Personally it's also because the office has become such a horrible place to work since the pandemic.
We've gone from fixed desks and floors divided by department to stupid flex desks where you have to drag your stuff from a locker and are sitting mixed with people you have nothing to do with whatsoever. Often noisy sales people besides ones that need to concentrate.
I used to enjoy going to the office 3 times a week. Now I officially should go 2 days but I hate it so much I rarely actually do. It's really a fancy place for management to see butts in the seats and the needs of the employees are a total afterthought.
> We've gone from fixed desks and floors divided by department to stupid flex desks
I've also felt quite discouraged by this. Before the pandemic, our projects had a specific area in the building. Now, it's about arriving early to find a spot somewhere in the building, often far from team members. But it's a catch-22 because the whole team agrees to work from the office, to prove space isn't wasted.
I (fixed desk) only get notices with a picture of how my desk should look like, and in that picture it looks like nobody works there. Granted, I'm a bit messy, but the standard I'm expected to follow is just bleak and sterile.
Funny how we keep inventing more terrible ways to work. I remember when walled cubicles were seen as hopeless, dreary work existence compared to those nice private offices. No way it could be worse than cubicles! Then wall-less cubicles were invented and there was no way it could be worse than that. Then we moved to the open-office hell where we had to work in an environment similar to a Wall Street trading pit, and surely at that point, we hit rock bottom. Now we have hot-desking where you don't even get your own seat. I'm sure this is the worst possible way to work that will ever be invited....
Agreed. Although it does not have to be that way. We could have a physical, post-pandemic office that addresses your concerns (e.g. quiet zones, pods for calls, etc)
Oh we have quiet desks with huge cubicle walls and pods for calls.
But what's the point in coming to the office to sit in a pod or isolation cubicle all day?
What I liked was that our floor had its own atmosphere. Where people understood the needs of IT work and respected our conversations (eg headset on = leave me alone). That's all gone now with these hippie flex offices.
I don't see how the office could be made productive again with flex desking. It wasn't like the old office was perfect, there was already a huge reduced productivity from the late 90s when people had actual offices where you could close the door. It was already pretty poor with the large open spaces but it's now been ruined completely.
I am offended. How is this hippie? Hippie would be respecting solitude and trying to give everyone what they want. This is just some kind of neoliberal bullshit that fits the narrative of "leaders".
A bunch of hippies opened my public high school in the 70s. There were no interior walls, just classroom areas. It was reportedly a giant mess. Thankfully walls were installed by the time I went, but many classrooms didn’t have doors, and some classrooms needed to use other classrooms to get to them. It was quite distracting at times.
I won't say that it's impossible, but I will say that I'm skeptical.
Let's say I'm in the quiet zone and someone wants to have an online meeting with me. What do I do now? Run to the nearest pod? What if they are all taken, do I take the call in the hallway? Do I go to the not-quiet zone and have my meeting surrounded by people participating in other meetings, or even worse, participating in the same meeting introducing a sub-second delay? And how comfortable are these pods anyway, are they good enough for meeting back-to-back? Because if I'll stay in the pod all day I might as well stay home.
I believe you can have comfortable working places (essentially offices with doors that close) that will be expensive OR cheap shared desks that optimize space but accentuate distractions. I don't think you can have a cheap, distraction-free environment, but I'm open to be proven wrong.
They have focus rooms at my work and they are almost always taken by someone for a whole day. There are other non-reservable office type rooms but crappy people sit in them all day too…despite signs saying not to.
I despise flex desk policies. Not being able to feel like it's "my" spot, that I can organize how I want, is giving me anxiety.
Sharing dirty keyboards and mouses, and not finding back my chair adjustments also gives me anxiety!
Yeah, if I had my own seat in small office with my teammates like pre-COVID, I would probably visit the office at least 3 days a week. But what we have instead is a massive open office full of flex desks. There is absolutely nothing attractive about the whole place, not even fancy coffee machines. I would just waste 30 mins of my life getting there.
It's all about saving time. Musk got a private jet to save time travelling around. Employees WFH to save time too. That's the hack they found to avoid commuting to work. In such they improve the quality of their lives.
Musk, Jasys and Benioff should treat their employees like they do their customers. Adapt to their needs. Asking people to come back to the office is just like selling something a customer no longer wants.
As for Musk saying "it ain't fair for service employees" I reply those are different jobs. Poor excuse.
I find the “it’s not fair to service workers” incredibly unconvincing. There’s lots of things that tech workers get that service workers don’t. Better pay, better flexibility with vacations, control over schedules, probably better insurance, the ability to sit all day, etc. The fact that WFH is the line for Musk is because he doesn’t like it. The same for other CEOs. But they know that isn’t an argument anyone will listen to.
