I really don't understand the militancy of both sides.
Some people like the office, some people can't abide it.
A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls.
I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy.
I don't think the future is fully remote _for everyone_, because fundamentally we are social people. On the flip side, I don't think full office 5 days a week is going to be the future either (caveats apply.)
The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.
This is such a great demonstration of the problem with "both-sidesing" things. You say all this as if "both sides" of this have equal power in the relationship, and this is something they can just politely disagree on and go on about their lives.
The reality is that if you need more flexible working arrangements, you are extremely subject to the whims of people who want offices to be the primary mode of work. If they don't want you to be remote, they don't need venom or arguments or to seem angry or even to seem to have much of an opinion at all. Simple inaction and lack of effort, followed by an "oh I'm sorry I forgot to tell you after we all got back from lunch" 3 weeks later is enough to make the remote person's situation untenable. Eventually the "oh I forgot you worked here. Just kidding hah hah hah" jokes kick in and then you know you're a couple months from being let go.
To have a successful working relationship with people who aren't in the office, work must be done by the people who are in the office to keep things working. Essentially, it can't work unless everyone adopts a remote-first approach where major discussions happen in writing out in the open.
The massive proliferation of slack and similar in the covid era certainly has and will continue to help establish this mode of working, but the people who don't want it because they feel uncomfortable when they don't see butts in seats 8 hours a day will likely put in a lot of passive-aggressive effort to bring things back to the old status quo.
> You say all this as if "both sides" of this have equal power.
No, I said I didnt understand the vehemence.
> The reality is that if you need more flexible working arrangements
Yes, I don't think I'm going ever really go back full time. Currently, I come in ~twice a week.
I've worked with remote singular and remote offices for years(10+) before covid. Its been part of tech for a long time. Even my dad has be doing remote since the early 90s (if not more)
If you have decent planning, ticketing and retros then you'll know if your remote(or any other) team are not performing well.
> Essentially, it can't work unless everyone adopts a remote-first approach where major discussions happen in writing out in the open.
I just don't think that's right. Sure people need to be included in the "room" to make the decision, but that's not the same a remote vs office. Decisions are only a tiny part, the rest is execution and unblocking.
don't get me wrong, you need to have a culture of respect and brining people up to speed, siloing doesn't work well.
In practice, even most office jobs are remote. Everyone is wearing headphones & don’t want to be disturbed, so you gotta Slack them. If even one person on the team is in another office or at home for the day, then the meeting is over Zoom. For any type of 100% onsite job, when is it even 50% onsite anymore?
I spent a few years in an office before going remote and this was 100% my experience.
The endlessly proclaimed, robotically repeated benefits of office work -- the vaunted "serendipitous encounters", "water-cooler conversations", and "impromptu lunchroom innovation sessions" -- they all involved nothing but small talk. All meetings were calls. No meaningful thinking or decisions occurred in-person.
When everyone joined me in working from home in 2020, the main thing I noticed was that people stopped trying to force down my throat all the mindless, unjustified, undocumented decisions they made in the office. I finally got a chance to use my voice to make the org stop being so dumb. And people were grateful.
I think people mostly make this "benefits of the office" stuff up to rationalize getting out of the house, away from their spouse and kids, and into the local urban center with all their favorite food trucks.
There are probably some industries where it has real benefit, like artistic ones, but for the most part I don't think SWE falls in that category.
In my experience there's a difference in the level you're operating at. What you've mentioned is familiar from IC level, whereas senior architect/tech director/cto roles many were done and made real progress through personal interactions. Often these things involve politics and personalities as much as situational specifics.
Haha, I can't help but find this humorous!
I genuinely can't take this perspective seriously.
What most people see is the 'architect' (read: [micro]manager) make 'important' interventions in others efforts...
I understand the role, I'm not ignorant of the purpose of these positions. But I'm painfully aware of how many people are b*llshitters and found their positions using these very office politics to get ahead. Their ultimate fear is being assessed on their own for their effort. Largely because they don't actually contribute much at all.
Fair enough, that kind of thing is toxic and I don't get involved with those kind of places.
Personally I moved back from Lead Architect/CTO roles to being a consultant mainly doing IC work where I deliver the entirety of a system myself. In other words I do deliver the goods technically, and happen to prefer that to working politically.
So it would seem my observation/perspective is coming from a different perspective than you were thinking of!
Everyone is wearing headphones & don’t want to be disturbed, so you gotta Slack them.
Or maybe don't interrupt the person who is deep in thought about a complex problem?
I've worked with clients who are fully on board with Slack (or Teams or whatever) and their culture doesn't really do email or phone so the most effective way to communicate with them remotely ends up being to join whatever channels the people you need to work with are on. If you all get along well it can be fun in the same way as any social network. But it can also be toxic to productivity because of the constant interruptions and if anything that effect is worse when everyone gets along because it's like everyone is in permanent water cooler mode as well.
This is the case for software development, but I doubt that procedures like that are widespread in other areas. From anecdotes, people in remote positions are often just left out.
I liked most of your comment until this last part:
> but the people who don't want it because they feel uncomfortable when they don't see butts in seats 8 hours a day will likely put in a lot of passive-aggressive effort to bring things back to the old status quo.
That is, in the first part of your comment basically says "Remote work isn't tenable unless in-office workers put in a significant amount of additional effort (e.g. always using written communication, impromptu conversations are verboten because you might be leaving a remote worker out, etc.)", but then you complain in-office workers just want to see "butts in seats" and are being "passive aggressive" if they don't put in the extra effort to make remote work tenable.
It could just (fairly) be the case that in-office workers don't want to put in the extra effort. I mean, a big reason many execs want people to be in office is because they see the efficiency in impromptu and verbal communication, and your post concedes that point by my reading of it.
> a big reason many execs want people to be in office is because they see the efficiency in impromptu and verbal communication,
Perceived efficiency. Like everyone is saying; for some jobs and some people it is apparently efficient (I have not seen this in practice much outside having a whiteboard with all in the room for brainstorming or solving a harder problem, but that really doesn’t happen that often and we can do that now with miro and/or VR), but for many it is just wasting time and annoying. I don’t mind hybrid if your team is all remote and the other teams are not; if you are part of a team that is hybrid, I don’t think it is very good in any case.
> impromptu conversations are verboten because you might be leaving a remote worker out
Most people on your team aren't listening to every conversation everyone else ever has. You should be documenting all meaningful communication for your project, regardless of remote availability.
I recently reluctantly went back to the office and it was better than I had expected. Having that separation of work vs home was huge for me. I left work at work and didn't give it a second thought once I was home. I hadn't realized how much I was still in "work mode" while remote, even after working hours. It was hard to disconnect and clearly a source of stress that I couldn't really see.
Yeah, I don't like commuting, paying for gas, parking, and other stuff that comes with the office, but for me personally I think it's going to be good.
I agree, the best companies will let people choose to work the way they do best. Getting that right isn't easy.
The biggest hazards lie in the grey area between extremes. If everyone is remote always, everyone is on equal footing. Same can be said if everyone simply has to show up at the office every day.
Maybe the whole org doesn't have to be all on way or all the other, but you should at least be consistent within the teams that work closely together every day.
> To have a successful working relationship with people who aren't in the office, work must be done by the people who are in the office to keep things working.
This is a massively underrated comment that needs to be highlighted.
> you are extremely subject to the whims of people who want offices to be the primary mode of work.
The idea behind working for a boss is that they can tell you what to do and how and where to do it. And if you don’t like it, you can go work for yourself or for another boss.
I would never work for someone with the mindset you espouse here. There's a lot that can be said about the role of management, but I think fundamentally I seek out and believe management should be facilitators. We all have work that needs to get done, managers are accountable for their team getting that work done. So their place is to provide workers with the resources they need to do that.
> I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not.
That's because it's true. You're either a remote company or the remote people find that they routinely hear about things much later than everyone in the office knows about them.
If anyone is remote everyone has to behave like everyone is remote. I have done this once with a company where I was the only remote developer and it didn't work at all. They did nothing extra to make it work and it made it impossible to do the job.
It's ironic because when I've worked in the office (basically all my life until covid) the management would often try to encourage people to more actively document their work in tickets or Confluence, and keep their ticket status updated in real time. It would seem that making the company remote-first would drive the exact changes that managers often want to make anyway.
In my experiences (multiple), in-person work is primarily about the appearance of work, and not nearly as much about the actual work.
I've tried to properly document basic reasonings and how-to's for future people in the roles, and told that wasn't really the work needed done. Then again, management failed to understand that onboardinng and more routine-ish tasks could be documented and sped up.
