Manager of a hybrid team here, 2 remote, 4 in 2 different remote offices, and 4 in the office with me.
My experience is that remote workers often have higher velocity but lower agility. When there's a well-defined task and little ambiguity, remote workers can usually complete it faster than in-office workers. But when the task is highly ambiguous, requires many course corrections, involves rapid communication, or relies on a large degree of trust, the in-office teams end up more productive. It all stems from known research on the benefits & detriments of office work, i.e. offices build trust and allow higher-bandwidth communication, but they also have more distractions and a less comfortable work environment.
I think the trigger that would bring people back to the office is a new economic boom based on new and unknown technology. That creates a highly ambiguous environment where you're forging ahead in unknown directions and need a lot of trust in leadership to make progress at all. Established companies with known markets probably would be better off adopting remote work - the employees work faster, and there are already well-known processes and strategic direction. Of course, if you're already well-established in your market, it probably doesn't matter what you do.
I totally disagree. I have worked remotely for more than a decade and run a team that is 100% remote. The company I work for is remote first as well. For white collar work, there is no difference between remote and on-premise employees. There is a huge difference between remote and on-premise leadership, however.
In my experience, remote workers are significantly more productive than on-site employees IF the culture is one of employee empowerment and trust. If you expect people to be mature, communicate effectively, and get things done AND you give them the tools and support to do it then being remote is absolutely no barrier. It just gives people an extra hour or two a day to think about things and do a little extra work because they are not commuting.
The missing piece is that leaders need to plan, execute, and communicate effectively. They need to empathize with their teams and work with people as individuals, which means extra time and thought and attention. Face-to-face work covers up for a lot of incompetence because that person is standing in front of you. Remote employees can't hide behind a herd and remote leaders can't hide behind an org chart. You don't need to spend millions of dollars on a building to cover up for poor leadership and weak culture.
For reference, I run a team of 10 remote employees and am responsible for highly technical engineers that support sales for a team that generates 8-figures of annual revenue on SaaS and on-prem software.
Have you worked in startups though? Organizations of 1-20 people where the whole company doesn't know who its customers are, why they would buy the product, or how to make money?
In my experience it's basically impossible to "plan, execute, and communicate effectively" in these environments, because if people knew what the plan was or how to execute it, someone would already have done it.
The company relies on quick and efficient feedback between employees, leadership, and potential customers. That's the part that's much harder with remote work. In a startup, if you tell an engineer to do something and it turns out it's impossible, you will see him grimace and cuss you out in person, and you can adjust the plan accordingly. With remote work, you don't get that body-language feedback, and he'll probably say yes while looking for other jobs and posting about how incompetent his manager is on Hacker News.
I’m running engineering at a small startup that’s full remote, it’s working fine for us. Don’t agree that remote work means you can’t have dynamic communication. It just means you need to choose the right employees and have an higher bar of alignment on how you work and communicate.
Don’t hire people who don’t value synchronous communication. People who want all communication to be async and don’t plan to respond promptly to messages (like the work/life balance crowd on HN) will not produce a dynamic team because that’s not the strong point of async communication.
Do quick calls when text conversation gets too long, build a team where you can expect people to actually make an effort to show up to the calls. For us we also have strategy calls with video regularly (but not too frequently), and make sure everyone is aligned to the plan and concerns are resolved before building. Make sure the team understands that for anything where they are unsure what to do or have any ambiguity around requirements, that they proactively ping the right people.
Doesn’t mean you need to be on all the time and that async communication is not valuable, but you need everyone to know when it is and isn’t the right way to go. So long as people are making a best effort to value communication speed it works out.
Hire people who are motivated enough to form opinions, and confident enough to say they really think. Most people are not invested in their work, or not invested in the problem space enough to bother making the mental and research effort to form valid opinions on your problem space. This is fine for when things just need to get done (not everyone on the team needs to be a decision maker), but foster those who are ready to invest. Make it clear it’s a good thing if they do form opinions and are willing to express their doubts about the strategy to others/leadership.
For us we also have very clear owners of different aspects of our operations and product. Someone will make the final decisions on those aspects. This doesn’t mean they make all choices, they can choose to defer to someone they trust to make the call. But someone needs to be clearly responsible, and others need to know that if a conversation is not resolving that they can pull the right person in to resolve it efficiently. People need to agree to disagree at some point once those responsible make a choice.
This general approach works for us, people don’t tend to hate their managers if they understand why choices are made, feel that their concerns are heard, and are aligned ideologically with the approach and way of working. But it does require choosing the right people and setting a higher bar for yourself on alignment.
Basecamp has always been remote and asynchronous and they seem to be doing well.
OP is talking about fast moving startups in an ambiguous environment, async is good but optimizing utilization doesn’t help if you’re going in the wrong direction. My point isn’t “don’t value async work” it is “don’t not value sync work”
Don't hire people who can't put two coherent sentences together in an email. I've seen many many of such types. They are tragedy in remote environments.
Async teams achieve dynamic results through multi-threading, not being really good at dropping everything else to do one thing at a time really well.
Ya but OP is asking about startups in an ambiguous environment. I think that works well when you’re more steady state.
I have personally experienced that effective multi-threading is much better when there is more ambiguity. I at least don't think it's a truism that for startups doing one thing at a time and doing it well is obviously superior.
If you present a plan in a meeting, don’t expect all important concerns to be raised right there before the meeting ends, people will need time and quiet to think it through.
Agreed, give many chances to raise objections.
I work for a remote startup and no, the parent, is correct. The company was previously languishing until they replaced the tech lead and hired me. Both of us can get shit done without being told what to do every 5 minutes. The previous people couldn’t. We’ve since increased our customer base and service usage massively, without any issues.
That is just a question of experience. A junior engineer needs hand-holding and a senior one does not. They had the former, and needed the latter.
The people we replaced were both mid-career. Just not good at taking initiative or anticipating future needs.
It's not like you're a junior until 28 and then you're a senior. You can retire a junior if your skills are that.