Pretty much, from all the debate, its clear that the problem isn't the office. It's the commute. I hated going to the office when it was an hour drive away, often worse with traffic incidents. But for the last few years I've lived much closer so it's a quick train trip or bike ride to work and now I much prefer going to the office. It's so obviously better for communicating with people.
There's been plenty of discussion about how the problem is, in many cases, also the office. Right in the discussion on this very article, in fact. [0]
There are many reasons to dislike forced work-in-the-office policies. Not all of these reasons apply to all people, but they all apply to at least some.
I’m not going to defend Musk. The sooner he is removed from his companies, the better.
However, the Tesla Cars made in China are excellent.
The Tesla model Y is the biggest selling EV in Australia for a reason.
Also, the Tesla Powerwalls are very good, and anecdotally based on discussions with owners of other home batteries, superior to other battery products.
And Starlink actually seems to be pretty decent!
Plenty of people in Australia love their StarLink!
Space X is doing Ok too it seems…
So yes, Musk has become rather odious, but the people in his companies are doing great work IMHO :-)
I actually hadn’t heard that excuse yet, but holy shit. It’s like once you’re a CEO you’re back in 3rd grade where everything should be “fair” again, unless it’s YOU getting ahead in which case you’re probably just REALLY talented.
It's the same time. An employee effectively pays me for what I feel is the "cost" of working there, which is measured in hours lost of my day.
They don't pay me to work 24/7, they pay me to work 8h per day. But of course the cost measured by the employee isn't the time lost working, it's the time lost working or commuting. So someone who used to sell 10 hours of their day to their employer and now sells 8 hours of their day to their employer for the same pay, isn't going to be happy about going back to selling 10 hours.
The fact that we got those 2 hours as an hourly "raise" at the start of the pandemic doesn't change anything. Being forced to go to back to the office is effectively a cut in your hourly rate.
Well, WFH can be good or bad depending on how is done, on both sides, worker side and company side. I'm an EU home worker and I have experienced some issues on my sides and many on company sides, that's much a matter of knowledge and willingness to test and improve.
Most managers, at least in EU, can't really get WFH, not just in terms of synchronicity or asynchronicity but in mere practical terms: they simply fail to understand the "job" part vs the "office boilerplate" part. This is an enormous issue that might reduce productivity alone. Most workers fear the change so tend to have poor home office setup and that's as well can lower productivity.
All these phenomenon are not part of WFH paradigm but just part of an evolutionary path we have all to do to understand. It's not much different than the old UK rule to put a horse in front of any train to control their speed. Now, do you prefer to have forever a horse in front of every train or having get rid of them is a good riddance?
WFH can save both employees and companies money IF done properly, similarly working on site can save money and work well or not, it's not a matter of where you work but how much you understand how to work in a certain way or another. The whole society can save money and live far better if the society evolve well, and we still have absurd procedures with pdf forms made not as forms but as to-be-printed, then scanned, than mailed tools, because those who have designed such procedure do not know nor understand the "modern" world (modern quoted since pdf fillable forms, digital signatures, web forms etc are modern, but definitively not new).
Now try to project the cost for a company of:
- eliminating offices, so not rent, cleaning services, electricity, ...
- enlarging they potential employees choice at least at a national level, if not the entire world (witch might be fiscally complicated)
- being able to move their fiscal residence as they want since there is no physical boundary
Does companies save money with such model? DEFINITIVELY YES, at least if they know how to do, and their best interest is trying, learning from errors, correct them and keep evolving instead of bovinely hold untenable positions just because they know them and fear the change.
As an employee I do save money WFH, but to do so I've invested much, I left a big city for mountains, building a new home and so on. I've studied and have done the change. A company can do the same with LESS investments typically.
It is sort of measurable. How many lines you output, how many bugs are in your code, how much time is spent fixing your bugs. Etc.
I mean its far from perfect and leadership roles are harder to measure (but can be measured by how the people under them think about them). But still I get your point.
I think the best we can do is have an expert familiar with the task and codebase evaluate contributions. Trouble is, this can be corrupted by all sorts of internal politicking.
We still do Agile Scrum, and our velocity has gone up significantly. Experienced team, mature code base, no real external forces to skew these figures.
Goodhart's Law does not apply, as we have done this for many years and are happy [1] with the way we do things.
With more people working from home, we need less concentration of people living nearby their work. This would decrease housing pricing and allow service workers to live closer to their work.
> As for Musk saying "it ain't fair for service employees" I reply those are different jobs. Poor excuse.
