> People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.

Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be paying for office space because of tradition or internal momentum, because it confers status or because it gives executives a feeling of control. (This isn't even speculation: I've actually heard executives say that they want people back in the office to keep an eye on them and make sure they're working hard.)

It's not that engineers "don't understand" that "every other function functions better in person", it's that they disagree—with a pretty reasonable basis at that. Companies pushed open offices on the back of the same kind of baseless assumptions contravening both research and individuals' direct experience, and the push to return everyone to the office isn't any different or better-supported.

How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.

You can't just hand-wave away the unpaid labor and risk to your life that you undertake with every trip to and from the office. You can't ignore the drive-by conversations you get roped into when you're trying to do head-down work or the overall noise in an office. Yes, in ideal conditions your office might approach what you get working at home, but I've never experienced it, especially given that open plan offices are now an unquestioned default setting.

In my experience I am more productive in office, lots of other people seem to feel the same. I guess I'm just lucky to have worked in lots of more than ideal offices, or, as seems more likely people's home conditions vary to such an extent that you can't make a blanket statement.

Let's separate kids (say younger than 14) from older teens and young adults here. I would agree that remote learning just feels like a disaster for the younger ones because kids just don't sit quietly for extended periods of time to learn. Older teens and young adults probably have developed the skills to sit down for long stretches. I can honestly say classroom instruction is the worst way to learn for me. By myself, I can read, re-read, take notes, watch a video and rewind, do additional searches for more background info, etc.

This does come to another point: some work and some study is physical and some people do not do well by themselves at home. I am not arguing that everyone has to work remotely, but think of the quality of life improvements if most folks get 2 hours back every day, if they have access to their kitchens to make lunch, if they're not burning gas or clogging metros, if they're sick, there's no way to catch their cold, and if housing gets expensive, they have the flexibility to move to a cheaper area.

They are different. In some contexts more than others but still different. I love going into the office but pretending its magically more efficient is a bit silly. I like getting distracted at work but don't think it makes me more valuable to the company. I certainly don't write better code at work - if anything my home office allows me to shut out distractions more easily (a luxury not everyone has). This entire argument is silly - not allowing remote work is denying a large portion of a workforce. That workforce may or may not be better or worse but its certainly cheaper for the employer. Why deny yourself a large talent pool?

Also, modern mass-schooling was built largely on the model of, and to prepare to, industrial production processes.

People get taught at early age that they have to go somewhere to listen to some authority, who will assign them tasks they may or may not care about, and they will be rewarded if such tasks are successfully executed. Tasks will become increasingly complex with time, but such progression is largely not managed by pupils. They are controlled very strictly at every step, and there is little or no flexibility or power for them to control their day: they must congregate in specific buildings at specific times, and then act as requested.

Is it surprising, then, that most of them might need such structure reproduced later in life...? Maybe if we taught them more self-direction earlier on, there would be a smaller risk of "loss of productivity when unchecked".

Meetings are not the core work activity, they're a tool to achieve the real job of building a product.

I can build a product even better if I don't have idiots setting up 200 meetings and I don't need more than a few short meetings with my reports to get things done. And there is an argument to be made that the better the tech is for online meeting, the worse everyone's productivity is. I wasn't bogged down by all these meetings 15 years ago and I was building products remote just fine. Also the more non-agile agile coaches poison companies with their crap which goes against the agile manifesto (like scrum) and impose more and more meetings (standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming), the lower everyone's productivity is.

In education, the current model is that the educator is filling the "empty vases" that students are with knowledge. I find it completely stupid and I think it doesn't work for most people (especially boys, no wonder they fall behind in education compared to girls). That model doesn't work in the online world because online meetings are sub-par.

Besides, the only valuable thing I send my kids to school is so they can socialise with kids their age. The crap teachers are teaching is mostly useless and they can learn it by themselves even better and without having to wake up at 7am.

remote working removes this very same element, but because nobody cares that an employee doesn't learn, it is irrelevant.

But certainly remote working affects on-boarding new people, and not just knowledge wise, but also team cohesion and ability to align together. However, i am willing to give all that up, because i do prefer remote working myself - purely selfishly, because those problems it causes aren't mine.

I have learned shitloads as an employee, and that's why I get paid more now than ten years ago. If you aren't learning at work, something is wrong.

Anecdote: I have a friend who manages a large food production plant in middle America. He constantly gripes about being unable to find skilled welders to maintain the giant metal vats used to mix/cook/etc ingredients. But, he's reluctant to start any sort of apprenticeship program because it costs money. He'd rather keep the employee churn and bitch on the internet instead of up-skilling existing employees or creating a training program for new employees.

