Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/business/remote-work-feedback.html

by aarghh • 3 years ago

268 439 3 years ago

Clubber8• 3 years ago

At this point, I'm betting this was a paid for study and article by a group interested in keeping corporate real estate values up. I'll suspect most articles before this point were too.

izacus3• 3 years ago

Or maybe you just refuse to accept that certain ways of working have downsides because you have a personal vested interest to ignore the facts?

Clubber8• 3 years ago

Not for me they don't. Most of our team is remote and it's great for retention. Nothing makes people want to jump ship more than a shitty office culture you have to experience in person every day. Guess what, most office cultures are shitty, no matter how many ping pong tables you put in there.

What's my personal vested interest do you suppose?

MSFT_Edging• 3 years ago

I find this to be an ironic response to "real estate has vested interest in maintaining real estate value at the expense of worker quality of life"

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

But one cannot just consider the benefits of office work in isolation. If working remotely makes me see my family and friends more hours per week (e.g., having breakfast and lunch with my partner/kids) then to the hell that x% of productivity I could theoretically gain by working from the office.

dboreham• 3 years ago

Likely. Everything you read is in support of someone's business model.

ramraj074• 3 years ago

I am totally for remote work but this is absolutely a real problem, and I see my junior engineers suffer tremendously from it. One asked me what made me so successful at my job, and there were many factors but being in the office really did help me. Success here doesn’t just mean solving chunks of problems from jira tickets but creating entirely new products and solutions which have then gone on to become important parts of the organizations offerings. This was only possible because of my initial years where I was constantly absorbing and brainstorming with folks in the office on a daily basis. We really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment.

One of the ideas I’m thinking about is to hire only within a metropolitan area, but keep remote. Every month we just organize a 3 day retreat where everyone’s expected to attend it, which could be in a resort or a hotel even. This might satisfy the interaction and brainstorming itch while still keeping everyone happy with their remote arrangements.

jon-wood• 3 years ago

Very much agreed on this. One of the key things in me being where I am now is spending a few years working for an ISP staffed by technology nerds in my early 20s, where I'd spend all day surrounded by people who knew what they were doing, and then spend several evenings a week in the pub with the same people. Its possible to get the same experience remotely - I got started in the industry via open source work, where mailing lists had a similar atmosphere, but it is so much easier if you can just bounce ideas around.

I love the idea of regular 3 day retreats, but being in my late 30s with a child now doing them anywhere near that regularly is a non-starter for me. Maybe quarterly, but even then you're going to have to really sell it for me to commit to all of them.

ramraj074• 3 years ago

It’s 3 days a month though, and to clarify my thoughts are that you still go back home every day. How would that be a problem?

moate3• 3 years ago

Imma be honest, if it was not explained to me during hiring that mandatory "3-day retreats" were part of my job on a quarterly basis, I would be finding a new job before the next one.

Some people care about their "careers". Other people care about paying their rent and see jobs as the only tangible way to meet that need. I will never give a fuck about being good at my job, only competent. I am currently at that competent level and have had this actively avoidance mindset since I got into the tech space. I'm very curious, love learning and have a ton of hobbies...that have fuckall to do with converting my time on this planet into profits for my overlords and financial crumbs for myself.

The Career people seem to think, falsely, that the Job people can be coached into changing. Some can, but some of us will fight the happy hours and the retreats and the optional mentorships.

ilaksh4• 3 years ago

Why are you not able to bounce ideas around in a text chat room, audio chat room, video chat room, 2d/3d/VR shared space? Why is it so hard for you to do it unless you are literally in the same physical location?

croutonwagon3• 3 years ago

Personally my team does stand up meetings weekly on Mondays. This is mostly to allow folks (and force a few) to think about their tasks and goals and organize them into "what can I accomplish this week" style bullet points.

But then we also have a Teams channel carved out to "watercooler" or Daily meets.

These are non-structured and you are free to come and go as needed. But its a place for folks to hang out and verbalize their tshooting or seek advice/help/opinions on problems etc.

For some, its a good place to listen and be a wallflower. For others, its a good place to bounce ideas. If you are trying to focus you dont join.

If someone specifically wants to bring someone into the fold they are free to ping them and just say "hey im in the daily, could really use your help when you get a chance". Sometimes that person can join immediately. Sometimes they may sit for a bit working on other things until the person they wanted to ask has the time. Sometimes that person just says "im busy, lets schedule a time or catch tomorrow".

Its worked....okay enough. And was specifically setup because I had several FTR guys well before COVID that specifically stated they felt distant and out of touch with the pulse or overall goals of the department.

Frankly I am in them so much I have a small Amazon Basics conference mic with a physical mute button and a blue/red indicator light.

The only habit that can be "bad" coming from it is sometimes folks will have an affinity to "rally the troops" and engage multiple people on something they themselves havent spent much or any time chewing on first because it can be perceived as easier or quicker to a resolution. This is especially true with "fires". But I have seen the same in person as well. Especially with teams of weaker IC's.

Gigachad5• 3 years ago

I feel like random teams chat just died the day they made channels threaded. Now writing a message feels like a newsletter rather than a chat.

comfypotato3• 3 years ago

My company has three days in office each month, and it’s during a week specified by the company so that you synchronize with your team. Very similar to what you’re talking about.

ramraj074• 3 years ago

How do you feel about it? Any feedback?

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

So, no one in your company lives in a city far away from the office? If so, how do they handle it? Imagine having to drive 6h to get from home to the office. Suddenly, your 3-days/month become 4-days/month plus accommodation.

stetrain• 3 years ago

I saw similar results when we first started hiring after moving full remote.

The group that had worked together in the office handled remote work spectacularly. New hires tended to flounder a bit compared to what we were used to.

We achieved some better results once we realized this and started putting some more specific mentorship time in with new hires.

Like in the first week their manager/lead should be meeting with them multiple times a day, then ramping down to at least once a day with screen sharing / pair programming etc. when they have questions. Plus inclusion and involvement in meetings that help provide a bigger picture of how the product works, customer needs, etc. And making sure they are introduced to many team members and know where to ask questions for the best feedback.

Of course this depends on the team, the new hire, and how things are going. But it seemed like the default case for many people was to spend hours silently not progressing when they were stuck on a problem, from dev machine setup to their first assigned tasks. Getting dumped into a Slack instance with dozens of channels and hundreds of people can certainly be overwhelming and being guided through these first steps seemed to help a lot.

I think it’s completely possible to give a new dev the same kinds of experience and mentorship, but with remote work that has to be done more deliberately. In a close office environment a lot of that happened via natural interaction and osmosis without anything needing to be scheduled on a calendar.

lostcolony4• 3 years ago

This is the main thing I've noticed - the people who talk about how there is something lost in how work gets done haven't changed how work gets done.

You can't just move to being remote without rethinking how you do everything. People were forced to be remote with COVID, but corporate essentially just tried to port the way things were done to remote, and on realizing it didn't work as well, want to move back.

A few places are doing things correctly and building specifically for remote work.

I honestly believe this is why we have such stark disparity in studies.

jollofricepeas• 3 years ago

Or…

Just have optional office hours, Slack huddles and mob sessions every few days.

Some of my engineers…

- have a open huddle for a few hours a day where anyone can drop into their project while they work

- others make use of our scheduled themed mob sessions (ie. Maintenance Mondays, deployment Thursdays). have a problem, idea or just want to hangout then come by?

- ICs & seniors are required to host at least a weekly office hour to assist juniors or teach something of their choice.

The default doesn’t always have to be return to office for a physical meet.

There’s lots of other options.

ramraj074• 3 years ago

There is absolutely something that gets lost in virtual meets. It’s not just for within team discussions. It’s also about discovering colleagues in other teams across the org. Tools like Donut help a bit but the magic is still lost.

bonestamp2• 3 years ago

I agree, although I will add that one of the biggest breakthroughs I came up with was when I transitioned to remote when most other people still worked at the office (this is long before covid). I changed something so that I can use it remotely, and that had a profound impact down the line -- it coincidentally fixed some licensing/piracy issues we had and made the product better in several ways.

I think the moral of the story is that more diversity, in as many ways as we can apply that word, is probably a benefit to most organizations.

walthamstow• 3 years ago

We basically do your idea at my current company. All the engineers have to be within traveling distance of London and we are all expected to be in the office together on the the same day every month. One day per month, that's it. Some are in more frequently but that's the baseline.

You can live wherever you want but you have to travel to London once a month and if that takes several hours and costs £100s, that's your problem.

It works really well. We do our retros and other group sessions in person, eat lunch together, chat with other functions, go for a beer or play a board game after work, etc.

broast8• 3 years ago

Personally, I grew up on the internet, learning from people in chatrooms and forums which were strong communities where most of my personal adult relationships have come from (many of whom I've not met in 20 years of knowing them).

From what I've seen, if your seniors and your juniors are both from this era and culture, your remote team will excel without missing a beat. I think it's the people used to the "old ways" that will suffer, for having expensive requirements like an office to capture the same value.

inconceivable• 3 years ago

hehe - just go ahead and say it... if you grew up on irc, this is your natural habitat.

many people who never irc'd have adapted just fine, but those who struggle with typing at 100wpm+ are obviously going to hate remote work.

timr16• 3 years ago

The internet has existed since before I was in college, so I also "grew up" on the internet. But you're vastly overestimating what you can learn from randos in chatrooms and forums. Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're getting a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know.

Will this work for low-value piecework, or learning how to use an API? Yes, for a while. But this will only take you from absolute noob to moderately competent junior. In order to grow in your career, the broader context, business knowledge, connections and intangibles you gain from being around senior colleagues are invaluable.

I say this from hard experience. At the start of my career, I thought I could learn everything I needed to know on the internet. I was wrong. Even if most of the technical details were there (they weren't) and correct (they aren't), in every career, your accomplishments are based on your personal relationships. Always. I can't emphasize this enough.

It's hard enough to make those relationships, even when you're in the office every day. Trying to do it all by video call is just living life on hard mode.