Exactly. I had a service job and I didn't mind going into work at all because that's what the job is. And besides, interacting with customers is much preferable to being in a building surrounded by people typing on keyboards when no one actualy needs to be there.
Should we now say that executive jobs are unfair to employees because employees don't get to run the company?
I worked a service job that required going to work for minimum wage and wasn’t happy that my wage didn’t increase when WFH employees got the benefit of WFH during COVID.
A class of workers benefited, but other classes didn’t.
Those roles are upper class or professional jobs. I’m guessing they had the ability to extract higher compensation or work conditions, compared to others who had to accept the new normal or else.
Musk was a terrible employee himself, he always wanted to do things his way. When Musk talks about WFH, it is something personal, you can see his face because he gets emotional.
I believe it is a good thing to meet colleagues from time to time in the same place, but for deep work I need to work alone. No distractions, on my place.
As an adult I can manage myself better than most people can.
Managers do want people in the office to physically lock them: if you are a giant in a certain place most works for you or have to migrate elsewhere and moving homes scare many, it's not easy, family members might have issues moving their jobs together, eventual kids might suffer loosing friends and change schools and so on. People in the office means people more tied to their employers, more keen to accept not-so-nice things at work, not-so-nice changes and so on.
While remote workers can change employers potentially just changing some login screens, witch makes them less keen to accept bad work conditions or bag changes.
> As for Musk saying "it ain't fair for service employees" I reply those are different jobs. Poor excuse.
Of course it's poor excuse, solidarity amongst workers is something Musk actively fights against, using that as a rallying cry for this is more than a poor excuse, it's blatant weaponisation of empathy against workers themselves.
Wasn’t that clear? The goal of, time and again, is always to increase the workers rights. Workers 100 years ago didn’t have the rights we have now, and in 100 years workers then will have more rights than us now.
In that regard, working from home (and thus avoiding a long list of time consuming activities that have no positive outcome at all: commute time, traffic jams, etc.) is a step forward into that direction.
There is no guarantee workers rights will keep getting better, but I hope they do! As long as unions etc. keep fighting for them and getting that written in law.
I think WFH is going to be more of a supply demand thing than a right though. Allow WFH and you have access to wider talent pool. Don’t allow it and you may limit your hiring rate.
> I think WFH is going to be more of a supply demand thing than a right though. Allow WFH and you have access to wider talent pool. Don’t allow it and you may limit your hiring rate.
And that's exactly what is happening. I monitor job listings in my niche and practically all top-paid positions are remote (with the few exceptions that ask for a visit in the office like once a month etc.).
Having WFH for the past 3 years, Im not sure I would start my own WFH company. Maybe Im in a company that doesnt have the culture to support it very well, but the amount of inefficiency I see on the engineering level would make me prefer a hybrid solution for my own company.
At work there tend to be other inefficiencies. A lot of "spontaneous collaboration" that people claim happens in the office is people talking to pretty/handsome people in other departments, without necessarily adding to the bottom line.
In person collaboration is definitely worth it, but this needs to be planned. It doesn't happen automagically if you are being forced to sit at a desk.
I can see why middle management's hates it thought. You can no longer tap on someone shoulder and pester them in prioritising your work above others. You need to make a business case rather than bullying a poor Engineer.
WFH just amplifies management incompetence, it’s not a problem per se. If it doesn’t work, it’s better to look deeper to understand the root cause of inefficiency.
WHF amplifies all incompetence, especially around comms. Managers are particularly bad at that but in my experience everyone is at least a little bad at it...
It's not just comms, many live in a digitalized world FORMALLY, they formally works on desktop computers, but their mind work on paper and they seems to be unable to works on computer other then mimicking their works on paper.
Aside managers like people in the office because they are more tied to the company, change employer often means having to move elsewhere and the worker might be in couple and his/her partner might have issues moving, they might have kids suffering from loosing friends and change schools etc, this means workers more keen to accept bad condition at work at a certain point in time. A remote worker can potentially change employer just changing some login screens.
The comms thing is a bit of a bug bear for me too. I like to respond quickly to messages/emails because I believe the person at the other end appreciates having their questions answered quickly so they can get one with their day. When I have to wait an hour (or whatever timeframe feels disproportionate) for a reply to my message it grates. Still, I can live with it if I don't have work in a noisy shared space.
About the remote work comms there is a widespread attitude that irks me: People texting "can we talk?" or simply "hello".
No! tell me straight away what you need so I can judge how and when to respond.
When people state what they need, most of the time the response is immediate and it's the thing they need or some ok followup.
"can-we-talkers" I'm starting to let stew for a few minutes, because I suspect they do that on purpose to "skip my queue".
