I'm mixed on remote work, even as an engineering IC, despite claims that only management want in-office.
To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."
For example, Coinbase didn't just allow remote but shut down the SF office for this reason. Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized, and employees are actively discouraged from eating with any teammates.
If you're the type of personality who gets energized by collaboration with teammates, if you like the real teammate relationships that more easily develop with facetime, then it's not a matter of allowing remote coworkers but whether those remote coworkers now get to advocate for actively destroying any office culture.
Again, I understand why there's many advantages of remote work, but let's not pretend the people who didn't want to go remote are unaffected.
I'd think the obvious rejoinder to that approach is, if they want to work remotely, they take the rough with the smooth. No, they are not going to be as plugged into casual office conversations. Their choice.
That's not what's happening in reality though. I gave you two notable examples but I know of a few more as well. This isn't hypothetical, many companies are actively seeking to destroy their in-person culture (outside of company offsite events). Of course, since every corporate move has to have a feel good PR element to it these days, the buzzword to justify this direction is equity/equality, and that since DEI candidates will be more likely to be remote, it's especially important to destroy Bay Area office culture to make sure remote employees are on equal footing. Again, I know many people at SV companies so this isn't speculation but what I've actually seen happen at several companies. And I'm really not trying to cast judgement on whether this is good or bad for the industry long term, just again noting that the idea that people who don't want to work remotely are largely unaffected by these decisions is totally false.
This is my experience as well. Companies are aiming for equality of outcomes even though WFH and office employees work in different environments.
I think it is totally fine for an employee to make the decision to work from home and obtain greater freedom at the cost of worse promotion outcomes.
The problem is that if employers say “hey you can work from home, but you are less likely to get promoted than your peers working in the office” they open themselves to discrimination lawsuits. What if there is a strong correlation between those who choose to work from home and a specific demographic? Well it turns out that women may be much more likely to WFH given the choice. Does this mean that the WFH policy is sexist given that women are much more likely to WFH and WFH employees have worse career outcomes?
I believe that this isn’t discrimination by the company because non-women who WFH have similar career outlooks to women who WFH, but there may be a case there and nobody wants to put that case to the test. Instead we get these WFH policies which bring everyone down — to accommodate those who made a choice to sacrifice their career prospects by working from home.
Wouldn't it be simpler to declare everything "hybrid" and then you don't have to track who's in the office, even though you expect there will be stuff like better promotion outcomes for people who spend more time face-to-face?
Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.
> Wouldn't it be simpler to declare everything "hybrid" and then you don't have to track who's in the office.
That doesn’t fix the issue. Even if everything is declared “hybrid” there is still going to be an “in” group of people working in the office most days and an “out” group of people working from home most days.
> Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.
Having objective performance evaluations which are agnostic to WFH would be ideal but I am not sure if they are realistic. You are working against human nature and tribalism: it is much easier to have favourable opinions of those you interact with regularly. Not to mention that very few work places actually have objective measurements of employee performance, it is mostly all optics and how well the employee sells themselves.
I'm not sure about an increased risk of lawsuits, though worse promotion outcomes is a bad answer for other reasons. That sounds like remote employees are less productive than on-site employees. I don't think companies would want to design a remote-work policy with that belief.
> That sounds like remote employees are less productive than on-site employees
The linked study (in my comment) says otherwise. WFH employees were better performers on average. This means that WFH employees — when normalized for performance — had much worse promotion rates that their office peers.
This matches my personal experiences. Companies have decided that hybrid is the worst of both worlds (right or wrong) so they're actively choosing remote-only over in-person only.
This doesn't work. As soon as a meeting has 2 people in person, the first time a zoom glitches or a leaf blower is in the background; the 2 in the office will feel disdain for remote.
If the office mic in the room only picks up one person, the remote person will be left out; the 2 in office will feel disdain for the remote miscommunication.
Just get rid of all your meeting rooms, and have everyone do the meeting from the desk, so it sucks for everyone.
I mean, that's kind of horrific, but it's the sort of thing people are thinking of.
The other mechanism is, even if people are in offices, construct teams so everyone is in a different one, and so everything is remote even if you are in an office.
> To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."
My perspective on that is that, at my workplace, the L4 lockdown in NZ was actually a significant improvement, which might sound counter-intuitive. That's because there was an implicit decision-making process where people local to your floor/building/city tended to talk together and remotes were second class. Once we were all on an equal footing - forced to be explicit in who we bought into Zoom/Teams/etc sessions - we got improved and more thoughtful interaction.
Since we've left L4/L3 we've managed to preserve that culture, even with people dropping into a cadence of a few days in the office and a few days remote, because it's normalised the idea that every conversation has a remote component. That's persisted for a good 9 months, so we'll see how it persists.
> Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized
Is this permanent? My employer is reopening, but I'm expecting it'll be awhile before amenities like free meals and snacks get back to normal. There may be more health restrictions initially.
To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."
For example, Coinbase didn't just allow remote but shut down the SF office for this reason. Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized, and employees are actively discouraged from eating with any teammates.
If you're the type of personality who gets energized by collaboration with teammates, if you like the real teammate relationships that more easily develop with facetime, then it's not a matter of allowing remote coworkers but whether those remote coworkers now get to advocate for actively destroying any office culture.
Again, I understand why there's many advantages of remote work, but let's not pretend the people who didn't want to go remote are unaffected.