---

Edit: people seem to keep interpreting this comment as "it's impossible to grow in a remote career". That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just going to respond once here:

a) I don't know if it's "impossible" to form strong personal relationships remote-only, but it's much harder.

b) Obviously, everyone defines success differently, and maybe your definition is different than my own, but

c) In my experience, all other things being equal, the more time you spend around other people, the better your career will be.

bugglebeetle4• 3 years ago

Right? If you can learn how to get good at Elden Ring from a fan wiki and a couple YouTube videos, I’m pretty sure you can learn how to do most office jobs with basic documentation and some video chats…

michaelt• 3 years ago

On the other hand, plenty of people going through college are exposed to a culture that you should work on a problem set for a good long time before resorting to the professor's office hours (which are probably only once a week anyway) and that asking a peer is practically cheating.

And indeed, when filing bugs in open source projects - there is often a culture that you should have exhausted every other option before bothering the nice volunteers.

thatfrenchguy2• 3 years ago

I also grew up on the internet, most of folks at my workplace grew up with the internet and... everyone noticed that during covid you miss out on a lot of growth and interesting conversations from unplanned meetings, I think it's a bit silly to assume there's nothing to gain from having a shared space at the office, the same way it's silly to think there's no cost in having to go to an office either.

DiggyJohnson• 3 years ago

I also grew up on the internet, but disagree strongly: the challenge of onboarding remotely is real, and more challenging the equivalent on-site experience.

And to be very precise: I don't think that remote vs in-office onboarding is simply different, or even that it simply requires more intentional efforts, but that it is on the whole entirely more complex in non-trivial ways (in time, effort, and attention by all parties - aka: more cost).

zeku• 3 years ago

IMO, just make that 3 day retreat during work days so you don't require people to work weekends. With that small change I think this would be great for software teams. Perhaps too, every month is too often for anyone with a family. Consider making the interval larger.

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

Is the “being in the office really did help me” because you were in the office so figured out how to be successful in the office?

I look at GitHub and I see thousands upon thousands of highly successful highly complex software written by all levels of experience collaboratively without an office environment. I got started with open source in the 1990’s and it was amazing how fast we wrote stuff, and the level of mentoring I got was amazing. When I started working in professional office environments it was amazing how little could get done in such a long period of time with so many people, and mentoring was something I had to eek out of people who were too busy meeting and jockeying.

I think folks see in office as necessary because it was their experience and they don’t have a frame of reference for any other way of career development. That’s simply an emergent reality, not necessarily the singular reality.

Investing time in juniors is a conscious decision. It’s just as easy to ignore a junior developer in person than it is remotely. But I firmly believe asynchronous work habits lead to the best mentoring possible - juniors can ask their questions in slack or whatever, and seniors can answer as they have the chance to. Soft skill mentoring happens just fine over zoom, and that stuff is better scheduled as a private convo.

Gigachad5• 3 years ago

Open source is an interesting subject to look at. Obviously it's possible to build software without an office environment, but when you look at most of these projects, they have 1-3 main contributors and others who submit a single patch and leave. I've tried a few times to contribute to OSS projects and found it to often be an impossible barrier to get over. I'm decently experienced with 10 years programming experience across a few jobs, and I just have not found a good way to get all the required knowledge to start contributing to a project. I quickly build up a list of questions and the only channel for asking them is usually IRC where no one responds.

Meanwhile I get up to speed super fast in an office/work environment where another dev will sit with you for a chunk of time and show you the ropes. So much faster than floundering around the codebase making assumptions.

theGnuMe• 3 years ago

The problem with in office work as an IC is that all day is spent helping other people and then you have to do your own IC work in the evenings.

The problem with remote work is the constant slack interruptions to help other people and you have to do your own IC work around that.

We have essentially a documentation, coordination, and communications problem that nobody has figured out how to solve in a remote first world. I'd be interested to hear people's solutions to this.

ilaksh4• 3 years ago

You have to communicate with people that you need a block of time without interruptions and that you only have a certain amount of the day to dedicate to things that aren't your own work. Your manager has to be on board and enforce this.

Otherwise you need to get another job.

To be fair I do get interruptions from Discord for my website that aren't related to other projects but I usually deliberately prioritize them because it's my business and no one else can provide support for it.

scarface742• 3 years ago

One of the ideas I’m thinking about is to hire only within a metropolitan area, but keep remote

How does everyone being in the same metro area help? The idea of working remote is being able to choose where you want to live?

digging2• 3 years ago

That's part of it. The main part is working at the physical location of your choice, usually home, and not having to commute.

ilaksh4• 3 years ago

I just don't buy into the idea that it's impossible to effectively "absorb" or "brainstorm" over the internet. It sounds like a lack of effort and/or knowledge of how to use the tools.

Salgat• 3 years ago

It boils down to work culture. Everything you can do in person, you can do remotely, you just need to ensure the company enforces a culture that embraces the tools required to make that possible. Pair programming? With modern tools it's trivial to do. Discussions? Start a call or use a channel. If anything, remote work forces you to better document what's going on, rather than some poor junior having to hunt down the right guy the office to help them figure something out. A junior suffering due to remote work is a junior whose company has failed them.

ChancyChance• 3 years ago

I think the word you are looking for is "osmosis".

People learn faster when they have someone to teach them in a multi-modal environment. Videoconferencing is only a shadow of this, and everything is scheduled. There is zero chance for spontaneity with such a sterile structure.

I'm nearing the end of my career, but I certainly would not have learned as fast as I did without many, many mentors. Just reading the internet, especially when the technology is cutting edge and not even ON the internet, would have left me far behind. And if everyone falls behind, the company falls behind.

I think companies that mandate some amount of in-person time will have less risk of falling behind than those that are 100% remote.

I don't see how all of those junior 100% remote engineers will keep up. Maybe they are all just very very very smart.

moistoreos• 3 years ago

This is less of a problem if there's a culture that provides positive & honest paired programming w/o judgement on a regular basis. I try to do this, not just to glean business context from other engineers, but so I can learn from others.

For this to work well, toxicity needs to be nonexistent. I would even advocate for a "no tolerance" for toxic comments/behavior from peers/colleagues.

theonething• 3 years ago

I'm at a fully remote company and I hate our onsite team retreats. A waste of time and money.

Apparently I'm not the only who thinks this.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/15/companies-are-shelling-out-for...

jtc3313• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/ezB6B

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Dramatic reduction in networking opportunities does have negative impacts.

Organizations have to be more intentional about making it happen, as it won’t happen by itself anymore.

tivert5• 3 years ago

Organizations have to be more intentional about making it happen, as it won’t happen by itself anymore.

Then it very frequently won't happen anymore. Anything an organization has to be intentional about will get neglected or half-assed, if it isn't some core function key to short-term results.

When I lead a team I try to minimize the number of things that require unmonitored "discipline" to do right, and try to set things up so as many things as possible so they "happen automatically" or "blow up in your face (early) if you don't do it, becoming a blocker." That's because a most people are lazy and communicating every detail of how to do things right is hard, so things tend to decay to some long/medium-term half-ass but short-term "easier" level.

cratermoon3• 3 years ago

"blow up in your face (early) if you don't do it, becoming a blocker."

This is something that many places, including my current consulting placement, will consider a bad thing and actively work to do the opposite. The attitude at these places is that "blowing up" is a Bad Thing, and should never happen. This causes everyone to suppress useful signals of impending problems that can be mitigated in advance. What's left is things that do "blow up" because of neglect, and are truly Bad, so it's a self-reinforcing policy.

These organizations accept the decay (apt word, btw) and really Bad Things happening too frequently over diligence and preventing Bad Things from happening in the first place.

ElevenLathe2• 3 years ago

Anything an organization has to be intentional about will get neglected or half-assed, if it isn't some core function key to short-term results.

The problem is that they have to be intentional about it no mater what, either by making the remote networking happen or by intentionally having a policy where most people work in the office most of the time (Friday-only WFH or some similar arrangement). Nobody gets it for free anymore because non-remote office culture is no longer the default.

monero-xmr3• 3 years ago

As a business owner it’s just so much more economical to hire remote. No office expense, the pool of talent is so much larger, no relocation expenses, people are happier with the flexible schedules.

Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow in this environment because economically it is just so overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner. I predict a surge in downtown living within the next 5 years as offices are converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments and condos. Young people will live there and WFH but get their socialization from the critical mass of young people living around them, learning how to make friends post-college outside of work (which is way healthier as well).

It’s way easier to figure out new mechanisms of working to mentor and grow junior employees in a remote environment than it is to fight economics. The economics are just superior and you can’t fight that.

lnsru• 3 years ago

You’re business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very profitable and can afford that. See it’s lots about egos and not always about economics.

tivert5• 3 years ago

You’re business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very profitable and can afford that. See it’s lots about egos and not always about economics.

There are also a lot of arrogant American engineers need to justify their inflated salaries compared to Indians, Eastern Europeans and other offshore workers. With the rise of remote work, we should hopefully see those inflated remote salaries settle to the international norm.

tivert5• 3 years ago

Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow in this environment because economically it is just so overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner.

As a business owner, you need to teach those entry level employees to succeed in the remote environment, or your remote hiring is going to get a lot less economical for you in the future.

I predict a surge in downtown living within the next 5 years as offices are converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments and condos. Young people will live there and WFH but get their socialization from the critical mass of young people living around them, learning how to make friends post-college outside of work (which is way healthier as well).

That's probably wishful thinking to a large degree, especially the part about making friends. Some people will figure it out, but many will founder (which IIRC, is borne out in loneliness statistics)

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

As a business owner, you need to teach those entry level employees to succeed in the remote environment, or your remote hiring is going to get a lot less economical for you in the future.

Hum... The GP can't solve this problem, and it is a certainty that business owners as a collective won't be competent enough to do it even if they try.

IMO, that looks like a job for a government or something similar.

ghotli• 3 years ago

Hm. I started working remotely at age 24 years back. This article just doesn't reflect my experiences whatsoever. One data point doesn't mean I'm right, just that this article seems written from an odd perspective from my perspective.

sneed_chucker• 3 years ago

Wow, 24 years. What was it like in the early days, say 1999-2005?