I agree. Having worked on the shop floor I don't like my time being wasted and I'm careful to add detail for my colleagues so that they are engaged from the outset with my query. All I ask is 'give me half an hour' or some similar response so I can manage other people's expectations.
This is why so many orgs find remote working hard. Everyone has to be willing to compromise on how they communicate to find a middle ground, or the company has to hire for people who work the same way as everyone else. When you have a team made up of people who communicate with different expectations, and they're not willing to accept that other people will think differently about what's reasonable, remote working starts to break down.
Maybe that's why so many companies push for people to return to the office. In-person working where someone can just walk up and interrupt someone else is equally awful for everyone.
I'm all about the compromise. I don't mind waiting for an answer but I'm often hassled for a response in my role and then I need an update from another member of the team. If that response is not forthcoming guess who gets the follow up? Now I'm badgering people who are probably busy but have neglected to tell me and I'm now the block in the pipe to those above me. I don't mind a pat response that they're busy but someone somewhere always needs a status update.
Urgent ad-hoc status update requested by someone above is in most cases a communication anti-pattern. Why would someone need it outside of regular reporting structure (DSM, weeklies etc)? Even in case of disaster recovery, when updates need to be more frequent than daily, it’s better to agree in advance on how communication proceeds and plan the work correspondingly.
When WFH(A) is a real alternative, office work means hiring a mediocre team to achieve mediocre results. It is not better value for money, because poor management is not just about inability to organize remote work. Toxic environment will result in higher churn and missed opportunity costs, poorly designed processes will inevitably decrease quality and increase time to market etc.
I own equity in a fully remote company worth billions of dollars and highly profitable, and I would buy more if I could. There is (edit: at least) roughly $120B in enterprise value in fully remote and remote first orgs.
Feelings and anecdotes aside, the data shows the model to be effective imho.
> There is (edit: at least) roughly $120B in enterprise value in fully remote and remote first orgs.
There aren't any North American private companies that have an enterprise value of over $120B right now so the company is public, why not just name it?
Figure presented is an aggregate if that was not clear, not a single enterprise. Open to suggestions how I could’ve improved that sentence in that regard.
I am lazy and time poor, not a liar. No need to troll if you [1], for whatever reason, take issue with the concept of remote work. You’re free to the opinion. I believe in the model based on a preponderance of the data (enterprise financial success and metrics, worker quality of life, environmental impact, etc). Probably a bit of “talking my book” [2] too if you will.
I’ll make time to have the Google Sheet cleaned up and shared here as a post.
How much more would you be willing to spend to get these employees to work in your office? Or put another way, at a fixed salary budget, how much smaller a talent pool would you accept to recruit from?
Recruiting only from the pool of "people who accept to work 100% in an office" is a massive handicap, at least in some regions and positions.
+1. I tell any recruiter not offering WFH to pound sand. It’s not the 1920s. I don’t need to commute to sit in front of a pc. I can do that just fine at home.
I've worked for two types of WFH company - the kind where everybody is kind of just left to their own devices and the highly collaborative kind.
I think a lot of people really like the former but I don't think it works very well. There's a marked tendency of many people to drift apart and communication breaks down within and across teams and the fallout it quite ugly - a lot of people individually doing their jobs (and perhaps doing them well), but nothing really fits together very well. I personally found working in this environment to be torture because my work felt performative and meaningless.
I find that the highly collaborative kind works about as well as working in person - possibly better. However, I think it's only really possible with a lot of camera-on video calls which many people find quite draining.
Things “fitting together” is generally on management though. Can’t speak for other industries but if you leave this up to engineers then they settle down into something like design by contract, or you write my tests I’ll write yours, etc. management often actively resists that with or without wfh because they don’t get to run fiefdoms on the strengths of their network and charisma, look important by forcing meetings, etc.
So effectively you have middle management failing to be fulfilled at an emotional level as well as failing at a professional level to do management, and their plan to deal with this is to first blame others, then try to convince leadership to kill wfh for line workers before anyone notices the real problem.
Nothing against any individuals out there, just seen these things play out a lot and have been having the wfh discussions since long before Covid.
Technical alignment is easy in a sense because it’s clear when two ends of a bridge don’t meet in the middle. Product people or department heads have a harder time of things, but if I were a ceo, I don’t want to buy office space for 2500 when 25 will do.
It’s kind of evil to advocate for back-to-office if you know it’s good for you, but bad for both the company and your coworkers, and I expect many of the most vocal advocates know these things in their secret hearts
> I find that the highly collaborative kind works about as well as working in person - possibly better. However, I think it's only really possible with a lot of camera-on video calls which many people find quite draining.