I jumped ship from my previous job (that was forced WfH with grumblings of returning any day now), to a 100% true remotework position. I'll *NEVER* go back to a hybrid or WfW job again.
Exactly! When we switched to remote at the start of COVID all our communication issues seemed way less important as people were communicating more on slack.
The latter is what working at every multinational is like, remote or no.
Your company may not have any remote employees, but if four people on a team are at the company's US headquarters and the fifth is in the company's office in Ireland, expect the Irish employee to get cut out of the loop constantly.
This seems like a timezone problem at that point. Even remote teams can't function too well together if some of them are sleeping while others are working.
I only used "the US" and "Ireland" as examples. It also happens at companies where both offices are in the same timezone or if employees in one location work on the other location's time (the latter was the case at my last company: we had an office in the Philippines where most employees worked on US Central time to match with HQ, except for the support departments where they did shift work for 24/7 coverage).
My current company is hybrid, and I haven’t found this to be true. But, it’s majority remote - maybe 1/3 of employees actually live elsewhere, and of the 2/3 who live in the same city as the office, most just don’t come in to the office super frequently.
I think this notion is built on pre-pandemic reality, when it was like 95% in office, 5% remote. Then remote was a 2nd class citizen, in-person conversations reigned, and remote ppl were fairly out of the loop. But when 50% or more of people are remote, everything is “remote first”, basically all communication happening in Slack (or at least being summarized online), and I just haven’t seen this happen.
We are still in the “pandemic reality” and just starting to transition out of it. If/when the majority of that 2/3 of people go back to the same office, remote employees will go back to being second class citizens.
Basically, I agree that your company is currently remote-first, even if they have offices and most people are in one location, but only time will tell if it stays that way after coming out of the pandemic (strongly depends on company culture and their policies).
Yeah, I agree that for companies that go back to ~95% in-person, remote will be a 2nd class citizen. But I think hybrid can totally work, as it’s currently working well at a tonne of companies. Remote has to be common, and the company has to be legitimately cool with in-person or remote, but if that’s all true, hybrid works great IMO.
It does need to be a culture of “remote first” communication, with the office primarily being a place for people who want a more social work experience. But I suspect this will be a lasting, common setup for many tech companies, that works well.
Yeah, hybrid is worst of both worlds. You still have to live near the office (so little labor market advantage), and remote workers become second class.
Being good tech staff is a hard skill. This idea that there will ever be enough just because the demand is high (and therefore there are many people getting schooling) is not healthy. Even when there are a lot of tech workers, there will be sourcing trouble. Instead of not finding anyone at all, companies will find very poor tech folks. In a very real sense this is already a problem today.
> In tech its not so apparent yet, because there is a short supply of staff generally. But that wont persist for ever.
There's a lot more programmers on the market right now than 10 years ago thanks to bootcamps and short degrees.
Honestly, for each one hired you generally need a proper engineer to cleanup the mess afterward. I'm not worried about an oversupplied of qualified engineers anytime soon.
You can switch jobs. Or you can stick it out until the boss realizes that they are losing employees to companies that didn't mandate in-office, and undoes the mandate. It's really quite easy.
Or the labor market will split into companies and employees who insist on in-person and those who demand/offer flexible arrangements. The question is what the size ratio between both markets would be.
It's not really an "or" imo, that's been the case for a long time and will surely remain so short of something far crazier than the current pandemic. But agree that the question is what size ratio we'll end up on, as surely won't feature quite as much WFH as right now, and equally unlikely to go all the way back to pre-pandemic levels.
> the remote people find that they routinely hear about things much later than everyone in the office knows about them.
I'm not sure this tracks with my experience. It seems like the organizational structure of a company is what keeps people from learning about things, not their location. The common case I can think of is that some meeting occurs in which a decision is made, and that decision and the context around it are not communicated outside the meeting (in a timely or efficient way, that is).
Some people are "in the know" and others are not, but it's a function of who they work with, not who they meet in the hallway.
If you mean gossip, watercooler chat, that kind of thing, sure. But, I don't miss that stuff.
Maybe you're thinking of some other example that I'm not.
Decisions get made at the water cooler, at lunch, in meetings where no one is taking notes, when one person stops by another person's desk... In person there are many opportunities for this information to spread by grapevine, because you actively see what other people are doing and you can ask.
Being remote often means you have more unknown unknowns, because you can't see the daily goings-on. If you haven't experienced this, you're either very lucky or your company is a lot more remote-centric than you think it is.
I don’t understand this issue with remote people hearing about things much later than in office people.
Are you satisfied with your job? Are you being paid the amount you want? If yes, who cares? I try to avoid being too informed about certain things anyway because it ends up making me a target for added responsibilities that I don’t care about.
I'm not satisfied with my job if I'm not being consulted and decisions I should be a part of are made because the five out of six people in the team "had a chat over lunch", no.
It's also about stability. I've had decisions as major as what language to use for a project done without input from the whole team, and now I have to live with writing in a framework I strongly dislike and had good arguments against using because I didn't find out for 3 weeks that it had been decided without me.
You're not working on a team if decisions are made by 5/6 of the people most of time without even a consideration that the other person might have input. At that point you're a weird internal contractor, and to your point, if they wanted me to be a contractor and just deal with whatever choices the team makes without input, I'd expect to be paid as a contractor.
To be honest, I am in a similar situation to you, and I deal with the lack of stability by creating instability. I keep interviewing all the time, looking for better opportunities. I also learn and improve my skills. But,at this point, I'm more likely to fire an employer than being fired by an employer.
If an employer is not willing to accomodate remote first and payme well as a contractor, I'll find another one willing to.
Was it your responsible to choose?
Did you make your opinion know earlier? What makes you think your opinion would have changed things in person? Why didn't you arrange a meeting to discuss this decision?
I mean, it clearly wasn't directly my responsibility since I wasn't consulted as a major decision maker, but I am an active co-lead developer on the project.
I was told the look into another language was part of "a bake off" between a couple options, and I assumed they'd have a more general meeting/decision before picking. I'd made my general opinion known earlier, but I didn't want to clutter meetings that weren't about the relevant decision by cramming my opinion on the matter into them.
I have no idea if my opinion would have changed things, but I never got the chance to find out. I'd have rather lost an argument where my point of view was heard than just had any objections overridden by default though.
I've asked about the decision later on, but that was after tens of hours of work had gone into the system I disagreed with, so making the case for throwing away most of a week of a couple dev's work is a lot harder to make than pushing to not "waste" that work in the first place.
I've been working remote for 2 years, and the team has been mostly good about it. I bring this up specifically because it's a good example of the pitfalls that can hit even a team that is otherwise doing a good job of remote inclusion.
The whole point is that not having folks as looped in to meetings and choices when you're remote makes it a lot easier to intentionally or accidentally cut people out of important decisions. In this case, now I have to be the disruptive jerk that's going "I don't like this. Stop." if I care, or I just have to go along with the decision.
There are other things that people might reasonably care about. Someone might honestly want to have influence because they care about the team's output.
Proponents of remote work don’t generally oppose hybrid or in person for anyone else who prefers it, but those going to the office would find themselves effectively doing “remote from the office”, if enough people choose not to go.
This is the reason why I think hybrid is a bit dumb. Regardless of the social component, the hybrid model effectiveness relies on everyone who collaborates in the same field, to agree when and where to attend, most of the time. If not, it’s just an excuse to fill up cubicles.
> Proponents of remote work don’t generally oppose hybrid or in person for anyone else who prefers it
This is true, but in most of the rhetoric I see, this gets omitted (I'll assume with benign intentions). There's also a lot of people on social media (e.g twitter) who wax lyrical about how it's only controlling management teams who want people in an office, and how everyone else wants remote. As an IC who hates remote on a personal level, it makes me feel increasingly marginalised and depressed.
I agree this is a good counter argument. If many people are remote (or potentially even just a few) then you may lose the advantages of working in the office (e.g. spontaneity, easy ‘point at the screen’ or ‘just speak like a human being’ communication that doesn’t need to be intermediated by inevitably broken technology, avoiding some of the futile attempts at recreating an office environment remotely, etc).
The counter to that is then that lots of the ways one must deal with remote workers (e.g. more better written communication, getting tools to attempt to recreate some of the interactions that were previously in-person remotely, although the best-in-class tool is usually still terrible only people sometimes don’t say it because they don’t realise we ought to want tools that don’t suck) are good improvements to in-office working. And having people remote isn’t so different from having multiple offices (and is perhaps better than different offices separated by large time differences) although being beholden to whatever Internet connection someone can get and chooses to pay for in the place they choose to work can be frustrating and the quality of communication hardware/software is frankly abysmal.