I have never been a member of an organization with more than three people who didn't have at least one member incapable of understanding headphones mean "don't talk to me".

Informal conversations happen in team chat now so it can be asynchronous, I never miss overhearing something relevant in the team room because I am away at a meeting, I can sync up at my convenience.

I have been in plenty of organizations that actively cripple their remote workers' performance, and others where I have been my most productive. Remote work productivity depends directly on the culture surrounding it.

If you believe a remote team will be less productive, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, set clear expectations that your team can excel, and then ensure the culture enables them to realize that potential.

Sure, this philosophy can go only so far, but -- without that foundation -- the results will only fall short of your expectations.

They’re saying the statement requires more evidence to back it up.

* One of your prized developers lives by themself and suffers bad anxiety from being alone all the time instead of in the office

* Your 10 year old production systems are designed from the ground-up to be secure from inside a single network. Sure you could add VPNs but then you get a load of other issues

* There are people who will only focus when in the office, too many distractions at home and they are less productive. There is no objective way to measure productivity and also what drop would be acceptable so how do you fairly appraise people when you can't see how they interact?

* Juniors trying to learn on the job is 100x easier in-person.

* All manner of issues with onboarding, hardware, network problems, unannounced disappearances from people that you need to speak to (as opposed to them being in the office and they tell you they need to go to the doctors).

Not saying that I don't want to fix these since we need to use remote working to survive probably but you can't pretend these are just things that can be fixed.

- Commuting

- Office noise and distractions

- Need to fit office hours

Might I even argue those are even bigger hits than just the remote hit

The story is always the same. If you're in the office you don't need to prove you're working: you obviously put in your 8 hours, even if you had 3 coffees breaks, played ping pong, smoked a pack of cigarettes watched a few youtube videos with your friend, checked social media.

If you are home, you may do a subset of the above non-work activities - but you're either producing some amount that is reasonable for your manager or you're not.

A lot of the employees in my team were working longer hours than when they were in-office.

In my experience performance reviews are a joke and based more on luck than anything else (was the project a success or was it cancelled?), so your manager's perception is more important than anything else to you keeping your job.

Being remote you miss out on a lot of socialisation and employees may leave your company more quickly (and don't get nearly as attached as they would with a in-office workplace), but they'll definitely produce more.

I think you’ve misunderstood the comment you’re replying to.

This is an excellent point that I'd never thought of. It demonstrates that a lot of companies resist change at their own peril, and not because it's the shrewd thing to do.

But startups [1] (the original context of this thread) aren’t “digitally transforming” themselves, they’re trying to create completely new approaches to outdated ones. The question is: Is the increased friction of remote communication a competitive disadvantage when in the company formation stage? What about the growth stage? If so, does the extra friction overwhelm the company’s other strengths, like market demand?

I suppose we’ll see in ten years or so if any/many unicorns emerge that started as fully remote. [2] (My guess is that we’ll still see most startups were not fully remote.)

[1] The YC definition: Venture-backed, huge growth, winner-takes-all, etc.

[2] Someone please start a spreadsheet/investment fund.

This is a bad argument. Just because they do one thing poorly (in your opinion - no proof) that doesn't mean they're wrong about remote work. Quite ironic considering you called out the other commenter for bad arguments.

In any case, the proof as always is in the results, not internet arguments. If remote work produced better results at lower costs, more companies would adopt it. If remote work is not a competitive edge, then it probably doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things - IMO.

You're right, so let's follow the money...

I regularly work with investors who acquire businesses (AUMs are typically ~$1B, I guess that is serious enough?).

> knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.

- I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance".

- I know of no industry study that is able to quantify this.

- "People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. We still haven't agreed either of these are true. Thus, this is a poor argument.

I actually don't have any concrete evidence for one way or the other, but I do know there isn't unequivocal evidence that confirms your statement to be true.

Because you can’t. The decision to go remote is a one way door.

> People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance.

Open offices are a management trend and hardly universal among successful companies. Whereas remote work is an extreme aberration from the norm.

I have been at three companies since the pandemic started, all of whom you would know. All of them struggle with performance management and output of remote teams, regardless of if they are public about it.

No it’s not, it’s just new to you so it seems scary. Companies have been dealing with this for decades with branch offices, contractors, etc.

Branch offices isnt remote, and contractors are mercenaries.