I think it's something else. It's providing space for employees to interact spontaneously. In software there's a huge push to have everything public and recorded, which makes me very cautious about how I present myself. When I switch to private messages, I get much higher sense of connection with the other person, because I don't need to stay that formal.
It's all down to the approach. I work for a company which has been remote right from the start (10 years ago) and if it's done right then it's great. A lot of it comes down to treating your employees as adults and trusting that they are doing their jobs. A good company culture is key to making it work.
At this point, there’s literally nothing useful / new that can be said on this. This is very clearly well into the territory of being a culture war issue. Both sides are entirely talking past each other, misrepresenting each other’s POVs, and there’s little if any room for nuanced discussion.
As made evident by any HN thread on this topic, tech nerds are among those buying into this BS hook, line, and sinker.
I disagree - the new thing is that it's the fourth year of this global revolution re. worker's rights and we partially won. I'm actually tracking the ratio of permanent/hybrid to remote jobs in my niche and I'm very happy there is no negative trend, i.e. the ratio of remote jobs is stable and they are the top-paid positions (which makes sense for other reasons). So I guess every year we can celebrate this enormous achievement that is positively affecting the lives of hundreds of millions around the globe.
You speak of worker's rights, and you use the term 'won' - this implies there is a loser(s) and this harkens back to the slavery of yore, people unpaid and later minimally paid.
I recall Ford paid wages that the other car makers despised him for just around WW1, he said he wanted his workers to be able to buy the cars they made. One of the key successes of the Industrial Revolution (IR) was the added wages induced by scarce worker competition. For many hundreds of years workers were in craft guilds. The classic crafts ( carpenters/iron/weave////) were all in craft guilds with strict rules to enter a guild, and to finally become a master craftsman after they passed their final approval of their work by that guild (now you know what a masterpiece is). All of day to day life was parcelled up in these guild, it was a rigid hierarchical society. It ran this way for thousands of years, with slow progression.
The printing method of Gutenberg was the first crack in this near permanent society in that it allowed people to create large numbers of printed pages to spread information to people, and they allowed a cleric (Luther) to spread the word and shatter the mediaeval corrupt theocracy (the catholic church) by revealing how crooked and corrupt they were to people at large who could read or be read to.
Before this, books were made by the scribes guild, pages were hand copied word by word, and often decorated with ornate glyphs, etc = Manuscripts = written by hand. Early printed books, incunabules, were made to closely resemble manuscripts, often with several colors and small ornate blocks added later to be like the manuscripts they replaced. The RC church had a fake religious structure of a god/saints/heaven/hell/angels etc, carefully structured to control people and steal from them. One of their bogeymen was heaven/hell/purgatory. Purgatory was a half-way house. The worthy went to heaven, the permanently damned went to hell, those not that good/bad went to the half-way house = purgatory = purge your 'sins', what these RC weasels did was to monetise purgatory by an 'indulgence' = pay $$ to the RC church = less time purging = to heaven you go - this was a classic monopoly = all your $$ belong to us. So Luther printed tens of thousand of 1 pagers(there were also many books/pamphlets) that exposed this as BS = a wide protest was born = protestant church, that soon won most of Europe - the closer to Rome, the harder it was to win. The RC lost and is in the final stage of decline. Here in Canada well under 5% of people bother at all, but a higher % are bribed to pay lip service for various benefits.
I digress.
Print was the crack that started the Scientific Revolution (SR) as teachable data could be cranked out in huge volume at low cost, and the SR led to the IR and the decline of the crafts when the IR allowed mass production of anything.
This meant more workers, more wages etc and TRIH!!
Getting back to 'we partially won' = that means the maker is the classic enemy of the worker.
In fact, I believe you are wrong. They need not be enemies, there is no war. There are people helping each other.
One of the reasons that Japan and Korea and Europe mastered this was to get the workers and manufacturers to be on the same side.
I recall the UAW refused to have 2 board members on the car makers board of directors!!. Remember, board members have full access to all financial of the company = whatever they want = they get. The UAW wanted to be a pure adversary.
From the 1940's they have done this.
What did it get them? Good wages for one, but they lost 85% of their jobs as the high wages allowed Japan/Korea/Germany/UK/Italy the ability to make cars for the US/Canada market because those high wages made US/Canada costs high = allowed their entry.
European/Korean/Japanese unions had board memberships that properly and rationally allowed their unions to chart a reasonable wage where at the end of their process their members had good wages and the products they made could achieve good market sales, which is a win-win for company as well as employees.
Thus the USA/Canada needs to move from this adversarial positioning at both the union and maker management level for the good of all.