Disclaimer: Head of Engineering, been working in startups only.
I see a problem with that approach. To me, it's not about you telling the engineer what to do, they are not a tool to execute your bidding, they are a colleague with ideas how to achieve the goal you are striving for.
What is great about remote is that it kind of forces you to write down your ideas in some format, in PRs, in proposals, in documents. That gives the space and time for others to chime in, at their own pace, without your "body language" or your "room presence" shutting them down. Granted, it's not the American way with a top-down approach to startups, but if your working model is you simply tell your engineers what to do and they execute it, then imo you are missing 90% of their value.
I have never had anyone at work "cuss me out", whether that's been remote or in the office. That sounds like a very unhealthy culture to me.
Additionally, I stipulate that looking for inscrutable clues in people's faces can instead be replaced with building a culture where you reward people for speaking (or writing down) their mind and all contributing towards the common goal, and there is a healthy amount of discussion (preferably written). As a technical manager, your role is to provide a clear goal to your teammates, and work with them to a good solution, not analyze their body language and making decisions based on that...
I'd be doing the same if my manager's main job is observing my every facial expression and I am not allowed to say no or at least explain why I don't think the task that's been presented to me is possible to be achieved in the proposed way.
It’s funny how arrogant you are about all of these very basic human traits being relics of the distant savage past, as if you were levitating above everyone else.
It really doesn't for some people. I have coworkers who will never communicate through text; after the first 1-2 messages they always say "let's just have a quick conference call", and then it ends up endless as they talk. I personally mostly avoid them as much as I can.
To add to that, a lot of engineering types are also very neurodivergent and just do not communicate on that level the same way as other people, leading to copious misunderstandings and miscommunications when it's not a "say what you mean, and mean what you say" sort of environment. That probably makes a certain other type of person uncomfortable, when their main skill is social hacking and not necessarily efficient management, planning, or collaboration.
It is especially true for startups to be open minded and flexible. If engineers aren’t having those kinds of conversations, perhaps they do not feel comfortable being open and honest.
If we create an environment where engineers feel comfortable enough that body language isn’t required as the sole feedback indicator in this scenario, perhaps the entire workplace would benefit.
I agree with all that, but it's also significantly easier to build trust in an in-person environment where the employee can read the leader's body language and judge for themselves whether leaders authentically believe in the mission that they're having the employees execute, as well as their chances of success.
There's a reason why generals who lead from a desk aren't really trusted, or why when executives skip off to New Zealand it corrodes morale in their organizations.
I don't think that most people are disputing that it can work either way. But enough people are invested in staying remote themselves (I'm one!) that it turns into remote is better in all circumstances and people who want to be in an office are just as well-off as well.
That sounds like an amazingly poorly run startup with horrible leadership.
The startups that I've seen that are successful purposefully try to fix that problem. We flew people out to customers, had them shadow them to see how they worked, and had a group of customer advisors. Out of all the startups I've been involved with the remote ones have done the best.
Honestly, the manager you're describing is incompetent. Why is that manager relying on reading body language instead of building enough trust with their engineers where the engineers would just say "that's impossible?". It seems like that manager is doing a poor job and is using remote work as an excuse for their own lack of ability.
Why fly them out and not just video call?
But jokes aside, I think this is really unkind. You're never going to have perfect people or perfect situations. Saying a process works great under the best conditions is only looking at things inside a small sliver of reality.
How would you explain GitLab or other all remote companies that have been successful since 1-20 employees, given your analysis here?
The people pushing RTO have to ignore a huge amount of data in order to make their point.
OK, so... remote work isn't suitable for companies/startups with incompetent managers? But then... what kind of work really is
I feel this to the core.
If one joins an org of 1-20 people without understanding "who its customers are, why they would buy the product, or how to make money" then it is on them.
If worse leaders can be effective in office and not remote, isn't that a pro-office argument?
On identical logic: that on-prem companies don’t hire the best leaders because they aren’t needed.
For that to follow, you'd have to assume that its irrelevant anyway because the best and not the best provide equal value. Conversely, if the best provides more value no matter the situation then companies are incentivized to hire the best and RTO.
There are a lot more okay leaders than great leaders. And it is hard to developer new leaders.
I'm confused by this too. What good is an in-office leader if everyone else is remote?
The conversation is about remote or co-located leadership. If the lead is in-office and the team is not, it would be remote leadership in this context. The whole team needs to be in office to change that.
I agree with you. I find remote work infinitely more productive for ambiguous task as well. I have memories of being in an office and getting into conference rooms and dicking around for 30 minutes before the work actually begins. This doesn't happen with remote meetings.
Those conference rooms are often where you learn about unstated requirements. Or the real requirement that they assuemed was too hard to asked for so they put in something that would accept that they thought was easier (even though the real requirement is easier). That is also where you learn when the company is shifting directions and so you can start doing what the company really wants.
All of the above can be avoided with remote work. However it is a lot easier to pick those things up in the office.
I don't completely agree here, but there is some merit to what you are saying with regards to honing on some social cues, gossip, candor, etc. However, I'd still take being in the dark on some of this stuff in exchange for all the benefits of working from home.
You can skip all that even when in the office. However you run into real danger of getting fired because you are producing things that they don't need.
That is when you point to the ticket description and ask "where does it diverge from this description?"
I'm sure most would too. But this is more about worker efficiency than personal desires. People who say they lose zero productivity in every stage of work lose some credance when the underlying narrative incentivizes them to say that.
"If you expect people to be mature, communicate effectively, and get things done"
That's a big if
Alsi "communicate effectively" is easier said than done, esp. given it's a two way street and remote communications can be pretty challenging for the employees.
I think the SWEs can really take a lesson from the semi-technical sales people. World of difference even in a casual convo with them. I've been reforming myself too.
Semi-techical sales people are less technical than non-technical everyone else.
That's the point
That is what GP says, too. GP was saying the advantage of in-person is agility and course-correction, which require intense discussion.