Certainly there is something to be said for companies that try to take remote seriously (eg stack overflow had private offices which recreated some of the quiet and isolation and communication requirements of remote work within the office). But a lot of companies basically had their hands forced by the ’rona and I think significant culture changes are required to more thoroughly embrace and accommodate remote or hybrid work.
We have a hybrid model and it has worked well so far.
A handful of people go to the office because they prefer it that way and/or don't (want to) have a proper work setup at home.
The majority is fully remote, but have signed a hybrid contract so they can be called to the office if there is a need. The only need so far has been a going-away party that involved a case of whiskey =)
I think it can somewhat work with flexible timelines. A full 2/5 days a week in-office hybrid is decidedly the worst of both, but a "we come into the office every N weeks for 1-2 days to handle major meetings in person" feels both more fair and less disruptive to all parties. Expand it further where folks living further away are maybe only expected to come in quarterly for maybe a full week.
It helps to keep up some in-person social constructs - you can spend time with coworkers at lunch, or going out for a group activity if you want, but keeps the majority of the day-to-day focused on making remote work for everyone.
Yea, it depends on the distance. I wouldn't want to demand that people fly for a few hours every months, and that's not really particularly environmentally friendly, but if it's in drive/train range, much more reasonable.
I'm sorry but it's not that simple, people who want to work in the office tend to want everyone else to work at the office too. People who want to work outside of the office want people to use remote tools to communicate (otherwise they miss out on conversations). You either go full remote or you don't, I think most people would agree that hybrid is the worst of both worlds.
> The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't.
I really don't understand this point of view, just pay for wework
> I'm sorry but it's not that simple, people who want to work in the office tend to want everyone else to work at the office too
I think both extremes want their own way. I don't want to force people in or out of the office. I want the option to do either.
> just pay for wework
You do see the inherent problem with that, its basically subsidising the facilities budget. If you have enough money to pay for a wework, you can pay for better home accommodation.
> You do see the inherent problem with that, its basically subsidising the facilities budget. If you have enough money to pay for a wework, you can pay for better home accommodation.
I actually think remote work places should start offering wework budget to employees. I agree that not everyone can be comfortable at home.
I've run fully remote teams for several years now and have worked remotely for 15 years of my career. There are some other things to consider as well, especially for people in this company.
Remote as an option doesn't work well for the remoters. They will be passed up on opportunities for career growth. The people who didn't show up when the CEO demanded it should strongly consider finding a place that is more remote friendly -- especially if their manager isn't one of the people who refused to go in.
There are a lot of unique challenges that come with fostering all remote teams. It would be easy to put the remoters on the back burner if I had a group of devs I saw face to face every day. That will be especially true for people working at a company that harbors active hostility towards those people who refuse to come into the office.
Nowadays people get either side of binary about all sorts of things. Then they fight for their side with tooth and nails without even considering ideas of other side of that binary. Truth is neither white or black it's millions of shades in between.
Agreed, the trend of the past 10 years to jump into a life and death binary opposition is costing us our humanity.
Saying we are a remote company or a mandatory office company is an attack on the individual to be subordinate to the collective. The pandemic upended this cultural norm and additionally made unprecedented demands on the individual by the collective on a global scale. In context it is not surprising to see visceral reactions and people drawing battle lines.
A rough idea I would like to see knowledge worker companies follow some sort of flexible model (not hybrid). That might look like a small hub office. Space at the hub needs to be reserved and people who use it less often are prioritized for seats (regular visitors may find themselves working from home occasionally to accommodate others). Travel to the hub is a 0 friction business expense if you have a reservation. Ideally this allows easy adhoc in person collaboration, creates norms that include individuals working remotely while also providing an accessible professional/social environment for people that benefit from those spaces.
I'd love to see some creative collaborative problem solving instead of an all or nothing battle between artificial groups.
For me it’s the forcing of an unnecessary decision.
It’s like there are cat people and dog people. If companies forced people to own a dog, or own a cat there will be lots of conflict.
I don’t want to see companies become tribal, but a company that tries to make me come into the office for random reasons will make me really angry and frustrated and probably make me seek out a non-stupid company.
Stupid because if remote works for me and I’m highly productive, forcing me to come into an office to do the same thing is inefficient.
I think this, in the end, will be what happens and companies will start to act like filters. Remote work or office work will be a filter for talent that companies will have to chase for talent if we stay in a market that needs workers, or if we switch to a market where workers are desperate for jobs, vice versa. Of course, companies like Apple and Google who have sunk massive cost into office monstrosities will want on-site workers to justify their cost.
From a socio-economical and ecological point of view, the insistence on pushing people back to the office while employers CBA to build/hire offices away from busy city centers is absolutely blasphemous. This goes way beyond just less cars on the road (imagine what less need for a car does once extrapolated all the way to parking spaces, asphalt, manufactory, etc.) Ironically, many of these companies would still claim they care about the environment in the same breath.
I don't necessarily feel the need to be militantly against in-office, but outside the elite bubble of fat TCs, loads of places expect juniors-mediors to just deal with it while giving them a pittance for what is otherwise a pretty difficult white collar job, to either settle in the city and make next to no savings / hope to further their life goals or live outside the city and erode one's sanity by dropping their QoL through commutes. Of course there's going to be some rebellion when the in-office crowd brings out BS arguments like "because it fits our culture better" which equates to "because we say so" with such a large benefit on the line.
> I really don't understand the militancy of both sides.
The loudest voices are the whiniest and most entitled, thus more likely to engage in online discourse about it. That in turn amplifies the team sports mentality that has become so pervasive in all aspects of society. I think most people have a moderate live/let live attitude toward it all, with the understanding that if they don't like it they will quit for something more suited to their interests.
I think you're right. Most people don't care. Remote is okay, in-office is okay, both have pros/cons. But people make it a game to shout their preferences as though the world will end if they don't get their way.
On this issue most do care. The loudest voices will win like in the case of CEO of Goldman. It will take a generation to turnover those c-levels until than it will be a battle with many employees not showing up when demanded back to the office.
Feels like we are in a 60s/70s cultural change period. People are battling over what they want the world to be. This is no different.
One thing I haven't seen mention much is real estate. The "back-to-office" militants are usually corporate, and there's a lot of corporate money tried up with office real estate that would lose a lot of value if everything shifted to WFH forever
I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss, about general stuff or potential new projects. If you go remote, you are going to fully lose this kind of opportunities.
Does this create an unfair condition for remote workers? It could be.
I have had teams that were in the office but fully distributed, with only one of my team members even in the same country as me. People could, and did, still chat to me. The big difference is that it required discipline. Especially from me in order to deal with team members who were reluctant to speak up. I solved that by ensuring we always had at least one weekly one on one call scheduled to speak about nothing in particular. If nothing else came up, we'd discuss ideas or training or general improvements we could make, but on purpose those calls were always explicitly not for project discussions (if anything came up during these calls I'd schedule other calls for that).
Sometimes we'd have "nothing" to talk about until people realised I'd still insist on doing the call and it turned out they had stuff to talk about when I was there on the phone anyway and they didn't feel like they were wasting my time because I'd made it clear this time was already blocked out.
Doing fully remote requires managers who understand how to ensure they pick up on things from team members when they can't see them, and that will be an adjustment for a lot of companies.
But once you have that, and managers learn how to be available in the same way, it'll work just fine. Consider that lots of managers don't know how to be available in person either, but lock themselves away in offices and only emerge for meetings with agendas that does not leave much room for raising issues or general chat other than for a selected few, so this is not a new issue - just a different version of an old one.
Do you not set weekly one on one time or just do quick huddle calls to chat on simple projects? My boss and my team is just as buried in the office and full of meetings. So we are going to be talking on teams/slack anyway- not sure about what I personally view as FUD about these mythical conversations people have with their managers and peers. Maybe my workplace is more fast paced than most. We also have a huge slew of contractors and offices coast to coast.. so it's not uncommon to have to set meetings with resources on both coasts. For us remote work has been, well, pretty freaking normal. And cheaper we have already divested of a couple smaller remote offices.
Not the commenter you replied to, but I think my personality is such that I chat casually with my in-group and am a perfectionist with communication with outsiders. Back when I worked in-person, I had daily informal communication with lots of teammates as well as my boss. Since I got a new remote job during the pandemic, I tend to only reach out to those I work most closely with (just a couple of people). Certainly there's nothing actually stopping me from opening a new Teams message to my boss or other teammates and saying "hey, how's life?", but in practice, I don't. It's almost as if most of my team are now "outsiders" who I'm very deliberate messaging, rather than the in-group who I feel comfortable bantering with. It's something I'm aware of and am working on, but I definitely don't have the same level of intra-team communication now as I had pre-pandemic.
