I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices.
What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home".
That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would have a reason to work for WFH company instead, WFH company would have significantly less expenses (more profits/budgets).
Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.
That’s an unpopular opinion but given more than a decade of remote work experience I’d say: yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).
The „on average” is key however. I’d say that most of the people don’t understand the cost of remote work until it hits them and simply not all can bear that cost.
It’s not like people are unwilling (occasionally you can find slackers) but it’s more often things like issues caused by functioning without micromanagement (which is the case in many companies), problem with written communication skills, communication process not efficient for remote work (e.g. water cooler knowledge share which is foundational for people breaks without water cooler) etc.
Then there’s self-drive requirement that can easily be extinguished by home conflicts, non-prepped environment or depression coming from isolation and lack of physical movement. Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)
From my experience, both remote work proponents and opponents are right with their arguments but the crowd cannot be generalized. Some will suck at the desk, some will suck in remote.
As for „sit where I can see you” - that’s a standard offshoring practice, nothing new. You do get to the point of „who watches the watchers” conundrum sooner or later ;)
> Then there’s self-drive requirement that can easily be extinguished
It is 99% extinguished by low pay though. Low pay means person can't afford better living environment, can't afford leaving toxic partner, can't afford to go out or hobbies which leads to depression.
> Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)
That has nothing to do with efficiency. If you create fake family or cult environment, then it is easier to manipulate workers to do unpaid overtime. They "go hard" until they burn out and they then are thrown away like a trash by the corporation. Efficient teams are composed of happy people, who live in healthy environment. You can't have efficient worker who is worried more about their bills than their current ticket.
Burn out is hard to manage; its something that happens in the cruisy 20-something hour a week job as well as the 80+ hour pressure cooker. Probably not to the same degree sure, but its not the only thing going on here.
Its a whole lot more sustainable if you can build an identity around "here is my team, we are building {___}", and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.
Genuinely clear objectives can also be a great asset here; but I find that clarity doesnt scale. When Ive been a contractor working on projects measured in weeks or months with small teams, full remote is easy. At corporate gigs where the thing you are doing might be several abstraction layers from a customer; its harder to answer "why are we doing this?". In the second case being able to share in person is important; because its not just the work its the context and other people doing it thats grounding.
That motivation brings efficiency; at least for myself.
> Burn out is hard to manage; its something that happens in the cruisy 20-something hour a week job
Usually burn out is also caused by bad management. For instance, noisy open plan office where developers are mixed with sales and other departments to "cross pollinate" and have "creative juices flowing". Most people can't really focus on work and then are blamed for poor performance. If you have bills to pay, you often actually work after work, when you go home, to meet deadlines. Other instance I saw - "busy" meetings throughout the week, repetitive stuff, so certain people can be seen as they are "managing", also peppered throughout the day so you don't get more than an hour of uninterrupted work. Then again blame "why this and that is not delivered?".
> and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.
I accept that some people struggle to adapt to online asynchronous communication, but in person meetings are inefficient from creative point of view. They disrupt flow and don't give opportunity for everyone to be heard. Some people can give answers or ideas instantly (not necessarily a good ones) others need information to simmer in their heads for a while. You of course get a sense of achieving something, but this won't be optimal. Basically just cheap dopamine.
> its harder to answer "why are we doing this?"
Answer is actually simple. To pay the bills, have roof over one's head, to have kids in good school, to enjoy life outside of work. If you are employee or contractor, you are not building your own thing. It's good to always remember that and keep a healthy distance.
Its not really about building your own thing, its about identity... You are what you do.
If you dont understand the impact what you are doing has once its out of sight, how can you understand yourself as part of society?
Contracting is simpler in a way, "I made a tool for Steve so that he can better do his job" is an easy to understand story, and doing that 10 times a year makes your connections to the world fairly clear (Not to mention it builds on itself, as more people know you as someone who can make things for them).
Big corporate jobs, especially highly distributed remote ones, can make it nearly impossible to clearly draw a line like that. The narrow context of "I improved a tool that the Widget team uses to support the Tools team who build visualizations for the Documentation team" thirty layers down before you get to a thing customers touch. In person becomes important, because it lets you better understand the context of your work as "Part of the institution that makes fighter jets".
There's actually a fair amount of research on burnout. (Disclaimer: while I have read a bunch of this in the past, I do not have any links handy.)
From what I've read—and my first- and second-hand experience bears this out—some of the most important factors in whether someone burns out on their work (besides straight-up overwork, which should be painfully obvious) are
1. Feeling like their work is meaningful (as opposed to just shuffling numbers from one spreadsheet to another or something)
2. A sense of autonomy and ownership over their work (as opposed to being micromanaged and ordered to do a bunch of work that they don't understand the purpose of—see #1—or actively disagree with)
3. Feeling like they themselves are valued, in the ways that actually matter to them (as opposed to being given "participation prizes", told thank you for your 4-week 100-hour crunch sessions, here's a $10 gift certificate, etc).
