I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.
Sometimes you don't want to formally disperse some information but are happy to let people overhear what you think.
An environment where people can find meeting rooms when they need them, can find peace and quiet when they need them but also generally have co-location means good team cohesion.
If developers are remote, you will find that your code-base becomes the same. That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.
Yes, when working face to face too many (formal) meetings can be a problem, but don't abolish co-location just abolish the meetings.
And don't be a cubicle farm. Yes, if you think the alternative to remote work is an anonymous grey cubicle on the 5th floor of an anonymous office block (or just as bad, the 'trendy' exposed ducts open plan office), then remote work will look like nirvana.
Of course I'd also recommend being somewhere with good public transport and have flexible working hours so people aren't forced into long commutes in poluting personal transport. Also offer and allow occassional remote work to further ease that demand without losing the benefits of co-location.
I got to say, I disagree with nearly every point here. Taps on the shoulder are the worst, anonymous cubical farms would be way better than the current situation (all open offices), skype/zoom/etc. are all immediately available for impromptu meetings, I'm not sure why working on code independently would lead to more silos? Does everyone always pair program in offices? Do you theorize less design meetings or something?
Plus remote you can not play the butts-in-seats game, get non-work related life things done at your leisure, wear whatever clothes you like, shit in your own bathroom, don't have to worry about anyone tapping you on the shoulder, eat what you want when you want, the list goes on. Theses are just the immediate things that come to mind.
I’ve done multi-year stints of both, and it’s highly contextual. For ICs I get the quiet and focus is a net win (assuming proper self-motivation and no social isolation issues). However for high-level or cross-functional collaboration there is no online tool that approaches the bandwidth of two people in a room with a whiteboard. The energy in person, serendipity and the ideas that come from prolonged close collaboration (especially in a startup) is hard to quantify but it’s real. It’s not optimal for everyone all the time, but then neither is full remote.
The energy in a person bears zero relevance to how good their idea is, though.
I found remote team code reviews to be much more objective. That way most people aren't worried they'll shame someone in person and they give better and more useful feedback.
The energy you speak of, while very real, is not related to the quality of the work that will follow.
You're talking about two different things. I work almost entirely non-remote. If all I did was write code, I could do so remote. I collaborate with people in 3 continents, probably 10 timezones, maybe more, many of whom I've never met in person, when it comes to code.
But design is a different beast. Collaborative design of complex systems has a few stages. There's a rapid prototyping stage where 3 people in a room bouncing ideas off of each other and scribbling is better than anything else I've done. Then you circle back with a document that formalizes things (like an RFC). The second part can be done with a distributed group. But the first part is better when people are close to each other. You see this even in distributed groups like OSS projects. They have conferences and work sprints where the maintainers can be colocated for a bit and brainstorm about things in person.
Sure, but you are not actually contradicting me as far as I can see.
I too collaborate with colleagues in different time zones but design and tons of brain-storming is not the main focus of our work. When we need to do that, we do long video calls with shared diagrams -- or we just scribble with the mouse. Works quite alright 99% of the time.
I agree that the rapid initial stages of a project are best done in person but failing that, there are replacements, and they are not as bad as many in this mega-thread claim.
Rapid prototyping should happen every time you need to add or change an abstraction. With the way many (most?) software projects work, with new feature requests and requirements appearing along the way, this happens all the time. With new requirements, the old abstraction often doesn't fit 100% anymore. Applying a few band-aids to the abstraction is probably fine, but at some point you will need to reconsider the design, or you will end up with a design that does not match the problem it's solving, making the code difficult to follow and therefore error prone.
In my experience, this need arises very frequently in complex systems with evolving requirements.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I fully agree! What I was saying is that the initial rapid prototyping of a project is happening only once.
Our company offered us to sometimes reconvene physically and discuss such things but since our team are all family men, it hasn't happened yet. But it is a really good idea and we should reconsider actually doing it sometime.
That 1% (and is often more like 5 or 10) can have big implications, but you can just have an on-site, it's a lot cheaper than having an office year round. Plus you can do it somewhere fun and it's a great perk and team building exercise.
So you're going to discuss all your designs in February? What if you need to make a major modification to a design, or like some priority changes or whatever.
The whole idea of agile is to design iteratively and reactively, but you're throwing that away.
I suppose if your process relies on that type of design happening regularly, remote work is not going to allow for that. But I don't think colocation is a requirement of iterative & reactive design.
I work on a remote office, and while I definitely agree that the rapid prototyping stage works better in-person, current tools help a lot - we have a pretty large app that was built 100% remotely (I did ask for in-person meetings but there was no budget).
Honestly, you can collaborate and do almost everything remotely. What does lose a bit is team building, you have to go a bit out of your way to build rapport (but it´s also doable).
I'm still learning how to be more personal while remote. An always-open casual video chat room is a fun idea (especially if you have a screen with it always open in the office!). Games (while on video chat) might also be fun.
Have you ever used a video conference or collaborative online whiteboard? If the actual scribbling is important, have you heard of these things called drawing tablets?
Yes, in fact the company I work for provides, bar none, the best experience for video conferencing and collaborative online whiteboarding I've ever used. We go to great lengths to reduce latency and make the discussion feel as natural as possible.
Its still, at least to me, markedly less productive, than an in-person meeting.
Like I said, conferences, summits, etc. These are done for a reason. Not to mention that there's some research I've seen that suggests that places like Bell were so successful because they cultivated happenstance interactions between smart people that don't happen in distributed environments.
I think that conferences, etc, build up on the human element and are important, but not for the reasons you mention.
My current belief is that a 95% remote team works, you do need in-person opportunities, the more the better, but at least once in a project can be enough.
I don't see how this is related to the previous matter discussed -- namely that the energy projected by another person is somehow helpful for work getting done.
I think this is more or less the consensus opinion among managers, which is why we mostly have office jobs that support some WFH rather than fully in office or fully remote.
IMO, that's because managers favor butts-in-seats and the idea that they can "see you working".
IME the only people who actually like open plan offices are managers, extroverts, and flakes, most of whom irritate non-managers, introverts, and non-flakes.
The managers I’m referring to don’t need to see you working. They want you to see you collaborating and socializing with the team in person, but are fine with you doing your actual coding at home and rarely if ever touching your desk. The office is open plan but usually pretty empty, as everyone is either in conference rooms or at home.
It seems like there isn't a great digital replacement for a whiteboard yet. Maybe a tablet and stylus, but I haven't used a digital whiteboard enough to justify buying or setting one up. Incorporating the stylus/tablet into laptops isn't a new idea, but I've never owned a work laptop with that feature.
There are, but they’re expensive. There’s Google’s Jamboard and Microsoft’s Studio Hub as a couple of examples. You could also go the iPad and Apple Pencil route and just use similar apps, or the apps for those products (i.e. Microsoft Whiteboard app), but that’s still fairly expensive if that’s all they’re used for.
There are lots of inexpensive online whiteboard programs that work fine. You just need to get used to typing and using the drawing tools, or buy a drawing tablet if that's really important to you. You can get ok graphics tablets for $25.
> there is no online tool that approaches the bandwidth of two people in a room with a whiteboard.
VR will change that at some point. Even in today's infancy, there are some VR apps that give you that sense of presence with all the other tools needed and then some (whiteboards, screen-sharing, projecting your desktop on a huge screen, etc...)
For remote workers to be effective, a lot of things that go unsaid or unwritten have to be written down. If you have that, then the difference between sitting in the same building and being remote isn't as pronounced.
But also if you have that, the advantage of sitting next to each other instead of just in the same building is also less pronounced. It's also easier to train your replacement, and some people are terrified of that.
You can learn a lot about the problems or architectural issues with your system by participating in conversations, and that supports the bullpen organization of offices. But you learn a ton more by participating in private or one-on-one conversations. In public only the brash get to talk. In private people will share their real fears as long as you don't belittle them for it. And those fears may reveal existential crises that are brewing in the system that nobody talks about.
It's much easier to have a private conversation with a remote person than it is to have a private conversation in a bull pen.
I mostly agree with you. But I do see what OP is getting at. There's a lot of accidental innovation that occurs during casual bull sessions over coffee breaks.
In a remote environment the tendency is for communication to be more formalized and structured. "Hey, are you available for a call. I just want to go cover X, Y and Z, then I'll let you get back to work." Often time half-baked ideas end up getting polished into important innovations. Without some sort of channel for informal, impromptu discussions a lot of ideas get overlooked.
For me it's the social aspect. I don't mean 'socializing' at work (although that also helps). I just mean avoiding isolation. Being physically distant from my team leads me to start feeling detached from them. But it's different strokes etc. I know myself well enough to know that I pull a lot of motivation from the sense of camaraderie I get by being in an office with people I like, so fully remote work is not for me. In fact, any more than one telecommute day per week is too much for me. Not everyone is like that.
So what I really wish for is increased flexibility.
Remote work eliminates any incidental information transfer. It makes it much harder to have a company culture, which is especially difficult for juniors and new hires to get an understanding of what's important and what's not.
In theory, sure. In practice, I've never had a Slack conversation or video conference which felt as natural, rich, spontaneous or productive as a focused discussion in person. I say that as someone who worked fully from home for five years on a remote dev team.
That's not to say it's not useful. It's better than email, leaves a neat record to come back to and supports asynchronous communication. There are advantages. But strictly speaking, no, you cannot capture everything good and useful about in-person conversation using text and video. I don't think it should be controversial that much of the richness of in-person conversation - tone, nuance, body language, facial expression, spontaneity, speed - can't be meaningfully replicated through remote mediums. You can't get all of these things from a message or video chat. You can get some of them well, and a few others decently, but it isn't the same.
