There's a lot of nuance that isn't discussed in the WFH circles. I don't believe the cynical claims some offer of VC's losing out on real estate deals, or mid-level managers needing to boost their butts-in-seats numbers or whatever. For some, perhaps, but on average?
What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term? Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town? Do you still "know" them the same as you did when you regularly met in person for lunch or drinks? Is it awkward when you do see each other in person that one visit a year?
Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction. A pure voice-only relationship can feel close, but it's not the same thing. Current technology like Zoom and similar is just not a good replacement for in-person interactions.
How many times have you spoken right over someone on a Zoom call or Discord server? The social queues are erased, and things become awkward and less productive. Creativity (which applies even in engineering) is diminished when you have to use online whiteboards and planning tools vs. a real physical whiteboard with everyone holding their own pen and bouncing ideas around in real-time. To use Zoom et al effectively, the pace of thought and contribution are greatly diminished into a sort of per-turn dance.
WFH is fantastic when you have a head-down, concentration-demanding task that is very clearly defined. For most other things, it's actually harder to get work done.
WFH is simply not a replacement for team cohesivity. There is a great deal lost when you do not meet in person with the people you work with on a regular basis - we can't just sweep that under the rug because we'd prefer to sit in our home office. We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team".
That's not the say WFH doesn't work. Some people make an entire career working from home after all. It is simply an acknowledgement that WFH isn't as beneficial in all situations as you might believe.
>What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term? Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town? Do you still "know" them the same as you did when you regularly met in person for lunch or drinks? Is it awkward when you do see each other in person that one visit a year?
that's the crux of a lot of people here. You are comparing coworkers to friend and some people don't care about friendhips at work. They just want to do their work, stay in good graces, and get back to their leisure ASAP. It's not their job to care about overall company productivity, so as long as they feel more productive it's a win. Any inefficies is irrelevant because it means the ball is in their court and they still get more time for said leisure.
As of now, the WFH initiative is the cloesest we got to a wide scale 32 hour work week that many desire.
It's more like a 52 hour work week for me. I think it depends on your personality. I have a hard time stopping my work, but I still think the benefits outweigh that.
I had this problem and solved it by tracking time spent in a spreadsheet. I have time targets for work and personal projects per week. If they are above, next week I switch some time e.g. from work to personal projects. I found this greatly reduces risk of burnout for me.
Why not just use a time tracking app like Toggl instead of a spreadsheet?
I guess the spreadsheet isn't so bad if you work in long, 2-4+ hour chunks. I often work in 30-minute bursts so just being able to click the start and stop buttons in my browser is less tedious than entering the time manually
Sure, that would work as well. I have macros in the spreadsheet, so starting/stopping a timer is quick too. I like to see at the beginning of the day what is my current ideal work/project ratio.
I think you're right about this, but there are companies that are putting distributed teams back into open offices just so that... they can sit in zoom meetings with their team. But now, they're less likely to have ad-hoc collaborations over Zoom because it's a pain in the neck to find a conference room and feels borderline disrespectful to one's neighbors to carry on a long call when they're trying to focus.
It's all situational. I agree with you that in-person collaboration is beneficial, but bringing people to the office doesn't necessarily do that without restructuring teams that were built on a distributed basis, which can be super disruptive and lose a lot of organizational context.
It's not necessarily the case, it happens that most of the people who come are happy to be in the same room for a meeting, but often they still have to endure one single distant coworker that preferred to stay home and selfishly forces all other ones to use the shitty tools.
At work we've bought small PCs for the meeting rooms so that all those present can be in the same room, and have the rare distant ones participate to the call remotely without preventing other ones to discuss in the room. It's obvious the quality of the participation is much reduced for the remote one in this case, which proves how poor such exchanges are when they're all remote. At least here we can preserve a good communication between those who make the effort to meet in person.
> but often they still have to endure one single distant coworker that preferred to stay home and selfishly forces all other ones to use the shitty tools.
How does this hateful comment reconcile with geographically distributed teams?
the same way some believe that forcing talented people to waste their time trying to use inappropriate communication tools will in the end disgust them so much they will give up trying to excel at what they used to.
It's true that it isn't always the case. We have no more than 2 people on the team at any given office, and are spread across 5 offices and a few full-time remote on a broader team of about 10.
> Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town?
Do you continue doing what it takes to be close with those friends? Do you talk every other day, for instance, like you do with your teammates? Do you share your experiences, think together, have plans and commitments?
Geographical proximity is not the most important contributor to closeness. I feel closer to random strangers on the Internet than how much I feel close to my neighbors.
"Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction. A pure voice-only relationship can feel close, but it's not the same thing. Current technology like Zoom and similar is just not a good replacement for in-person interactions."
I cant stand it when people put out these blanket statements in the form of objective facts. If I'm in a group team huddle with our cameras on - I'm able to pick up on body language, I can see their faces and we can all exchange ideas at the same time. As far as somebody talking over somebody else you can split into multiple groups if it's too big, you would have the same issue in proximity.
You seem to be under the impression that social interactions can only happen if we're all breathing the same air. The only thing that being on site would add is potential tactility. Do you find yourself hugging and touching your coworkers a lot?
Whenever you hear someone trot out facts about “human nature” you know they’ve run out of reasonable avenues of thought on the issue.
Why, for instance, didn’t any of this apply pre-COVID when distributed teams were already common? Are humans beings not social creatures when the same conglomerate owns the office real estate containing all meeting participants?
> For some, perhaps, but on average?
> What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term?
If only you believe you have this "relationship" at work that's even remotely close to things being equal. For some, perhaps, but on average?
- Do you get to decide what to do or your boss? Even if you know better ways of doing things or see issues you might not have the politics to pull it off. Does this happen in a relationship? If so, it's pretty poor.
- Can you "unfriend" a co-worker and choose not to work with them? Do you choose your team? You can certainly quit your relationship or even friendship. In a company you get assigned a team. You can't pick and choose.
> Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction.
And you will get it? You assume your co-workers are your friends. Friendship and relationships common together on common things they like. Co-workers come together to work and may not actually have anything in common. So you prefer being forced together and fake friends than not have any? It can be worse. Being professional is all it is.
> We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team"
That's not a WFH issue. Your whole argument sits on that the only way to build relationships is in-person, even by quoting how long-distance relationships fail. Well do you hug and kiss your "team"? If not, then maybe it's fine. And it fails because there aren't ways to enforce the long-distance relationship to spend time together. Are you forced to spend time together with your co-workers? Yes.
Coworkers are much more like family. You don't get to choose them and you don't have to be friends with them but come thanksgiving, you just need to get along.
In that context, wfh makes it a lot easier to just get along.
Different skills dominate in WFH vs. in-office cultures. It should ultimately be unsurprising that people prefer to work in an environment conducive to their strengths.
Some folks focus on deep work, and benefit from working remote - others focus on collaboration. There are cons of remote work, there are also cons of in-office work. Remote workers who work best with deep stretches of focus are unlikely to be as productive in office. Collaborative workers who focus on long brainstorming meetings etc. are unlikely to be productive remote where people can just go on mute.
I think framing as deep work vs collaborative is a bit too assertive. It’s people who prefer working solo versus working socially, and there are different types of work that naturally lend themselves to one personality or the other, but the preference is “lower level” than that.
For example, brainstorming we pretty much know to be ~ineffective at this point, but people who love socializing continue to do it. Inversely there’s definitely work that’s ridiculously hard to accomplish solo/async, but people with a strong preference for solo work want to muscle their way through it solo anyway.
Solo workers are willing to give up some collaboration and social workers are willing to give up some focus.
The sweet spot in my experience has been for WFH orgs to get together periodically for extended offsites. A one week gathering twice a year has forged some incredible bonds on my distributed team.
Ugh. Multi-day work offsites are the worst. Along with conferences. You have to make arrangements to be away, (try to) sleep in a hotel room, end up eating and drinking too much, getting a workout in is nearly impossible, they just completely disrupt all your routines and responsibilities.
It's harder 2 weeks a year, but that is so easily offset by the 50 other weeks that make your workout, eating habbits, routines and responsibilities so much easier.
Is 2 weeks of travel a year that unexpected? A job I got hired at said to expect quarterly travel for various conferences. Not week long arrangements, but we're talking about being ready with a few week's notice to fly out for a few days to some different part of the world.
of course I got hired in that place in 1/2020, so we know how that turned out.
It sounds like you are perhaps just inexperienced at traveling, or don't like it.
All of your complaints are (usually) easily solved by experienced travelers. It's okay to not like travel, but it doesn't condemn the concept of a weeklong company offsite a couple times a year.
I'm not crazy about travel, that is true. But I'd concede it might be worth it if the offsite or conference provided exceptional value. I my experience, they don't. Never had an offsite meeting where the actual information being communicated could not have just been in an email. The social component of it is something I'd rather manage for myself on my schedule and with people of my choosing. Work relationships should be professional and collegial, I don't need or want to be in an egg race or play charades or go hiking or do some other stupid "team building activity" with Betty from accounting.