Maybe with perfect leadership this is tenable, but when responding in a quickly evolving situation, I can see the advantage of in person. It just doesn't seem realistic to expect leadership to do all the planning. Engineers "at the bottom" often have better perspective and should be at the planning table.
My personal perspective: I'm currently 100% remote and enjoy the improved throughput. I also have had to get better at planning, as you point out. But when I have to do heavy coordination, video conference fatigue gets real. I'd prefer to be in person for those days with >3 hours on video.
I worked in-person for the first 7 years of my career and remote for most of the last 7. This was true until the pandemic. It's not true anymore. Even in-office workers at my current hybrid workplace are using huddles and threaded chats to meet and decide things faster than scheduling a room or walking up.
The only thing that was consistently faster in-office was the espresso machine, and even that flipped around when the Bambino came out around 2019.
Have you really had zero issues with brainstorming and team design remotely? I find it way more efficient to jot down messy ideas on a whiteboard than mess around with a virtual mock. Those are great as a polishing step once we reach a general approach we agree on. But constantly shuffling, panning, and resetting a Mirio board ends up with utter chaos IME
Literally none. PMs are disciplined, there's top-down and bottom-up accountability, there's good transparency of work status and blockers, and people can take days off, miss meetings, and still contribute to decision making because all the work is done in a shared space that everyone in the company can see.
We don't even need standups most weeks because everyone knows where everyone is just by looking at the related tickets.
The closest things to "problems" are in bridging front-end design and back-end implementation collaboration because they use different tools, but that was at least as big of a problem when it was turning whiteboard mockups and Post-its into engineering tickets.
I don't recall middle management being amazing in person - mainly I recall some unnecessary guy who spent all day on Facebook until he got bored, who then starts wandering around bothering people. With 100% remote, those positions just seem to be gone which is a big upgrade in my book - though I can understand why middle management is anxious about it.
I think the difference is 100% remote. Hybrid is the worst of both worlds.
Hybrid is my ideal option. I don’t think there is any point coming in every day, just 2-3 days to get all meetings and collaboration done, and then a few days at home to grind out the work that requires no discussion.
If all the same people are in or out on all the same days that could work.
That's how we do it. 2 days a week everyone I work with goes to the office, then the other days it's sales teams or whatever. Means you actually get a lot of value out of the time in.
Could you share about the way leaders plan, execute, and communicate effectively?
Do you have an email address or a contact method?
If you've been remote for a decade then what are you comparing it against?
You know both premises can be true at the same time, right?
Anecdotally having spent several years at my current job in person and now several years fully remote (whole company, full remote) I find it much much easier to do quick huddles and swarm on tasks/ideas. Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms). Now we can meet almost right away, no physical context switching.
As with most things it really depends, also having some people be remote and some in person is always going to disadvantage the remote workers and set them up for failure in management’s eyes so no surprise there.
"Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms)."
This may be a company-culture thing, but before remote work, collaboration at my past employers was always "Swing your chair around and open your mouth". It didn't take a whole lot of convincing or a conference room.
IMO this is the worst kind. It means I can be interrupted at a moments notice. Unfortunately, even the act of asking "hey are you free?" means I am sometimes broken from very deep concentration.
Remote Work lets me silence the things I don't need to deal with right away while those that truly need my attention I can prioritize ahead of time or there are ways to "break through" the silence because its urgent enough to warrant it.
I hated not having that level of autonomony in the office. Mostly, so did everyone else once they realized how this wasn't as nice as it seemed
This is exactly the tradeoff, right?
By definition this is more efficient communication when you can ping someone irl, interrupt their flow, and get an immediate response.
And yes, it’s significantly worse for deep work.
In exchange for losing deep work, you no longer have to write a detailed thought to your PM, wait 5 hours for them to ping back “sounds good to me”, then begin working on it the next business day not feeling sure if they even read what you wrote.
But you're also expected to meet your weekly "commitments" in JIRA - which means you're going to be working nights and weekends to do the work you're supposed to be doing since you were interrupted all day to do the work other people were supposed to be doing.
But you're right, this _is_ the tradeoff, and it's by design, since you're "exempt".
No. The answer isn’t nights and weekends. It is much easier to simply document interruptions. This also means that during planning you can now actually plan appropriately for your time.
Please don’t accept the narrative that exempt means unpaid overtime is ok.
If their supervisors believe "exempt" means "abuse this person with all the unpaid overtime", and don't respect their time and autonomy and expect them to respond to every interruption and get all their own stuff done, it's very unlikely that documenting those interruptions and "planning appropriately" will actually make a positive difference. More likely it'll just get them told they're being insubordinate.
Now, the ideal answer in a situation like that is to leave and find a better job. But if everyone in a situation like that could just leave and find a better job, we wouldn't have situations like that for long.
Yeah, I’ve worked in some very toxic workplaces. The other reason to document, is that now you have ammunition that you can take to progressively higher levels of management. Bureaucracies hate paper trails, and the sooner you can establish a paper trail the better off you are. But I do get it, often “heads down, do your work” is the only path due to factors outside of work.
I dunno; I'd say "bureaucracies love paper trails—they just want the bureaucracy's official paper trail to be the only one," heh.
But yeah; if you're in an organization that is not totally lost to corruption (of whatever stripe), or one that has to answer to higher authorities, like federal laws and the SEC, then documenting can be an extremely effective way to force, if not necessarily genuine changes of heart, at least skin-deep changes of behavior.
The case where I saw stuff like this happening second-hand (it was to a family member), the rot came, unfortunately, from the top. My family member was doing absolutely amazing work supporting the stated mission and values of the organization, and was having to fight tooth and nail to make it happen. Unfortunately, the organization's actual mission and values were much more along the lines of "make lots of money and pander to the people who will give it to us," so the job description was changed overnight to one supporting part of the organization that they had made perfectly clear over their years in that position they would have nothing to do with (because it was the part that most strongly violated the stated values). This was sufficient evidence that, after they quit and applied for unemployment, the state agreed this was constructive dismissal and paid out in full.
