Changing my mind on remote, moving the team back to San Francisco

https://flocrivello.com/changing-my-mind-on-remote-about-being-in-san-francisco/

by swyx • 3 years ago

46 70 3 years ago

flocrivello.com

cratermoon• 3 years ago

Another CEO hoping to avoid laying off people by forcing them to self-select quitting.

zhte415• 3 years ago

This post made me think of Martin Lukes https://www.ft.com/comment/columnists/martin-lukes

wolverine8765• 3 years ago

I mean, San Francisco ain't such a bad place to be. It's not like saying 'we're moving back to the middle of North Dakota where I started my business'.

(Yes, I know all the recent stuff about SF, but as they describe in the post (and as has been my experience in other demonized places), it's not really relevant.)

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

It doesn't really matter though. You can't 'change your mind' on stuff like this on a whim, you entered into an agreement and set expectations. Maybe you'll change your mind again tomorrow. You can't toss your employees around like so many beans in a tin can because you had a good idea under the shower.

wolverine8765• 3 years ago

What does that have to do with my comment?

cat_plus_plus4• 3 years ago

It doesn't have to be that dangerous to be scary for adults or inappropriate for children. I once went to SF Opera and my kid saw a guy brandishing a knife and muttering to himself. Why would I raise my family in this kind of place? I have never been to North Dakota, but would every place there necessarily have the same level of concern with homeless, street drug use, naked guys on the street, rampant theft? To be fair, most of Peninsula is pretty clean and safe, if only someone can afford the house prices.

wolverine8765• 3 years ago

I love these horror stories. I spend almost my entire life in cities, in all sorts of neighborhoods, and never see this stuff. It's pretty amazing. I see people muttering to themselves (no weapons), but they are harmless - less than harmless, they are the most vulnerable. I've never had a problem with an apparently unhoused person - they are just people, like you.

(An unhoused person brandishing a weapon would be arrested or shot instantly. They have no rights at all and are brutally overpoliced - I've heard a police officer coach a room on what to say to get someone arrested. They are humans who are trying to survive; they aren't crazy and don't want to be attacked by police.)

Crime and drug use are issues in rural areas as much as urban. The post-pandemic crime increase, at least according to ~1 year old FBI or DoJ data, is as much rural as urban and everywhere in the country. The lower population density means you'll see less of everything - bad, good, criminals and restaurants and neighbors. Also, not much opera.

uglygoblin• 3 years ago

The first complaint is about not being able to reach each other and being async. Async is not a requirement of remote work.

Have working hours. Have calendar invites. It's required to make use of in person collaboration so do the same.

anonzzzies2• 3 years ago

Yes, this is not at all a problem of remote/wfh work. We have 4 hours sync per day, and the rest is async. You can have 100% sync, even with people on the other side of the world. What a crap reason to make employees’ lives potentially miserable.

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

Absolutely, I’ve seen teams of traders work over the pandemic, they worked remotely but they had a zoom call open and from market open to market close they were on that call the entire time. Their working conditions were almost entirely unchanged between remote and the office.

heisenbit• 3 years ago

Remote work enables me to see who is present and get more answers quicker as now I reach out asap. rather than schedule and wait for a meeting. In a crisis to assemble a team also became quicker and due to WFH the ability of that team to tackle a longer crisis increased. I also perceive the hierarchy as flatter.

I miss the non task related communication. Small-talk was never my strength and I suspect I need to get better given the remote working hurdles.

ryanjshaw• 3 years ago

"Core working hours" addresses ALL their complaints as far as I can tell, not just the first.

dmitrygr• 3 years ago

Colocation is more fun too. You get to have lunch with your team, grab beers on Friday nights, play video games at the end of the day in the office

Lost me. I have family and friends for fun, you should get some as well. Using your employees to fill that void in your life is ... petty, to say they least.

My Friday nights are for the abovementioned family and friends. Which you should, as I had mentioned, consider getting.

drstewart2• 3 years ago

Get to have != Have to have

Tricky for new English learners to see the nuanced difference, admittedly

lolinder2• 3 years ago

If the boss is coordinating beers on Friday nights, it's pretty hard not to feel like your career will suffer if you don't participate.

This is something bosses need to understand in general—something that you mean to be low-pressure and optional is not going to come across that way to the people whose paycheck depends on your goodwill.

avocabros2• 3 years ago

Some people (perhaps a lot, even) are also friends with their coworkers, which seems preferable to working with people you are not friends with.

opmelogy2• 3 years ago

I missed this part but it makes even more sense now. The author only knows how to function like him and expects everyone else to function the same way. It reeks of immaturity and the inability to understand others.

