spent a fair amount of time living in both environments, and for me the quality of life difference is night and day. The lack of proper "towns" within commuting distance of NYC means that we have to live in town-y neighborhoods within the city, which are much more expensive to than the 'burbs, and don't come with an acre, a pool, and free parking. The apparent lack of towns means we're eventually going to leave the entire metropolitan area, which is kind of sad, since we like working here very much.
The exhurbs are hellish whether or not people use, because the land use is terrible and everything requires a car. (And aesthetic reasons that largely follow from the above, but which I could rant about at length.)
Just because there's no mass commuting doesn't inherently mean the exurbs are cured of that. People could still shuffle arround funneling roads making traffic to go to the mall. Every has lawns but no one has nature. Everyone is still isolated.
Traditional rural towns and villages are actually quite dense---you must discount the surrounding land. I mention the carbon tax because I think it's that or highwaymen needed to force people to clump up.
\[BTW, I think the variation is key: density should be "fractle" "scale-free" or whatever other similar buzz ord one wants to throw out. Everyone gets stairs and nature.\]
I generally with you. Do you have examples of towns that you think pull this off well?
Most towns I think of as pleasant in the US (I’m mostly familiar with western Massachusetts, central CA, and the border towns of NJ/PA) are still basically inaccessible by any mode of transportation other than a car outside of downtown. I don’t believe they would score high on your scale, but maybe I’m missing something!
I've never lived in a town, but I'm thinking premodern ones where everyone had to walked. Or through in bikes and 5x it.
No reason with enough carbon and land value tax the towns in the places you mention couldn't recover though. Plenty of nice Berkshire and foothill downtowns.
Stating that people preferring WFH is a "du jour" opinion is not based on any fact or productive at all. Utility bills are not being "blown out" by working from home [1]. Acknowledging that your observations are anecdotal doesn't absolve you of speaking honestly.
My site lead (small office, big-ish company) sent as survey. Only 25% percent of people wanted to work from home more days per week than they work in the office. Heck, 40% said they wanted to return before the date our CEO selected.
There seems to be a group on HN that really wants to make the desire to WFH seem universal. A few weeks ago a post like yours likely would have been buried.
- I do have a home office with a nicer setup than my work office
- I love and thrive on social isolation, going home to my empty house is the best part of my day...
- See above... I have no network...
>>God forbid some people want to live in big cities
yea I have never understood those people... I live in a mid sized city and have a strong desire to move back to the farm fields. Probably more on how you grew up than anything, my childhood was in a town of less than 3000 people.
if it was not for network connectivity issues in Rural America I would probably still live in the sticks.
>on top of that, my observations are anecdotal. No need to point that out.
What are you trying to say here? You seem to be agreeing with the OP. Different people like different ways of working and we should have possibilities for both.
at least in the software industry promotion is not easy. Your current employer is not too incentivized to give you a promotion. They are however incentivized to bring in that guy who did great in interviews so they might get an instant promotion to the next level while you're going to get your 3rd "maybe next cycle" response from the promotion committee.
What I learned from working at large tech companies is that the only way up is out.
i don't care about promotions as long as I get paid more. I've had to ask for raises every year cause they kind of just "Forget" and they realize how valuable I am when I lay out what I do for them and accept my number every time.
I worked for a company that regularly does half in person and half remote employees. You could choose either or. The problem with being the remote worker on a partially in-person team is that you miss all the face-time and exposure to new opportunities simply because you are not a person but a task completing widget.
You are never the presenter at company events. Nobody outside your team can recognize you. Nobody talks to you except to get something or clarify information. People can casually take credit for your work as you aren’t there to defend it. You lose out on all the background information like conference funding availability or the cool new job in Innovation.
You miss all the little opportunities for going the extra mile as you never look over your colleagues shoulder to see how they do their job and nobody looks over yours.
So much of success is being in the right place at the right time to meet the right person and that can’t happen as much remotely.
My ex-girlfriend described herself this way to me once and I thought it was funny, but it's in fact true of people in general: if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer. It's unfortunate but it's true: you are going to naturally think more about and have better feelings about the coworkers you see every day in person. No, VC doesn't count. I think this is pretty much a human universal; the only exceptions I know are quite far on the autism spectrum. (Even I notice myself doing this, and I'm definitely somewhere on that line.)
Given that, I want to be in the room with my coworkers. I want them to unconsciously think of me as part of their tribe, and I want to feel the same way about them; that means we need to be able to perform regular in-person social petting. This is doubly true of my bosses. It sucks, but there's no way around it.
(Also, while this is less universal, there are plenty of extroverts, even on HN. I'm one. It's ironic, in that I also suffer from pretty nasty social anxiety; large rooms of strangers scare me and choke me up. But lock me in a room by myself for a month and I go crazy. I am happier, by far, when I can be in the same room as people I like.)