Dragonai• 3 years ago

I believe the parent commenter meant it as "I started working remotely at age 24, [some] years back" :)

Brendinooo• 3 years ago

I've been working remotely for about 9 years now, and have progressed from "designer who knows jQuery" to senior frontend dev. This criticism is true but not insurmountable.

Working remotely requires more active communication and explicit processes to make sure you're filling the deficits, but this can be done. Do code reviews on your merge requests, talk on Slack, do a Live Share in VSCode.

And make the most of your in-person visits: I've had people tell me that I seem to know more people in the company then some of the people who are in the office regularly because I make it a point to make my rounds, introduce myself, and talk to people when I'm there.

jtc3313• 3 years ago

Even though I’ve personally taken the trade off of remote work, it’s always seemed intuitively obvious to me that there are also massive benefits to being in-person because collaboration, chance conversations, and feedback are more likely to happen naturally and because communication bandwidth is far higher face to face.

The trade-offs are largely around whether those things are desirable. Sometimes they aren’t. But also sometimes they are. And I’ve never understood why there seems to be such a dogmatic insistences that remote is better on all fronts and there can be no acknowledged benefits to in-office work.

manicennui2• 3 years ago

The reason you see so many of us being so insistent is because most of us work at highly dysfunctional companies with incredibly boring and annoying people and don't want to spend 1-3 hours per day commuting to the office and/or spending more on staying alive so we can be closer to the office.

I've been remote since the start of the pandemic and will never go back. I'm the happiest I've been in my adult life (mid 40s) in large part because I'm able to get more sleep, don't have to deal with the noise and density of the city, and don't have to deal with commuting. My home office is better than any office environment I have ever had. I put less than 5k miles on my car in the last year. I eat far better and spend less money on eating out.

I have also received great raises every year since the pandemic started (and before) and have been promoted (for the second time since the pandemic started) to what is probably equivalent to an L8 at Google (I don't work for a FAANG company).

Some of us are flourishing in this new work environment, and we are being tired of being told that we'd be better off if only we would spend an hour commuting to hear Fred's mildly racist/misogynistic jokes and attend useless meetings in person instead of passively listening to video calls while we get actual work done.

jtc3313• 3 years ago

Notably I didn’t disagree with any of that, and, in fact, take pains to very carefully address only that there are tradeoffs—that is that there legitimate arguments to be made both ways particularly depending on the person.

I don’t object to an individual saying “I’m far better off this way”; it’s often true. But it’s also the case that I’ve observed others who are far less productive working from home.

And we should be intellectually honest enough to recognize both realities.

mrsuprawsm• 3 years ago

This is quite transparently FUD. Clearly many people have a vested interest in commercial real estate occupancy being high and are pushing this narrative to inflate the value of their currently declining investments.

diego_moita2• 3 years ago

I've been working remotely for 4 years and can assure you: no it isn't FUD. It is a real issue that can and should be addressed. And the good news is that CI/CD, Slack, Dischord and Meetup make the solutions possible. All you need is management understanding and buy in.

There are a lot of organizations that try remote with the same culture/mindset of in office. This is an error. Communication and iteration on remote work must be explicit, formalized and enforced.

davidgerard• 3 years ago

Ed Zitron's phrase for this sort of article is "boss erotica". https://ez.substack.com/p/techs-elite-hates-labor

paulcole• 3 years ago

I mean many people have a vested interest in working from home as well and push the narrative of middle manager = bad, office = bad as well.

It's not that either narrative is right or wrong, they're just different.

WFH isn't the unequivocal One True Way. It's a way.

matwood3• 3 years ago

I'm a huge proponent of WFH, but I do know where there are challenges.

New employee onboarding is challenging. It can be done, but it has to be very deliberate.

Any large team moves/merges are harder. Again, it can be done but there has to be a lot of deliberate work.

Interpersonal relationships are important for working. They are the lubricant that helps prevent communication friction. It used to be those relationships happened naturally in the office, but now they have to be deliberately nurtured. And that's part of WFH, not something ignore.

juve19968• 3 years ago

Office relationships can be good and also extremely toxic. I doubt there is any statistical evidence that being in the office leads to any net benefit of relationships.

Beaver117• 3 years ago

Why to we "really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment"?

It simply doesn't exist. Remote work, while great for junior engineers who enjoy slacking off and playing video games during meetings, should only be reserved for senior people

throwaway173738• 3 years ago

My juniors would like to have a word with you about why you think they’re not paying attention during my meetings.

nprateem3• 3 years ago

And I know some seniors who'd like a word about why you think they aren't playing computer games during meetings

pxc• 3 years ago

Remote work [is] great for junior engineers who enjoy slacking off and playing video games during meetings

J/w: how large are these meetings where you notice that level of disengagement? How long are they?

bbbobbb• 3 years ago

If they're able to play video games and not pay attention during the meeting then it's a waste of their time to be there in the first place. Stop wasting people's time with your meetings.

49erfangoniners• 3 years ago

Video games during meetings should be a best practice

diego_moita2• 3 years ago

This is big, serious and meaningful. It is tangent to the main problem on making remote work to properly work: formalize communication and iteration.

Management needs to make a conscious, methodological and deliberated effort to stimulate communication.

Dialog channels must be pried open in the remote era. There is a proper workplace culture for remote work. An organization doesn't just wander into remote with the same practices and culture of office work. My suggestions:

* rules for asynchronous communication. This includes a development methodology with full support on CI/CD techniques, issues tracking, code reviews, clear documentation, etc.

* people should be available on Slack/Dischord on pre defined times. You know the "my doors are open", "cubicles are meant to stimulate cooperation" slogans? In remote work these informal channels must be explicit

* There should be overlapping timezones in the team.

* stimulate frequent meetings with a maximum of five people, where people should talk not only about work but also personal subjects of their choice. This stimulates camaraderie and personal trust.

xwdv3• 3 years ago

If you want to stand out, the traditional way of just showing up to an office isn’t really enough.

Write company blog posts, hold demos of new tech, have 1 on 1 talks regularly. You have to think like a content creator.

flyingfences• 3 years ago

No, thanks; that's not my job. I'm hired as an engineer, not as a rat-race "content creator".

xwdv3• 3 years ago

Office small talk and interaction is often a form of content creation. Office theater.

bart_spoon2• 3 years ago

As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career, this does not match my experience. Perhaps it’s the organizations I’ve been at, or the field I’m in, but I have had no issues getting feedback or up to speed on things. Stuff like code review, which the article mentions, benefit in no way from in-person vs remote work set-ups. Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. The only junior employees that I’ve seen struggle in with remote work are those who

1) are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee

2) don’t even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn’t work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)

3) Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It’s easy to ask for feedback, or for problems that you can work on, or if you can pair with someone else on a problem they are working on so you can get some experience. None of that is really enabled or disabled by working from office/remote.

If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college. There are students I knew that were successful using resources that aren’t handed to them, like the internet. Others seemed to exclusively study via study groups, study guides, and going to the professor/TA during office hours, and without these. Once you enter the work force, the second kind of student has those resources pulled out from underneath them and very quickly has to learn to be the first kind of student, or they will struggle. I think remote vs in office doesn’t make much of a difference for the first kind, but in office feels more like a stop-gap for the second kind until they become more senior and acclimate. That’s just speculation on my part though, and is exclusively based on my limited experience and field.

croutonwagon3• 3 years ago

If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college.

I am not so sure on that. But I have seen similar throughout my years. More and more I am coming to the conclusion this is one of those "some people are wired a certain way, others are not". I have seen plenty of highly "educated" folks lacking terribly in skillsets. I have seen the same for those with no education.

As an instructor as well, it skews similar with the students I have seen. Some just have a "fire" and work through issues, others will just give up at the first sign of issue (I am talking "I couldnt figure out key based auth, so i did nothing".

I have tried to get folks to take personal ownership in products and deliverables, to varying degrees of success. In the past I was ardently against "silos" of responsibility but ultimately this led to some taking no ownership stake in any products. So we have had to transition to "assigning" primary, secondary, tertiary responsibility to services/products. This helped a little bit but also led to some then just bringing in personal excuses.

Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that folks have varying capacity for load/projects and how much they are simultaneously work/support. As well as varying capacity to be able to work indepedantly vs need more guidance/check-ins on stuff. I try and cater to whats needed to get the most out of them and understand not everyone is a rockstar that can just take a challenge and come back with solutions. Even still, it can be tricky managing that withing intra-team dynamics.

alistairSH2• 3 years ago

As a manager, it's not the day-to-day that concerns me the most.

It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.

Edit - I can't really quantify the above, so maybe it's not really a thing. But, personally, I miss those conversations and worry that new/young employees aren't able to have them.

surgical_fire• 3 years ago

It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.

I've worked in the tech for more than 2 decades, in different countries. I've worked for startups, for FAANG, and for companies of different sizes in between. I've built successful projects and saw my share of failures.

I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game yesterday?" sort.

This "water-cooler effect" myth that is repeated often as if it was fact, and that completely puzzles me.

Those important conversation you mentioned, for me, always happened online even when I was in the office, normally through slack discussions (or email threads in the old days).

eptcyka• 3 years ago

Some people flourish anywhere, some do so at home, some need closer supervision to do their best. I don't think anyone needs watercooler idle chat to get them to do the best they can.

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

All of which can be done online. If you can talk to your friends via facebook messenger or whatsapp to stay in the loop so can you with your colleagues via teams or slack.

AlwaysRock• 3 years ago

Bah. That is what hackernews/the internet is for. I learn more about new tools and stuff that other companies are using from seeing other companies/employees talk about that online than I do talking to co workers. Most of the time co workers are not talking about new cool tech, we are talking about life/bullshit because we are not robots.

bastardoperator• 3 years ago

Open Google Calendar or Office 365, create a meeting once or twice a week for 30 minutes and call it "watercooler chat". Make sure staff know it's an open forum, and that anything can be discussed safely. People that want to show up will. People that don't wont. Modern problems require modern solutions.