This quote pretty much hammered in the last nail in the coffin. He has no idea how to run teams.

klabb3• 3 years ago

The author only knows how to function like him and expects everyone else to function the same way.

Very much so and that’s the big red flag. I’d pick someone with a diametrically opposite preferences and lifestyle to me, over someone who’s judgmental and narrow minded, even if I happen to agree with them at the moment. This post reeks of “there is only one way” mindset, which is particularly ironic given that the domain is innovation.

cat_plus_plus4• 3 years ago

Good for you, got kids who need to be safe in schools and walking around in your neighborhood? Do you pay your entire team enough to afford 3 bedroom spaces adequate for a family in the city? I am sure a lot of your employees would have gladly agreed to maintain constant presence / availability for instant meetings during working hours and other measures to mitigate problems that you described. Now they are stuck with 3 hour daily commutes or cramped living conditions.

46Bit• 3 years ago

Do you pay your entire team enough to afford 3 bedroom spaces adequate for a family in the city?

It's critical for their careers to not have families. Instead they can have beers with their colleagues.

cjk3• 3 years ago

Really tired of this horseshit narrative that a team has to be in the same physical place in order to be productive/successful.

Perhaps it’s more tempting to blame remote work than to blame one’s own leadership, or whether one has the right team.

And, async doesn’t have to be lower-bandwidth. With even a modicum of planning, engineers can be set up to pick up the next most important thing if they’re blocked waiting on a response from someone else.

This is not rocket science. Tons of successful companies have done this since long before COVID.

bsder3• 3 years ago

Tons of successful companies have done this since long before COVID.

Have they? I can think of a small number of majority-remote companies, but none of them stick out as being wildly successful. Of course, being wildly successful is rare enough that it may not be solid evidence one way or the other.

Perhaps it’s more tempting to blame remote work than to blame one’s own leadership, or whether one has the right team.

1) I'm sorry, but damn near every online meeting we spend 5-10 minutes waiting for somebody that has to fiddle with their AV setup. When people show up 5-10 minutes late for real meetings, management is going to have a chat with you for wasting everybody's time.

2) Not everything is software. For example, it's still stupidly difficult to replicate whiteboard interactions with online technologies. And if you have any contact with hardware, the lab is extremely difficult to replicate.

3) WFH is not heading toward more async, it's heading toward more sync. As someone pointed out in the comments, being forced to be on a call continuously for 8 hours is starting to become a norm. At that point, I'd rather be in the office.

cjk3• 3 years ago

Personally, I’ve seen less and less A/V setup fiddling over the last couple years. Except when screen sharing comes into play. That’s still a nightmare for some reason.

And I do agree about the whiteboard thing, to a point. My team tends to do more long-form writing instead, and if diagramming is necessary, we use something like Monodraw.

WFH heading more towards sync than async feels like a cultural problem, perhaps partially rooted in a lack of trust if management can’t look over everyone’s shoulders. I’m sure that there are companies that are doing this, but I hope that this is not part of some wider trend.

avocabros2• 3 years ago

I don't think the jury is resolved on whether colocation matters for success; if anything, it's more common that the most successful companies are forcing RTO (Apple and Amazon), and I doubt they're making the decision on a whim. Google is ostensibly 3 days/week, and Meta has hinted at better performance for certain categories of people (new grads and new hires) when in-office.

Lots of people live to 100 smoking cigarettes their whole life, but that doesn't make it ideal.

SpicyLemonZest2• 3 years ago

And, async doesn’t have to be lower-bandwidth. With even a modicum of planning, engineers can be set up to pick up the next most important thing if they’re blocked waiting on a response from someone else.

Sometimes! The hidden assumptions are that you have a backlog of independent tasks to pick up, and that most dependencies are well-defined enough that there's no need for a back-and-forth to understand the problem. I don't think those are crazy assumptions, but in the kind of company the author is running (a startup building new stuff trying to find product/market fit), neither is typically going to hold.

cjk3• 3 years ago

You make a fair point. I’m sure there are situations where those assumptions don’t hold.

But, I think for most startups, there is _so much_ to do at any given time that, in general, no one should be left twiddling their thumbs, especially with smaller teams.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

Yes, because people are like chess pieces. /s

genocidicbunny2• 3 years ago

Only commenting on a small part, but it really grates me when companies try to define 'fun' for me. No, having lunch with my coworkers every day is not fun for me -- I like taking lunch to have some time for myself, maybe take a walk or something. No I don't want to play games after work with my coworkers -- I want to go home, work out, make dinner, play my instruments..etc. No I don't want to get a beer with my coworkers on Fridays -- I want to go see all my other friends who have M-F jobs and are similarly busy during the workweek.