Only if you're totally overscheduled?
It is a balance: you need to do your own work, other people need you to do their work, and you also need other people to do your work. Depending on your and your company's culture you may need to block out sections of your day for deep work. Or you may need to ask your manager for support to not be the SPOF for a bunch of other people's work.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but every job _I've_ ever had ends up devolving into a 24/7 expectation without much in the way of appreciation. This seems to follow the person, not the company.
I've never worked in a place driven by JIRA, always companies where they just expect a small team to come out with a product or major feature on a timescale ranging from ~quarter - ~year. You're evaluated by whether the product or feature launches and how good it is, not by how many tickets you close.
We're measured by both.
It can be asymmetric though of course.
The smartest person on your team is going to be interrupted the most. The worst person on your team is going to do a lot of interrupting. So your highest quality producer will produce less & your lowest quality producer will have their incompetence papered over. With remote, a lot of this interruptions are now on slack, and searchable.
In an environment with a lot of juniors that need coaching, the office definitely excels. For a team of mature engineers trying to work on challenging tasks, it can be highly disruptive.
I've been in a fully remote job and gotten more built in the last year than in probably my previous 5 years in office. Meanwhile when I was in-office, most of my coding was after hours (back at home).
Remote also means I spend less time in conference rooms listening to monologues and more time on 1-1 or small group zooms with productive screen shares of code/data/probelms.
You should ALWAYS put your smartest/best developers on the least important project. This means your second best developers can grow to become your best developers, and nobody feels bad about interrupting the best developers. It also means if an urgent must do now project comes up your best developer is free to drop everything to do it - who cares that you just made the least important project late, while if they were on an important project management would have to think about priorities. (most do it now projects are things that can be done in days or weeks, if they are more than that it needs to go through the budget process)
Any large project will have plenty of technical debt that isn't important to clean up now but should be done. There are always new tools to try and see if they add value to your project. There are new frameworks to try that might or might not be worth telling everyone to start using for the next story.
The above does work for a tiny company of course. However for larger companies it is important.
How do you retain your smartest/best devs when you are putting them on the least important projects and expecting them to tolerate infinite interruption?
Certainly there is a tradeoff of coaching vs doing for seniors, and you want to raise your overall team up.. but in practice a lot of "agile" environments are very focussed on output, and want to see more points/stories out of higher paid people. It sets up an adversarial system where nothing is expected of some, and everything is expected of others.
You are also correct about team size. In an engineering org with 1000s of people, you want everyone to grow and no 1 person really matters.
In startups, small orgs, and teams of 3-5 devs.. you do need your best doer to, actually, well.. do.
The best/smartest get to work on interesting problems. They get interupted a lot, but between they have time to try interesting things that someone focused on the important wouldn't. They are the ones trying rust first. They are the ones asking "what if" and trying new architectures on a small scale.
That sounds more of a planning / culture issue than something thats unavoidable. At the beginning of the pandemic, this happended alot, where I had to wait for PM input or what have you, but eventually, culture molded to be more async and we were given more trust to do things we felt were right.
We re-structured meetings to be more productive, for example: PMs are required to write all the requirements in advance of a refinement session so everyone can read them first, and you are expected to have read them. This opens up for async discussion (via Jira messages) and come refinement meetings, a way to ask and discuss directly.
In the last 2 years since thats taken place, I have not had another instance of waiting on a PM for a response.
In cases where we need something more urgent, there are always ways to get a PM on the line ASAP, we have protocols for that (seldom used, but they exist)
Yes, there exist company cultures and management styles that greatly assist remote teams
You can write a deep thought at 9am get on with your day and wait. Same thing happens in person.. send an email from your desk and wait.
Not sure I see the difference unless you are roaming the hallways ready to pounce to ask them a quick question before their next meeting.
The hallway pouncers are well known. I am remote but used to visit an office and knew to stay away from people who would do the hallway pounce and you’d walk away with a bunch of work. No thanks dude!
In my experience those people take forever to make decisions anyway so you'd be doing exactly that from the office.
Unpopular opinion, but this seems more like an issue of developer comfort than actual productivity, similar to how taking adderall can make you feel more productive than you actually are.
If the product quality depends on you maintaining a flow state for extended periods, then you're either working in a research lab or it's a poorly designed product.
I say this as a dev who also gets annoyed when my deep focus is interrupted, but so long as the interruption is actually warranted (and with my company's culture it usually is) I swallow my annoyance, task-switch and get the job done anyway. I'm already earning a higher salary than than most people in the world with good benefits and flexible hours. I can be mildly annoyed at work sometimes if it helps get the job done.
I disagree. I can move through quite alot, quite well, when I can work in a deep flow. 2-4 hours of deep work can be incredibly productive end to end and we follow TDD pretty strictly, which lends itself well to really thinking about problems and their solutions in my experience thus far, but it requires the ability to really walk through a problem space.
Our code quality here has improved significantly around this, and we are shipping faster than ever.
That isn't to say I'm unavailable (or anyone else) its that there is an acceptance that not all things are urgent, and if they are, its warranted to break through any focus periods.
Doesn't sound like we disagree that much. You are actually available, but not all things are urgent. I'd say the difference at my workplace is that pieces of the product are extremely old, developed under different architectures with different technologies under multiple management regimes of varying quality. There's a lot of tribal knowledge, so everything is kind of urgent by default as someone new to a specific piece of code can't move forward efficiently without picking the relevant SME's brain. Forbidding interruptions would be akin to mandating "only the SMEs can work, and the rest of you need to waste money twiddling your thumbs or banging your head against obscure legacy code until they feel like helping you". Most of the time when I'm interrupted it's because someone's blocked and I have the knowledge to unblock them, or I can at least point them to who does, so my loss of flow state is their gaining the ability to move forward at all, and everyone benefits.
By contrast it sounds like you guys designed your product around maximizing the impact of flow states and minimizing the need for interruption. I bet you have good documentation too. I'm honestly jealous, it would take tens of millions and years of re-writes to do the same here, and our prime customer wouldn't be willing to accept the delay even if we had the funding.