/rant
I have to admin I had fun to read your digression. So while in principle I agree with your proposal, they shouldn't be enemies and they should help each other (and some of them do!) unfortunately very often it is the opposite. I might disagree about the reasons Japanese etc. cars got more popular though. Also, I don't think you can extend your example easily - Nvidia doesn't have record profits because they treat their employees well but because of their near-monopoly on GPUs used for "AI"-related tasks (it will take decades for AMD and Intel to get there). It would be nice if your theory was true, though.
Yes, Nvidia, Apple and in past days many monopolies, abetted by IP or copyright have acted badly = making profits while their regnum lasts. Often they get careless, sure of their dominant position, and some become so arrogant they crash/burn = Kodak/Xerox.
Nvidea looks smart enough to stay on it's feet - but you never know.
The debate about whether WFH is good/bad works/doesn't is pretty much had already yes.
But I never found it very interesting. The key insight at this point really is that employees, I think, mostly don't care whether WHF is more or less effective, or whether companies function better or worse with WFH. They are going to work from home regardless. So they'll end up at companies that either believe that "it works".
And after that, there is a second insight that follows from that: it becomes self fulfilling. If enough people refuse to work in an office then companies that force office work are going to recruit from an ever shrinking talent pool. Eventually they'll be less effective even if they would function much better given the same employees or salary budgets as the companies with WFH.
While I agree with you in general, I believe there is a substantial group who knows that in their particular case the company will be as effective or even more effective if they WFH. Why? Because they worked in (usually) open-plan offices before and they work in their own spaces now and they can estimate how much time was spend on work and non-work activities.
For example, I communicate on Slack quite often, we have huddles as needed - but only when needed. If someone like, they can have smalltalk on dedicated channels and socialize as mach as they want - but only with the ones who explicitly choose to do so. In other terms, you control your time and the execution of your tasks much better.
Yes, at one time people owned certain other people called slaves, and many wars were fought, then they had indentures = more wars, now they are called restrictive covenants = selective slavery - these are being outlawed place by place in a haphazard manner. Workplace evolution is the latest buzz.
A form of gig labor is evolving. Instead of work from home, we might get a task pool format = bid for task = race down a hole. This is widespread and is allowing many so-called third world countries to get hard currency by exploiting the fact that a USA worker wants $30/hour for a data task and a smart lady in Nigeria can do this for $3/hour with both people happy at their local hour's wage because they can buy the same breakfast/lunch/dinner/rent for the same number of hours used. We see many of these tech migrants doing this between Thailand and Silicon Valley, and many other places. I think there is a 'great levelling' under way with the migrants in the vanguard. When it is fully levelled, with a robot work force and work from (any home)to (any workplace) has been achieved we will be inching towards a world government - by AI of course, politicians will be happily shed along the way, as they die their inevitable death by uselessness...
I've worked 100% remotely for over 20 years, and plan to continue. There are tradeoffs to everything, but most of the problems I've encountered came from people who aren't suited to working remotely at all, or people/companies operating as if they were a single-location in-office company/team/etc when they aren't.
> but most of the problems I've encountered came from people who aren't suited to working remotely at all
I think this is where a lot of the dichotomy in people's experiences come from. Existing remote companies select for people who are effective in remote (who in turn self-select too).
But if you force an existing organization (or even the whole economy) to go full remote, you will get many people being very inefficient since they just don't work remote just as well as in-person.
Definitely, and it extends beyond "inefficiency". I made a couple of mis-hires early on before I learned to incorporate the topic/challenges of remote working within the interview. I hired some really bright, talented folks whose psychological well-being required an environment we couldn't provide (even when I budgeted co-working space for them to at least have other people in their environment).
I think the split is rather in people's communication skills, where remote amplifies the weaknesses. It's further complicated by the prevalence of async communication - e.g. it's more difficult to prevent/clarify a misunderstanding in async.
Communication skills, like everything else, can be learned. But still, some people will be disadvantaged.
What I keep repeating on this issue: for a lot of people it’s not about not going to an office. It’s about breaking real estate and escaping high cost of living cities that refuse to build housing.
At this point it’s clear that the Bay Area in particular and much of the West Coast in general refuses to build enough housing to meet demand because it’s controlled by owner and real estate speculator cartels. The only economically rational move is to leave.
CEOs who insist on locating there with no remote work option should skip the middleman and pay property speculators directly.
I've had this conversation with quite a few people recently. As I say to them, once the genie is out of the bottle it's hard to put it back in again. People will simply go to companies who allow them to be remote or more flexible.