These are absolutely all things that can be perks for some people, but I don't like it when social interaction is the proscribed 'fun'. For some of us, the job is a job, not our life, and we have other things we want to spend our time on besides work.

novok• 3 years ago

And a seed stage / pre-seed startup is not for you, that's ok! The same kind of people that want to play in the NFL or play at the top orchestra are the types of people who would gravitate towards these kinds of environments. Those people too don't care much for work life balance and having a 9-5 job.

genocidicbunny2• 3 years ago

Oh absolutely. It's the business owners prerogative if they wish to hire specific people. I just don't like all of these additional justifications being piled on, and the 'fun' one was frequently used even before the pandemic and the large move to WFH. I think it would be pretty refreshing if some of these RTO articles were about a business owner saying "We're returning to office because that's what I like, and it is my business, so I get to make the rules. Yes, it won't be for everyone, but that's just how it is." I might not agree with them, but at least I'd be able to respect the honesty.

slyall• 3 years ago

Beers, Video games and Lunches aren't doing work. You aren't working 12 hour days if 4 of those are getting drunk at the bar.

f1shy• 3 years ago

In the company I work I get constant invitations for “have fun with colleges” after work. Instead of paying actual team building events, or do something during the work time, they want that we prefer to be more time “at work” for free instead of being with our families. I did that until I was 30… I don’t anymore…

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

Yes, some companies really push this to extremes too.

Centigonal2• 3 years ago

FWIW, here's another post/memo from the same person. He's laser-focused on developing a competitive advantage and severely discounts the value of employee experience. If you don't share the same priors, you might find his arguments less convincing.

https://flocrivello.com/ux-ex-the-painful-truth-about-custom...

Even more context is that his previous startup focuses on creating software for remote sales teams - so this guy should know more about how remote teams work than many.

Personally, as someone who's part of a remote pre-PMF team, I feel that remote work makes it somewhat harder for us all to be in sync, build together, and feel a sense of focus. That said, I assign a non-zero value on not having to sell my stuff, leave my friends and family, and move to the other side of the country.

ltbarcly32• 3 years ago

He makes an incredibly weak argument here. Even if it is true that UX > EX (users experience more important than employee experience) you don't have to trade-off between them until and unless you are at the Pareto frontier. It's almost always true that you are not Pareto efficient, and that means you can improve UX with out hurting EX or improve EX without hurting UX, and I would wager in almost all teams and all companies in the world there is plenty of room to improve both at the same time.

Centigonal2• 3 years ago

I totally agree! Furthermore, chasing better employee experience can drive wins for customers, because chasing UX over EX would lead us to a very fragile, risk-prone world with few long-term efficiency improvements (short term EX is often long-term UX).

Things like DevOps ("why spend time making internal tools for maintaining infrastructure when we could manage it by hand?") and data engineering ("in the time it takes you to replace our manual Excel process with Python, we could have come up with 3 new insights for our stakeholders!") rarely prosper in situations where EX is totally discounted - even though they end up paying big dividends for the business in the long run.

Most importantly, employees are human, and dejected employees won't do their best work for you. I agree that the best place to be is somewhere on the pareto frontier, and most startup CEOs are fooling themselves if they think they're already there.

HeyZuess• 3 years ago

I work in a couple of small teams for a few companies. I have a full time gig and a few part time ones. All the teams are remote, and many are in different timezones and varying a lot, even with language sometimes. In some cases the entire company works remote, from HR to sales to dev.

I don't get the communication issues, nor do I get the project planning issues. Some of the companies are established while others are new, some are one product, others are many.

We have regular catchups, some of the teams I work with even meet in person occasionally.

I think though in the post the 2 bits which stand out to me is the VC reason, but also having a small team and not being able to align them.

I am going to make the judgement that small means less than 10, it is hard to manage teams but it's not that difficult. Teams are not hive minds, and if you cannot align a small team of people who probably spend the majority of their time working individual, then there is something else missing.

tzs• 3 years ago

It’s harder to get a hold of each other, as we’re not online at the same time. “I’ll talk about it when I see him tomorrow” — these delays compound in a huge way.

Remote does not inherently mean "everybody gets to come and go online whenever they want". It's perfectly reasonable to require people to be online during the same hours that you'd require non-remote people to be in the office.