I like remote work a lot and wish more companies would support it. That being said, in my experience when people give honest, cogent criticisms of remote work they mostly receive responses which don't speak to the spirit of their point. In this comment thread, for example, the person you responded to is talking about difficulties. You are responding as if the person was talking about impossibilities. It is (emphatically) not impossible to function as a remote team, and very few people will try to make that case. But in the world we live in and with the technology we currently have, there are things about in-person discussion you will not be able to capture on a remote team.
If nothing else people have different values. Some developers enjoy being highly social when they're working, others don't. Some don't mind interruptions, others do. Many people feel a sense of comfort and empowerment by using Slack or Zoom which makes it easier for them to have productive discussion, for a variety of reasons. Likewise many developers do not get any of the same enjoyment out of a Slack or Zoom conversation that they do from face to face communication.
The vast majority of chats seem to take much more linear time than a 1:1 conversation. Multi-tasking them just means 5 people are tapping you on the shoulder within a near-timeframe. So 5X worse than an office? Slack is often the worst part of some email and forum hybrid.
I often wonder how many problems used to be resolved because people worked together in the same location vs now it feels like the 10 things I interact with in a week are broken or require finding a work-around. Many of the chats are "how do you get around this?"
Video conferencing is great for people taking turns presenting, but my experience is that Zoom with high-end integrated conference rooms on 1Gbps fiber cannot support conversation. The latency and audio processing wreck the normal “traffic control” protocol for interactive discussion. Participants don’t perceive and yield to others trying to jump in, like they would in person. Instead you get a sequence of monologues, which requires formal moderation to work decently.
IRC/Slack/etc is great because you can have informal conversations in a channel where your whole team can observe and participate in a more asynchronous nature.
Human conversations are fine, but you generally don't get a durable record of them after the fact, and only those present will have a chance to participate.
Yeah, I've been remote first for three years now and don't have any of these problems. Perhaps OP had a bad experience. And not knock IRL first — there are definitely things I miss about being in an office but they are all social aspects and not work — but I think remote first does have a lot more benefits. It's also tougher, the discipline required, the social isolation, all difficult issues.
TBH, OP sounds like a manager. Which is fine, but their experience is usually constantly worrying people under them will work more slowly when given more freedom. So, since their job is contingent on the people under them doing a good job, its easier to claim accountability when they can physically seem them in their seats every day. People who talk about "impromptu collaboration" generally aren't individual contributors.
This seems rather uncharitable lol. Managers, or good managers anyways, are constantly connecting conversational channels -- conversations between product, between developers, facilitating conversations between product & developers, etc. Take the communications challenges that pretty much everyone buys into with remote, and then put someone at the intersection of that pain point amongst multiple people, and they're going to have a unique perspective.
I have a feeling that we don't have more work-from-home-first jobs because (middle-)managers wouldn't know how to deal with that. They are not quite there for such change.
And I'm talking about the "simplest" things. Like properly defining a task. Tracking it. Signaling when it's complete. Managing risks, changes. Communication. And so on. To have as most as people at an arms reach is just too convenient to workaround any shortcomings on the managerial side.
If in the general case, i.e., working at offices, all together, we're nowhere near[1] excelling on those "simple" management stuff, things would collapse in a work-from-home situation pretty easy.
I also don't see, in general, (middle-)managers changing their stance in favor of working from home either. Don't see them getting ready for such change. Prepping to work with virtual teams in any future and such.
Perhaps, those who believe are ready for such change could (myself included), somehow[2], show theirs capability. Slowly pushing the changes bottom-up by improving his/her own communication skills, reporting, risk and change management, displaying availability, to such an extent that the concerns of those (middle-)managers are barely noticeable or reasonable?
If we could show that we can organize ourselves and coordinate our efforts towards a goal, effectively, while working remotely, those concerns about remote work could start to fade.
I believe the point I'm trying to make is that we could show better that remote work works! We could be better sellers of this paradigm. Show how we can actually help those worried (middle-)managers. Like safely climbing a ladder, one step at a time :-)
Would be this a good opportunity to create a work-from-home manifesto, in the same way we have an Agile manifesto? I don't know. But that would be something interesting to collaborate on for sure. I might put some thoughts on paper about this subject for starters.
PS: I was an IT project manager for many years, working both on-site and remotely. Now I'm a software developer working on-premises for a big company in my country not friend to the idea of remote working at all; so I could contribute my experiences and views on this subject from both ends, I believe.
PS2: non-native English writer here. So if you find something that needs clarification or correction, please let me know, I'd be grateful to accommodate those kind of feedback. Would be more grateful if you share your thoughts too, though :-)
[1] yeah, I'm aware that there are famous cases of success, but I believe those doesn't account for the majority of offices.
[2] not sure how right now.
> In fact, they won't just work slowly, they will actively work towards sabotaging your project.
If your estimation and metrics tracking doesn't catch this remote, it won't catch this in an office. It is true that it's easier to hide incompetence and laziness, but perfection is the enemy of good on those scales.
Protip: If things get this far, it's the manager's fault. I've been remote before and also managed remote ICs, and you learn who needs the frequent checkins and status updates and who can be left more to their own devices. I had someone waste 2 weeks going down a useless rathole, and I learned quickly that I needed to be more involved with their prioritization and planning, and that was on me. It didn't happen again.
This. Failure of remote working is usually a problem with managers who don't/won't/can't manage remote employees effectively. If they can't manage based on results, only on "butts-in-seats" whipcracking, then they should get a time machine and travel back to a time before the internet, like in a sweatshop.
Whenever I have challenges that are difficult to Google (architectural, lots of different views/opinions etc all of highly technical nature) I feel that I don't ask, because as others mentioned here; asking for time face to face is so much easier and better than setting up a Zoom call. I feel the same for all interactions, whenever I'm alone at the office I always tend to save interactions to whenever people get in because Slack/email/hangouts always incur a cost to communication. This said, ppl should def be able to do remote, however getting people in to the office sometimes still has a lot of value.
Agree. With tools like Remote VS Code it's definitely as good if not better than in person because you each have your own creature comforts but share the same workspace (even terminal) and can edit the same file at the same time.
I don’t get why it’s always presented as cubicle farm vs fully open floor. My company uses semi-open offfices; you have an open office with 8-10 people in a team, but don’t share space with other teams. So it’s access to the people you work with directly and no more.
Technically yes, but it feels very different to an open office with 50 people in it. <=10 is small enough that everyone is able to respect each others' privacy, noise, etc while still enjoying some of the benefits of an open office such as turn-your-chair-around collaboration. I think we need a new term for when <=10 people are in an open office. It just isn't the same as what is usually referred to when someone says "open office".
That's the "team room" concept - each team has an "open office", but it's not open to all the noise from everyone else. There's a door for when the team is heads down on stuff.
I work in a 10 person open office with lots of separation - 1200sqft, 7 would be better but there is no comparison to a 50 person bullpen with everyone within arms reach of another.
Every team on the floor is in a semi-enclosed room with an opening into the hallway (no door).
In practice noise doesn't really leak from rooms into the hallway, so it's not a problem most of the time unless something extremely loud is happening, like a dog acting up or someone building flatpack furniture.
I think it's safe to say there are people who work best in radically different environments. I can't stand working from home, or working from a coffee shop. I also can't stand offices where everyone is just wearing their headphones as if to say "don't you dare ask me about something important that I know a lot about." What's the point in being at the office?
In my opinion and experience, professional programming is a deeply collaborative experience. But of course other people who ostensibly do the same kind of work have completely different preferences, and that's great. It does mean that people need to be very careful what kind of company they take a job at.
I agree and disagree with both of you. There are real, tangible advantages and disadvantages to both.
My approach is to embrace both at the same time, by almost always coming into the office, but arriving before 0700. The first half of my day is super focused, uninterrupted work, and the second half is relatively unfocused, talk to people and be talked to at random times kind of work. I leave around 4pm.
I've had no substantial problems going home so 'early' among the eight or so orgs I've worked at in the past couple of decades.
The bathroom in my office is nasty. Nobody has a gallbladder and they all eat greasy food. It's a shit factory and I hate being here for that reason alone.
the thing is I'd rather shit in the office bathroom, it's so much nicer than mine. I'd rather eat the FREE food at the office, it's so much better than what I could cook spending money and time.
I sometimes regret weekends because I don't have access to those things.
Your argument seems to be that optimal/ideal office working is better than remote:
"An environment where people can find meeting rooms when they need them, can find peace and quiet when they need... and don't be a cubicle farm. Yes, if you think the alternative to remote work is an anonymous grey cubicle on the 5th floor of an anonymous office block (or just as bad, the 'trendy' exposed ducts open plan office)... I'd also recommend being somewhere with good public transport and have flexible working hours so people aren't forced into long commutes..."
Of course this ideal would be great!
But this also totally misses the point that in reality, the reason that people are often attracted to remote-working is precisely because their experience and environment fail on some or many of the ideals you list.
As such, you've not constructed an argument against remote working - just a (valid) argument against most office writing environments.
I'm a remote worker. The office I was in is as described. Fantastic place to work. I went remote because I don't want to live in a high cost city and I don't want an insane commute. I was commuting 2-3hrs each direction for years to allow myself to live in the mountains and forest but still have a good job in Orange County, CA. I've now gone fully remote and it has been fantastic for my work life balance that I'm still trying to get right.