Aeolun• 3 years ago

Eh? We kind of make sure to discuss all those things on Teams too (or only, really, since 80% is still remote).

kovac• 3 years ago

If this is true, this is a really simple problem to solve. Organize cross-team show and tells. Past couple organisations I worked for did this successfully.

BlargMcLarg3• 3 years ago

It is culture in about every form. Education isn't actively made to teach people to be independent. Work culture for the past X decades has been pushing people to be dependent on each other directly. Social culture has pushed people to be dependent on work to fulfill various needs beyond a paycheck.

And despite us catering towards the open office for multiple decades, we are still seeing it is barely on par with an ad-hoc WFH call while other things are going awry. Anyone with any kind of perspective can tell these comparisons aren't remotely fair.

sagebird• 3 years ago

The idea that you can make up for being remote by being proactive proves the counterpoint.

You seem to be a top performer— the kind of person that someone higher up but perhaps not directly related to you -would pull to the side and have you work on something more important, if you were in the office, because the office is where non-organizational-chart-directed-actions take place.

It can even be as simple/stupid as an idiot in a suit asking “are you good at computers” while in an elevator. You fix their idiotic excel problem that they could have googled, then you end up in charge of some thing they want to build.

I understand that this represents a bit of disfunction - but I believe this is reality.

returningfory2• 3 years ago

Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive.

In your comment you say you haven't worked in-office much. So, genuine question, how do you know feedback doesn't benefit from being in-office?

I think this relevant because in my experience (1.5 years remote because of COVID), the benefits of being in the office often aren't apparent when you're out of the office. For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed. If I wasn't in the office I wouldn't even know I had missed these conversations.

BlargMcLarg3• 3 years ago

For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed

Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. Taken to the extreme, they even create a state of helplessness in others, where these individuals become a funnel for all others to ask questions and obtain knowledge from. This is without accounting for all the noise pollution it creates.

Opponents are very eager to pull out these 'what about the office talks?' arguments, but whether the benefits even outweigh the downsides isn't obvious at all.

Heck, most developer work cultures use Scrum, and they can't even work through a single item on their retrospectives. Surely a bit of skepticism is warranted.

bart_spoon2• 3 years ago

I worked in-office for about a year and a half. Then I switched fields and companies right before the pandemic hit, so I was effectively starting over again. I did not find being in-office vs remote to be particularly impactful on my ability to be effective, get feedback, and get up to speed. Obviously this is a very small sample size based solely on my personal experience.

908B64B1973• 3 years ago

are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee
don't even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn't work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)
Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.

Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).

Extasia785• 3 years ago

As a junior that also just started before COVID forced everyone into remote, my experience has been that team culture is the deciding factor. I've always been extremely vocal in communicating ideas, acquiring feedback and asking for help digitally, but my experience has been split for the two teams I've been yet.

The first team was just set up as the pandemic hit and thus had all collaboration happen online. This created structures that fit a remote-first approach and even worked after work got hybrid again. All important discussion happened online, we had ways to spontaneously get help and enough formats to get creative. And it worked, I never felt left out, all blockers for everyone got cleared as fast as you would expect and feedback cycles were good.

I can't say the same about my second team however. While it's officially hybrid, I'd say 70% are coming into the office every day, while the other 30% (me included) work basically exclusively remote. And it isn't working well, the office people just have their own bubble. They exchange ideas and communicate offline and it's hard to be part of that. I tried integrating digital tools, I tried talking about it, but it just doesn't work. I can plant seeds for new ideas, I can ask for feedback, but the second I communicate it to the office bubble, I'm not part of it anymore. This isn't intentional obviously, but when they talk about stuff at the coffee machine or during lunch, the idea will start developing by itself, while I have no way to take part in it. And who can blame them? If you have a good idea during lunch, why should they not talk about it? And who wants to provide an official protocol for the remote workers about lunch discussions? And then when I then try to talk about the idea a few days later, I always notice that it advanced without any possibility for me to participate. This sucks obviously, because it massively diminishes my influence to bring in and grow my ideas. And while I do get feedback when I ask for it directly, I have noticed that barely anyone actively informs you about the small 1% stuff that you can improve. Which doesn't sound bad, but if you miss an 1% improvement every week, even in a year it will amount to a big enough sum to matter.

And I think these 2 things do massively influence a career. You need to be the face of a bunch of good ideas if you want any kind of soft power. You do need the small informal feedback someone gives you when getting a coffee, if you want to be the top 10%. And in some hybrid organizations, you will miss out on that.

ilaksh4• 3 years ago

The office people here actually are actively politicking against the remote people whether they realize it or not. If you were their boss they would have no choice about keeping you in the loop on lunch conversations.

This sort of thing is definitely a problem with many "hybrid" situations.

jayd162• 3 years ago

For 3) the difference with in office work is that the manager can passively check in on how someone is doing. Just casually checking someone's posture from across an office you can tell if they're struggling or not.

Forcing a video call is a lot more formal and just doesn't have the same effect. People will attempt to present a cool demeanor.

Someone who's doing great and is fully self sufficient in office can probably crank out code form home just fine... its the cases where people are struggling or need to collaborate in an non-formal way that I think in office helps the most.

opportune• 3 years ago

I’ve been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are not self starters or need lots of help are not doing well.

That first group is able to (IMO) progress just as well as they would in-office because they know when to reach out for help, fix things on their own without help, etc.

The second group may or may not be better served by in-office work. In some cases there are language barriers that make things challenging and I expect more in-office communication would reduce these. But I think a much bigger help would be for these people to be able to watch more experienced employees work and operate (both in terms of learning specific tools/processes for doing things, and the soft skills like when those other workers reach out for help, how they do so). Both of these assume they want to do better though; I don’t think WFO would help truly disengaged juniors.

So basically, I completely agree with you and I think the distinction is important. FWIW, I think people who progress in their career and become valuable employees quickly tend to almost always fall in the first group anyway.

Eumenes2• 3 years ago

I don't even know what half the people do at my company. Productivity has no doubt fallen to historic lows. I def feel like 5% of the people are doing 75% of the work. I agree with the article that junior employees are not setup to succeed in this environment which will ultimately result in companies hiring less junior people (fine with me, tired of babysitting).

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

Honest question: why do you care? Don’t you prefer to see your family and friends more than working 8h+commute time? If you think you are working and others are not, why does that bother you? You are getting paid anyway. If you are forced to do extra hours because there are people who don’t do their job, then just say No (if you cannot do that, then you probably want to change of company anyway… they will bite you in some way or another).

If any, remote work has taught me something: I care way less about the companies I work for. I’m a mercenary, I do my job to the best of my knowledge 9-5 and I couldn’t care less what the company does with my work (as long as it’s legal and ethical).

snapcaster3• 3 years ago

I agree with you, thanks for the term "mercenary". Was trying to discuss my (different) perspective similar to this with my girlfriend and couldn't find this word

Eumenes2• 3 years ago

How would you feel if this was not a cushy white collar tech job but a blue collar job involving physical labor? Say people are slacking, not working hard, generally being lazy, while a small group does the majority of the work? Would it be acceptable to care then? I don't see how its any different. Remote work has given the underperformers somewhere to hide, and quite frankly, its not going to help them in the long term.

ryzvonusef3• 3 years ago

Would working totally remote, but paying for quarterly tickets and accommodation to gather all staff (from all over the world) for a week to meet and brainstorm, be cheaper than hiring locally and renting?

I know someone who worked for a danish company, they has a similar scheme but every six months... worked really well for the most part. The company would hold retreats all over Europe, and since it combined both business and employee perks (stay at a nice resort), worked like a charm for them.

____

But it also highlighted an interesting issue, that might act as a counterpoint for the whole thing.

The problem was my acquaintance was a Pakistani citizen like me... and visa for us is a really big headache.

Not a big deal for an EU company to announce only a week or two before where the retreat would be held this time, and most of their workforce, who all had relatively strong passports, also didn't face major issues.

But the earliest he himself could get any form of schengen visa was like 3 months after the retreat, so too late for the first one and too early for the second one, whenever and wherever that would be decided.

I think it worked out for him after sometime, but remote work is not all sunshine and roses.

detaro• 3 years ago

Even if you are in the EU, 1-2 weeks notice for something like that is bonkers. And as soon as company has more than a handful of employees, this is something you want to have booked with hotel and such earlier anyways. From what I've seen in other companies, time and location of such things gets announced months in advance.

ryzvonusef3• 3 years ago

Apologies if I am remembering the anecdote incorrectly, it might have been more than two weeks. (We were in a chat group and he was bemoaning his visa headaches, I forget the exact mechanics of his company policy, since that wasn't the crux of the issue)

The point was, however earlier they had given their employees the notice, his visa was going to arrive much later than that.

Visa for us is extremely difficult, someone on twitter shared a screenshot, the Canadian website told to expect a wait of "580 days" or something absurd like that.

So you can hire remote workers cheaply from other countries (and no employment visa headaches), but if you expect to call them for a quick visit, plan absurdly early.

izacus3• 3 years ago

I've lead remote teams and gathering the team 1x or 2x per year was absolute necessity to have everyone working well together.

Obviously you do this in a sensible manner (a lot of heads up, locked down dates so people can plan vacation around it, full expenses paid).

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

Can’t they schedule anything in Dubai?

ryzvonusef3• 3 years ago

I decided to hit him up again, and he told me he had moved to another (European ) company, one which would sponsor a work visa, so he didn't have to go through all these headaches

so I guess remote didn't end up being suitable for him.

Dubai isn't suitable for most Euros, tbh.

kemayo• 3 years ago

I've seen this with some Nigerian coworkers. The sheer difficulty of getting them a visa to attend any sort of gathering outside of Africa is intense.

908B64B1973• 3 years ago

The problem was my acquaintance was a Pakistani citizen like me... and visa for us is a really big headache.

Passport travel freedom is caused by security and fraud risk.

This can be fixed by countries simply by making sure fraud and security risks can't end-up abroad.

moate3• 3 years ago

Management: You don't want to work remotely Employees: Yes we do Management: No you don't, look at all these studies about how bad it is for us? Employees: We don't care Management: No you don't, look at all these studies about how bad it is for you, sorta, in some minor aspects?