I've had the same from the manager point of view. As the manager I had the luxury of just forcing the issue by scheduling one on ones with everyone and flat out telling them I wanted to make sure I actually regularly spoke to everyone and I could just blame it on being "busy" and so wanting to block out time to make sure I had it set aside.
As an introvert, I resorted to that in large part because it removed my ability to manufacture excuses for myself or just forgetting because I rarely get the impulse that I feel a strong need to talk to someone.
But you can do the same yourself even if you're not in a position to demonstratively schedule actual meeting slots with people: Just put reminders in your calendar to talk to people without scheduling an actual meeting. If you want to make it seem more organic, just put in the right number of slots and keep a list to yourself that you randomise week by week. You can always tick people off if you have conversations outside of your schedule.
My boss is not my friend, why should I chat with him about his or my private life, I am an introvert so I never start this kind of discussion, but from the OP I understood he was refering to work related chat
Yeah, I'm not an "I need to be friends with my coworkers" person either, but I just mean the everyday stuff that is work-related or work-tangential. Who is meeting with who, how people feel about what's going on, etc. More than one might glean from a Confluence page with notes from a design meeting or whatever. "Oh, the real reason we chose technology X for this feature is just because Jim knows it well", "oh, the real reason we're adding this logic to the back-end is because the boss thinks the front-end devs are incompetent", etc. Things that get whispered in person, but don't get written in an email or wiki page.
Maybe some teams are small enough or well-adjusted enough for this not to be an issue, but I've definitely felt I've lacked this sort of context since having fewer informal talks with my boss.
I think the vehemence is easy to understand. No one likes to be told to do something they hate and to lose freedom of choice to be in the environment most conducive to their happiness.
I think the structurally advantaged management will let people work the way they work best and figure out how to smooth the rough spots.
That's nice, but what does that have to do with your job? You can meet people anywhere and when you choose the venue and the context they may even have something in common with you. All anyone at your job needs to have in common with you is a desire to eat.
> I really don't understand the militancy of both sides.
Nor I, with the complete ridiculousness of "hybrid". And I support climate justice. Commutes to go to a workplace where someone is hacking coughing, and I'm still doing Teams meetings is fucking ridiculous. Never again.
> A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls.
Standard introvert/extrovert justifications. People need to learn how to partition these things to create a hard delineation between work and not-work. Most whom I know who hate remotework don't have these essential skills.
> I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy.
It is binary. Either you're a remote-first org, in which where your butt's geographical location doesn't matter, or it does.
If you're remote, there's a LOT of positives including: uses no gas to get to work, less wear and tear on vehicle, climate benefits on massive scale, easily eat from home with food amenable to us, have access to niceties here at the house, pets, multitask with stuff like laundry (3 minutes activity with 1h waittimes), and I'm compensated the moment I log in versus commute.
WfW is bad because all the above aren't true. The major justifications I'm seeing with this revolves around business rents, middle-manager surveillance capitalism, and appearance of work vs work really done.
Hybrid it's worse than WfH or WfW. Now, most of the above are true, but in work's location, you're now having to also act remote.
> The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.
That's the first real big change with remotework. YOU MUST SET HARD GATED THINGS BETWEEN WORK AND NOT-WORK. Me? I set my work laptops out at 8:55a and log in at 9a. I pack up my work laptops in their respective bags at 5p. I'll even do a short walk before and after shift as a "commute" and exercise. And sometimes, I'll even change clothes. The hard line is what's absolutely needed to partition work from not-work.
> If you're remote, there's a LOT of positives including: uses no gas to get to work, less wear and tear on vehicle, climate benefits on massive scale, easily eat from home with food amenable to us, have access to niceties here at the house, pets, multitask with stuff like laundry (3 minutes activity with 1h waittimes), and I'm compensated the moment I log in versus commute.
Yes, if you live in a nice place with nice amenities. When you are starting out you're either stuck in your parent's house, or a shitty house share. (yes yes, if everyone is remote pricing changes. But it won't sort out inequity, if you're poor, your housing is going to be shit. )
> Hybrid it's worse than WfH or WfW. Now, most of the above are true, but in work's location, you're now having to also act remote.
I don't understand this. surly full time office is the worst? There is no flexibility, You have to optimise for the commute.
> YOU MUST SET HARD GATED THINGS BETWEEN WORK AND NOT-WORK.
Oh I'm a sysadmin, I did this already. If I'm not on call you're shit out of luck.
However thats not my point. When you are bullied, or have to accept cunts into your VC, or the work is just plain awful, you associate that feeling with your surroundings. It taints your living area. It leaves an emotional stain that's really hard to remove. Now with an office, you just YOLO to a new place (in know I know, its not always possible). a complete change of scene, no bad memories.
At home its a lot harder.
To conclude:
I am not arguing for exclusivity, I think its possible to accommodate fully remote workers, I've had at least one remote worker on my team (or a remote team) for the last ten years. Its never been an issue (apart from fixing hardware errors.) With decent planning tools and decent comms its perfectly possible to help people thrive remotely or onsite.
> Yes, if you live in a nice place with nice amenities. When you are starting out you're either stuck in your parent's house, or a shitty house share. (yes yes, if everyone is remote pricing changes. But it won't sort out inequity, if you're poor, your housing is going to be shit. )
Fresh out of college hires belong in the office. After a year or two it depends.
The pandemic isn't over. Look at the graphs.[1] Still around 1,500 deaths a day in the US, day after day. "Real America" may be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with Real America.
Something funny is going on in a few states. In most states, as case rates decline, so do deaths, a few weeks later. In Florida. Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina, reported cases are way down, but reported deaths are climbing.
It's been "over" several times already (remember "it will be gone by easter"?). This time won't be the last, the data just doesn't justify that assumption yet.
What you are saying is: "Society thinks it is now ok to have ~1000 deaths from this disease per day" as a steady state. The problem with that is that the health infrastructure to deal with this amount of disease on top of other seasonal diseases like influenza just isn't there in most places.
People being done with it will change again when tumor removal surgery and other procedures need to be postponed and general quality of life is suffering.
There is also the aspect that lots of people will still take precautions like not eating out in crowded indoor spaces when seasonal infection rates are high. This will change business environments in the long run, whether we like it or not.
Yes, but there are concrete reasons it didn't end: new variants showed up, and in the case of omicron in particular it was able to overwhelm resistance established by previous strains.
That can absolutely happen again, but increasing vaccination rates across the globe mean the odds of a new variant are lower.
I don't think odds of a new variant are lower. Vaccines turned out to not be effective against infection after a few months (they are very effective against severe disease). People who are vaccinated might clear the infection faster but as long as there is viral replication there will be mutations. At the same time, evolutionary pressure to evade vaccine protection is increasing as more people are vaccinated.
I think the COVID-Is-Over crowd needs to send that memo to COVID, it didn't get the message, yet. We've been here before multiple times now. Politicians rush to "get back to normal" and then a few weeks or months later, the next wave hits. Will we ever learn?
If we had another spike in 2 weeks that turned out to be the worst so far, would you still say that? Everyone would still be done with it, and yet it would be objectively not over. It's not just about people acknowledging it exists, it exists regardless.
Hospitalizations and deaths have been so low for so long that as soon as people stop paying attention, it is over. We've been out of the pandemic phase and crossed over into endemicity for most of a year. Time to get used to it.
Death rates are still quite high - 1500 deaths per day, the maximum were around 3000 in February 2021. This is in times where lots of precautions were still in place (school masking for example).
Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020 [1], with much worse drops for minority populations (3 years for the latino population) and 10 years of progress of equalizing white and non-white life expectancies has been reversed.
Is this an acceptable steady state for society? I don't think it should be. This is all preventable and we otherwise spend lots of resources on improving these metrics.
What you are saying sounds like people being done with lung cancer and start smoking again.
If diet related illnesses were unknown before COVID they'd have had an even more dramatic impact on those numbers.
We've not only decided that's an "acceptable steady state", but actively embraced it.
> Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020.
In other words: it dropped around 1/10th as much as the difference between today and 1970.
Do you think the average person in 1970 would have accepted 10x the invasiveness of the measures we've had for the last couple of years to reach parity, or were they just used to the "normal"?
You can argue that we should or shouldn't do something, but claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd.
Another way to put it: How many Americans in 2018 were clamoring to spend massive amounts of GDP on reaching parity with countries like Peru, Costa Rica, Austria, France, South Korea and Japan? Those countries have (respectively) around 1-6 additional years of life expectancy compared to the US[1].