2-3 hours each way for years? That's pretty crazy. Depending on the road though, you probably had many moments of deep introspection by spending that much time alone in the car. And plenty of time for audiobooks / podcasts. Interesting life!
a fair bit was by train, and that was a tremendous help. I have consumed a whole lot of audiobooks, haha. I prefer multi-book series, where the longer each book is, the better. Plenty of 40hr+ books. I figure I went through maybe 150 such books. As part of the commute was by train, I could work or do other things there, but for driving, audiobooks all the way.
I assume I'm going to have to work with remote people now. In essence, the people in an office might as well be remote. There's almost always someone working from home. And when everyone is in physically in the office, many people don't like being disturbed, so you gotta hit them up on Slack and wait for people to respond.
I would argue that if a remote worker is dissatisfied with the physical setup of their remote office, that's on them, not the employer. Having a team that does not prioritize remote-first-style communication is another situation entirely.
> the reason that people are often attracted to remote-working is precisely because their experience and environment fail on some or many of the ideals you list.
Disagree. They want to live someplace that doesn't have the highly paid jobs that, say a city or tech center would have. A San Francisco salary with a Modesto cost of living. Or they want to do the digital nomad thing.
Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.
> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.
The "open office" has been repeatedly studied and proven sub-optimal on many aspects that impact both employees and companies. Yet companies continue to design new offices with these designs. I would love a fully-remote gig mostly because it would be respite from the open-office.
"Remote work requires discipline" is true. Some people find it hard to stop working, others find it difficult to focus.
I'd say it's 100% different, but it's not necessarily difficult. We need to talk about how change is hard on the one hand, and how remote work is different on the other, and not conflate the difficulty of the two together to have an effective conversation.
There are fixes to just about all of the problems people mention including dedicated in-person time occasionally - just not all the time.
Based on your "onsite" it sounds like you're a consultant or with a pro-services firm servicing clients, rather than part of a product company. I don't think as consultants you can really have the same freedom because you cannot control your client culture, and the client culture will dictate how effective you can be when remote. I would argue that if you're a client-facing consultant you first have to put in the time before you can really consider going remote because you need to build the trust and understanding to do that. That can be hard, and many client cultures do not understand it and will have a hard time connecting delivered functionality to value. They value, instead sometimes, a butt in a seat.
Recently transitioned into consultant work, before that I was a silicon valley native who worked at big names and startups.
Remote work is difficult because when you are remote and care you feel pressured to do more work to make up for the missing office political presence you get from being onsite.
That human interaction is much more important than people want to acknowledge
Been there and understand that completely. I transitioned from full time on-site to a remote worker with the same organization which meant that I understood the things I needed to work to replace when I started working outside the office - that was a huge edge compared to folks that joined 100% remote.
While I don't feel pressured to do "more work" necessarily, I think where I have seen intensity increase is in making more of an effort to actually speak to other humans adjacent to your work. This might require taking time out of your day and end up causing you to spend more time.
Overall I find being remote allows you to focus more which means you can often get more done in less time (if you're on maker time) so hopefully this doesn't result in many extra hours.
If you're on manager time (which I often am) then this is a whole different challenge of course, but it's an interesting one.
Mainly I would say it's best to balance your self-pressure to do more (coming from a fellow person who cares). Doing more work probably won't help, but ensuring you have regular touch-points with the right people will go a long way toward people knowing you exist, what your value is, and providing you with context to execute effectively without guidance.
Probably saying something you already know but feels good to type it either way :)
Like maybe a week ago there was an article on HN arguing that true blended remote/onsite is impossible. That at least some of your office co-workers won't be inclusive to remote workers (e.g. refuse to use slack).
It's all about forcing in-person workers to use the same communication tools as remote workers - which is worse for those particular interactions, but better for the company overall.
After 9 coding jobs and a year or three in labor and service work at each end, I much prefer fixed schedules.
On-site is best, tho I think taking away time flexibility could actually be a boon and help make remote work tolerable.
Working for minimum wage now as a green waiter with people juggling 2-3 jobs and/or kids and a marriage in the Bay Area, more than any office colleague, I observe that fixed schedules work. The gig people I interact with are far more stressed than my colleagues.
Apparently tangental perhaps, I think this case helps isolate factors of logistics well when contrasting the more common cases; and I think it’s a wise way to go, and am building a life to support that type of engagements. Thanks for sharing.
The opposite can sometimes be true. I work remotely about 1 day a week. Some days I get in about 4 hours of real work and others it's in the 12-16 range. In any case it's a different environment and requires some self-awareness to be effective.
I'd still prefer remote of an office fully optimized for what I'd want in an office. For me, remote just works so much better. I can live where I want, I can work hours that work best for me, I can spend time with my family rather than commuting.
Another benefit of remote work is that a company that's 100% remote has to spend time thinking through and improving communications and culture in ways that are optional for other companies.
> Another benefit of remote work is that a company that's 100% remote has to spend time thinking through and improving communications and culture in ways that are optional for other companies.
I have been working remote for years, and one reasons why companies hire me over a much cheaper resource in other countries is that I am US-based working US hours. If I started working crazy non-standard hours, I will no longer be employed.
Plus, the company saves by not having to pay for more office space, parking, cafeteria, yadda, yadda. Instead of cramming people into an open office like battery hens to save money on high SF office rents, people can work remotely, commute less, and save the company money on offices. The cost of communication software is far less than even the skimpiest open office rent and build out.
> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.
I’ve worked at many companies who spent a huge budget on the office, but I was never offered my own office with a door. Anything less is far from optimal.
When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2009, I had my own office with a door. A month into the summer, a teammate (another intern) moved in to share it, but we still kept the door closed and basically stayed out of each other's way (she was pretty awesome though, wish I'd stayed in touch). Productivity was incredible. And if I got stuck, it was more worth my time to stay put a few minutes at least trying to solve it on my own than to bug anyone else.
As a full time dev in one of the world's most valuable companies, I don't even have a cubical wall between me and my teammates. If anyone wants to speak, we all get interrupted.
> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.
Sorry, but most companies nowadays use open offices, which are absolutely anathema to me.
Here's the thing: I absolutely want to work in a cube farm. I want to work in a traditional office environment with individual cubicles in a suburban office park. Unfortunately, there are very few companies like that anymore.
I like my current company. I like it a lot. We're a B2B telecom in the northern suburbs of Dallas with cubicles as far as the eye can see. I'm happy here.
But if I ever end up leaving (which isn't going to happen anytime soon, because I'm happy here), then my next job is probably going to be remote, because I seriously doubt I'll find another non-remote job that matches my criteria. Sadly, the kind of company I prefer working at is a dying breed, and I'd rather work remote than work in a trendy open office environment that caters to millennials (hell, I'm technically a millennial, but everything to do with millennial culture makes me cringe).
I don't think "most companies" use open offices. I think it varies.
I do agree with you, when I graduated from college, I explicitly didn't want to be in a cube farm. Graduating me was an idiot, and I very much do want to be in a cube farm.
Also, I don't think lumping "millennial" as the cause of open offices is the correct reason. I feel like it's initially attractive for a lot of college grads, but it's generally opposed by people with experience. If you're at a place that doesn't have the working conditions you like, it's because they don't (or can't) value you enough to provide those conditions. I'm a millennial as well, but have only worked in an open office once, and that was when I was younger and had less experience.
Individual offices I understand completely. Cubes? Seems like a very cheapskate version of a real office. I've never worked in one though, so I guess I can't quite understand it.
> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.
I kindly disagree. Open spaces are more prevalent than ever.
Dowtowns where office space are plenty are hell to commute.
In general I think companies want bullet points “we’re a great place to work” perks to recrute new people, but overall comfort or ease to work doesn’t seem to have gone up IMO.
Yeah, I see all these companies with open plan hell pits claiming to be a "Great place to work!", and I have to say "Compared to what, a sweatshop in the third world?"
The commutes are awful, the parking is expensive or non-existent, the office is noisy and crowded, the culture is repressive, the compensation is below market, but they all claim to be voted "Best workplace" or "Top ten place to work" or some such.
Hypothetically, if the going rate of a developer in San Francisco is $250K and that's what I have to pay to hire someone locally, but I can hire someone from anywhere in the country, if I know the going rate in Modesto is $120K, why wouldn't I offer them $140K? They would gladly accept it.
Companies also don't offer San Francisco salaries to people living in India even if they are equally qualified.
Why not? As a business owner why would I pay $90K more than I had to? Since my pool of candidates is basically the entire country, that means my pool of potential candidates who would happily take $140K and be able to work remotely has grown.
"As a business owner why would I pay $90K more than I had to?"
For the same reason might ask why they would take less than they have to.. although it is true that the candidate pool grows, the pool of jobs we can select from is also worldwide.
I mean, I can afford to work cheaper if I want to, but I don't have to because people will pay... the principle works both ways.
Why would I take a 140K/year job just because the people around me are living in abject poverty unless I have to work locally?
I'm remote working from a folk festival in rural texas. I have a cousin here who is homeless when she's off the ranch. I don't think it would be good for anyone for me to set my pay based off her pay.
Well yes, I agree. I don't think anyone would argue that though. I believe the argument being made though was that a company didn't need to offer Tech Hub market rate when they could simply offer above-market rate for a remote worker, and then both parties would come out economically ahead.