It may not be that "only SMEs can work" but that "SMEs don't have 5 tickets this sprint but 3 high level deliveries over the next quarter" thus they are allowed work uninterrupted from the daily churn and focus intensely (contributing to their already high base knowledge). Whereas other engineers are constantly distracted and stay surface level trying to stay afloat.
I completely agree with this way of working, and we have the same “protocol” as it were. I check my comms once every one or two hours to see if there is any pressing matters.
So little is actually urgent, unless you have some business critical infrastructure you have to maintain, but that sounds like a different role entirely.
I think you've conflated quality and productivity; you started talking about one then switched to the other. They are related but not the same.
Certain dev tasks require deep flow for good results/quality. Robust refactorings, abstraction design and prototyping. Basically anything where you have to preserve invariants under code transformations. This isn't all dev work, and isn't necessarily frequent either, but when flow state is required it's usually important work that's core to a program's operation, so product quality definitely depends on flow.
If you're working on such a task, an interruption requires a return to that flow state to ensure good quality, and that takes time and will definitely impact productivity.
Other tasks do not require going very deep though and so achieving comparable quality doesn't require much depth in your flow. Interruptions won't affect productivity much in such cases.
My two cents.
I think the key point of the line you quoted was "for extended periods". Obviously flow states are useful, perhaps even required in some contexts, but to demand a full day of uninterrupted flow-state engineering bliss is IMO unrealistic and very often counterproductive. Software development at the company level is a team sport, and being actively hostile to necessary communication simply because it "interrupts your flow state" is the act of a prima donna or "rock star" developer. I've refactored a lot of code/been doing deep design work and been interrupted during said work. Did it make my personal task take substantially longer to complete due to the task-switching/getting my flow state back? Sure, but the interruption was for a good reason and my help was actually needed. On balance the interruption saved the company money and time because the drop in efficiency of execution for my slice of the pie was less impactful than what my help was needed for.
Now if you're getting constantly pinged for stupid shit that anyone could Google, then perhaps you should politely confront the person(s) doing so and make your expectations clear rather than declaring a pox on all interruptions.
Wouldn't this be true of just about everyone complaining about such interruptions though? I can't imagine anyone would mind being interrupted if the building were on fire. People just differ on what they consider to be good reasons.
I'm sure there are unreasonable people on all sides, both those asking for unreasonable conditions to interrupt them and those not respecting reasonable conditions for interruptions, but I don't think it's the majority of the people complaining about it. I've been in this situation a few times, and lots of people just don't have good impulse control and so don't even think twice about interrupting you if it's more convenient for them.
Did you notice that the grand parent is promoting instant interruptions with remote meetings? You're talking about being able to ignore your coworkers requests easier.
Seems pretty contradictory, no?
I also do wonder what the real value of it ignoring live requests is. You personally get to stay on task but what about what's lost? If you block two or more people isn't it worse overall?
Work should be structured to be as non blocking as possible in the first place. If its not, there is either an issue in planning, resources, or in (unlikely) cases, truly it has to be serial, in which case it should be planned accordingly
I'd also argue, that 2 people being blocked because of X should warrant breaking through any focus period, as thats clear indication of an issue that needs more attention.
If you're talking about 2 people being blocked simply because they don't know what to do, thats why companies should have proper mentorship programs in the first place, it was a need hidden because being in-office made this less visible of a need, but it was always there, and dedicated mentorships are better than ad-hoc problem solving in these types of cases. Not every senior needs to be in the "deep work" pool (we do mentorship on rotation where I work)
Which works if the work is predictable. If you’re in a dynamic environment, that’s not possible. Hence, agility.
To take an absurd example, military command shouldn’t be RO.
Noobs mostly do the interrupting and want to be able to interrupt.
On the other hand, the experts are just getting interrupted with noob questions, and end up helping several people with their tasks in a day and their own task is still there undone.
Noob get promoted and expert doesn't.
Expert hates the noob.
Clear enough?
Feels like and environment problem. One workplace I had was an open office, but it also had a few dozen "focus rooms". Very tiny booth sort of room with A desk and outlets. Someone in a focus room clearly shouldn't be disturbed, but in the open space you're generally a bit more open.
If you want to work in silence - become a monk.
Sr. Director; team is entirely remote. Company is half remote with 1 day per week required for non-remote employees.
My team is highly technical and generally requires deep thinking and little interruptions to make progress. The single best thing that remote work has done is stop the endless interruptions via shoulder tap at the desk.
Glad to hear! How do your engineers deal with impromptu messages in Teams/Slack disrupting their deep work?
It's a lot easier to put yourself in Do Not Disturb via whatever team chat option you're using than having to hide from someone tapping your shoulder at your desk.
I wrote localslackirc :)
I basically have the ability to completely block certain people, quietly ignore channels until I get mentioned directly (@here gets ignored), and cause the abusers of @here to not generate a notification for me.
I also don't see gifs and reactions, which is a big help in not getting distracted.
I would never feel comfortable interrupting people like that in an office. What if they’re in flow state?
I've spent the last 20 years or so working for large conglomerates that have multiple satellite offices in different continents so huddles were always on zoom anyway. But they're still insisting on RTO.
The tech isn’t there for quick discussion, it’s a very UI/UX issue especially for current generation of video conferencing software, there is a huge layer between digital and physical. Hopefully AR can bridge some of that gap.
Future job may look for prospects that are adept in AR office work and will be asked how well they use it
This is such a huge gap. Why there is no widespread more impromptu collaboration product I have no idea. I try to get people to use the excalidraw shared whiteboard any chance I get, at least that doesn't require the uncomfortable on-camera appearance.
There's got to be some other process we could try to recreate (to the extent possible) that "together" feeling of the office. Maybe set aside an hour when team calls into a meeting but just keep on working as normal? And can banter/ask random questions etc. Otherwise things are just too formal.