(Note that #3 can be the trickiest, because what feels validating for one person might not for another. In particular, from my own experience, one of the things the division someone I know was in liked to do as a "reward" at the end of a particular period of work was to host a social gathering or party...but the person I know working there was introverted and shy, and this felt more like a chore than a reward. For others, though, it was meaningful and fulfilling.)
From everything I've seen, it's true that it's often easier to build these things with an in-person team, but a lot of that is just because that's what most of us are used to and have experience working with. I firmly believe that as we move forward with more remote work, we will, as a society, get much, much better at building the kind of camaraderie and bonding over the Internet that we have well-understood methods of doing in person now.
> That’s an unpopular opinion but given more than a decade of remote work experience I’d say: yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).
Thankfully that's just an opinion, and the stats bear out the opposite.
Regretfully, managers and workers who want to RTO will force us to do so regardless.
I still miss that one team that did async work extremely well. On my current team - fully remote, but siloed knowledge due to lack of capacity - there's a high chance that things go missing in dailies.
All this is very true. And to add one more thing that is the most problematic: many many people are horrible at determining if they're a type of person who works well from home or not.
I work 2 days from home and 2 days in the office. I couldn't bare full WFH for the reasons mentioned. I would get depressed in the end. I couldn't bare full office, for other reasons mentioned. I would get fully stressed out in the end.
Conted per day it is certainly more productive. Where I live, the progressive tax system makes the financial impact of not working full time less severe.
> yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).
Maybe, depending on the tasks. Also it depends on whether or not you take the view of the employee or employer. Say you work 8 hours a day (which even people in offices don't do) as the employer I do agree that you might get more done if people are in the office, but as the employee, I'll add my commute as well, so I now work 9 - 10 hours per day, part of which is completely unproductive. You also need to factor in that there is a shit ton of people who are fairly unproductive even at the office, they just look busy.
There are some fields where I can easily see the office being more productive in general, but you also have tasks where you move people for no reason. I think accounting is a pretty good example of a job that almost never require you to be at the office. Many companies even outsource this to other companies that most definitely isn't at the same office.
If you instead hired people to do a job, not be in front of a computer for 8 hours, then you could probably have an even higher level of efficiency. Imagine working from home, have a stack of assigned tasks for the day and be informed that once those are done you free to spend whatever remain of your eight hours as you please. I assure you that people will get shit done at light speed.
It's about management, and management mostly have not, and have no desire to evolve to handle work-from-home. You need better managers, more highly trained managers and managers that works harder than they do in the office, which many of them don't want to.
> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient?
I don't think the labor market is efficient to such a degree that we can draw this conclusion. Lots of startups are doing this, but it takes time, capital and luck to achieve the success of the big corporate competitors, which have a huge amount of middle management who hate WFH.
There is also the danger of being successful and then acquired by a big tech.
You will then be folded into the organisation, maybe the initially hired staff will retain certain perks but they will be eroded with time, and new joiners to the project would never be afforded the same.
> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.
Sadly yes. I was grumbling about finding a solution to a problem and a colleague overheard me and supplied a perfect solution, as he had the same issue a month before. Same colleague was grumbling about needing a specific non-OSS software and the paperwork around requesting it and I told him we have a subscription already and he can get access to it. Wouldn't have happened if not in the office.
My boss tries to keep me informed of what's happening and what will come, but often enough the best stuff is learned serendipitously at the coffee machine. A couple of times I challenged what I learned and it ended up correcting our strategy and saving money.
Ok but don't you have engineering wide slack/teams channels where these discussions can happen? If I think to my self 'man this is really hard to achieve for whatever company specific reason' I don't just stew on it for days by myself.
If you always post complaints to these channels, and nobody else supports you - you look like a complainer. If you first find some people with the same problem at the water cooler and you say "we have this problem as a group" then you are proactive.
I think that despite what LinkedIn influencers promote, a lot of people take advantage of wfh to be less focused on work. Not all, maybe not even most, but dealing with this (and not knowing who will fit into which camp) eats into the efficiency saving.
Also once the majority of a team is WFH, it's very tempting for management to take this one step further and start supplementing, then replacing, with off shore workers
Nobody is focused on work in the office, it's politics and coaster culture everywhere. WFH allows me to my work efficiently and quickly. I don't need to look busy because I'm delivering.
> a lot of people take advantage of wfh to be less focused on work
That has been my impression, too, but not for very good teams and often to a fairly small extent.
The bigger issue with WFH is that it requires a management that can write well, do virtually all comms asynchronously and still quickly spot and address both technical and people issues. My 2c.
It's non-existent in Western Europe around my field (electronics & embedded programming of small products that can easily be taken home in a backpack).
I mean there are tons of companies offering 1 or 2 day WFH, but what I was referring to was 100% remote. No office.
What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home".
That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would have a reason to work for WFH company instead, WFH company would have significantly less expenses (more profits/budgets).
Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.