I mean, if these CEOs had even one strong argument (apart from the old and dubious "it increases collaboration" whereas everybody knows it's all about control), we could have a normal conversation as adults. Instead, if I want to change a job, I filter by "remote positions only" and that's the end of the story.
My company did a hilariously stupid thing where, towards the beginning of the pandemic, corporate decided that hybrid work was the future and ordered everybody to change to open offices. We are a small company and have few enough people that there is room for everybody to have a cubicle. Our management sometimes fights stupid pointless orders but not this one -- so they began a lengthy process of tearing out all the cubes and replacing with a bunch of open spaces, including more conference rooms and labs for some reason (that I guarantee will never be used because again -- very small company). They went so far as to change where walls were -- when I visited recently and took a tour back there, it felt super claustrophobic.
When corporate changed their minds and said everybody needs to start coming into work again, our management realized that, because of the way they did the conversion to open offices, they no longer have enough room for everybody in the company to be there physically!
I still can't decide whether I'm bitter about the pointless change to open office, or if I'm thankful they did because otherwise they would have pressured us harder to start coming in again.
> because of the way they did the conversion to open offices, they no longer have enough room for everybody in the company
Stop me if you heard this one:
Act I: "Since most employees are working from home we'll move to a smaller office and assign shared desks. Please remove all personal items from your office."
Act II: "No one is coming to the office and the few that do feel lonely. Please come to the office three days a week."
Act III: "You are all coming Tuesday-to-Thursday and we don't have enough space for everyone at the same time. Please choose three non-consecutive office days."
Act IV: "There are too many people using the meeting rooms. If you have lots of meetings then please stay at home that day."
I recall the first manifestations of work-from-home showed up in Academe where, in the late 80's, grad students as well as post docs were involved with both students and faculty, both of which worked to teach and supervise their multi-year student bodies (from year 1 to grad school and post docs). This meant you had teachers as well as levels of students with a wide scatter of study places as well as learn spaces. Initially large main frames were coupled with various campus wide networks (token-ring and later ethernet - which ultimately triumphed). These were called TSO, (time sharing option) with a complex time of use/department where each processor-second(often less) were tracked and debited to each department/prof/student = sucked increments from each associated grant.
It was soon found that a department could buy an Apple II or 8088/186/286/386/486 and use widely spread free programs to do much of the data processing. These boxes cost on the order of $3000-10,000 and could be coupled with low cost dot matrix printers with the result of doing tasks locally, and more importantly at very low cost to a grant than the TSO = huge IBM filled rooms with huge costs on an hourly basis, with the TSO accounting scheme aggregating these CPU milliseconds to each project. This TSO was in fact a data empire, with Kings/Princes/Vassals. Turf wars developed, departments were forbidden to use grant $$ to buy IBM/Apple/Clones as the data Kings were greedy. So the profs bought them with their own personal $$, then they would not allow personals in the labs - ultimately, the Apple/IBM Queens said "Off with their heads" and logic prevailed. Early data shares by FTP or sneaker net and then email = the start of what we have today.
Drawing a parallel with work from home, I know how this will end, heads are even now rolling.
Working from home will win in most cases - the places that demand presence will fade as old manglers (managers) are pensioned off, and things that demand presence will endure - we would hardly see The Boat Race worked from home - but with modern robotic rowers, it could be done, but that is another empire/war yet to come.
WFH won't go away. It's not suitable for every company and not good for everyone, but it's ideal for many of us.
I'm a heavy proponent of WFH, but I have the experience to understand that it's not suitable for all occasions (and especially for middle management ;-) )
I divide them into two groups (it's not about being middle, low, or top, or junior/senior): reasonable and flexible ones and unreasonable and inflexible ones. The former can provide convincing reasons why in a given scenario WFH may or may not be preferable and you can discuss it with them on equal terms - after all, if an employee leaves, it is an extra cost for the company. The latter are unable to do so, for various reasons - fear, insecurity, bias, need for control, distrust and other traits they are sometimes not fully aware of.
The discussion is often about efficiency and productivity and from the point of view of someone who really likes working from home, I think that’s the wrong way to frame it.
I think of WFH as a perk akin to paid vacation or health insurance benefits. Are workers more efficient when they get 4 weeks of paid vacation? Maybe or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter though because vacation isn’t framed as a way of increasing productivity. It’s a perk. I think flexibility around WFH is should also be talked about as a perk that companies offer to attract and keep talent.
I’m pretty sure the government should just make it law that employers have to pay employees for their time commuting and this whole fight would be over.