The way your comment was worded, I thought you meant accepting $140k/year was akin to being in abject poverty, which seemed like a very uninformed view of the world. I don't think that's what you meant though.
Gitlab gives few reasons in their handbook [1]. The obvious one is: "If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results."
Because I assume they have a headquarters which would be empty. Firing high-cost of living, high expertise employees to hire new ones (might be senior level, but not well versed in the problem) does not sound wise.
The employer doesn't care about an employee's cost of living. The employer wants to pay as little as possible. The employee wants to make as much as his local market will allow. What the employee will accept is based on his other alternatives which is indirectly based on the cost of living.
> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.
My last 3 companies over the last 7 years (I'm new to one of them) have:
* open offices (2 of the 3) or short-wall cubicles. That latter actually had a noise meter to try and flag when people were too loud...but they had to make it mobile so it could be wheeled around to the area that was currently the most complained about.
* A constant battle to find open conference rooms. All 3 changed offices while I was there, and promised more meeting room space in the new office. All 3 quickly found it wasn't enough.
I don't doubt that the companies are trying to make the open office space as nice as they can, but you can only polish a turd so much - they are still committing to the open office spaces.
> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.
Ha! Not my company.
Why can't it be both? I want remote work because our office environment is horrible and my company isn't likely to change that AND I don't want to commute (after my company moved it's offices).
They make parts of it as optimal as possible (free food, nice facilities, readily available supplies). They do not bend over backwards to make the actual work environment optimal, as evidenced by all of the open office plans.
Not at all. I think that some folks just don't work well in such circumstances. A close friend of mine was much like you: he craved the social environment, and the immediate collaboration with peers. Personally, I'm the opposite. I hate drive-bys, I crave the flexibility to work when I want and how I want, and the social interactions offer no real value to me.
I think it's great that you know how you best work. It's a key to happiness.
> If developers are remote, you will find that your code-base becomes the same. That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.
That's just patently false. Not only can this happen in co-located work environments, but is often symptomatic of a poorly functioning team rather than how they're located on the planet.
> but are happy to let people overhear what you think.
In my experience, most engineers in offices spend their days with headphones on because they’re trying to drown out the office noises. They’re not going to overhear anything. Also, again, in my own experience, even if you don’t and are listening to what’s going on around you, you still can only overhear what’s said by those relatively close to you. That is, the probability of overhearing something useful has been, for me, incredibly low to the point that it hasn’t been worth it.
> rather than grabbing her for a “Can you look at this?”
When I’ve worked remotely, we’ve often sent each other messages asking to explain some code or hopped on a quick screenshare to go over it. Bonus: due to the asynchronous nature of text chat, I don’t accidentally interrupt the other person. Also, the more that is done in text chat, the more of a record of it you have when you inevitably forget. Its much better to be able to do a quick search in your chat logs than to re-interrupt the person to explain the thing again.
> But whole-team remote work? No thanks!
I’d rather have everyone remote, because it means you can optimise the company around it. If only some people are remote, or people are remote only some of the time, then companies tend to treat them as second-class citizens and optimise for in-person.
Personally, I prefer remote work, but have had a hard time finding it lately. Half of my opportunities require me to go to an office to work. I don't complain much, as I increase my hour by ~40% when it is not possible to do it remotely. That also comes to compensate for the time lost in commute, the extra money spent (e.g. transportation, food), and the fact that I can't really choose the hours I work. This last point is always funny, because my employers always tell me I have a completely flexible schedule. Their faces when I ask if I can come to work from 10pm~4am is priceless though. "Oh, your hours are 100% flexible given that you come anywhere between 8am and 6pm", heard this so many times it got funny.
PS: writing this at the office, feeling sleepy... they won't allow remote work... and this computer takes a while to build, 23x more than my personal workstation, I timed it.
To be fair, in a lot of place it is probably illegal to work those hours.
Where I am from, 11pm to 6am are night hours and you need a special contract to be be able to work during those times. This contract is subject to restrictions (i.e. the employer needs to prove you need to work those hours, e.g. you work in healthcare, retail, ...) and they would need to compensate you more per the law.
Same thing for Sundays.
Where are your from? AFAIK in the US most developers are paid as salaried exempt employees, which means they never got overtime pay and can work any hours. I don't think the restrictions you state are generally true anywhere in the US either, even for hourly employees.
This. That's one of the reasons. Here anything between 22 and 5h is also considered night work. If your work is nocturnal (e.g. a security guard) you receive a "night time bonus" on top of your hourly rate. If it isn't though (e.g. a programmer), in theory one would need to receive double hourly rate to work those hours. This does not apply to contractors here, but is an issue when hiring someone as a formal employee.
There are several type of people of course and there's no correct answer. And for good personal reasons usually. A lot of asocial introverts are likely to have an issue with open plan offices but might do just fine in a private office - yet some of them would prefer only working remote.
Developing personal rapport with the colleagues is often another factor. I have seen remote-only people join the "office" camp and consider it more productive and motivating, simply because they found a workplace that they liked more than working remote, with one of the factors being relationships they developed. Some even prefer the synched schedule over flexible hours.
Personally I am remote-only but I appreciate everyone's different and not everyone work the same way.
> If developers are remote, you will find that your code-base becomes the same. That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.
I have not found that at all. With good engineering practices and mature developers, no one should be gatekeeper of any functionality in any environment, remote or co-located. Inside a good piece of software should be idioms that work across the whole platform, so that no matter what the code does, anyone in your team can pick it up.
If you have a bad mix of junior and senior developers, and either of those groups are left to go on programming tangents that are outside of the idioms of the software then yeah, you're going to find yourself with code no one else understands, or tools no one asked for in the codebase. But that was a failure of the software's architecture, and the way you trained and managed your team to work within it.
I'm not saying it can't happen on a remote team, just that it's not a problem caused by remote work. A remote team is not any less competent just for being remote.
No your not. We’re building products with remote teams and I’ve to tell you compared to co-located teams it’s just pure hell. My conclusion is: either everybody is remote or the team needs to be co-located entirely. The middle ground results in entrenched warfare between the 2+ parts of the team.
> either everybody is remote or the team needs to be co-located entirely. The middle ground results in entrenched warfare between the 2+ parts of the team.
Are you sure? I’ve worked remote and worked not remote, and trench warfare between team factions can happen in both situations. It’s leadership and culture issues that leads to that kind of collaboration breakdown, and can happen even with locally collocated teams. In a large company many of your collaborators are going to be in other cities anyway.
I agree it can happen in both cases. I think the likelihood is just way greater and efforts to build a strong team thus way higher in the remote situation.
Having been remote to a much larger team (at Google) in the past, I know where you're coming from, but I'd also like to point out that this is a question of balance and communication structure. In my case the team was about 20 people, and myself and another guy were remote, but in the same time zone. The co-located team made no effort whatsoever to disseminate information or seek my input. As a result, I sometimes had to undo or re-work other people's changes because they _thought_ they understood the gnarlier bits of the system, but they really didn't. As you can imagine, sometimes this led to confrontation. I lasted about a year and a half, but I was extremely productive during that time, communication notwithstanding, mostly thanks to the constant communication with my TL.
The point I would like to make is, in that team of 20 not sharing information and not seeking input was a problem, even though people sat right next to each other. And that problem could have been solved very easily by putting most of the decision making into one pagers, Google Docs and bug tracker, as well well as by defining the goals more clearly.
That is a cultural problem which remote team members did not create, but merely magnified. It existed before we joined and after we left. It resulted in a project which you need to have a PhD in computer science to figure out how to use, and as a result few teams inside Google use it.
Which is a long-winded way of suggesting, that if introducing remote workers shows some cracks in your team structure, perhaps there's a deeper reason why, and things aren't 100% ideal to begin with.
I've had that experience when there are two teams each colocated but remote from each other. They tended to build their own culture and that quickly becomes us and them. I've had great results when there was one hub and a lot of individuals working from home. We shared a culture. My guess is that an entirely remote team would work well too.
Good question. My feeling is that distance creates emotional separation and vice versa. Maybe because remote communication is abstract and misunderstood quickly.
BTW: The best I’ve read about this so far is: “The Culture Code”
Once you've worked in a environment with healthy technical interaction on an organic basis it's qualitatively and quantitatively better than a group of remote workers. There is so much shared information that is lost when you can't just strike up a conversation.
But even for fully on-site teams the preferred format of a "knowledge base" is digital (wiki, Google Docs, etc.), because it's something that lasts, can be improved over time and is always accessible. And having the discussions stored digitally (Github issues, emails) is also usually preferred because it's "asynchronous" and it's something that can be looked up in the future.
So on-site teams also use Wikis/issue trackers/emails a lot. The difference is that instead of a face-to-face chat remote teams have to use Slack. Which is also largely used in on-site teams... So my point is that some of the modern IT offices already resemble a "co-working" space because all the tools are already digital, and all meaningful knowledge sharing already happens in the digital space.
Some humans do not think on their feet. They often need time to digest thoughts and new ideas. If you start observing this behavior, you will notice that an impromptu brain-storming session often results in a couple of people talking and many others observing.
It ends up being highly productive to the people talking, and very frustrating to those who are observing.
If you don't see this trend, your hiring practices may be optimized for finding only one type of person - extroverted people who can say things quickly.
Consider that you may be missing out on some very good ideas from people who aren't comfortable with quick context switches and immediate requests for feedback on ideas.
So, the secret to a good office, is to be enormously wealthy?