Renaud2• 3 years ago

Assuming everyone is in the same or close timezones.

rovr138• 3 years ago

Looks like they started in SF. I don’t think it’s too far fetched to require people to have at least a 5 hour overlap with Pacific time business hours.

i2cmaster• 3 years ago

Only your scrum team really has to be in the same timezone. I've worked with people on different teams in Europe. You just talk with them in the morning and sometimes wait a day for a response. I usually have more than one ticket going so that's not the end of the world.

bsder3• 3 years ago

A quick look for software engineers finds that SF has about 40 times more than Miami: (and my hunch is that they’re better ones too)

Anyone who asserts this without evidence loses large amounts of credibility.

You are a startup. In SF, the big guys easily outcompete you for the best software folks even with their current layoffs--you are a tiny fish in a pond with big predators. Practically by definition, the people you can get are the second and third tier.

If you're really interested in getting good technical folks, put your engineering in a secondary market like Pittsburgh and put your fundraising executives in Silicon Valley. You will be a big fish in a small pond (although that may have changed a bit with work from home) and can pull in way better people for the same amount of money and those people will be more likely to stay with your company.

Udi Nir, who was CTO of Modcloth, actually said as much in a video somewhere, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Maybe the HN collective can cough it up.

tonystubblebine• 3 years ago

Happy to rent SF office space to anyone who thinks the same. I have a nice floor with a kitchen that we aren’t using.

opmelogy2• 3 years ago

I find a lot of this to be surprising. The author seems sharp, but is missing so many obvious issues with what they are saying.

It’s harder to get a hold of each other, as we’re not online at the same time. “I’ll talk about it when I see him tomorrow” — these delays compound in a huge way.

What? What does working remotely have to do with people working different times during the day? Core hours should be a thing - regardless of it being remote of in the same building.

So most interactions are async, leading to lower bandwidth, more context switching, and more things falling through the cracks.

I can't wrap my head around why async communication results in more context switching. You literally decide when you engage with async information.

Even sync chats aren’t as good. People can’t interrupt each other or have sidebars, and there are bugs with video, audio, screenshare, etc… These frictions compound too.

Ah here we go. Bro culture coming into play. If you have to interrupt each other in order to have discussions something is off.

This causes us to be less aligned. We’re only a few engineers right now, and yet people feel out of the loop on who’s building what.

Now we're on it. The problem isn't remote work. It's how you are handling work and the process. If you think the only way to solve this is to put people in the same room then you are destined to fail on how to build stuff. You are limited in your thinking on how to work as a team and are going to greatly reduce your ability to deal with variations unless it "totally aligns with how you know how to work." This pretty much explains it all right here.

choeger• 3 years ago

CEOs are a cargo cult. The big ones started the back to the office frency to facilitate their layoffs and lower wages and the smaller ones follow because that's what they do.

On top of that, petty middle managers drink the cool aid because that's what they do. On top of that, a fully staffed office gives them that sweet, sweet feeling of hierarchy and importance.

In the meantime, the big shots will continue to offshore to Asia, Africa and South America. Startups can't do that because "remote bad". Cui Bono?

ltbarcly32• 3 years ago

Terrible analysis, hand waving, no evidence given. The author has lived in SF for years and years.

"More money is raised in SF!" At one point the richest city in the US was Detroit. The innovation hub was the cities around Lake Erie: Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Times change, SF well on it's way to being irrelevant. Besides, who cares how much money in total is invested in this county or that county. What is the probability of investment in your company is the question that should be asked. What talent can your company recruit (and afford) in this location or that location?

The author lives in SF. They feel like people at the company they run aren't 'getting enough done' and their solution is to force everyone to move to SF, where they happen to already live, rather than learn to lead a team and have some way to understand what people are doing and how long it is taking them to do it. This is the kind of founder who's first hire is a junior engineer and second hire is a PM, and then they wonder why nothing gets done. I wish I could short this company.

Love the extensive quoting of Mark Andreessen about why it's so important to be in Silicon Valley in 2007. What was important in tech 16 years ago is no more relevant now than Windows 3.0 (launched in 1990, 16 years prior to the blog post) was to Mark Andreessen in 2007 when he wrote that blog post. Doing little blog research projects is a way better use of a CEO's time than, say, figuring out how you are failing to do your job and as a result employees aren't productive.

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

Detroit is still the center of the US car industry, at least the combustion engine part.

go_prodev• 3 years ago

I've just started another week of 14 hour days, working 100% remote from a different continent. My productivity is 200% what it was in the office. Even less busy periods are more effective from home.