Is hard to replicate the physical instant access you get at an office and simulate it well in digital form. in the physical office space you cannot ignore someone while maintaining plausible deniability like if you were remote. You likely will be responded if you are face to face physically. I’m not sure if replicating that remotely is too intrusive for people to handle(forcing a camera to be on when requested).
You can always ignore people from remote till you are good and ready
Well, and getting together for lunch, or a beer/mocktail after work. Virtual socialization feels so forced by comparison. And no-agenda meetings don't work either.
I sort of agree on the virtual whiteboarding (it's partly a surface area thing) but I think we've also discovered that colllaborative docs work fine for a lot of purposes.
We had a product called Sococo some years ago, that showed active team members. You could 'knock on their door' and know whether they were ignoring you or not.
So it's possible, with the right interface.
Lots of teams/groups have open video conferencing rooms where people can just hang out without any specific purpose - while doing other work. It works to some extent.
Google meet works for my team. We have a few rooms dedicated to hang out in during the day. Some people leave the camera off, others don't. It reminds me very much of the office where if someone has a random question there are already people around to answer it. There is no expectation you have to be in a room but lots of people do it because it is fun and interesting.
If anybody wants to work on this find me on LI.
There's also the struggle of remote workers in a hybrid team unable to move up the ladder as easily as on-site workers for the same trust-based collaborative reasons you mentioned. It is possible that remote workers would look elsewhere for upward mobility, leading to more turnover.
Additionally, because the social fabric is weaker around remote workers in a hybrid environment, there may be a perception of them being less likely to remain out of any sense of loyalty or obligation. This seems like a potential stigma that remote workers would need to overcome in the absence of explicit inclusivity efforts by leadership.
Loyalty is a funny thing, because companies are not loyal, yet they want their employees to be loyal, without reciprocating in any manner.
I don't recommend holding loyalty to any company. Maybe to co-workers(s) or a direct boss (IE, if they leave, maybe you leave too. I've seen this happen) but certainly not to the employer, since it will never be reciprocated
I think maybe instead of loyalty just some appreciation for the things that were good. Otherwise easy to turn to this toxic Blind-style cynicism, that never sat right with ne.
I'm all about appreciation, and I don't sit well with the culture on Blind either.
However, there is a difference in appreciating a situation and being professional vs being ignorant of the ultimate fact: at any time, the business can just let you go, either via layoff or other means. Its best to be aware that unless you're in the C-suite, you're a cog in the machine.
That however, is not an excuse to do bad work or act unprofessionally
Agreed but the image of loyalty is valuable even if loyalty is never worth giving
A person is rarely so f'ed as when their manager _no_ longer believes that person would always act in their (the managers) best interest.
Nobody is perfectly loyal. However some companies are more loyal than others. Some places you regularly see 10% let go. Others go decades between laying people off. Of course things can change at any time, but both extremes exist and generally come with enough other culture factors that they won't change very fast without obvious warning (that is getting bought out)
Well, technically that would be a market inefficiency, so we should be encouraging employees to view their employers as fungible and switch jobs as soon as it's advantageous to them. If your employer is trying to keep you around through social ties instead of competitive compensation you're being taken advantage of.
So many of these managers are basically saying, "in-office is better because I get to engage in high-status behaviors with other people IRL." I get that it makes you feel good but that's not necessarily translating to the bottom line.
Nobody has any numbers on what is translating to the bottom line. There aren't any facts and even then the variables will be highly dependent on person, company, situation.
I mean, companies all did WFH successfully for 3 years without issue. The bottom line is probably more affected by multimillion dollar commercial leases than C-level "feels" about productivity.
Those 3 years would different enough in important ways so you cannot look at numbers to compare before/after.
That's not what the RTO proponents bring forward. A sincere "I prefer you to be here so that I can admire my kingdom and feel good" would be more productive than the currently preferred grasping for straws on why it's better for the bottom line:
Everybody gets a good laugh, and returns to their tasks, or coffee chats, or whatever it is that they were doing, where ever they were doing it.
I think this is pretty much the key to it, psychologically speaking. It comes down to status and personality type.
Higher status and more extroverted workers tend to get energy and motivation from going to the office. It feels good and is fun for them. Our brains have evolved to know when we're high on the social totem pole and give us copious feel-good chemicals as a reward.
For similar reasons, lower status and more introverted workers tend to not enjoy the office. They find it de-motivating and draining.
This isn't always the case across the board, and there are often other reasons involved like family/commute, but I think it explains the different camps fairly well in broad strokes.
All that said, an argument can definitely be made that having happy, highly motivated leadership actually is extremely important to a company's bottom line, so I don't think it can be so easily dismissed.
This can be made better or worse by processes and tools.
After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos.
A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.
I been saying for years that Teams is worse than Slack -- glad I'm not the only one.
Exactly.
The big killer is being able to pop into a team's room and say "hey tell me about VLAN X" and get an answer from someone. or even just figure out who to ask. with teams that's much harder, you have to play the "find the right person to ask" game, and the visibility is poor.
Teams is fine if you need a IM client for people who are in cubes on the other side of the office and integrates with the Office suite. but for distributed team use it's garbage.
Most of the company uses Windows. A few of us actually write code and are on Mac. For some reason, for me, Teams is perpetually disconnecting from the network and requiring a refresh. It's essentially become a worse email service for me.
Time and again I see this when these claims come up, it comes down to a lack of responsive cultural changes to new norms, rather than inherent differences in in-office vs remote work. If you change your processes and cultural norms to facilitate better work for all styles, everyone benefits. There are ways to overcome preceived deficiencies of remote work. In short, its a solved / solvable problem, but it means changing culture, and seemingly, thats what the C-Suite hates.
I would love to hear otherwise. I haven't yet seen evidence to the contrary, and I'm very open to it. I don't think executives like culture changing without their fiat, which is what happend in most WFH transition cases. Some did end up embracing it anyway, but over and over again as of late, its being walked back, and even Amazon admitted they have no data to backup their RTO plans.