Because to have a nice high-quality office (not cube farm, not open-plan exposed-ducts) that's also a large office ('where people can find meeting rooms when they need them and also peace and quiet') in the pricey core of downtown ('somewhere with good public transport'), and to also have your employees afford to live downtown too ('so people aren't forced into long commutes')
It's all true, I agree with all of it, but it's super expensive. Even to do just one of those things is pricey, to do all of these things is enormously expensive.
I've worked in profitable companies that had that, but then Wall Street started demanding more profit, so the work environment (and headcount) was easiest to cut, but has the worst long term impact on the company.
Good public transport exists where people live, as well as in the priciest parts of the city. A suburban office, or one in a medium-sized town would be walkable for a large portion of your staff.
I've been working mostly remotely for my clients (in office part of 1 day every 2 weeks; I do charge my billing rate for commute), and I enjoy remote work tremendously. I wake up at 11AM (without an alarm), and all I need to "get to the office" is go downstairs to my work desk (I don't do work anywhere else as a way of enforcing the separation and creating the routine).
"Can you look at this" at random points in time would ruin my productivity.
Open plans ruin my productivity.
Constant bullshitting at the office that has nothing to do with work ruins my productivity.
Not being able to do my work between 7PM and 2AM (when I'm the most productive) ruins my productivity.
Commute for 1.5 hours a day ruins my productivity, too.
I actually have my own company now, and while it's just me so far, when it's time to hire people I will structure it such that it's remote-first, and I will hire from all over the US, and possibly all over the globe when the company size allows.
You don't need an office for team cohesion. You don't need a bunch of meetings for that either. You just need reasonably clear goals and responsibilities (this is the hard part, but only when you have no clue what to do), the rest can be handled pretty easily via email and GitHub. Have a weekly Zoom meeting you want, to sync up.
If remote is the alternative to the open-office, chit-chat hellscape of non-cubicles and non-offices, I'll take remote 100%. If I have to choose between destroying my hearing long term with loud music to drown coworker's conversations and working from home, the decision is simple.
This is far too reductionist. Of course there is a middle ground, from open work spaces that emphasize quiet (library style), to small "pods" that hold 6-10 people in a team, there are a lot of options that companies provide.
You also do not have to "destroy your hearing with loud music" to avoid coworkers conversations. Earplugs are cheap and available, and industrial grade noise protection (25db+) is available for <50 bucks. Unless you're opposed to wearing any sort of headphone/earplug at all, then you have to heavily screen your potential employers to get the environment you want.
> rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence
Is that experience, or speculation? Having worked remotely on large teams for a decade myself, I've had just about the opposite experience. The unavailability of a component's main developer can be a powerful spur to dive in and take matters into one's own hands, vs. the short-term convenience but long-term bottleneck of always walking over to your hypothetical Naimh for assistance. This effect is seen all the time in large open source projects, even for challenging code e.g. in the Linux kernel. If your experience has been otherwise, that suggests more about your team than about remote teams in general.
Actually I liked cubicle farms. I had my own space and could have meetings at my desk if I needed to and would go over and chat with my colleagues a lot. I mean it wasn't visually exciting but as a work space for a order company it had a lot of good qualities.
Also the complete social isolation for at least 8 hours a day (sounds) like it would be awful. Honestly confused as to why anyone thinks they would like that. Everyone I know who have tried working remotely complains bitterly about it.
I never understood this argument.. you don't go to work to socialize, you go there to get work done.
I am of course respectful and cooperative with my fellow coworkers but my relationship with them ends at 5PM.
I personally find the offices that push for forced socialization quite frustrating.
After working remote for the past few years I love the fact that I no longer have to commute, am in charge of my time, can eat what I want , have better sleep, can exercise and have the luxury of actually getting work done.
Not to mention remote work majorly helps people with kids / newborns and also caters to women who need extra comfort during pregnancies.
When I was working in a big office, I actually had to arrive early or stay late to get work done (I'm not kidding), because those were the only non distracting hours.
I suspect the reason why most companies are not remote is because they rather keep a tight leash on their employees and celebrate the butt in chair "work" rather than trusting them with actual work.
I can understand why you might feel the way you do, but have a hard time understanding your confusion. Given that social isolation is a common punishment for children and prisoners you can't understand why people wouldn't want to work in a socially isolated environment? Sure, you don't go to work just to socialize (well, some people do) but that's quite different from saying you shouldn't expect to get any socialization from work.
You must be more active when working remotely wrt. seeking social interactions. When working on-site, you get some of the interactions for free. When working remotely, you must actively organize them by yourself. I know people who get MORE social interactions from working remotely because they have more energy/time for things like meeting with friends, clubs meetings etc.
Remote work doesn't mean "Sit in your home by yourself." It means you can work remotely.
I just switched to a remote job and at first, it did feel pretty socially isolating. But it doesn't have to be. You might be isolated from your coworkers, but you have to choose to isolate yourself from other people. Depending on your working style, there are dozens of places that work great for working.
I don't spend 8 hours in isolation. I lunch with my wife, pick the kids up from school and walk my dogs. I also get to go run on my local trails (as I can just work later / earlier from home to make up for it). As long as my work is done, the company does not care where / or how long I sit at a desk for. I don't have a big brother monitor making sure I stay isolated at my desk for 8 hours a day.
Yes, people by and large are different. I'm sure there are some people who would enjoy social isolation. That said, in my experience most people who claim to be special and enjoy social isolation deeply regret it.
Well, personally I am. I also think it's the sort of thing where a lot of people like it until they actually experience it. That said, if you do enjoy it, all the best.
>I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.
In my office talking is EXTREMELY discouraged, only certain people have messenger, email is for specific uses only, dress code, in the winters it easily gets into the low 60Fs in the office and in the spring we start seeing upper 70Fs and even 80Fs in the summer, we get 30 minutes for lunch and the closest fast food is 10-15 minutes in traffic, been here 13 years and we just got the right to wear jeans last fall, no office phones, open office with team leads effectively in the back of every row to watch everything you are doing, shared desks with other shifts, not supposed to even look your personal phone, can't go microwave your food on the clock but only 3 microwaves for 100~ people, 1 drink vending machine that wouldn't take cash or coin for the past 3 weeks and is often empty for most choices, parked off of active runways so our cars get coated in unburnt jet fuel/deicer/bird mess, parking lot is cratered nearly as bad as the moon (not exaggerating), photo ID has to always be visible, cameras on every entrance and exit, have to sign in at your desk but it can often take 2-3 minutes to even get a browser open which means realistically you need to be here 5 minutes early, minimum, every day, have to fully log out AFTER clocking out before you leave --- as you don't have admin privs software hangs and you have to force close it every single time you log out because it wants to update (mostly looking at you adobe), even if there is a county travel ban for snow/ice we're supposed to work our full shift...
Yeah man, I'd love to be able to work from home given there is nothing I have to do here that I can't do from anywhere with a computer, a web browser, an internet connection and a few BlueZone mainframe displays open.
Then you're lucky and probably have 1 or more degrees, this is most offices across the country for those of us without a stack of degrees and certifications.
Those are issues of culture and communication. I'm not saying it's easy to solve but it is possible given enough effort and push from management. Although generally you have to do so from day 1 since retro-fitting it after the fact is much more difficult.
>That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.
For example, with something like USE Together it's possible to have the equivalent of over the shoulder looks complete with easy input sharing.
I find it more effective. To looked over a screen you need to talk to me (or IM me), I then need to walk to your computer, squint at the screen and then ask you to move over if I need to dig into something (which then results in you squinting at the screen). The last one may involve me asking you to come over to my computer since your setup may be harder for me to navigate.
With screen sharing I don't have to move, don't have to squint, we both get to have a perfect view of what is going on and I can pull things up on my own computer concurrently (and show it to you if I want to).
edit: In fact, I find it so useful that even when we're in the same room the approach is to screen share.
I am with you. I personally hate remote work and companies who actively use remote workers as a strategy. I was a remote worker for 6 months and was borderline depressed due to limited human contacts. My next employer had a very distributed team in different time zone. And it was incredibly inefficient. It was difficult to find a common time overlap. Every meeting was disrupted due to webex and network issues. Quick casual meetings were not possible. My current employer is 100% onsite and I love it. Ability to just walk over and white board is good for my soul
I've been working remotely for 8 years now for a couple of companies. Currently work in an environment where I'm one of the few devs working remotely, where the rest share an office.
I'm trying to figure out if you've actually worked remotely or not. It does take a much more concerted effort on everyone's part to be more inclusive of remote workers, especially if only a handful of devs are remote and the rest share an office.
Meetings aren't usually a problem. We primarily rely on Skype for Business and all meetings are generally held online. We've even managed to move scheduled meetings (which I loathe) into Microsoft Teams channels. The written words manage to keep everyone on the same page, much better than just hearing it.
Microsoft Teams and Slack facilitates the sharing of cubicle conversations and informal ideas but it takes effort to get everyone onboard with using these as their primary ways of sharing convos.
I mean, I don't get interrupted very often. I can be as out of site/out of mind as I want and need. And I'm way more productive working from home, than I am where I can be interrupted constantly. I don't know about you, but it usually takes me about two hours to recover from an interruption to get back to where I was. Not always, but usually.
All of the above is pertinent to being a mixed bag of remote and office sharers. I would imagine that an all remote team, would have an even easier time with communications and inclusivity.
I have been working remote for 4 years, both full-time at two different companies. I also do not like the experience.