A typical 9 hour day in the office was broken into 2 team coffee breaks, meetings, lots of distracting conversation and a feeling of low productivity at the end of each day.

Having said that, OP is in an extremely competitive space and appears to be building an AI tool, similar to recent features in Office and G suite, so it makes some sense to steer the ship together and focus 100%.... But they're going to take a hit in the short term, getting everyone to relocate, replacing people who don't move, onboarding etc. Seems like 2 steps backwards to me.

porcoda• 3 years ago

Oy. Can we just admit that some people like remote work, some don’t, and let everyone self select into the appropriate employers? Does anyone ever get anything new and useful out of the comments on posts like this? It seems like they just turn into the same ‘you’re wrong’, ‘no, you’re wrong!’ back and forths that are devoid of anything of substance.

moi2388• 3 years ago

No. I prefer hybrid; 2 days home and 3 days at the office, therefore everybody needs to do the same /s

SpicyLemonZest2• 3 years ago

I wouldn't deny there's a lot of low-substance comments, but I've substantially changed my views on remote work from reading comments on posts like this. I used to be much more skeptical that there could be practical business costs to it.

anonzzzies2• 3 years ago

Wrong

There is no 'wrong' with deciding remote/office/hybrid per se; the reasons for deciding it can be though. I mean they could just say; I prefer the office and that's it; the author is the CEO and decides. The reasons this article states are just more of a management thing than a remote work thing. The CEO/author seems to 'have tried' some type of remote work mimicking an office and wanting the same (overbearing; the reason I cannot sit in an office; it's not the office, it's the management; offices an sich are fine) control of an office situation where you can grab someone at a whim and ruin their productivity for that day.

Remote work requires everyone to change their mindset in the company; it does not mean you can sit in your underwear all day and play with your kids & dogs most of the time while working here and there a few minutes. It also doesn't mean, as a manager, that you can just hit Zoom every 5 minutes and get frustrated when there is no answer immediately. It requires a different way of working; you cannot mimic the office.

bobmaxup• 3 years ago

So most interactions are async, leading to lower bandwidth, more context switching, and more things falling through the cracks.

Wouldn't async interactions lead to less context switching?

msrsan• 3 years ago

I guess everyone is in SF now but in the office 2/5 days per week.

jacknews• 3 years ago

"Colocation is more fun too. You get to have lunch with your team, grab beers on Friday nights, play video games at the end of the day in the office, etc…"

Well of course, if you're the boss, one of the perks is you get some 'friends' who will hang out with at lunch and after hours.

ReDeiPirati• 3 years ago

I think everyone here can attest to the fact that we tried harder than anyone else.

How? It would be nice if the author would have put some link or resources for the readers. I don't really have any clue about what this person did.

All the argumentations against remote work on this article don't have nothing with remote work, but bad management. I identified two main issues:

1. this founder is trying to mimic office work in remote setting. It doesn't work that way! It really requires to rethink about process, culture, etc... in a very different way;

2. this founder like 90% of startup founders is a bad manager. Lack of alignment, poor coordination, poor feedback management, low trust are all the main symptoms that this person doesn't seem to have the appropriate skill level to manage a team and a remote org.

I think that remote work also requires stronger leadership and people management skills. But many founders don't really care much about those things as they should. Which also tells a lot about what these people value.

aetochon• 3 years ago

So most interactions are async, leading to lower bandwidth, more context switching, and more things falling through the cracks.

As several have already stated, async means less context switching. So what I think the author's actual problem is is that there is more context switching for him as he needs to wait for responses and finds something else to do.

Colocation is more fun too. You get to have lunch with your team, grab beers on Friday nights, play video games at the end of the day in the office, etc…
This matters not only because fun is fun, and building community is super important, but also because it helps build trust, which improves our work. You second guess each other less when you trust your team, and know you can give feedback more directly.

So what about those on your team who aren't into a beer and the end of the day, or don't care about video games? Are they not able to gain trust and function in your company?

The same tired tech. bro arguments. When this dude's company fails, it won't be because of remote.

chkaloon• 3 years ago

Only a mention of taxes, claimed to be offset by the 15%+ wage increase. No mention of housing costs...

satisfice• 3 years ago

I work remotely. I deliver. Customer seems happy. Next!

skyzyx• 3 years ago

In other words, “we’ve learned nothing”.

As a principal engineer who left the Bay Area in 2010, this post obviously excludes me. If I have my choice, I’ll never go back to the office.

Changing my mind on remote, moving the team back to San Francisco

Related Stories