I think this is my favorite idea. I already pay for commute time for the plumber, electrician, HVAC, etc. I'm paying for their time, and it works pretty great: I know where their office & my home is, and I know they're hustling to get jobs done (travel pay is less than job pay). I'm not sure to how to align incentives for employee-to-office, though? It's a different problem, and I've never been able to figure out a satisfactory answer!
Having worked 30+ years in various office environments (some good, some bad) I believe that hybrid is the sensible option for everyone. And that should be optional as well. I had a great job working for a company that was one day a fortnight in the office. Pretty much everyone who could make it in did and they came from 50-60 miles (some more) but the expectation when you got there was 'hello let's do a bit of work together, chat, have a nice long'ish lunch and leave before the trains get too busy'.
If CEOs want to push people out and do silently layoffs, it doesn't matter WFH is good or not, they are going to find all kinds of reasons to make you want to quit.
We might find out what CEOs really think about WFH if the job market looks like 2021-2022 again and forces companies to compete on perks to attract workers. Although I doubt it will happen anytime soon (or ever)
Alex Pentland wrote a book about a decade ago, Social Physics[1], where he empirically studied how ideas spread in firms. Comparing remote and office workers was one part of it, and he found a strong advantage for in-office work. The reason is pretty straight forward, there is virtually no spontaneous social interaction ("watercooler conversations") in remote work, and teams who worked in person were significantly more dynamic, ideas are generated more often and spread more easily.
Other than routine labor like doing paperwork for the municipal office aside, in person companies are going to have an extreme edge, Musk is right on this point, it's also an explanation for the geographic concentration of say, the tech sector, people don't pay those horrendous SF rents for nothing.
> there is virtually no spontaneous social interaction ("watercooler conversations") in remote work
This part is wrong, or maybe it was more right in 2014, but it's definitely wrong now. Our fully remote team is on chat all day talking about all kinds of things, and we have regular video conferences.
It's very unlikely those are the same kind of interactions. Typical programmer example: You work on a problem and are struggling. Your colleague walks by, sees that, takes a glance at your monitor, knows the solution, helps you out right there.
That's extremely unlikely to happen remotely. Video conferences and chat interactions are always deliberate, nobody really sees what you're doing or struggling with spontaneously. You always have to go and initiate an interaction.
Once again, my position is - if you want people to want to work from an office, you have to make the office an appealing place to work. Open office environments with temporary desks and tons of noise pollution is just not going to cut it.
Yeah, I'm not going back either. Worked remotely for a few years. Got impacted by lay-offs and joined a hybrid company. Would still have been able to work 4 days from home, and 1 from the office. Went to the office 4 times, and spent 90% of my time either alone at my desk, or in an office room in a meeting that should have been an e-mail. Sure, in person collabs might (!) be easier for ideation and greenfield work, but in all honestly, don't get to do that all to often anymore.
Needless to say, I'm back at a fully remote place now. I'm fine if they offer hybrid, not everyone has the room/situation to work from home. I can imagine that for some, having a desk at an office is a net benefit, but don't make me come over and waste my time because you have control issues.
I had interview recently. Company allows dogs in the office. I had very bad experience with dog owners in past (a few weeks in hospital) . I asked some questions about self defense, insurance, sick leave... Interview went downhill pretty fast.
In past I would deal with that, and just pay cost from my own pocket. But pandemic changed that. Now I demand fair compensation for work in hazardous environment.
I absolutely don't get this office dogs thing.
I like animals, but I don't particularily like dogs. They jump and drool all over you. How is "liking" dogs considered as universal or even a perk?
As someone with a nasty allergy to dogs(all dogs with zero exceptions) I wouldn't be able to work in such an office. And from experience, this isn't seen as a reasonable thing, even in agencies/companies purporting accessibility.
Let's be honest: where do we make friends if we work from home? To make friends, we need to be in a sort of co-living environment. It's hard to make friends if all we do is passively set up appointments with someone.
School, hobbies, social activities, friends of friends...? I have made very few lasting friends at work that last beyond the current job.
Offices are not actually great places to make lasting friends. I can understand missing the social aspect of work though (although at my age it doesn't bother me at all).
I live in a pretty remote part of Texas; so, see, what I did was walked out of my front door, down the road a little while and introduced myself to Justin — a local roofing expert, and small (medium?) business owner. I offered to help him take down a lightning struck tree.
We've gone from fixed desks and floors divided by department to stupid flex desks where you have to drag your stuff from a locker and are sitting mixed with people you have nothing to do with whatsoever. Often noisy sales people besides ones that need to concentrate.
I used to enjoy going to the office 3 times a week. Now I officially should go 2 days but I hate it so much I rarely actually do. It's really a fancy place for management to see butts in the seats and the needs of the employees are a total afterthought.