My issues stem from working at non-remote-first companies and my personality. Being one of the few people that is remote, I will have no visibility. My pull requests will linger, no room for advancement, no learning from others. And as an incredibly social person, I find the isolation to be too much. I also detest people that work from cafes. They are not offices!
Why would you detest people that work from cafes just because you don't like it? For me working remotely full time, it's a good break from working from a home office all the time. Coworking spaces are few and far between where I live so it's really one of the only alternatives.
> Sometimes you don't want to formally disperse some information but are happy to let people overhear what you think.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point because remote work is not for everyone, and who am I to tell you what to prefer? But I wanted to note that I've been working fully remote for more than ten years, and I'd say 95% of my contact with team members is informal, and along the lines of just sharing thoughts and ideas exactly as you describe. The only difference is that we share them on slack and via emails rather than having that tap on the shoulder as you describe it. Which is "better" is a matter of personal preference.
In most development work team productivity is more important than individual productivity. I have found that the best approach is to have co-located team rooms. (And the team members should be working on the same project. Putting people together does not make it a team. If everyone has a different project, that’s not a team)
If the work has to be done individually, then there is no point in being co-located. Remote works well.
Co-located teams communicate well, decide and move quickly, and has much higher trust between team members.
Work that does not require too much communication, speed and collaboration is more suitable to remote.
The boring answer is, there are range of preferences; some prefer offices, others prefer remote-only, yet others prefer a combination of remote and office. To each unto their own.
On "But whole-team remote work? No thanks!":
One of the cardinal rules for "remote-first" to work as intended is that either the whole team is remote, or not.
Otherwise, information asymmetry can affect team dynamics and morale in non-trivial ways and the product suffers.
Depends on the role, I am a DBA and work totally -remote, and I find it better than getting stuck in an open-plan office with people interrupting me constantly.
There are enough collaboration tools (slack, zoom) to collaborate when I need to. May not work for developers, but our entire team has a choice between coming to work or being remote and they're doing great. Depends on the company culture and will only work with seniors folks.
Remote work is the solution to specific problems. For me, that problem is commuting. Office buildings are not where people live. I can't have a house right next door to the office for an amount that the company is willing to pay me.
Since the company is cheap, hires the bare minimum of people to do a specific job, those people either have to come from a large local area, or support remote work.
A common topic, and not without controversy for sure, I can see both arguments for and against remote working.
The only addition I would like to make is that an employer should try to take into account the personal situations of their employees. For example, a blanket ban on remote working at a big tech company [1] to me is rediculous. Some people are exceedingly efficient working on their own and on their own terms. At the same time, some employees can become demotivated if left to their own devices.
I would say that in the capacity of the employer and their inherent responsibility towards their employees it sounds natural to me that some would work from home and others not. An all remote team would presuppose that (all) the employee(s) would like that kind of thing.
[1] I see from time to time this happening (or people trying this). A google search some of those that tried: Yahoo, IBM. Top-to-bottom decisions are sometimes rather disruptive and maybe unnecessary in this case.
I think that the issue is not whether remote work sucks, or working in an office is superior, but it's more about hiring the right people. This gets a lot harder when hiring for remote work, which is why many remote companies require previous remote experience.
Working at the office is a Luxury, a very very high priced luxury that the employee pays for entirely with the price differential in your Home Rent/House she/he pays. In SF for example, you pay 1000$/sq ft vs the 130$/sq ft the national median.
I've done many multi-hour video calls switching between pairing and unrelated tasks with 1-2 co-workers on my primarily remote team. We talk both shop and not shop. It works well, plus any of us can exit the call to focus. I find it vastly more productive than an open-office.
> I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.
I can't tell you how many ideas I've come up with & worked through and problems I've solved while remote. When you have a culture of DMing and chatting in interest channels (#haskell has been a fun place in multiple companies), ideas flow wonderfully. And then you can add to it with Zoom chats and tmate pairing. The next thing I want to try is collaborative distributed whiteboarding using drawing tablets.
I think neither extreme is perfect. I very much enjoy working closely with my peers. After a while you build a small family. Social factors are a big plus for office workers and a big risk for remote workers. But in an office I cannot work at full potential. For me it would be good enough to have occasional zero disturbance times. Sadly the occasional mode is usually harder to integrate and realise then the full mode. On top of that I highly despise communicating remotely.
our entire company (not just developers) clicks video chat almost before thinking about an issue. I get a lot of calls that are just one of our technicians saying something looks odd in a config file and asking me for a 30 second sanity check. It can be annoying because email communication is (it feels like) avoided even when it would be a better medium or force someone to actually think through an issue.
However, it does mean that we have good team cohesion.
I'm in a technical director role, and have been in IT, DBA and development roles in the past.
Today, I work remote approximately 1 day per week. It's great for creative/heads down activities, which for me are writing, reading and tasks like spreadsheet work or ideation. I do it more when I'm on call-driven projects. It's not great for coordination with "close teams" and not great for operations team dynamics.
From a purely personal point of view, I don't really want remote work. At least not full time.
Work is a distinct social environment. You meet different people, do different things, etc... It has value. It helps see things from different perspectives. If things get hard at work, going back home gives you an escape, and vice-versa. You don't need for commute for that but it helps.
> And don't be a cubicle farm. Yes, if you think the alternative to remote work is an anonymous grey cubicle on the 5th floor of an anonymous office block (or just as bad, the 'trendy' exposed ducts open plan office), then remote work will look like nirvana.
What is the alternative to "not a cubicle farm and not and open office"?
I have friends who couldn't work remote. But for me, it's the greatest perk of my current job.
I love working remote. No gas to buy, no wear on the car. No commute time. Instantly at work, instantly back home after. Video conferencing keeps me close (enough) to my co-workers. I can't say enough good things about it.
I think its just that non-remote work is considerably more common so you are much less likely to find people openly complaining about it because their needs are mostly met.
Online discussions always amplify the decent of the minority because the majority tends to get its way. And because the majority is satisfied, it remains largely silent.
100% agreement. It's continuing the trend of offloading management onto the burden of the individual worker. It's the responsibility of the company to create a solid, quiet, accessible work environment - by enabling "remote work", they can effectively write off this responsibility.
It is absolutely possible to get all of those benefits while working remotely, provided you have some Tim wine overlap with at least part of your team. You just have to be explicit about it and not rely on the shoulder tap.
I'm with you. I currently WFH 1 day/week and i actually look forward to going in the next day. I guess it helps that i'm a single guy in my mid-20's living 15 mins bike ride away from my work.
Perhaps small office spaces in areas with many employees could be a solution. For example, you have the opportunity to go to a local workspace for your company on a weekday, but have no obligation to do so.
Agreed. I'm a remote employee with even a better setup at home than at my office, but I go in nearly every day. I don't have the long time experience to maybe be burned out of office work but I still enjoy the "separation of concerns".
Jesus, you're describing a hellscape, as far as I'm concerned. A noisy place where people can interrupt me whenever, where no work ends up documented because you can just "look at this," and people are motivated by the beer and parties, not by actually working on something worthwhile. I mean, yes, especially in the eCommerce world the "worthwhile" is rare to come by, but you're not going to disguise that by trying to replace your employees social life. Finally, my experience tells me that if "only Naimh can owrk on FooBarAdapter," then Naimh left the company three years ago and moved into the Ural mountains to live off the land.
And good grief, if my choice is between a cubicle farm and an open office, cubicle farm every day. Thankfully, my choice is no longer that limited. Oh, and working with people who document their work and read team message board, turning your "only Naimh can work on" into some forgotten memory of past nightmares.
I've been working remotely for 8 years now. I'm truly interested in understanding why you think it's such a bad idea.
I mean I used to have to commute through downtown Portland, Oregon at rush hour. Just being able to leave that out of EVERY day has tremendously improved my quality of life.
This is a cultural thing more than a remote work thing. At my company we're remote 2-3 days a week but can chat on Skype as needed. Our team (3 people supporting a major app on Android and iOS) talks several times a day to go over things and our team cohesion is good.
As a small business owner who’s had remote employees across the US, there are two big problems. (These are specifically about remote employees, not remote contractors.)
First, to pay payroll taxes to employees who live in different states, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops with each state’s government. For example, when we had an employee living in Colorado, we had to set up a business relationship with the state of Colorado - using a fax machine. They literally wouldn’t accept paperwork any other way - it had to be via fax. Later, when that employee moved to another state, we had to tear down our relationship with Colorado (or else keep paying business fees to Colorado), plus set up tax paperwork with the employee’s new state. All of this cost us time & money.
Second, health insurance was a lot more complex. We wanted to offer the best possible health insurance to all of our employees, but health insurance companies make that massively complicated, with various rules about where the majority of staff lived, where each person lived, which plans were available in which states, etc. If I could do it all over again, I probably would have just given each employee an allowance to use on their local state’s open health insurance market, but that’s a hot mess too.
I am doubtful the author is truly managing people carelessly across 14 time zones without jumping through significant legal hoops, or is rather hiring contractors instead that manage their own legal responsibilities.
I’m in the same situation, with the exact same problems.
We also found 401k's to be a problem that our payroll vendor that had helped us with all the state issues before we had a 401k, couldn’t handle (or didn’t want to handle). So we had to change everything to switch to Paychex.
Basically everything is harder than it should be, because the states all have crazy rules and are set up to deal with local companies.
> First, to pay payroll taxes to employees who live in different states, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops with each state’s government.