Look, I think there is not "one" answer to this. I personally can't think of anything worse than complete remote. Its isolating, difficult to understand the entire company and everything requires explicit communication. Some companies do this well, Most do not.

However I have worked with fully remote workers, and they love being remote. I don't know how we sensible accommodate both modes of working.

You seem to not only want to work in an office (fine), but you want other people to.

Yes they are. Any time you have one or two employees on your team but in a branch office, they are effectively remote. This happens a lot a bit companies and has been happening for a long time.

> Because you can’t. The decision to go remote is a one way door.

That's pretty hand wave-y. If there is money in it companies will do it. It wouldn't be much different than moving an office or factory.

Right. And if there was concrete evidence that this was the case then investors (especially controlling interest ones that I work with) would DEFINITELY being doing it.

Follow the money...

The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done.

Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable.

For the kind of work I do (web development) in-person interactions are only good for middle managers that enjoy micro managing as a way to justify their job.

What does not work is to try to keep doing the same things you did in the office in a remote way. You need to adapt to the new context.

If your company went remote and suddenly you have 5 video calls a day, you're doing it wrong. Of course it will be worse and less productive.

The reality is that most managers have done little to no thinking about (nor have they ever been formally trained on) actual management. So when taken out of the environment in which they "learned" to manage, largely through example, they have no framework or theoretical knowledge to fall back on for what effective remote working looks like.

We have a hybrid working model but some of our employees are genuinely remote and never come to our in-person offices.

It works well but it takes co-ordination effort by leaders to make it work.

I think there genuinely are benefits to in-person work for certain collaborative elements of work but it makes no sense to just say "there are productivity costs to remote work" without actually answering the key questions, namely:

-For what kind of roles?

-For what kind of tasks within those roles?

-By how much? Does any loss of productivity get made up for saving office costs, commute costs for employees, lower cost of living? If your productivity goes down but it's by less than costs... well maybe that's ok actually!

-Have you quantified other benefits like retention? Even if a remote employee is now less productive (not proven tbh) they are still more productive than the new hire who isn't up to speed on your tech yet, not to mention certainly more productive than the person who no longer works for you and the people who have to interview their replacement.

It's bizarre that people say, well there are costs and benefits to remote, without actually even attempting to quantify them.

That's one of the key factors for remote work success. Tribal knowledge stops working when team goes remote. Especially onboarding sucks because there's nobody who could just drop by and help you with first steps. It's harder to do when remoting. Last two places I've worked had nothing written down and it was colossal waste of time trying to get started because knowledge was scattered among people, some of whom had already left the company. I mean, you know that you're hiring for a particular position, then ensure that everything needed is either taken care of or written down and accessible. But no, I needed to waste first weeks just piecing needed information together. 1/10, would not do again.

- https://friday.app/

- https://wordpress.com/p2/

- https://www.yammer.com/ (is this still a thing? used it like 10 years ago)

- etc...

We also used slack (or equivalent... also used hipchat, and even jabber before that) for ephemeral, one off, non important stuff. And then a lot happens also in READMEs, Merge/Pull Requests, Gitlab issues, helpdesk tickets, etc. Not much use of emails other than for notifications.

At the end of the day everything has a link and things can reference each other.

I think what most companies are missing is a way for employees to "post" and "subscribe" to updates that are interesting for them.

Ah yes, the magical world where office politics and power dynamics does not exist.

Back in the real world at a certain corp I am closely familiar with there are 3 redundant projects that do the exact same thing and it takes 2 months for a new joiner to be issued with their work computer, and two more to get an admin account so they can start development.

For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus?

To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.

The nature of the work actually highly lends itself to being in person. Even remote workers will be on some physical location the majority of the time.

COVID changed this, and not for the better. It is much harder to do remote.

All the places where we had B2B sales, we've had a travel budget. Ironically the sales "offices" were usually one person in a territory. But they were very much out wining and dining big customers.

We also had a telesales team, who were centrally based, and they totally could be remote workers.

That sounds odd. Maybe the company was so big you weren't aware of these things or the company wasn't mature and only had low value contracts. But eventually all b2b software goes to enterprise and that means face to face time with clients, expense accounts for thousand dollar dinners & travel budgets large enough to get global services status.

Yet, VC investments and returns soared in the last two years they were all working remote.

> Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person.

Sales, Marketing and Customer Support departments in typical tech companies have had a sizeable fraction of their employees located outside the office for some time now, long before Engineering.

Office work aids productivity of some functions. There is no good reason, IMO, to make sweeping universal statement about productivity.