Or, to put it another way: Life expectancy peaked in the US in 2014[2], while it kept rising in most peer countries. That certainly made the news, and something was being done about the root causes of that, but by and large it was being ignored politically.
Again, none of this is an argument for or against any particular COVID measures. I'm just pointing out that it's a particularly egregious case of historical blinders & end-of-history thinking to think that human beings as a species can't get used to the relatively small (in a historical context) rise in risk the world has seen in the last couple of years.
Your reasoning is unsound. We spent massive amounts of GDP to only have roughly a million people die of this disease over the last two years. It could have been much worse if we hadn’t done as much a we had.
World war 2 lowered life expectancy by 3 years. Is 1.5 ok for COVID?
> We've not only decided that's an "acceptable steady state", but actively embraced it.
I’m not sure what you mean by that but nobody I know thinks it’s perfectly fine to have half a million people per year die unnecessarily.
> claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd
People are dealing with those risks all the time. About ~90% of people
were voluntarily wearing mask when I went grocery shopping earlier today. People had their seat belts on on the roads there. Their kids were in child seats even though it’s quite inconvenient to put them in there. We do lots of things to mitigate risks. Some of them are pure theater (letting the pilot go through airport security), others are really effective (having a co pilot in the cockpit).
Vaccine mandates would probably be the most effective strategy. This would reduce the death toll and also otherwise severe disease (and also long covid from the data we are seeing) by a factor of 10. At that point, we might as well drop all other measures and live with 10k dead people from this per year. Currently, it's still at an unacceptable level for society, even if one is only considering the economic impact and doesn't care about human suffering.
> If we had another spike in 2 weeks that turned out to be the worst so far, would you still say that?
People SHOULD update in light of new evidence. Right now I think I am quite safe from crime. If I get robbed twice next month, I will absolutely re-evaluate that statement.
That said, the most recent spike was vastly milder than previous spikes, so it would be extremely surprising to suddenly have The Worst Spike Ever
It isn't, and immunocompromised employees should meet no resistance when continuing to work from home, but it's unclear that we're at a point in the pandemic (or have been, for many months) where avoiding office work is a meaningful intervention for slowing transmission. We sort of axiomatically assume that avoiding offices must slow the spread, but the epidemiological evidence for it --- for any kind of social distancing --- is very weak (unlike, say, increasing vaccination).
That's not to say those kinds of NPIs weren't very important at earlier phases of the pandemic.
IMO that's because people still go out to restaurants and bars and gatherings in others homes. If you do that stuff, you might as well go into the office.
No, that seems unlikely; you can compare outcomes for otherwise-similar counties where people go to restaurants at near pre-pandemic rates, and others where they don't. Like I said, the epidemiological evidence for NPIs at this point is very weak. Similar comparisons show powerful evidence for the effectiveness of vaccinations.
No... when was your last vaccine if it was over 10 weeks you might be interested in reading this study from the New England Journal of Medicine.
Primary immunization with two doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 vaccine provided limited protection against symptomatic disease caused by the omicron variant. A BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 booster after either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 primary course substantially increased protection, but that protection waned over time. (Funded by the U.K. Health Security Agency.
Don’t get me wrong they oversold the vax. But what I quoted are the key words here. If Trump’s vaccines turn COVID into a literal cold for all but the most compromised of individuals… it works.
> It isn't, and immunocompromised employees should meet no resistance when continuing to work from home
Note that immunocompromised people are still protected by vaccines and some are not even higher than average risk; maybe they need a second booster and that's all.
On social media I've noticed they all think they're going to die but that's because they get all their news from irony poisoned podcasters.
Reclassications of covid deaths has been happening. They will look over anyone who died and reclassify them as a covid death if they meet new guidelines.
It's basically over in the UK at least. Covid deaths for people who aren't fully vaccinated are down to around 0.1% of deaths, still mostly in people over 70 who don't lose many QALYs anyway. It makes absolutely no sense to worry about that.
One possible reason for wanting GS employees back in-person: it's much easier to avoid putting things in writing when you can just walk down the hall. There's probably a lot of stuff they don't want on email/Slack/etc.
I’m surprised this is the first time I read this argument. It seems so much more obvious than the typical “what would middle management do if nobody comes back?”.
As a rule, toxic management avoids leaving paper trails. I had a boss who was so predictable about this, any one on one call with him would inevitably default to threats and harassment.
Kind of the point isn't it? The existence of people preferring in-person communication because it absolves them of a paper trail is necessarily something that can only be established anecdotally.
Sorry, S.A.C. Capital Advisors didn't shutdown. Rather, it repaid outside investors, and then was reborn with insider-only money as Point72 Asset Management. (Yes, I know that a few employees of SAC were found guilty of financial crimes.)
They were shut down as part of the plea deal with the government (in which they plead guilty I might add). Not accepting outside money is a de-facto end to the business.
Nobody that is asked to do illegal (or grey area) things or that gets threatened in person will yield to your demand for "evidence". To ask for it in this context is not very humane of you, it's not hard to imagine why it isn't there.
That doesn't match my experience. At an investment bank, or hedge fund, you don't usually go to interrupt someone. You "ping" them on chat, set up a videoconference, or something else. You meet people at the floor kitchen, the cafeteria, or meeting rooms. In NYC floors they don't even say good morning to the person next to them. Even if on the same team and both going together for drinks at the end of the day. It was shocking how isolated workers are. This was years before the pandemic. And I'm not just talking about trading floors.
Video calls aren't the same as spontaneous in-person communication. I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to have a 2 minute "face-to-face" conversation (via video), only to receive a reply by chat: "Sure, try me tomorrow morning." I think: "Oh nevermind. I'll find someone else." Six months later, I have almost no communication with the people who regularly tell me the same.
The issue is though that those 2 minute conversations are actually distractions for the people you talk to and in an office setting they don't have the option to avoid them.
Or they are 2-minute conversations in the hallways between meetings or spontaneously over lunch. Those two categories are even more important and even more precluded by remote work.
Talking of personal experience after a year remote due to covid I went back to office for a single day and I had members of product management team coming to me every 15 mins with questions. I realized they were doing this pre covid and also during remote but the difference in the latter case was that they were using chat and that meant I could prioritise and reply to them asynchronously. Never went back to office after that day. A
If it’s not worth it to someone to articulate their thoughts/questions in writing, that is a huge red flag that said person will probably waste much more than a few minutes of my time if I don’t reset their expectations.
In many places, including where I live, its illegal to record calls without the consent of all parties on the call. If they are being illegally saved (certainly possible), nothing in them would be admissible in court.
Where I live, you only need consent of one person (ie: ypu self).
But then it changes when you are using company tools. Teams can be configured to automatically record all conversations. The consent is baked into your employment agreement.
those calls are easily recorded on the server, your speech transcribed with reasonable accuracy and searchable. Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams offer the live transcribe.
Whatever it is, it isn't for 'off the books' conversations.
Legit why some co-workers and I have signal. Be like- hey can you hit me up on s? (For non work related conversation, or taking about our Plex/emby/jellyfin/home lab meta conversationa)
Or by the other person. There's a new hire on my team who records all his video chats with what I think is a program meant for streaming games, and Meet/Zoom/etc don't recognize it and so can't notify the other person (he mentioned it once and that he uses it instead of taking notes (the only reason I know he does this), and I was just like ???). It's kinda unnerving.
You might give them a friendly hint that this might be a criminal offense, depending on the state they or the state their conversation partner is in. In California for example, this can be charged either as a misdemeanor or a felony, both with hefty fines and up to multi-year prison sentences.
This is a skill everyone should be doing. Require everything in writing. I started doing this in office because everyone has amnesia and I was tired of people lying or changing their mind. If you want something done, then go through the channels and in writing.
My aunt has been working at a huge company for over 30 years, remote for like 20. The company recently decided everyone had to come back no exceptions, even her. So she’s retiring.
I don't get it. Isn't the covid virus still out there? It only takes one infection to mutate into another strain, one infection to pass it onto many other members of a community, one infection to cause long-lasting damage to your body.
Why is policy to go back to the office? That's going to guarantee viral spread. Shouldn't we at the minimum avoid clustering until the last of the virus is killed? This policy makes no sense to me.
It's been 2 years, experts are speculating this virus is here to stay like the flu. I subscribe to https://gbdeclaration.org/ . If you are at risk you should take precautions and maybe we should change society to help people at risk but forcing everyone to live in fear is not the solution. The past two years have been a dystopia for the entire planet and it is not clear it was even warranted
> experts are speculating this virus is here to stay like the flu.
If they're only speculating it at this point, then they're way behind the times and shouldn't be called experts. Animal reservoirs were confirmed in 2020, and more found in 2021. Omicron may have been a jump back from rats to humans. We're way past the point of it being here to stay.