While this is a pain and can be costly, isn't it still far cheaper to pay the fees to the states and your accountant than renting an office?
> If I could do it all over again, I probably would have just given each employee an allowance to use on their local state’s open health insurance market
Doing that would save you money by not having to manage the health insurance yourself. It's ridiculous that companies are even responsible for providing health insurance but that's another conversation.
The savings you get from not managing healthcare would probably offset the extra cost of multi-state payroll.
> While this is a pain and can be costly, isn't it still far cheaper to pay the fees to the states and your accountant than renting an office?
Depends on your location. At one point, we had 9 people scattered across multiple states. On one hand, it would have been cheaper to have a small office in an inexpensive location, and force folks to come into an office say, 2 days per week. We’d have been able to ensure that everyone lived in the same place, and avoid the multi-state tax & health care hassles.
We chose to be fully remote because it enabled us to hire better people. The people you want aren’t necessarily in a specific geographic location (nor do they want to move there), and the people you want may have financial incentives to stay where they’re at. The people you want may also choose to live in more expensive areas for quality of life reasons, too.
I found it amusing that, even though we were fully remote and our employees could live in cheap places to maximize their salaries...they didn’t. In fact, we all chose some of the most expensive places in the US to live: downtown Chicago, Manhattan, Miami, San Diego, etc.
This is all true from a straight up numbers perspective, but in my experience, a fixed expense like a 3 year office lease is less stressful than managing fluid expenses like fees imposed by a dozen state governments.
I'm still very pro remote work, but people tend to underestimate how logistically expensive it can be—especially when a team gets bigger—compared to simply leasing an office and saying "Everyone works here."
It's possible to have a remote company that only hires employees in one or a few states, though. As an employee, I would much rather work for one of those than one that required me to work from a specific office.
Yeah, that is a thing. At my last job, we had a mix of remote and in office workers. If you did end up going remote, there were some states that weren't allowed because of, from what I guess, OP is saying.
Trinet is a PEO[0] and Gusto is just for managing your payroll and benefits...two very different business models. In the former, your employees technically become TriNet employees and have agreements with virtually every state (so yes they would cover the). It's just not cheap. Gusto just facilitates the process to find/manage insurance/benefits and your employees are still your employees.
Gusto will make the correct payments, but you still have to set up your "business" in each state. I have the same problem too. I still get a bill from the State of Washington every month, despite the fact that my last employee there left over a year ago.
> Compensate your employees well, have them be independent contractors.
Absolutely, that’s a valid choice. We chose the employee approach because that’s what I would have wanted as an employee: I didn’t want to hassle with health insurance, taxes, vacation, hardware, etc. I wanted to just show up to work and have my employer take care of the rest, so that’s the company I built. (We definitely went overboard trying to make things easier for the employees.)
Most of our competitors in this same space take the contractor approach, and I’d say that’s better for the company for sure. I understand why folks do it, and I don’t think there’s a wrong answer - both have pros and cons. My comment just wanted to lay out a couple of answers to the post’s question, “Why aren’t more companies remote-first?” Hopefully I achieved that.
Within the USA, I like hiring people via the employee route.
I'm paranoid that one or more contractors will do something like not pay their payroll, file for unemployment, or simply claim they should have been an employee all along. I'll consider contract arrangements for people that are clearly contractors with their own business, people outside the USA, and short term engagements where someone specifically asks in writing to be a contractor. Anyone who doesn't otherwise say so is going to be an employee. I consider the certain overhead of having employees to be insurance against the uncertain overhead of are-my-people-employees-or-contractors shenanigans.
That is likely not legal in the US. An independent contractor needs to be "independent" for the most part. If they work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for the same company they are considered an employee and can't be given a 1099. They should be a W-2 type employee. Now if the company wants to hire another company to be the legal employer of the employee they can do that. But still need to be a W-2 employee.
Not to say that people/companies don't do it, but the companies that do are leaving themselves open to legal issues.
> If they work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for the same company they are considered an employee and can't be given a 1099
IANAL but this is not the legal framework for determining whether someone is a 1099 resource. There are plenty of people who work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for the same company and are still legally considered IC's.
Behavioral: Does the company control or have the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job?
Financial: Are the business aspects of the worker’s job controlled by the payer? (these include things like how worker is paid, whether expenses are reimbursed, who provides tools/supplies, etc.)
Type of Relationship: Are there written contracts or employee type benefits (i.e. pension plan, insurance, vacation pay, etc.)? Will the relationship continue and is the work performed a key aspect of the business?
Are remote contractors easier due to how things get billed out? I am assuming that puts the accounting burden on the contractor instead of the employer.
That’s correct, however, it is a one-stop shop instead of becoming a local employer. It can be tricky though because contractors without their own legal entity can be qualified as employees in many countries, especially if they have only one client or only a few clients.
Fortunately none of those two issues are relevant where I live. That sounds very tricky indeed.
I used to work a few months at a time from my home office in another country. It worked fantastically well. I like to be able to concentrate without interruptions, and, as the timezone was different from the office, I got a very nice overlap where co-workers would provide work for me as they left for the day, and I would have that sitting in my inbox when I started working. Then, when my day was over, they would have the work ready for them when they got in (for that kind of one-day jobs).
Of course there was also video conferences and such. But, as our customers are everywhere anyway, it didn't make any difference if one or two of us from my company were in different locations when we had video conferences with them.
Don't mean to burst your bubble but they are. If you don't have proper work visa, you can't work from the country you are in. Most companies ignore local immigration laws and allow you to work remotely from wherever. And this is fine by what I consider should be allowed. However it doesn't mean it's legal.
Hold on, I didn't add all details to my post. Didn't think that would be necessary, it's not the point of the discussion after all. Of course I had the relevant regulations covered. There are detailed bilateral agreements between my home country and those countries I have worked in.
We were talking about regulations that make remote work difficult. I am not aware about bilateral agreements between countries that allow remote work. Can you share?
Remote work simply falls into the category 'working for a company that does not have a local presence', which (depending on the bilateral agreements, which can vary a lot) can have different rules than when the company has a local presence. This is almost always about taxation (where to pay the tax). In other words, to work remotely you may need a working permit of some kind, which I've had in various countries.
I'll try to answer the question from my perspective as the CEO of GitLab with 650 people in 50 countries and shared offices.
First of all as an industry we haven't agreed on a term. Remote first or remote friendly are used by companies that do have a headquarter but are open to remote work like Stripe. Since remote can have a negative connotation some companies like Wordpress like distributed but that is also used by companies that have offices in multiple locations. At GitLab we prefer to use all remote https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/
The three biggest companies as far as I know are Wordpress, InVision, and GitLab. Wordpress and InVision both have around 1000 people while we're 45% smaller. I've heard that InVision has people work east coast hours but that doesn't show in their job listings.
I think remote will become much more popular. It saves people commuting time and gives them more flexibility to care for family, go to the gym at a convenient time, travel more, and deal with sick children. For the company you are able to hire outside of competitive metro areas and you save money by that https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/ and on office costs.
It is early days for remote and it is still viewed as a risk by potential investors. But with tools like Zoom and better tools for asynchronous collaboration like InVision and GitLab I think it will become popular rapidly. Because you have to adjust you communication https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/ I think new startups will be all remote while existing companies will find it much harder to change.
So, someone can change their mailing address to that of a friend living in a high income area and have a better pay? What about when moving, are employees' pays docked too?
For example, I come from a low-income area and most of my family is poor. By working in tech., I'm able to provide a safety net for parents and close friends. My home address is in my hometown but I would spend time at my significant other's apartment during the week to be close to work.
Why should my pay be less than that of a coworker that does the same exact same job as me simply because this is a remote company? What about someone that does a worst job or is less experienced? Unless that means that the only employees hired in high-pays area are senior and other employees are all junior or mid level and seen as cheaper labor, I don't see the reason... except as sour way to save company's operating cost.
Does that also mean that you believe someone in this situation should never have the resources to move to a high income area? Someone from a high-income area could live in a shared rental, save a big cushion of money and then move to a lower income area for less stress while knowing they will be able to retire. Someone from a low paying area wouldn't be able to do that.
Compensation should be based on output performance and the difficulties and complexity of the work being done.
3. "Compensation should be based on output performance and the difficulties and complexity of the work being done." => Opinions differ about this across companies and some of them like Basecamp use your method. For our take Please see the section "Standard pay eats away at production and personnel" in https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/
The justification in the link essentially sounds to me like, "If you worked in the office at another company and moved to a lower cost of living city you'd also get your pay docked. We do the same because we're following the precedent and because you don't have other options."
This fails to mention the flip side - we developers do have other options. There are certainly SF companies I'm aware of that will be happy to outbid Gitlab's desire to pay a software engineer $75k because they moved to rural Nebraska.
I agree that more and more companies will start hiring remotely and the market will get more competitive. As I said in the blog post: "I hope the distance between those stances becomes smaller as more companies offer remote work opportunities."
I understand the reason and how it is a necessary evil. But it's still an evil. Simply put, it is discrimination.
Paying the poor less and the wealthy more.
It makes no sense that two employees with the same workload and same credentials would get a different pay based on their primary address' geolocation.
Just off the top of my head :
- Employee resides at their rich parent's home and get a higher pay vs. employee move near their mother's elderly care center in a ghetto and dock their pay.
- Employee lives alone with no dependents in a high pay area vs. employee being a single-parent in a low pay area.
- Employee lives on a native reservation and get less pay.