The pattern of behavior I'm obvserving aligns (to me) with what I'm saying: its C-suite taking back control because it diminished their executive power and increased competition for labor, driving up labor costs.
100% agreed. I've noticed major differences between companies that are deliberately organized to facilitate remote work, and companies that deep down wish they could convince people to RTO.
The difference is palpable in, for example, whether and how explicit norms around asynchronous communication are implemented, whether office budget is repurposed into services and materials that enable remote work (including, for example, company offsites), etc.
It's obvious that certain jobs require in-person presence, but I think the big reveal is that most white-collar jobs don't.
The problem with hybrid teams are that there tends to be in-person communication happening in the in-office teams which the remote employees aren't brought up to speed on. That creates alienation and preferential treatment. And the latter is important since it isn't a blinded scientific experiment and the manager gets to pick and choose how to interact with the two different teams, which is going to shift the outcomes. If the manager was remote-only with 8 remote employees they'd have to adapt to 100% remote work and the bias would likely evaporate.
This is how it should be, if you care - return to your team in person.
In most tech companies, I'd agree. When I was on exceptionally good teams where everyone was energetic and responsive, remote was perfect. When I was on average teams, it was too hard to get a hold of remote people even if they were productive. The individual action is simple, respond to messages ASAP and take video calls readily (maybe aside from some prearranged team-wide "focus time"), but leadership didn't set this direction.
I'd like to think that any new software workforce can arrange itself to be remote-only if it really tries, and it'd be much better off that way. Can also see why an existing company would rather bring people in-office.
I think this is a problem comparing older remote companies which likely selected for people who are good at working remote, but an average employee / team won't be as effective.
I've worked in a rather average team remotely during Covid and it was pretty bad. Lack of communication, difficult to get hold of people, low productivity. The team fared better before Covid for sure.
That aligns with my (admittedly anecdotal) views as well. I wonder if thats part of why so many managers and leaders feel lost without in-office culture. Most organizations are not good at that kind of explicit communication and organization, and remote work magnifies those flaws. So instead of trying to reduce ambiguity and improve the process accordingly, they instead just wish people could come back to the office and absorb that inefficiency.
And I'm just talking here about dysfunctional organizations, there are plenty of valid reasons for a functional organization to need in-office culture if they need to work through "legitimate" ambiguity (like designing a new technology or product).
Explicit communication is harder as you don't get feedback about what people don't understand. A conversation means you see the blank look on the other's face and know to slow down, or see they got it already so you can go faster. Without that feedback you have to carefully go into extreme detail about everything because you can't be sure the other understood any other way and that is a lot more effort - most of that effort is wasted because the other would get it with much less, if only you knew that.
I'm not typically a statistics hawk.
However your team having 2 members that are remote, then generalizing it to all remote workers is a bit of a leap.
Outside of that I do agree. New technologies that require a high degree of experimentation and discovery lend themselves to in person work.
It's really 6 - the ones in remote offices effectively serve as remote workers for the purposes of management effort & management style. One of them is a singleton anyway - he has a desk in the office that is local to him, but he's the only one on the team there, and I don't really care whether he comes in.
Also about half of the rest of the org is remote - folks that collaborate with my team, but who I don't have reporting-line responsibility over. So there's a good sampling across 30-50 people who I interact with as teammates as well.
I would resepectfully disagree. I think this depends on the engineers you are working with.
I have been remote since 2014, so far before the pandemic changed all of this. I also have 25+ years of experience.
I am able to handle architecting a major enterprise project fully remotely. The entire tech stack, writing code, handling pull requests, highly complex issues requiring communication between myself and other people to ensure everything goes smoothly.
It does.
We release updates on a weekly cadance and everything thus far (2 years with this current project) has been smooth sailing. And the number of issues, new features, and requests addressed in each update is significant.
It can be done remotely, without issue. I spent over a decade in the office, with an hour commute each way.
I am never doing that again.
With such a user name it goes without saying :)
I totally agree. If you have a task oriented job, working from home is great. More focus, more comfort, more efficiency.
If you are a CEO and need to bounce ideas off of I.T., legal, finance, marketing with highly dynamic environment, definitely need to be in same location. Think war room or command center.
The CEO of a large company will certainly have in-person face time with their senior leadership team (among many others including customers). Their office may also very well not be in the same location as that of many of their first or second level reports.
When I go to the office. I am in online meetings talking to my colleague (and others) next to me.
Come on now. Maybe that's true with workers who are not very good communicators or proactive yet, but it's not true if they are good at it. I've been involved with plenty of fully ambiguous online open source projects and they've all been incredibly nimble and excellent at resolving complex disagreements and decisions quickly.
I have been running remote teams for many years. Offshoring has been a thing for a long, long time. Globally-distributed businesses have been a thing for a long, long time. I had been lucky with some walkable commutes in the past and the period immediately preceding the pandemic, I would walk 20 minutes to the office, sit at a desk and spend my day on Slack and Meet with my dev team in South America, my clients in the midwest, my account managers in California. Maybe get a coffee with whoever was around, then walk home. There were days I just didn't bother going in and nobody noticed.
The economics of it are purely about labor efficiency. A company in the midwest that needs tech services isn't limited to service providers within driving distance. Service providers aren't limited in hiring. Talented people in developing nations get ready access to first-world markets without needing any connections. This was all thoroughly proven and justified before 2020.
Too small sample size
I think the same. It's also (IMHO) way more important to work in person together at a startup, where that agility has maximum application.
I agree with this. I manage a fully remote team, and the bottleneck on delivering complex technical projects is the inability to effectively communicate. Slack/Teams do have limitations as communication tools.
We are just now shipping novel biotechnology to market (cancer screening via cell-free DNA fragmentomics), and everyone that can be remote is. I'm skeptical that being in a new market in of itself makes RTO competitive. I can see how being able to hold people hostage IRL would be helpful in a state of emergency though, and a hard pivot might qualify as such.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Mine is the opposite: when I work remotely, I work. There is only measure my work can be estimated: whether I finish my tasks on time or not. But when I'm in the office, there are many distractions and productivity suffers, not to mention the fact that open plan offices are completely unsuitable for zoom/teams calls.