I'd hardly call it a dystopia... That's some hyperbole. It wasn't great for a lot of people but far from a dystopia. QoL went up in the US by many measures (I know the US is not the world).
This has already been done. I have friends and loved ones who never got to work from home. They were not living in a dystopia. You are just using extreme language to further a political point.
You and the people who created the Great Barrington declaration make it sound like "being at risk" is a binary and rare condition. In fact, most people in the US have risk factors[1] like being overweight, physical inactivity, being pregnant (~5% of the total population is pregnant at any point in time), being over 65 (16% of the US population), and many others.
> ~5% of the total population is pregnant at any point in time
That seems (literally) unbelievably high. If you take an average life expectancy in the US of 78 years (it was 79 in 2019), assume roughly equal number of males and females, each female would have to be pregnant for 7.8 of the 78 average years, or 10.4 full-term pregnancies per woman in the US. That can’t possibly be the right figure.
Total estimated pregnancies in US in 2009 (most recent figure I could readily find) was 6,369,000 (4,131,000 live births, 1,152,000 induced abortions, and 1,087,000 fetal losses). If you give all 4.1 M as full term and treat all the others as half-term (a gross over-estimate), you get around 5.2M full term pregnancies or 3.9M years of pregnancy against a US total population of 307M (person-years in 2009) or a bit over 1/4 of your figure.
This Great Barrington Declaration is more restrictive than current laws in my Eastern European country.
For example, it says "Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside" but in my country there is no such lockdown for any age group.
It says "Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home" but in my country employers aren't required to stop allowing young people to work from home (before 2020 working from home without breaking laws was basically impossible in my country).
> The past two years have been a dystopia for the entire planet
I must be living on a different planet then.
> but forcing everyone to live in fear is not the solution
Nobody forced me. I could have gone into the office. But why should I have?
Being vaxxed and boostered the risk is relatively low. Still I don't go back. The last two years were the most free of all in my career. I missed theater. And concerts. But regarding work. Or weekly food shopping with distance or click and collect were a boon.
Do I expect that to be true for everybody? Hell no.
Everybody has a different view. Projecting ones view onto the planet probably dies not help us discuss in good faith.
The parent argument can be used for a lot of activities outside your own house. If you like WFH and not having any social activities then more power to you.
Even if "only" 30% of the population had a very bad time during the lockdowns I would still call the last 2 years a dystopia.
I still have a lot of activities. Most of them were still possible during stay at home/distancing orders.
We even kept our sport/dance group running via zoom. Did cooking sessions and social dates.
I am enjoying the moments to meet some people in person. Even in group settings, when our local business network is able to meet and enjoy the produce from the farms and producers in the network.
> Even if "only" 30% of the population
As said I would call it a dystopia for these people. Not for the planet or all members of society.
Else you would need to call pre Corona times a dystopia as well as around your number of people probably have a bad time in "normal" times.
Agreed. We are different. That's what I am implying from the get go. And so are many others.
I totally get that people want to return to the office. To socializing, to chats at the coffee machine.
That people want to travel to clients. Have workshops, go to conferences. And so on.
As much as I understand how people discovered more freedom during the pandemic and do not want to trade this freedom in for the sake of the ones that want to go back to the way it was before.
> The last two years were the most free of all in my career. I missed theater. And concerts.
Remote work is even more fun when there's movies and shows and other events available. Makes all that extra free time during the day even more fun :) I've been remote for half a decade and I can't wait for stuff to open up. Feels half-retired.
Am I aware that I am in very happy circumstances? Sure, absolutely. I am. I also worked hard to be were I am today. While I don't do everything for money I still worked very hard to be were I am today.
Less than 15 years ago, I was well below the poverty line. In the meantime, I live well. And I can't complain.
Still, I know that as the child of a middle-class single father, I am clearly counting as privileged.
The GB folks are charlatans who have been wrong at every stage of the pandemic and have been shown to be secretly paid for their ridiculous plans and “studies” (see JI and the JetBlue founder paying for the Santa Clara study in March 2020).
There are plenty of trustworthy orgs recommending opening procedures and personal safety mitigations without the baggage of weird US “libertarian” think tank funding and completely ascientific calls for action.
There are many more problems in the world than Covid. This myopic fixation on one single thing to the exclusion of basically everything else was not healthy nor sustainable.
I think the WHO and CDC have to do a lot of trust building over a lot of years if they want people to start taking them seriously again. I'm glad I'm living in a state that isn't waiting for the CDC to tell us that we can start living our lives again.
Most people still take them seriously. The fact that there are entire states that do not speaks more to the leadership of those states than to either the WHO or the CDC.
Between the two options, I would certainly trust an epidemiologist over an elected politician on the topic of epidemiology, and I have a hard time understanding the cognitive dissonance that allows people to get to a state of "we have to trust our governor because governments lie." It's not like the governor isn't part of the government.
Do you ever eat meat that has not been cooked “well-done”? Do you ever go outside without wearing sunscreen? If you’re a woman of childbearing age, do you ever drink alcohol despite not being on hormonal birth control?
If so, then no, you don’t take the CDC seriously. You only take them seriously about Covid, probably because their advice on Covid matches your priors.
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy simply because it observes that in a formal logical sense, the credentials of somebody making a claim are irrelevant.
But formal logic assumes absolute and understandable truth or falsehood of facts among all parties. In terms of data analysis and interpretation, especially when both involve parties that lack the skills or training to do these things, trusting authority is likelier to generate positive outcomes than trusting one's gut or one's untrained analysis in most circumstances.
Just in case you are arguing in good fait, appeal to authority is not generally considered a logical fallacy. This is the first sentence on wikipedia: "Historically, opinion on the appeal to authority has been divided: it is listed as a non-fallacious argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources,[5] as some hold that it can be a strong or at least valid defeasible[6] argument[7][8][9][10] and others that it is weak or an outright fallacy."
In general sure scientists can be wrong, even in fields they are experts on. But overwhelmingly they are not.
Also as I mentioned, and you did not respond to, all of us use appeal to authority probably multiple times every day. One example is that most people go to experts to see help, for example lawyers, doctors, dentists etc. The other is that it is common at work to have an expert resolve an argument. It would of course be better to research 100% from first principles every time, but that is just not feasible to do all the time.
Hope that clears it up. Next time it would also be more constructive to bring your own arguments, not just say "appeal to authority". Logical fallacies are pretty often quite nuanced and it is very easy to use them incorrectly.
hard to say how many people still taking them seriously. Anyone who has been paying attention certainly does not. CDC flip-flopped many times, changed the definition of 'vaccine', admitted the 6 foot social distance number was arbitrary, etc.
I, for one, have yet to see this proven. I have seen public guidance and the best practices modified as we came to understand more about the disease and its impact on the public.
Even if we waved a wand and destroyed all traces of COVID once and forever, this statement would still be true.
We can't let our plans hinge on the presence of a virus. If offices need better air management to reduce the risks, then that's what we should focus on.
>Shouldn't we at the minimum avoid clustering until the last of the virus is killed?
No. Is it not common knowledge that viruses are a constant threat to human life that we must live with? Do you remember before COVID when people got sick and died and the world still turned? Unfortunately, we are all mortal. We can't live this way forever. We stopped society because of things like what happened in New York. That's not happening anymore. COVID is now a hazard of life.
> Shouldn't we at the minimum avoid clustering until the last of the virus is killed? This policy makes no sense to me.
You don't get it because you have a totally ridiculous expectation of "until the last of the virus is killed"
sars-cov-2 is endemic, we're well past the flattening the curve phase, it's time to get on with life. Everyone eligible in the US has had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated and boosted to prepare for the inevitable exposure.
> As far as I know it is not yet endemic. But will be. Just a minor nitpick.
As much as lots of people did not want to be forced to stay at home now maybe even an equal amount of people don't want to return to the office every day.
Probably there will be a lot of different variants in terms of how people work in the future.
Cynically thinking it's a combo of elections coming up, and business fears of the cracks in economy so "maybe this will help" with numbers and productivity.
The last of the virus will never be killed. That’s impossible. So you’re suggesting we avoid “clustering” (i.e., normal human social behavior) forever.
In the early 80s, bulge bracket investment banks figured out that they can just hire hungry and ambitious analysts straight out of college, work them to the bone for 1-2-3 years, and then send most of them off to grad/business school or somewhere else.
That's why, IMO, jr. investment bankers work such horrendous hours. They know it's a temporary thing, and that the real payoff comes later.