Some people want to work remotely, other people don't, and management/corpos HATE it because they invested in massive office leases/are listening to their rich investor friends who have money tied in urban office real estate.

I'm sick of these propaganda pieces, you're not going to convince the people who want something that they don't want it this way. IDGAF how much my "career" will suffer, I like spending my day hugging my wife and gardening when I don't have work on my desk. FOH.

anticensor• 3 years ago

Management also wants to maximise control over their employees, which is easy to lose in a remote environment.

crhulls• 3 years ago

I think your thesis about management wanting in-office is accurate, but your rationale for why seems misguided.

I'm the CEO of a 500 person company and our lease cost is negligible relative to everything else, and being fully remote means lots of travel and expensive all-hands get togethers which almost fully negate any office savings.

The overlap between VCs and public market investors and "rich investor friends who have money tied to urban office real estate" is non-existent from a pressure and influence standpoint.

moate3• 3 years ago

Management: We just want everyone to be able to meet and share ideas and be in a simple easy to monetize…monitor space. It’s about team work! Employees: we want to work remotely and don’t care about your fucking problems or rational so just stop trying to convince us

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

One has to distinguish between management and upper management. I have met plenty of middle managers (e.g., Engineer managers) who love working from home, but have to sell the “go back to the office “ idea because it’s coming from upper management.

dogman1444• 3 years ago

Relationships and quick chat get built and done on Slack. My professional network is a web of in-work, Signal chats, professional Slacks/Discords. I have a massively largely and more substantive professional information network that benefits me and my employer than I do if I kept all the focus in the office and on what Mike my manager fed me during hallway interactions.

Proactivity to the above is worth hiring for, but works fine if you do. This all comes down to “since I don’t want to DM someone and set up zoom calls, and travel to the office once a week a quarter, let’s make everyone start commuting in.”

This article describes people who don’t know how to do that well or want to leverage alternative routes to achieve. Or, using number of GitHub comments as a measure for good feedback is about as logical as number of slack comments per day. Engineers know these metrics are tracked for performance and compensation.

DrBazza• 3 years ago

There's a couple of reasons I can think of: "young professionals" are more likely to be flat sharing or living somewhere that's sub-optimal for remote work, and the other is access to grey-beards like myself for questions about the system and so on.

50 yr old me versus 25 yr old me: flat vs house with office, knew my way around Solaris and Windows, but not much experience in large systems or databases and so on.

And the IT world is so much bigger than 90s. Back then, it was Solaris or NT4. Oracle and Sybase. VB and C++.

lostcolony4• 3 years ago

From the article - "but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code)"

Sooooo...literally just measuring how many comments are being added to the code? That feels like both a really poor measurement for feedback, and also really easily addressable (heck, if you really want that in person feel, make it so PRs are done synchronously; someone hops onto a zoom and the writer presents their code, talking through the changes).

xchip2• 3 years ago

Let me guess, and going back to the office is the only solution, isn't it?

IMTDb2• 3 years ago

Creating you own company; hiring junior remotely and having a big success going that proves the article wrong and is another viable option.

revlolz• 3 years ago

Propaganda piece from economists. Hello CBRE. I'm part of the demographic they claim and it couldn't be further from the truth for me. In remote env, if your seniors (management or peers) opt for their productivity 100% over training juniors then you have a shitty team and that's hardly unique to remote work. In fact, you will likely spend more years wasted commuting into office doing nothing as opposed to having more time to experiment, hypothesize, and learn. Good teams make it policy and process to lift everyone. They have networking events in person and remote. They accept the situations that as adults and leaders we don't need mom and dad to hold us so we can go down the slide and write a pr. Bad teams hyperfixate on metrics like cr revisions, drown newbies on complexity impossible, ambiguity black holes projects. Again, these things happen in the office too, so why is this study focusing on an issue prescribing it unique to remote? I don't know.

TeeMassive3• 3 years ago

Propaganda piece from economists.

I was under the same impression. The whole article is full of "but what about". If you follow the money this is not surprising, the managers, who also happen to own real estate in New York / California, want their workers occupying their expansive office space and living near it so the real estate bubble doesn't pop right now. So they had the NYT write an article about it.

mr_00ff002• 3 years ago

It’s a bit bad practice to assume all research that promotes an opinion you agree with is truth, but anything against what you like must be propaganda.

dogman1444• 3 years ago

Certainly what it felt like. A Fortune 500 company (sounds like IBM), 1 sales team anecdote, fear mongering over job loss for the remote’ers, and a very narrow study getting an op via the article to “suggest something broader.”

spacemadness2• 3 years ago

It’s fascinating, as well as disheartening, watching the massive pushback to labor advances in real-time by corporate owned news media and by their helpers on social media. The layoffs seem to be a catalyst to claw back power, even if it is a side effect and not the sole reason for occuring.

tomrod2• 3 years ago

Propaganda piece from economists

Weird, propaganda doesn't tend to come from economists in my mental model. To be fair, the one economist I've seen seriously looking into this is Nick Bloom, whose research on the descriptive statistics side of things shows WFH Hybrid is here to stay.

There are some commercial real estate folks predicting a cratering of comm RE values if WFH is continued, but I'd argue that's just capitalist creative destruction at its best.

saghm• 3 years ago

Weird, propaganda doesn't tend to come from economists in my mental model.

In my mental model, propaganda can come from anyone with a political agenda, and that will certainly include economists from time to time.

88913527• 3 years ago

Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely. It's just tougher to have off-the-cuff conversations. With fewer of those opportunities, that means what could've been a 5 minute conversation and resolution to a technical issue becomes a full day for a junior engineer, and they have fewer opportunities to ask seniors since they're worried about being a bother. I'm not trying to force people back into offices, I'd rather adapt, but I think anyone new to the industry is at a disadvantage in the interim.

495312• 3 years ago

Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely.

I cannot think of a scenario where if I needed help with something I couldn't have a 5-minute conversation with someone.

Slack conversations I have several times a week: "Hey do you have a sec to help me? I can't seem to reproduce X bug" "Yea, wanna huddle?" "Sure!"

I don't know what new skills someone would have to learn in order to do that.

commandlinefan• 3 years ago

becomes a full day for a junior engineer

A full day of honing his own problem solving skills, which pay off quite a bit more over time than watching somebody else do it.

oregano• 3 years ago

Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely.

I do not understand why you would choose to generalize to such an extreme degree. How could you possibly have the confidence to speak in such broad terms?

Reflecting on my last 6 years of experience as an engineer (which includes both office-based work and being remote) this is not true at all.

hanniabu• 3 years ago

One of my old bosses would schedule an hour a week between him and I with no agenda to help with these more natural unplanned convos. We'll probably only do 5min catchup and then bullshit the rest of the time about random stuff, but something always tends to come up that spurs an idea, provides clarity, or helps in some other way.

lief79• 3 years ago

Our company added designated buddies (generally senior assigned to junior) to assist with this for new hires. If they're stuck on a problem, you have someone set aside to ask questions too. If they don't know the answer, they probably know who to ask.

peoplefromibiza2• 3 years ago

let's talk about general terms, not the narrow hyper specialized sector that is tech.

many companies (I would argue most) would stop working if people are not reminded every day what their job is and asked what is the ETA for the task they were assigned to.

it's a real problem, people are usually not super smart, they are average, and tend to learn nothing on the job unless they are required to, trained regularly and their advancement measured in some way. They do not think about their work outside, they hardly do it while at work, they do not experiment, they do not hypothesize, they simply wait for the paycheck at the end of the month in exchange for a portion of their lifetime.

if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would have jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one would not exist.

kitsunesoba• 3 years ago

if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would have jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one would not exist.

Perhaps, if it weren't for confounding variables like companies trying to justify the big shiny new buildings they spent a fortune on prior to the pandemic, middle managers working to keep themselves relevant, and forces in the commercial real estate market trying to mitigate price crashes from reduced demand for offices.

paddw• 3 years ago

A lot of jobs are about being able to network and people-manage, not about being able to push PRs. It seems clear to me you are at a disadvantage being remote in these types of roles. Even for people in technical roles, or whose work naturally fits into being remote, these things are probably harder in remote environments. Most companies are not perfectly well adjusted, so it does not make sense to talk about what the ideal remote-first culture is, but what on average working remotely is like.

clnq2• 3 years ago

My company provides a 24/7 onboarding voice chat, where experienced team members are always accessible for questions. This system significantly reduces onboarding time, with most questions answered within minutes and team members starting regular code contributions in days. While some people may be uneasy with this persistent voice channel, participation is voluntary. Newcomers can simply join, ask their question, and leave. The company culture prescribes an expectation that at least some seniors should be available for new people, but naturally the extroverted ones participate more often.

In my experience, the "remote work hindering junior employees" narrative hasn't held true. Admittedly, there is an initial managerial effort required to accommodate remote work. But then remote onboarding thrives. So, as you say, it's not a remote work issue, it's a cultural one. Or as I would say, it sounds like an issue with managers refusing to do their job and manage the remote company.

aix12• 3 years ago

Wait a minute, a 24/7 voice chat with experienced team members? How is that staffed?

Are you in some sort of huge-team highly-distributed setup with offices everywhere, or does the company expect people to work 24/7? (I'm guessing somewhere in the middle, but would be curious to learn more.)

slantedview• 3 years ago

The study used as the basis for this article looked at one set of workers at one company. This is hardly worthy of a writeup in a local industry rag, let alone the NYT, but the point of this and similar pieces is to empower owners over workers.

ldehaan• 3 years ago

Dude why do you guys keep reading this trash company's articles? These corporatists are pay to print. They'll print anything you pay them to.

Stop reading this garbage.

I strongly suggest checking out your weekly media assassination, tune in to the best pod in the universe: No Agenda

https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/4175796

rahimnathwani• 3 years ago

From the paper:

  Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020.

They studied just one company.