Maybe it's easier for managers to accept all of the workers' stumbling when there's more contact between them. Rapport lubricates forgiveness.
Remote work seems to only be a manger problem.
So how can we help managers feel more "in control?" Or where can we hire managers that are like that?
it just comes down to willingness to stop and chat with each other. at a company of sufficient size everyone is in different offices/cities/countries anyways so you'll always hit some sort of odd issue. You just have to be able to control what you can.
For me, being in office would add nothing, because my team is split between two cities, and if i ask a question outside of my team its highly likely we're talking about crossing oceans.
Like anything, its about communication
Interestingly I see divides like that in the fully remote parts of my org, so I think it may be more related to what those teams work on rather than work style.
In fact our in-person teams have the opposite reputation: they are slow but theoretically work on high business value problems, while the remote hive mind takes care of business in the background.
I believe it is more nuanced. Full disclosure: before moving to UK I worked for seven (7) years in a remote-first company. And while it is certainly possible to run with a fully distributed, remote-only organisation, not every company can do that. The company would have to have been built, from day zero, to not merely "support" remote working but to fully endorse it. Starting from the founders.
When the plague hit, I was one of the few who knew how to transition from office to remote without a glitch - because I had the experience for how to do it. I honestly believe that fully remote can work only for a select few businesses, but mostly remote is perfectly doable for vast majority of tech and tech-adjacent companies.
To start, remote work self-selects for two types of people. Seniors, who already know how to work independently and productively - and the reasonably well-off who have the space and can afford to dedicate a physically separate study as their office. The overlap between the two is significant.
Several things are fundamentally more challenging in a fully remote setting. Such as...
1: Training and/or onboarding juniors. People entering the industry need constant supervision and near-synchronous assistance for a prolonged period of time. The first two years of your career you are clueless. Yes, you too, a HN reader. We ALL were! Training juniors takes time, skill, attention and - let's be honest - a personal touch. Doing that remotely is possible, but a lot harder. And only really possible in a company where everything has been built, from the ground up, to assume remote-first for everybody.
2: Active brainstorming. Bouncing ideas rapidly off of each other depends on establishing a rhythm where any communication delays are detrimental and can crash the cycle at any time. Having to devote brain cycles to communication delays and/or equipment detracts your attention.
3: Mob debugging. Very few things are more effective at complex root-cause analysis than having two or three people cluster around the same set of desktops, with enough large monitors to pull up new dashboards on a whim, and a whiteboard or three ready for quick scribbles and ad-hoc diagrams.
4: Random encounters. The US term is for some reason "watercooler effect", but in my experience "not at the office"-effect would be more accurate. If your culture manages to encourage people to take a walk outside the office setting, a small but meaningful fraction of those end up with valuable insights and outsized productivity boosts. Getting away from the physical office, while discussing things with coworkers, is an essential aspect.
5: Cultural cohesion. Maintaining a good company culture is tricky when most communication happens without leadership having any clue of it taking place at all. The only solution I can think of is solid trust.
Replicating or reproducing any of the above in a remote-only setting is incredibly hard. However - remote work has enormous benefits that don't necessarily show up directly. Such as:
Ten-second commutes. The ability for a remote worker to effectively flip from at-home mental state to at-work mental state, without having to endure commute is an incredible advantage.
Disturbance shutdowns. At remote work we can completely block off coworkers (or managers) from disrupting the flow. Just remember to also set your phone to silent.
"Friendly face effect". When your mostly-remote workforce does meet in person, they tend to spend time talking about things they have had simmering at the back of their minds. Stuff that has takenl iterally weeks to form. And they are for most parts happy to see each other. Compare that to office work, where seeing the same faces day after day gets dreary, really quick.
Encouraging async communications. When you have to properly think through what you want to convey, and actually take time to do it right, email chains can become quite fruitful[0]. Sure, the latency of communication may be slower, but the S/N ratio for non-combative topics tends to be high. (For combative topics, nothing helps. Best way to resolve them is to put the people involved in a cage and let them pummel each other to different shades of blue.)
For all of the reasons above, I believe that for most companies the best approach in the long run will be "mostly-remote". Have people meet in person for couple of days every couple of weeks, so that they can get all the synchronous activities done in one batch, and then let them disperse back to their home offices to focus on their real product-oriented work.
Onboarding juniors and non-senior new hires is still going to be tough. For companies that thrive on hiring newgrads, it's unlikely they could ever embrace remote work for real.
One of the unexpected downsides of mostly-remote is that a company going down that route is incentivised to have location based salaries. This works, mostly, when their staff live reasonably near large cities. But by incentivising their workforce to relocate to lower CoL areas during employment, they are actually also encouraging social isolation. I saw this first hand - and it's not healthy.
0: Writing a good email takes time. You may have to spend an hour on it, just to ensure that readership can not easily misunderstand the message you want to convey.
the key part is really trust. there's no substitute for in-office work on that matter. 100% agree with your take on this.
I concur.
I’m a remote employee (no company office in my city)
I work remote 3 weeks and then 1-week travel to be in office.
It’s a great balance of the dynamic you described.
To me it's all gray. I agree that in person makes room for freeform chat, exchanges, collaboration but it's also a swamp of masks and fluff where people just chat, annoy, babble, disrupt and nobody is enjoying any of it.
A good internet link and company hosted audio/video room is enough for us to share issues, unblock, pair or cut some slack.
The new technology is already here: LLMs. OpenAI requires 3 days per week in office
Seems like the kind of task that should have never been created, but required you to schedule meetings first, which you didn't.
Failure on your side.
The modern Internet, the WWW, Linux, etc. and most of the core infra as we know it (and take for granted) was built in the 90s by people worldwide largely communicating via IRC and mailing lists.
If that's not an example of new and unknown technology, then I don't know what is.