> graduates every year, who learn from experienced bankers and build networks face-to-face. The experience also encourages teamwork, which is central to the firm’s culture
When they say 'hiring' college graduates they mean interns. Because they do pay interns (rather well I might add). It's not the same as churn of permanent employees.
And more to the point, there will be a capitalist check-writer that *will* accept 100% remote work because it will get labor to sign up with them.
Reminds me of a LinkedIn post from a CEO that said they watched the "Return to Work" notices being hated online from competitors, and he'd send recruiters to employees recruiting and using remote as a reason to jump.
Unless their competitors who allow remote steal their best and brightest. Remote is a perk (like a cafeteria… or sleep pods I guess?) that can be used competitively.
It is a cafeteria, home cooked food, yoga room, personal office with a great music sound system and a personalized cozy environment with everything one might need at hand - all in one.
Along with the absence of driving through a potentially deadly obstacle course for two hours a day.
I’m not asking you to predict the future, though that would be awesome, but could you share some thoughts on when/how the labor market turning might unfold?
I'm not OP, though I see that he's among the few that shares this opinion of mine.
Take what I'm saying with a gigantic grain of salt because I am not some economist.
We have had 10 years+ of quantitative easing both in the US and in Europe, with it all peaking during the last 2 years due to Covid. This has delivered an aritificial stimulus to the economy in the form of basically free money. This has had a lot of consequences, including the craziness in the housing market & stock market, as well as a huge influx of money that went into other investments like startups, expansions and so on. Basically, in simpler terms, everybody could easily get money because money has been very cheap.
We are now starting to see the side-effects (of an otherwise arguably good thing) in the form of inflation. So the greater powers are now at a fork in the road - they either allow inflation to wreck the working and middle class or they turn off the money tap. The problem is that after living for so long with 0% interest rates, any significant change to this might trigger a recession that will make 2008 look like the good times.
I started my career after 2008, so I have only ever experienced an environment in which employeers were heavily competing for engineers (and generally workforce in all professions), so I'm afraid that anyone in a position similar to mine has simply no way of realizing the way things will look a few years from now.
Unless I'm seriously missing something of substance, then I'm afraid that there will be quite a few years in which people will lose homes, jobs, sanity and us privileged developers are maybe in a better position than most, but make no mistake - we will all suffer.
Keep in mind that large populations suffering often have political implications. That’s why economic predictions are mostly shots in the dark. They are reasonable and logical until people say “Nope”.
We’ll see what inflation is like this year, but it’s reasonable (due to Russia oil) to assume it’ll be just as bad as last year. This has a ton of economic and political implications. Some that can be predicted and some that will likely be surprising.
So making statements about what the the labour market will look like in 2 years…
> Keep in mind that large populations suffering often have political implications.
Not sure this is as insightful as you think. Yes, obviously that is the case. So? If inflation and housing continue to be this bad, then we have to stop printing the money or maybe find a way to better allocate the wealth, which would mean even more turmoil than your regular economic crisis.
> Some that can be predicted and some that will likely be surprising. So making statements about what the the labour market will look like in 2 years…
Yes, which is why I'm not making predicitons about company X in Y months from now. If you think that continuing in this manner for another 2 years is sustainable, then it means that one of us is _seriously_ misunderstanding the macro-economic situation. We can't have house prices increase 20% every year and inflation edging towards 10% inflation and stagnating salaries.
Something has got to give, and the point I'm making is simple. Things will get worse before they get better. If you think that is simply a coin flip or a matter of pure opinion, then I'm afraid, again, that one of us is really, really uninformed about the situation. Maybe it's me.
My point is you are drawing conclusions about the labour market when there are likely very large and potentially unpredictable changes in store.
One (just one) question is whether anyone has the political will or clout to make things worse in the short term to potentially correct it in the long term. Interest rates should have been raised long before covid if you’re thinking long term and yet that never happened. Raising rates right now could be political suicide (albeit the most logical path). There are a lot of other hard to reason about factors. Economists a couple months ago were predicting lower inflation this year, like in the 4% range. Seems unlikely now.
Any conclusion about the labour market is predicated on some pretty massive assumptions and therefore complete speculation.
>you are drawing conclusions about the labour market when there are likely very large and potentially unpredictable changes in store.
...isn't that the entire point of this particular thread? Looking at possibilities without necessary prediction?
Is there any point in history where you can't say "there are likely very large and potentially unpredictable changes in store."? Why predict anything ever then?
> Is there any point in history where you can't say "there are likely very large and potentially unpredictable changes in store."? Why predict anything ever then?
Pardon the rudeness, but that’s silly. Of course there are times of varying turbulence where predictions can be more / less accurate. To be honest though economic predictions in the last 20 years haven’t done better than a coin flip.
I think we’re mostly in agreement except the part about everyone will suffer so demand for software engineers will decrease. In fact I think the economy is probably worse off (not just QE causing issues) than you laid out.
But the demand for software engineers decreasing? I mean, maybe, but I don’t think your points support that. I think there’s a mountain of assumptions you need to make to conclude that.
In a vacuum I would actually argue the opposite and say software engineering is even more important today than yesterday and that we aren’t producing enough. For example (anecdotal), the almost complete lack of technical fluency shown during the remote learning shit show that was my kids education last year. But we’re not in a vacuum and the economy is so untethered to reality that I can’t predict anything about the labour market.
> But the demand for software engineers decreasing? I mean, maybe, but I don’t think your points support that. I think there’s a mountain of assumptions you need to make to conclude that.
If all businesses are suffering in that scenario, then who will employ the software engineers?
This is itself a massive assumption. What extremes are we assuming and how likely are they? There are businesses who flourished under covid and also businesses that basically print money during conflicts / wars. Almost all of them require and use software. So are we talking apocalypse here? If so, then I have no idea what the job market will look like, and neither does anyone else.
I do agree that low interest rates have helped fuel growth, but I'm not convinced that it's played that big of a role.
If we look at Europe and Japan, despite the historically low interest rates, they haven't exactly been a beacon of innovation in the last decades. In fact, the US and China have eaten most of their market share.
I think you are mistaking things because I didn't even mention growth.
You're also saying that just because the US and China have done better than Europe, that means that QE has not had a measurable effect on the job market?
I'm sorry, but it looks to me as if you're strawmanning becasue your reply is barely adjacent to the points I was trying to make.
Major tech companies (e.g. Netflix, Cloudflare, MongoDB, and nearly every other publicly listed high growth tech company) have seen their stock prices fall as much as 50% in the past few months.
When the value of the entire tech industry shrinks that dramatically this quickly, companies are bound to become a bit more conservative in their operations, which cloud slow the pace of hiring in tech (and for some, layoffs)
As for "when", the slow down has already started and will accelerate over the next few months (my prediction, no evidence).
Companies that don’t offer the choice to work remotely will be less competitive in the recruitment market. So smart companies will offer a hybrid model where you can choose how many days you will work in the office. It’s that simple.
I think people are missing the point. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks are working just fine remotely. This looks more like Goldman CEO is desperately trying to give a hand to help Manhattan not die. Good luck with that.
Yep. CEO and Mayor had a chat, because Mayor is worried about tax bases, and CEO said "sure, I'll bring'em back in." Maybe a hint at favors, but probably just part of the wholesale giving-of-gifts that circulate at those levels.
I doubt the question of productivity, team-building, communication, were even briefly considered as part of the initial decision. Those would all be post-hock rationalizations.
In the short-term this may be the case, but the party that we've had due to massive QE is close to ending. We're in an employee's market now, and my guess is that it will turn into an employer's market quite quickly.
The only reason you can refuse working from the office is the fac that you can simply walk out the door and find another job somewhere else. If this very fragile fact changes, the workers will do whatever the employeers want. Maybe employers will also prefer WFH, but my predicition is that many of them will not.
There will certainly be some people that would prefer to take a WFH job taking an in-person job because 'any offer is an offer', but unless you foresee 10% real unemployement among white-collar skilled labor, I don't see this being a major factor in the long-term longevity of fully-remote as a business model.
There will be jobs available, some will be WFH, some will be in-person. The WFH jobs will be able to get away with paying 10% less and the companies, especially small companies, will save money on office space.
Those advantages and disadvantages will play out regardless of the quality of the labor market.
I can refuse because over the five years I've worked remote, my employer has shed most of its office space across the nation. If they want us back in the office, they're going to have to add that expense back to their balance sheet. For companies that like to use their office space as a show piece, that expense isn't a problem but for companies like the one I work for who operating on tight margins, things like offices are a luxury the bottom line can do without.
The only reason you can find another job somewhere else easily is because there are so many remote positions open. There is a balance somewhere and it doesn't look like it's going to favor local employers without remote flexibility.