I'm guessing that the company doesn't have a remote-first culture, and that things may have improved in the last 2+ years, as companies have gotten more used to both hybrid and remote-only.

typicalrunt• 3 years ago

And their timeframe is pre-COVID and the worst possible time during COVID, when people were just trying to figure out how to work and live and not catch some deadly virus. 2020 was a hectic time and such an abnormality that I wouldn't base any long-term human behaviour on it.

RoyGBivCap• 3 years ago

Makes the entire article a glorified anecdote, IMHO.

desireco42• 3 years ago

I can see that they will say anything just to get people to sit in the office, commute downtown or wherever and justify commercial real-estate.

Reality is that people are much happier when they can work from home. Not every profession and position can do this and maybe those who need to show up should be paid more tbh.

Economical and ecological impact of working from home is huge, positively huge. Companies get to expand without huge fixed costs for example.

Articles like this are created to promote world that has been and is not coming back.

Workaccount22• 3 years ago

I always feel that discussing remote work in the context of software dev (basically, discuss it on HN) is so heavily skewed to the point of being meaningless.

We're talking about an industry that has a heavy concentration of, for lack of a better word, shut-ins, who don't really like socializing and really excel at work when they are alone and not being bothered. Most of them self-taught to some degree, or entirely. Heavy technical knowledge and strong ability to deal with technical hurdle of remote work. Probably have a bad internet addiction too, and attribute most of their knowledge to it. The nature of the work also heavily lends itself to being remote, and why there were even people in the 90's(!) who were doing remote developer work.

But take another field, like say marketing, that has lots of extroverted types and lots of meetings with heavy emphasis on visual things, that no one was doing remote prior to 2020, and suddenly remote work becomes a much more grinding endeavor that can really chew up juniors. These people are not shut-in computer geeks and their work is not a fit for those types by a long shot. As much as they may hate the commute and insist that remote work is fine, the fact of the matter is that the type of work really doesn't lend itself to remote working.

TL;DR: These articles about remote work failing aren't really talking about software jobs, and your experience as someone who has worked remote dev work for 15 years isn't really relevant. You work a job that is almost tailor made for remote work.

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

Maybe the marketing people can do some market analysis and figure out that trying bully software developers back into the office so that marketing people can have a captive audience for their extroversion isn't a great path forward and instead is creating incredible amounts of resentment and even hostility. Maybe they should go hang out at the local Starbucks and make some real friends instead of trying to impose themselves and their preferences on others. Note that the WFH people don't give a shit if the extroverts with an addiction to endless external validation work in an office, at home, or in a deep sea trench but the converse isn't true with the extrovert trying with all their might to force their preferences on everyone else. You'd think marketers would understand people a bit better and realize that the outcome is going to be that they're going to get blasted each time they try to use their slimy sales tactics to force everyone to conform to their personal preferences.

Workaccount22• 3 years ago

I don't see how the working decisions of a markerting firm would have anything to do with software devs.

The world doesn't revolve around software devs, which is kind of the whole point of my post. Devs can work from home, these articles aren't about them, and hence why its dumb to discuss them on HN.

armatav3• 3 years ago

Bro, you’re in-office because of your C-level, not the extroversion of an unrelated team.

You don’t think they could just socialize amongst their immediate peers in-office without you?

ncraig• 3 years ago

I suspect you're correct more broadly, but this article is talking about software jobs:

The economists — Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais — studied engineers at a large technology company. They found that remote work enhanced the productivity of senior engineers, but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code), and some of the junior engineers were more likely to quit the firm.

However, there are major problems with the research. From the research article:

Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm be- tween August 2019 and December 2020.

The study period includes the throes of the pandemic and ignores long-term adjustments.

ElfinTrousers• 3 years ago

It's true: a lot of people in software are people who, at a very early age, decided that a life with many more machines and many fewer people in it would be best for them.

tonnydourado• 3 years ago

First, there are the cliches: "face to face meetings are better", "spontaneous collaboration", "out of sight, out of mind".

Then, there is the non-sequitur of people quit when the pandemic hit, it was because remote. Maybe it was a shit company already and remote just made it worse enough, did you control for that?

Last, but no least, what the hell do economists know about human behavior to do a study on how remote work affects it? It would be like me doing a study on ... Well, anything, I'm a college dropout, I'm not qualified to do any scientific research. But I still learned enough to spot a weak argument at best.

gbrindisi• 3 years ago

I feel like this is a management problem that needs to be solved. As the context has changed so should management style.

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

I work remotely and am a big proponent of remote work but onboarding is definitely a huge challenge. Getting young people up to speed is doable if you are using a lot of standard frameworks about which you can find information about on the internet. But it gets really if you need very specialized hardware and software and also use processes that are required by regulation. I work 8n medical devices and I have noticed a lot of our offshore don’t really understand things even after years. It’s probably solvable but you need management that understands this and puts resources into onboarding processes.

nobody99992• 3 years ago

I have a slightly different take about this than other folks. Perhaps it's because I'm older and when I entered the workforce, there were very few jobs that could be remote, and even fewer that actually were.

I've worked in-office for most of my career (much of that was as a consultant hired for specific projects, and many clients want to see you working), but pre-pandemic I was full-time remote for more than five years, which was mostly positive, but with a few caveats.

One of the biggest caveats was that it was more difficult to build strong teams, as your colleagues were just voices (this is before ubiquitous video meetings) on the phone and text in chat and/or emails.

But that isn't limited to work environments either. More and more of our lives are spent online, with less and less human interaction. I suppose that might be a plus for the misanthropes among us, but it seems like that's fracturing our social cohesion (I'm in the US, my experience may not be valid elsewhere).

Please note that I am emphatically not prescribing full-time return to the office. Not even close. WFH allowed me to be more productive and not waste 700 hours or so a year sitting on a train commuting. I shudder to think about how much I hated driving to/from client sites as a consultant as that's even worse than riding the train.

No, I don't believe that your employer/co-workers are "family" (well, unless they actually are but that's not usually the case in larger organizations), but humans are social creatures and really do need real, physical human interaction (I'm not talking about sex which is important, but irrelevant in this context) to maintain a healthy outlook on other humans and society in general.

An outlier (at least I hope it is) being the recent spate of people being shot just for attempting contact (knocking on a stranger's door) with other humans.

What makes folks so suspicious and willing to harm their neighbors? I think it's a lack of regular human contact and the constant drumbeat of evil deeds from the news media (how does the old saw go? "If it bleeds, it leads."). And with the ability to get news from anywhere in the world in near real-time, we constantly hear about the worst of us, but rarely about the mundane, pleasant interactions that people have every day.

Perhaps I'm way off base with this take, but it seems to me that fostering human interaction with physical proximity with one's larger society promotes social cohesion.

That's not to say such interactions must be in the workplace, but for many folks (given car/suburban culture), it might the only time they might interact with other humans who aren't family or close friends.

Which brings to mind Asimov's dichotomy (as he combined his 'Robot' and 'Foundation' universes), especially in Foundation and Earth[0], where the "Spacers" are so anti-social that they loathe any physical, human interaction whatsoever, whereas the "Settlers" were comfortable being around other humans. I'm not saying that this is what's happening, just that there are some interesting parallels.

I don't pretend to have all (or even some/any) the answers, but interacting with actual human beings usually enhances my view of humanity/society/local community, while online interactions mostly degrade that view.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Earth

[1] Please note that I'm not being categorical here. There absolutely are unpleasant/evil/nasty people in the world who should be avoided. But at least in my experience, most humans are honest, decent people just trying to live a decent life.

Edit: clarified prose. Fixed typo.

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

I think I agree with what you said. That being said, for me when it comes to balance work (as in “working for company X for Z money/year) vs non-work, I put all the weight in non-work. That means:

- in-person is better for collaboration than Zoom? Of course, but if I have to commute 30 min each way to see you, then Zoom it is

- being around other office people at lunch time is cool sometimes? Yeah, but if I have to rent an expensive and small apartment in the city to being able to be at the office at lunch time, then Zoom it is

nobody99992• 3 years ago

That being said, for me when it comes to balance work (as in “working for company X for Z money/year) vs non-work, I put all the weight in non-work.

Absolutely. Although many folks don't have much physical interaction with other humans outside of their jobs. In that case, cutting out those interactions without some sort of alternative for human interaction is detrimental to most humans' mental health IMHO.

Since we're online here, there's a much larger proportion of neuro-atypical, introverted and/or misanthropic people than in the population at large, so I think the discussion is a bit skewed.

Which is why I posted what I did.

All that said, I don't disagree with your assessment at all. It's just important to have those interactions somewhere.

More directly addressing the topic in TFA, when I was pretty junior, personal interactions with more senior folks was crucial for me to understand the culture and political landscape of a large organization, even as a technical resource. And those lessons/mentoring have served me well in my career.

For me, those interactions happened over cigarettes (this was 30 years ago) and at the bar after work, but the result was the same as "water cooler" interactions.

As a more senior resource, those interactions weren't as useful, but I can certainly see where juniors could benefit greatly from a more senior person taking them under their wing.

mercwear• 3 years ago

Unpopular opinion based on my personal experience: Remote work is broken and we will slowly see a full return to the office in most cases.

Why is it broken? This article points out some of the big reasons but the ones that stand out to me are: Lack of face to face collaboration, Lack of learning via "osmosis", and the biggest one I do not hear a lot about is the complete lack of social skills that I see from people who have worked from home for the past 3+ years. Some people have become totally incapable of dealing with others due to the fact they have been holed up for so long.

chiefalchemist• 3 years ago

The problem isn't remote work. The problem is tradional in-office management and leadership that don't understand remote isn't just add Slack or add Teams and you're a remote-able team.

There's more to it than that.

But once again leadership blames the proles for getting it wrong.

cratermoon3• 3 years ago

"Hidden Penalty" is less feedback. But mostly the kind of feedback allistic people worry about. That not the kind of in-depth feedback that can make a real career difference, it's the "your pant legs are too short" kind of feedback that is important in the shallow sense of being a good corporate drone.

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

How was any of this hidden? It was plain a day from the start of the pandemic that not being present, not building social relationships and just being a name in a chatroom is going to have consequences in the velocity of your career.