The social animal bullshit is a myth. You can see it around you everyday. People in public places everywhere spending time on their phones rather than talking to people around them
It's true that we can see them everywhere but you'll probably notice that you don't know what jobs such people do and that those who you know and who need to benefit from others' experience typically do not do this. I tend to think there is a class (and a large one) of people who live only for their phone and social networks just because they have no life and they're trying to get one in such superficial stuff. Or maybe they just feel that nobody looks at them because they're not redefining the world and are not interesting, and they're trying to exist through groups of other people like them. It often makes me sad to see how they can be absorbed by these non-sense activities instead of simply being proud of what they are.
What happens when we swap phone with a hobby? I can't blame someone for feeling bad about themselves after putting themself out there and being ignored or hated on. On global networks, that feeling is somewhat amplified because it starts to feel like nobody would find you interesting, out of 9 billion people.
Why should we feel interesting? Well, I personally would not want to socialize with someone who found me boring. The juice should be worth the squeeze.
I am curious about your view on pride. The idea of pride is somewhat alien to me. What is there for an average Joe to be proud of? Most of us are trapped in an oppressive economic situation and are forever distracted from any meaningful goals in our lives by responsibilities and society's selfish expectations.
The loss of third places exacerbates the problem. People don't belong in their own communities, and they feel it.
"It often makes me sad to see how they can be absorbed by these non-sense activities instead of simply being proud of what they are."
....because "being proud of what you are" doesn't work when no one cares about what you do or who you are. Then, your options are two-fold: you either become an isolated loner who doesn't care about socialising, or you participate in those superficial activities in hope of human connection.
Maybe it’s not a myth, in a sense that without a phone they had to interact and learn how to do it, but that is too bad compared to what phones give for free.
No it doesn't, false dichotomy. Addiction can coexist with socialising, see pubs for evidence of that. Also, the instincts that drive us to be sociable may also make aspects of social networks enticing. In the same way that desire for sex drives porn use. We can not always tell the difference between artificial experience and real.
How does this reconcile with learning and the internet? Or books? The assumption that someone is using the addictive apps or services is the flaw in your argument.
Same with bars, people can go to a bar not for the purpose of socializing at all. They may simply want to get away from home and be left alone while drinking some beers at the bar. Maybe the in-laws are in town. I do this myself.
Some people don’t need socialization and yet aren’t “loners”, their focus is just elsewhere. Trying to state all humans are social creatures is what a few posts up is about. Not everybody is the same, haven’t we learned that already?
We are social animals and having in person interactions would probably boost the team’s cohesion. But it’s not a requirement and we’d have plenty examples of projects built over virtual meeting and async communications.
As someone else said in another post, unless you like touching your coworkers during meetings then a camera works just fine.
And to jump onto one of your points, Linux is the big elephant in the room. Almost every company uses it yet there’s no office building for Linux HQ where the devs all go and sit to build it.
I agree the conspiracy theories don't add up. The potential benefits of WFH for employers are substantial. Lower real estate costs is direct money saved. Ability to recruit from a much larger candidate pool means they can hire faster and for lower salaries than otherwise.
There have to be meaningful downsides that CEOs and the like believe is outweighing all that.
> online whiteboards and planning tools vs. a real physical whiteboard with everyone holding their own pen and bouncing ideas around in real-time
I was wondering if there is an online whiteboard where every participant can work concurrently. I think excalidraw has a shared feature but I haven't tried it with > 2 people.
What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term? Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town? Do you still "know" them the same as you did when you regularly met in person for lunch or drinks? Is it awkward when you do see each other in person that one visit a year?
Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction. A pure voice-only relationship can feel close, but it's not the same thing. Current technology like Zoom and similar is just not a good replacement for in-person interactions.
How many times have you spoken right over someone on a Zoom call or Discord server? The social queues are erased, and things become awkward and less productive. Creativity (which applies even in engineering) is diminished when you have to use online whiteboards and planning tools vs. a real physical whiteboard with everyone holding their own pen and bouncing ideas around in real-time. To use Zoom et al effectively, the pace of thought and contribution are greatly diminished into a sort of per-turn dance.
WFH is fantastic when you have a head-down, concentration-demanding task that is very clearly defined. For most other things, it's actually harder to get work done.
WFH is simply not a replacement for team cohesivity. There is a great deal lost when you do not meet in person with the people you work with on a regular basis - we can't just sweep that under the rug because we'd prefer to sit in our home office. We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team".
That's not the say WFH doesn't work. Some people make an entire career working from home after all. It is simply an acknowledgement that WFH isn't as beneficial in all situations as you might believe.