Hell, even product managers I know like coming in to an office to collaborate on the big whiteboard wall they can’t fit inside their home.

I've actually considered taking a pay cut just so I can go back to slinging code and not worrying about much else.

BUT... there's also less responsibility for maintenance - offices often will have cleaning/maintenance, decent hvac, etc. They can provide a standardized work environment that helps legitimately separate 'work' from 'home', which many people need help in doing (even pre covid).

Yes, you get the big whiteboards and maybe other equipment that just doesn't make sense for a home (big copiers from decades ago, etc) as well.

That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair).

I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.

You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote.

FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.

i'm not saying that just because one is physically present that this would occur - i'm saying that for this to occur, physical proximity is a necessary (but insufficient) condition.

Making this process of osmosis more formal just defeats the purpose - after all, these huddles and idea meetings and "demo days" already happen in a remote setting (at least, if your company's management decides its worth the time to replicate it remotely).

No, the trade-off is being able to hire the best people possible instead of the best people who will work in the office. Honestly, the office has been dying since 4G and high speed internet got everywhere. Offices should be optional - there if you need it, there for meetings, team work sessions and presentations. We don't have to work like it's 1998 anymore.

I can't get any of my normal day-to-day work done in the office because of the crappy internet. I don't have 4 monitors there either unlike at home.

If a business takes a performance hit, perhaps their talent acquisition, organisation, process flows and leadership are sub par?

Don't believe me? Wait till you lose your best performers because you want them in an office. There's a bigger performance hit you'll take there, along with staff who are demoralised and stressed out with one eye open on the job's market, trying to drop kids off or whatever else they need the flexibility for.

Remember my post as a warning the next time you espouse this view, because it's inaccurate and it isn't valid in every single case.

The only reason I would consider working in an office full time (and I already live within commuting distance of a major tech-hiring metro) would be for $450K total comp or higher. Plenty of big companies can offer that these days, but startups are still going to mostly pay $200k as an upper limit (since they have no RSUs to throw on the pile).

There are plenty of companies that offer remote and total comp in that former range, there is absolutely no way you're going to hire any talent as startup now without remote as an option, even if remote were sub-optimal for your long term development.

Yes, client services can be done remotely. Yes I like not having to commute every day. Yes, I can see the number of tickets we close and remote is just more unproductive.

I used to work in that area. We had someone on the team that would go through open calls that were waiting for a response, phone the user at 3AM, not get a response, and close it with "assume this is fixed, please reopen if not".

He was far more productive than the suckers who spent 6 hours fixing a single fault.

This seems like something that can be pretty easily solved with a process change, no?

Remember years ago MSN Messenger had that buzz feature that would let you shake the conversation window for your contact? You could recreate something similar by eg force-enabling Slack alerts for specific keywords.

Beyond that, our clients are seeing increased success on their major initiatives — communications are much easier when handled digitally as it forces some amount of PMO hygiene if you want to get anything done.

I actually am noticing a bifurcation of companies: the ones who pivoted to full remote indefinitely are able to pay more and are winning the war for talent, particularly in engineering roles. On top of that, it turns out out in-person isn’t so great or efficient when over half your meeting participants are virtual: everyone in the meeting room needs their laptop open anyway for the camera and hot mic issues abound.

Personally, I’m not going back. If they try to push us back, I’m getting another job. This is why employers pulled back on trying to bring everyone back — one of my clients who announced in October they were requiring everyone in-office in January saw 30% of their engineering staff walk out the door over the course of 6 weeks. That’s apocalyptic, it will take them a year plus to recover as most of their teams are now in the “on-call death spiral”. They are now permanently hybrid for all roles, not just engineering.

Source: I know many agency owners, also am one. Also, most marketers I've been trying to recruit have said their agency's are remote indefinitely now.

2) As an agency, everyone being remote means we are more embedded with clients than before. All on the same Slack etc instead of in a separate office.

3) People use better collaboration tools

4) More things are written down

Companies have been paying for open plan offices for years. When I first started my career I found it bizarre that open plan offices were in any way considered suitable for programming problems.

However it's evident that many companies haven't got an issue with handicapping their staff in this way.

I would rather point out the dishonest personnel, paid to reduce costs by x, who won't hesitate to sell some brillant ideas that will ultimately cost the company 2x to 10x. Elsewhere. Making sure it isn't clearly noticeable in the short term.

I think we just have to face the fact that many people and companies spend a lot of money on suboptimal things.

Every other "function" is a person who hasn't bothered to learn to use a damn computer.....