Anyone claiming otherwise is lying to you because they don't want to lose the perk of the flexibility and don't personally care about their own trajectory at that point in their lives (nothing wrong with that, just wrong to claim its without tradeoffs).

mbfg• 3 years ago

"At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?”

almost no one does that. Me smells a marketing piece done for property owners.

nprateem3• 3 years ago

I bet her boss wishes he can WFH again

nprateem3• 3 years ago

After 3 years at home I wouldn't mind being a TWAT (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), provided I liked my colleagues and the cute account managers were in. But if I went back in and there was little social interaction I'd rather stay home.

ragnarsson• 3 years ago

It happened to me when I was junior engineer during covid, honestly I came out as a better developer since I learned how to get answers from the code, I got much better at navigating different codebases. Though it was still a drag sometimes and I felt my manager didn't do enough to create an environment where junior engineers could thrive in.

I found that there were 2 kind of seniors - genuinely helpful ones, total assholes. These assholes will never help you, if you ping them they pretend to not see it and the helpful ones are always so busy they can't get any time to help you.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I love the photographs in this article, of young professionals smiling and having a great time in the open plan office. It's been a few years, but I seem to recall a different vibe prevailing in offices like that. I guess you can't take a picture of someone internally fuming because the person they're sharing a desk with can't stop drumming his fingers on the table and farting. I guess you can't have a photoshoot of someone working in the stairwell because it's the only place they can concentrate, since all the meeting rooms are already occupied by other people who can't get work done at their desks.

jalapenos• 3 years ago

No, you just open Zoom and share screen and everything's at least as good as in the office days when everyone was so distracted by interruptions that they could barely work.

aynyc• 3 years ago

I'm not here to assign blames, it seems to me the younger generation somehow missing a lot of life skills.

I was both a student and TA in college back in the days. My experience has been, those who go to Office Hours or TA hours usually perform better than those who don't (unless you are one of those folks who are just smart and know how to work hard). In my junior/senior year, I consistently went to office hours and TA hours, my grades got significantly better. This goes for my students as well.

Remote problem is like that as well. No one is parenting you anymore, your success and failure is based on your action. If you are a junior, schedule calls with your senior, two to three hours a week, prepare your questions and see what you get out of it. Don't wait for your managers or seniors to contact you.

I will say this, there are companies/seniors/managers that are shit at helping juniors, just like shitty professors and TAs.

tennisflyi2• 3 years ago

Leadership is always busy. No way I’m try to impart anything else on them.

root_axis• 3 years ago

There's a lot to say about in-person collaboration and knowledge transfer through osmosis, but I think this quote from the article highlights the crux of it

When you’re remote, you’re out of sight, out of mind

The people in the office are having lunch together, they're talking and laughing, participating in office birthday celebrations and get togethers after work. Even something as simple as a warm smile and a "good morning" has a cumulative impact on those around you. Your presence is a contribution to the cultural mosaic of the company in a visceral way.

It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're also someone you can have lunch or drinks with. The business world is just as much about politics as it is about productivity and if you find yourself far away from court, you'll inevitably deal with the consequences of those who are present to assert their influence.

juve19968• 3 years ago

When you’re remote, you’re out of sight, out of mind

This simply isn't a state of being. You can be out of sight, and out of mind, if you have a shitty manager or a shitty company culture, in that case, it's probably a blessing to be fired.

It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're also someone you can have lunch or drinks with.

If you're at a company that chooses promotions based on a crappy HR pizza party leave immediately. I've never been rewarded at work because I pretended to care about coworkers personal lives beyond courtesy.

What got me promoted was being courteous but also reliably getting shit done. You can do this in the office, remotely, or through some hybrid set up. I've done all three. Do good work, make sure it's visible. It's not complicated.

Gigachad5• 3 years ago

I feel a whole lot closer to the sales people and random product people who come in the office than the other developers on my team because those people in office are real people while the others are just icons on a screen.

disport• 3 years ago

As a remote, older professional now, my career nevertheless supports the premise of this article: in-office was beneficial when I started out.

My first job had a strong lunch culture, providing an environment for serendipitous conversations, daily. Over time, I bumped into folks I never would have met in the normal scope of my role, across finance, legal, SRE, support, sales, data science, etc.

In turn, as a young professional, I was able to develop a mental model for how businesses "work", why they're organized how they are, and how (good) culture can bind everyone together towards a profitable outcome. I made some friends and acquaintances that I'm still in touch with to this day.

As a remote, older professional now, I don't necessarily "need" these serendipitous conversations anymore, although I miss the general socialization. But I do feel like they're an essential "ladder" that every subsequent generation of professionals should be able to access, and that it's a moral obligation for me to "pay it forward".

For remote work to be "fair" to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.

o_nate• 3 years ago

I'm an older professional now working in a hybrid arrangement, but I very much concur with the parent comment. I can't imagine how my early career would have gone without being able to put in the time in the office. Its a cliche, but work culture really does exist, and it's about social cues and rules of courtesy. These mores are not taught in school but are absolutely essential to working effectively in an office. I would suspect this socialization is even more important for people who perhaps come from families where no parent was a white-collar office worker. I was lucky to start out at places where it was common for teams to eat lunch together. These unofficial interactions were just as important as regular work interactions in helping me to understand the psychology of my more experienced colleagues, what was polite, and what was taboo.

shmatt• 3 years ago

I think leadership at many of these companies have their wires crossed in terms of messaging but also expectations and ideas about what they want to extract out of employees

They always start with return to office = productivity, which people push back on, because the office is full of 2 hour lunch breaks and water cooler discussions about fantasy football. Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day. If we're talking lines of codes written nothing beats working at home for most

But you're right, there is a ton to learn during those 2 hour lunches, pulling people in to impromptu meetings, and socializing as a whole

The messaging needs to be fixed, expectations adjusted, people should be empowered to both work heads down at home, and do less head down work at the office

mulmen12• 3 years ago

There's another problem in that the modern office is not optimized for the really valuable interactions. There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. What we really need are small quiet areas to focus and do work and separate large areas for socialization and collaboration. The modern office doesn't actually facilitate any of this.

When I was a newbie I sat in a cube across the hall from my boss' private office and next to the kitchen. It was actually really nice. I was in a quiet corner of the office and had full height cube walls with bookshelves and a big whiteboard all to myself. But I could turn around and ask my boss a question or walk less than 30 feet to talk to any of the senior engineers, who all had private offices which doubled as collaboration spaces. The spontaneous interactions happened around the espresso machine. In hindsight it was wonderful but if you looked at that building from the outside you might think it was an outdated dump. We got bought out by a company in silicon valley and they moved us to a new building with an open floorplan and sat us next to the sales team. It was big and bright but we lost all our collaboration space.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

The messaging needs to be fixed

The present messaging accurately reflects how managers are seeing the situation (they think employees goof off when they aren't being watched, and don't have the metrics necessary to tell that's not true), replacing it with "messaging" about career development is essentially lying just to get people to go along with RTO. If they really cared about young professionals that wouldn't be "changing the messaging."

908B64B1973• 3 years ago

Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day.

They completely lose credibility when bringing up those points. Errands are nothing compared to the ~2h per day of commute people save.

aeturnum2• 3 years ago

I agree that "in office" culture implicitly values informal, face-to-face interactions that happen "for free" if you are in office. The problem, in an increasingly globalized world, is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee commutes (and buys lunch, etc).

I also find the casual interactions in-office valuable - but I'm not going to "eat" the cost of enabling them for the good of the company. If someone actually offered me an in-office position that took the time I spent enabling those interactions seriously (i.e. compensated me for them) - I would be a lot more receptive to returning!

Instead, companies tend to want it both ways: they want their employees to donate the time to get the benefits of working in-office, then they want to use the same employees lower raw productivity stats to fire them down the line. I'm old enough to recognize such an obvious trap.

javier2• 3 years ago

The 2 hour lunches are actually useful once a week. Sitting at your desk is even less a guarantee anyone is working. Its a fools errand to try to micromanage that.

dfxm12• 3 years ago

Managing remote workers is a skill that many managers are finding out they don't have right now. I wasn't in the same office as my manager when I started out. I was lucky to have good managers over time who were able to foster these types of discussions you're talking about, without ever being collocated with everyone involved.

It's kinda sad, because this isn't a new problem. Whether you're remote because you're working from home, or you're remote because you're in Belgium and the rest of your team is in North Carolina, the managerial issues are roughly the same, but we've had multinational companies for a while now...

iso1631• 3 years ago

Managing any workers is a skill that many managers have never had, especially in companies where the only way to progress (in terms of salary and status) is to become a team manager.

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

But there exists 100% remote companies, even before Covid. In such companies this “lunch culture” doesn’t exist (never existed). We should learn from such companies because I think remote work is more about finally putting more emphasis on the “life” part of “work-life balance”

flappyeagle• 3 years ago

I’ve worked at many styles of company, including 2 that were fully remote pre-Covid.

The secret to success is, we have like a 8-1 senior to junior ratio. That’s the only way they get enough specific attention to stay effective, not get lost in the shuffle, get the training they need.

The company that I worked at which transitioned to remote during Covid… didn’t go so well

throwaway987655• 3 years ago

I work for a (pre-covid) 100% remote company with a decent company culture. What worked for us is two whole-company meetups per year plus some smaller trips for teams and departments. It really boosts the team spirit to spend a week somewhere nice with plenty of time to just chat to mates and random people that I wouldn't otherwise meet.

We also have some online social activities during the year but it doesn't work as well. The participation is low. Teams have regular online (paid-for) lunches together which is nice but a bit awkward. People generally prefer to focus on getting the job done and having a good work-life balance. This works as long as we get to see each other in person a couple of times a year.

That said, with the recent economic down-turn, the company meetups got put on hold. The company grew and it's now very expensive to organise transport and accommodation for everyone. I can already see the negative effects of the decision.

xiphias2• 3 years ago

,,For remote work to be "fair" to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.''

If you are older and more experienced, you should know that life isn't fair.