I'm assuming you think this will happen due to less demand for labor. Wouldn't that be yet another incentive for people to look for remote work over local work when the local pool of opportunities is shrinking? I don't see this changing the remote vs local split, just the overall pie would be smaller.
IMVHO People should reason about https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ and about the fact that we work to live, not live to work. From that the target is neither WFO or WFO but work less to still have more. In that sense we should/must tend to what makes us feel better.
If WFH works for that than we should go for it, if not we should not. The world is not that big, but also not that little, there is room for diversity, not only: diversity is the engine of evolution, we do things differently and compare the outcome in a constantly improving manner, a thing all dictator hate because let people see different worlds instead of "there is no alternative", "we are in the sole and unique possible system" etc but the real engine of human evolution.
That means it's about time to change the society, and yes that's not easy, that's might provoke big disasters and suffering before arrive to a new stability but that's is. There is nothing "fully right" and nothing "fully wrong", there is almost never "the best solution" to anything, we need to try, fail, correct, keep evolving.
Hijacking this thread a bit but can someone recommend me the best book on remote work culture and how best to foster it? Perhaps the guidebook for C-suite and the book for employees is different but in either case I'd love to hear your picks!
Let's not forget that Covid is still here, and new variants are worse.
Long Covid is looking to be a real problem, with all sorts of side effects. Even from a cold business perspective why take the risk of causing these problems to your workforce ?
Note: have been building/ running hybrid (in-office/remote) businesses since the early 90s.
It’s not binary. Think of a continuum of always-in-office <-> satellite team <-> wfh.
Most people would not plant themselves in a single point in that line (I would like to be in the office a few days a week, though I have friends who prefer and are more productive at 100% wfh). I used to lock myself in in my office sometime to be productive. And at times I have needed to work in a lab but could do data analysis etc just as well at home.
So instead of thinking “we need to start with a bias towards X”, think: how can we support all these modes and how can they even help people who stay in a single point (e.g. accounting who may need to be solely the office for security reasons).
E.g. keeping convos in writing not only decouples you spatially but in time. One can search for and return back to prior discussions. This can help everyone.
Recording and auto-transcribing meetings, not just zoom calls but ones in conference rooms frees note-takers and opens up new modalities. Perhaps I can skip that meeting and just skim the notes.
My gf likes working at big companies (basically FAANG). She says that even before Covid they were videoconferencing people in other buildings and even other floors simply because travel around campus was too slow. These modes should all be considered as falling on that same axis.
Frankly the (for many, new) communication habits around zoom calls have been a wasted opportunity to rethink the whole system.
Going to be honest my company has a gen x CEO, and mostly gen xyz staff. Our awesome boomers did have some trouble adjusting to remote. I am sure is one hell of a shock for a generation to go from using checkbooks and cash with party lines that were shared with nearby houses to ubiquitous communications and kids who grew up in BFE Texas having best friends they have never met face-to-face in Finland and the Australia. The idea you cant be successful being remote is poppycock. I have been promoted twice during covid as a manager at that- I check in with my teammates at least once a week, they call me for 5min huddles when they need to chat. When your generation was raised with bbs's/IRC/AIM is any of this really that abnormal?
Going to be an ageist here, but I think it's foolhardy to claim that remote is as easy for boomers and centenarians as it is for xyz. I think we are seeing a shift in workplace demographics and that is fueling a new normal for work. It's not bad, it's just evolution. My boomer mom loves her remote work now that she has been doing it because she has better interactions with her team. And like me, her office was already global with remote locations everywhere. Mileages may vary, we are all figuring this world out and riding the tiger. I won't go back to a physical office neither will she- if asked she said "I'll just fucking retire" so I think the seas have shifted anyone trying to push for full on-prem IS going to lose resources. When I hear this honestly I think of some crusty old out of touch manager who still uses a paper desk calendar.
Older folks have houses and resources and established social networks. They didn't necessarily like remote, but they didn't take a huge hit.
Younger, less established workers got crushed. They had to work in suboptimal (read lots of roomates and no rooms) conditions. Mentoring was down. Experience was down. Social networks were smashed.
Even as an older tech worker, my social networks have atrophied. And I even took extra time to try to keep them up.
To be perfectly honest, it feels like the gap between my level of technical skill and the technical skill of incoming employees grew a LOT on both sides.
While new folks lacked experience, it felt like they also always brought loads of new stuff to the table--not all of it was valuable but some of it literally gobsmacked those of us in the greybeard category--that seems to be missing now. I suspect a lot of it is the lack of peer social interaction.
And, as someone experienced, it seems that the pandemic released me from a lot of useless social obligations as a manager and my technical skill got a HUGE boost (if I get my work done in an hour today I'm not going to sit and do nothing, you know) from being put back into use. So I seem to be a lot better at direct technical tasks than I was pre-pandemic.
This is quite odd take given that everywhere I see, young people want to go to office and older one are happier home.
While yes, older ones are more afraid of hybrid setup ending up punishing workers from home, because that pattern was visible even before pandemic. However, everyone at home thing was awesome for middle aged people with families or hobbies.
Yeah but this is the finance sector so more understandable. Like my partner works for one of these companies on the Wall Street and there are so many regulations, compliance etc. that a regular SV startup never comes to close and WFH just made everything more complicated and less secure.
Startups will soon follow suit, since GS is a major investor. It's sad that none of the infrastructure was improved during the isolation/quarantine periods, and now we're going back full force and wasting billions in wasted commute time.
The infrastructure wasn't improved? Pretty much all of the video conferencing tools are much better and tools that didn't have screen sharing & video calls added it. Plus the vast majority of people have actually used those tools now. Pre-pandemic group video calls existed via Teams but a lot of people never used them.
I doubt GS's internal culture applies to any startups... not every company needs an apprenticeship culture and it would be a large capital and time expense for startups. GS's model is very different (IIRC), hire a lot of young talent out of premier institutions, then see who's left after 2+ years of 50+ work hour weeks.
> The infrastructure wasn't improved? Pretty much all of the video conferencing tools are much better and tools that didn't have screen sharing & video calls added it.
It's very HN to think infrastructure is "zoom" and not the implied: internet, housing, roads, power.
> Startups will soon follow suit, since GS is a major investor.
I don’t see this happening. GS interests in real estate and churning finance folk in and out, have nothing to do with their riskier investment priorities.
Also, GS is not a major player in the venture capital landscape.
Also, angel investors have much more influence than VC in how startup culture is set up initially. Once in the VC funding phase, it's too late to tell all key employees to move to commuting distance from main HQ.
Yeah, half those people probably love putting on a dress shirt and feeling fancy about walking into a Goldman office. The thing is, it just takes a toll on you long term.
This battle is not rooted in those who like remote and those who don’t. This battle has been fought a long time ago between K-12 and College. In K—12, you are under strict rules to show up on time for every class, 5 days a week, where attendance is taken. Every week for over a decade, and your best chance of escaping it is a snow day or a wonderful sick day.
Then you get to college and everyone says ‘enough of the nonsense’, you are free. Your obligation is to pass the class, whether that be by showing up to every lecture or just a few, whether you eat at the cafeteria every day or travel a few blocks to a restaurant.
It’s a matter of freedom. Covid was a black swan event that forced everyone for a second time to ‘cut the nonsense’, and ask ‘what is work really?’. Work is work that gets done. If work getting done is the measuring stick, then what is the superfluous push to add additional work? The commute, the banter, the office theatrics (yes, believe it or not I don’t work past lunch, even in the office - I’m staring blankly at the fucking screen). You want to keep the bullshit going?
Banks finance a lot of commercial real estate. It is in the best in best interest of banks to insist to come back to office. They are already neck deep into this.
Between the price of gas and the negative effect driving has on the climate, it seems immoral to force people who can work remote to commute to an office.
I haven’t had Covid (I haven’t had even the smallest cold in 2 years) and am vaccinated, but even unvaccinated people can develop long Covid. Forcing people who can work remote into the office where their chances of getting seriously sick go way up seems immoral.
My mental health has greatly improved since I started working from home exclusively. Forcing people to work in the office, at the detriment of their mental health, seems immoral. For those whose mental health is improved by working in an office, they should have that choice. Though, if they end up being the only one in the office, that is no justification for forcing everyone else to commute to the disease incubator.
No doubt part of problem but it looks more organized to me. There has to be a lot of money involved. Organized wasteful behaviours are often about money, since nothing else would make sense.
Some people like the office, some people can't abide it.
A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls.
I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy.
I don't think the future is fully remote _for everyone_, because fundamentally we are social people. On the flip side, I don't think full office 5 days a week is going to be the future either (caveats apply.)
The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.