But at the same time I see lot of young people want to start working remotely and want to do software development _because_ it can be done remotely, but fail to understand that it's an advantage for them.

Sadly social media is full of good sounding bad advice for young people.

mihaigalos• 3 years ago

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to light that such research is funded by hedge funds owning the commercial real estate you "absolutely have to have for the poor young professionals."

tennisflyi2• 3 years ago

This was stated early on as a downside.

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

It's amazing how much better teams are at remote work now than in 2018. However... It's still just not as efficient as in-person fact-to-face ad-hoc meetings. The "water cooler discussion forum" is very real. Informational cross-pollination between teams and between levels of the org structure simply aren't happening as much with remote work. The siloing has locked companies into rigid plans that cannot respond to change.

pradn• 3 years ago

It's so much easier to take your laptop over to a senior colleague and ask them to help you debug something in person. There's much more friction to asking for a call, waiting for them to respond, sending them the invite, perhaps waiting for them to get to a phone room if they happen to be in the office, setting up screen sharing (with its minute and fuzzy type), and having to type things in yourself.

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

It’s harder because you (the one asking for help) first need to articulate your problem in a way that is understandable via text. So, I would say that’s an advantage for everyone: think first, then ask.

Usually, in the office is: poke first, then ask, then realize you actually didn’t even read the error message in the display.

amrocha4• 3 years ago

No, it's hard for a lot of reasons that you're conveniently leaving out of your argument because you prefer remote work

TurkishPoptart• 3 years ago

I am burnt out on remote work and have been burnt out on in-person work. Now I am just trying to plan a way out from all of this via self-employment.

repeekad• 3 years ago

I worked really hard in school, and when I got my golden ticket to silicon valley I was so excited to leave the corn fields and start my new life. I knew zero people in the Bay Area, but my coworkers and roommates (and roommates’ friends) were enough of a social circle for me; I loved my work and my team. One year later, CA lockdowns hit and everyone I knew left CA or moved back to familys’ million dollar homes. I was left adrift, not wanting to go back to the cornfields, expecting things to reasonably end soon, working remotely, and alone. They did not reasonably end: I grew more and more depressed and isolated. I tried but zero in-network providers were taking new patients for therapy/psychologists, and the (sigh) remote therapy options just felt more isolating. I vividly remember having a good conversation on betterhelp, only for the call to end and just be left there sitting alone in my room, silence.. I talked to managers about it, but they told me I should watch more Netflix, and likely just furthered the decision to lay me off.

Getting laid off was the best thing to happen to me. The work culture that led to it being done over zoom, was the worst.

juve19968• 3 years ago

This is your experience and is valid. But I would think about something. Those people left through their personal choice.

Many workplace relationships are like this. I met some great people at work. They left, or I left, and I never spoke to them again. Work brought us together, but it was just work. After one of us would leave, we chose to spend our times with other people we'd rather spend time with. I've had maybe a handful of friends actually be friends when work changed and we were no longer on that same team. It's not personal, it's just life.

My dad was a workaholic and never cultivated his life outside of work. When he finally retired he realized he didn't have any real friendships aside from a few. I make sure I do things outside of my occupation for this very reason.

lampshades3• 3 years ago

It doesn't sound to me like GP was placing blame on people for leaving of their own accord and it really doesn't help to disparage how people get their social interaction. I enjoy the social aspect of the office and someone leaving has no bearing on that.

sinsterizme• 3 years ago

I think feedback is a minor point, much more important in my mind is the morale-boost you get from working in the office alongside colleagues that in my experience is completely missing from remote-work

paxys• 3 years ago

Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020.

I'm not sure what broad learnings you can derive from such a narrow study. Individual firms have seen wildly different WFH outcomes based on how they implemented it.

lynx23• 3 years ago

Do we have a word/phrase to describe the rather obvious fight over remote-work that broke out roughly 2 years ago? I still remember the mechanics. Covid-19 forced management to go all-in on remote-work, which was a god-sent for those which always wanted to have more of it. Now, these people (rightfully so) realized that with the end of the pandemic, their newly acquired "right to work remote" would be endangered, so we started to see dogfights over the concept. The one side emphatically arguing for remote-work because they were seeing their new acquisition endangered, while the other side trying to get back to work with other people. That said, in my opinion, the discussion wouldn't have to be so energetically loaded if both sides would realize that it all boils down to CHOICE! If people were not forced to go one or another way, they could actually choose what fits them best, and there would be no need to fight over what is right or wrong. This article wouldn't even have to be written. Because if WFH is not mandated, people choose what they prefer, and missed opportunities are much less relevant as long as you are walking a path you actually decided to walk on.

mkl95• 3 years ago

I started my career in my early 20s at a junior-unfriendly office. Senior guy next to me literally bought some noise-cancelling headphones to avoid talking to people. I hated that place.

Getting a 100% remote job is still the best decision I've made in my career. It has allowed me to make way above market average money and work with incredible professionals from all over the world, despite living in a country with a mediocre IT market.

ZephyrBlu• 3 years ago

I think there's a valid argument for the premise because office and remote environments are very different and people default to working like they're in an office, but this piece reads like shit.

At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?”

All I could think when I read this first paragraph is, "she sounds incompetent". Feedback 10x a day makes zero sense once you have basic competence. You need much longer feedback loops for more complex and important skills.

Feedback is guidance. If you need guidance 10x a day...

30m once a week is a lot of time for feedback (Perhaps too much) if you're smart about using the time, and it's way more useful than 10x a day.

xiaosun• 3 years ago

Sales and sales development roles are very different, especially if you are in an inside sales role. The number of feedback touchpoints are much higher for those roles. Sales interactions happen very frequently and getting feedback real-time increases the quality and relevance of the feedback.

saos2• 3 years ago

This is why every company should adopt hybrid. Its just totally unfair on young professionals starting out/

tkiolp412• 3 years ago

How does hybrid fix anything? Seniors at home and juniors in the office? 1 day/week everyone at the office (so “no-hire” to anyone who doesn’t live in the city)?

saos2• 3 years ago

everyone in the office 2-3 days a week

so “no-hire” to anyone who doesn’t live in the city

This can be adjusted to 1-2 days in the office a week

garbagecoder• 3 years ago

I don't have an answer for this, really, and I can see it. Still, I think if workers prefer a certain way of working, they aren't cattle, or just a number, and they should be allowed to make this decision for themselves.

I'm older, financially set, and have a partner with a good job, so I can't make that call for others. Part of how I got to this place was by leveraging professional relationships along the way. I was never more than a couple of phone calls away from something if I was starving. If I didn't have that I'd just be a house husband I guess. Or maybe a NEET.

10 years ago, I would have told youngers to get their ass back to work and never have lunch alone. Now that I'm rounding the corner towards retirement, I can't give that same advice in good faith.

dhbradshaw• 3 years ago

For now, jobs that can be performed remotely should also be the easiest to automate.

We'll see how long it takes.

crimsontech• 3 years ago

This really only applies at a company which is “in office first”. I’ve gone from being a junior to a lead fully remote. The only time I have had an issue is when all other team members were office based and the work culture was based on that.

When a company is remote first this issue goes away.

slipswflaps• 3 years ago

Our plane of reference for our coworkers and interactions with them is now confined to the two-dimensional nature of our screens, rather than the three-dimensional world we "used" to see and interact with them in.

This is another interesting way our cultural changes in work may affect our experience because of our biology. The spatial data that contribute to declarative, episodic memory in amygdala-hippocampal memory formation, for example.

willio582• 3 years ago

One thing my remote team does that I think helps massively with this is we have a zoom room that's always open and we use it for regular meetings like standup, sprint planning, etc. When the meeting is over, you can hop (many do) but you can also stay as long as you want. Even as a write this, I'm in the zoom meeting. You can go camera off, but if you ever have even a small question it's encouraged to ask. This has helped massively with keeping an open communication channel that feels organic and synchronous. I highly recommend this, but the key is it's fully optional, it's camera optional, it's mic optional, and there's zero punishment for not being there.

umeshunni• 3 years ago

how does the zoom channel help over a team slack channel or something like that?

willio582• 3 years ago

slack is great, we have that too. But it's asynchronous by design. Async communication is great, it's super useful for getting work done. Synchronous communication is important for things like brainstorming, when ideas are half thought out and that's a good thing because it gets gears turning. Slack is too easy to sit there and edit your own words out of existence when maybe those ideas could have been helpful in a group branstorming session.

cracrecry• 3 years ago

Something relevant here: The New York Times is a Real State company now. They manage the real State they had in the center of New York that is more valuable that all the printing presses in the US.

So this company is highly biased against Remote Work. If people can work from home, they don't need the super expensive Offices in the center of the city, prices go down and NYT loses money.

balderdash• 3 years ago

I think I learned more from the fellow juniors in my first couple of jobs than I ever did from managers/supervisors/seniors - remote work is easy for me now that I’m mostly “baked” but think it would have been a huge detriment for me early career.

fatneckbeard• 3 years ago

first world problems.

a huge number of employees are punished for socializing / having "random" meetings at work. why arent you at your cube / chair doing your job instead of wandering around talking to people?

the metrics a lot of companies use purposely look for that and punish it. and tech-bros should understand this because they developed a lot of those tools.

the lunch breaks are 20-30 minutes, the cafeteria is replaced with shitty vending machines, breakrooms have taken away all the chairs, the ones that are left have some giant TV blaring reality TV 24/7. people get in trouble for spending too much time in the shitter.

buildings are sectioned off, you have to have a badge to go anywhere and do anything. if you are in the wrong area you are a security risk and could be written up.

dunno if people realize what tiny tiny fraction of the workforce has these jobs where they are supposed to randomly walk around and talk to each other about problems.

lampshades3• 3 years ago

What a timely article. While I'm not a junior, I did take a down-level at my current job because it's a completely different field. So, even though I'm not junior, I've felt the affects of this as well.

However, the main problem I've had is social isolation. I'm going to be quitting my remote job and don't plan to work fully remote again for the foreseeable future.

xchip2• 3 years ago

Yet another study to try to get people back to the office

Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says

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