- Employee lives in a co-location in a high pay area vs. employee lives alone in a low pay area.
- Employee has impressive credentials in a low pay area vs. employee with no credential living in a high pay area.
- etc.
This is nothing more than a loophole that allows you to give a bonus to employees living in high pay areas while keeping a clear conscience.
If anything, kudos for being open about the whole situation.
In other words: "we pay less because we feel that's what we can get away with. if we face more competition in the future, we might have to pay more, but right now we don't see that competition".
Interesting, but admittedly honest perspective from a CEO.
It is competitive, but you don't see that competition because you flat-out tell people you won't pay them competitively. I would never consider Gitlab for that reason, it just doesn't make financial sense.
Money isn't everything, I've certainly taken a significant paycut to take a job I wanted and believed in. But I'd have to take a 50% paycut to work at Gitlab, so... no thanks. And worse yet, you'd openly pay a city dweller on my team twice as much to do the same work.
They most likely pay competitive rates if you ask for them. They can't really lose anything by having a document with compensation rules for the gullible folk that fall for the "rules apply to everyone" spiel.
> 1. "change their mailing address to that of a friend living in a high income area and have a better pay" => that would be fraudulent
Would it be though?
If my legal address is a small apartment shared with 5 other individuals in a city I never go to, there's no legal reason pushing me to disclose any secondary housing I might own.
Another reason for such as situation is someone being homeless/nomad and having their address set to some organization or PO box in the city.
An employee at GitLab clearly knows that their compensation is based on their address, and is done so because the compensation is matched to local cost of living. Doing anything (including giving an address, even a legal one) that artificially changes their compensation so that it doesn't match their local cost of living is knowingly deceptive, which is the definition of fraud.
To be clear, I wholeheartedly disagree with GitLab's practice of docking people's pay just because they live somewhere cheaper (are they charging less to companies who are based in cheaper COL areas? no), but their policy is still their policy, and fraud is fraud.
> It’s not that we want to pay you based on your rent or compensate your cost of living. We want to make sure that we pay at or above market.
The blog post is very clear, and supported by the CEO's post above, that they are interested in paying the lowest amount they can get away with- that which they think is "at or above market". They don't care about cost of living. This is also made clear in their relocation policy, wherein they require you to get their permission to move to a different area, and you run a real risk of being denied/fired if you want to move to a higher cost of living area (The CEO has to approve such a move).
I really like that Gitlab and their CEO are so open about their true motives like this. If they didn't pay so poorly, I would consider sending them my resume!
It is true. The things you pointed out in GitLab's post don't disagree with my points, they just go deeper. GitLab's 'market rates' are based on, at least in part, cost of living calculations. They are simply saying they go one step further and try to pay you above the standard cost of living, and hopefully above what others pay as well. It is completely missing the point to say they "don't care about cost of living", because while it may be true that their objective isn't to match COL exactly, COL is a major factor. In their actual compensation principles guide [1], they specifically state that the location factor component of their compensation is almost entirely based in Numbeo data (numbeo is a site that quantifies regional cost of living).
Huh, I directly quoted them saying that it wasn't true! They explain in their post that they found that market rates correlate with rent costs, and that is why their pay correlates with rent costs.
Would this be any different if the employee actually lived there?
Say they own a house in a rural town that has been handed down from their parents, yet they decide to live in an apartment in some big city. They receive an interesting job offer and start working remote at Gitlab but haven't changed their legal address.
Suddenly, they paycheck is reduced unless they disclose their secondary address and somehow make it their main address.
Should that employee be required to sell their house? I would say no.
Well, it's no different if you live in a big apartment out of town and decide to rent a cheap broken down apartment in the city.
What if the employee does not have a fixed address? Are they fired on the spot? Perhaps never hired out of discrimination? Is their pay adjusted for each city they drive their van to? Do the employer require them to stop travelling? What if that person's fixed address is already registered at some organisation or mail center in a "high pay area"? Should they be required to change it to a "low pay area" to be ethical?
Having any kind of 'secondary address' doesn't matter. Nobody is saying anything about selling a house. There are many, many people who own multiple residences. That's not what matters here.
All that matter is what your actual cost of living is (measured by proxy via where you actually live) versus what you tell GitLab your cost of living is (measured by proxy via where you say you live (regardless of if its your primary address or a secondary address or whatever)). If you knowingly tell GitLab that your COL is higher than it actually is so that GitLab gives you higher pay, that is the very definition of fraud.
> What if the employee does not have a fixed address? ... Is their pay adjusted for each city they drive their van to?
Yes, it is adjusted by each new place's COL. GitLab details this out in their compensation handbook, if you're really interested.
> What if that person's fixed address is already registered at some organisation or mail center in a "high pay area"? Should they be required to change it to a "low pay area" to be ethical?
They should tell GitLab that they do not actually live in the high COL area and should be paid accordingly to the low COL area.
I think you're getting hung up on some sort of strict 'legal address' definition. In this discussion about compensation, I don't think GitLab gives a damn what your "legal address" is or where you get your mail delivered to. They care about your actual cost of living, and they use an address as a convenient way to measure that. If your actual cost of living doesn't match where your 'legal address' is or where you get your mail delivered, you would simply tell them "My legal address is X, but I actually live in Y".
Except they don't. If they cared for that they would ask for your rent and economic situation.
They are not asking your cost of living to help you, they are asking which hiring pool you belong to in order to cut on operational costs.
You could be living rent free & debt free in a high pay area and still get a higher pay than someone with dependents, debts and a high (for their area) rent.
This is the part that disturbs me.
Being born in a good situation and staying with your parents without any costs would mean your paycheck is bigger than someone born in a worst situation that is also living at home.
You might as well build your class barriers out of concrete at that point. Postal-code discrimination is something that should be removed from our lives. Remote working is one solutions to this issue. I really hope that this practice doesn't become a trend.
>Except they don't. If they cared for that they would ask for your rent and economic situation.
I think you misunderstand what "Cost of Living" actually quantifies. It is not meant to quantify your personal economic situation, and is far more than just rent. COL is meant to quantify how much it costs to afford a basic standard of living, such as the cost to buy a basic meal or afford a basic apartment. It is not meant to quantify each individual's specific economic situation, living arrangements, debts, dependents, etc.
Cost of living is difficult to accurately quantify, and the most accurate proxy is geographic location. I'm sure GitLab et al would give some adjustments to compensation based on extraneous personal factors, but it's not up to the company to hold your hand and make sure every employee is making exactly enough money to pay all of their bills. At some point that becomes the employee's responsibility.
>You could be living rent free & debt free in a high pay area and still get a higher pay than someone with dependents, debts and a high (for their area) rent.
Are you suggesting that someone who is debt free and rent free should be punished via a lower wage for their choices which led to them not being in debt? Conversely, should someone be paid a higher wage just because they made bad decisions earlier in life and have mountains of credit card debt?
As mentioned above, debt is specifically not included in COL calculations for these reasons. COL also doesn't change based on if you decide to live in a high rise condo or a camper van. Yes, if these people are doing the same work and live in the same area, someone living rent free and debt free should still get the same pay as someone with dependents and high rent. Their personal situation may be different, but their standard cost of living is the same.
And this isn't any different than any other company in the world, nor is it the business of any other company in the world to solve. I know someone who used to work at Google making a very high salary, but paid no rent and only minimal bills because he lived at his parents. And by the way, other companies adjust their pay geographically, too. A cashier at a McDonalds in rural Kansas gets less of an hourly wage than a cashier at a McDonalds in SF. This already is the norm, and though it isn't perfect, it isn't nearly as disastrous as you make it sound.
>You might as well build your class barriers out of concrete at that point.
I'm not sure how I see this is a class barrier. This is not saying "if you grew up in Compton, we will not pay you a high wage and you will never have the opportunity to move to a better area". This is saying "if you currently live in a low COL area, we will pay you accordingly. And we will pay you more if you make the decision to move somewhere with a higher COL". That is almost exactly the opposite of a barrier, as it is clearly saying we will up your pay if you choose to take on higher COL.
Many people view this as a matter of "two people performing the same work deserve equal dollar amounts". Other people (presumably like those who make the decisions at GitLab) think that "two people performing the same work deserve the equal quality of life", and the dollar amount required to obtain a standard quality of life is variable depending on where you live. Someone making $80k/year will live decently in SF, while someone making $80k/year will live an luxurious, king-like life in rural Laos. Assuming they are performing the same work, why should the Laotian enjoy a higher quality of life than the San Franciscan?
Same reason why the exact same drug or tech product is sold cheaper in developing markets than in the US - because it maximizes profitability.
Since everyone is paying according to geographic location, companies who don't will be at a cost disadvantage to their competitors - now they can play arbitrage, and pay just slightly more than market rate in hope of attracting the best Engineers, and some do, but mostly businesses are conservative and just want to pay market-rate for their various functions, and save their "innovation energy" for their main product.
IMO asking this question is akin to asking something like "why aren't developers paid as much as doctors?", or, "why do realtors take a 3% cut instead of 2 or 4?"
The upside of hiring remote workers should be to allow you to get the best workers no matters where your company is located. Good employees (those that would be able to get a job in Silicon Valley) will bring profit to your company no matter where they are located.
To pay a worker less because they chose to, say, move back to their hometown to take care of their relatives puts a sour taste in my mouth. Reducing people's pay because they moved to another location makes no sense to me.
Gitlab's pricing is the same no matter what city the client is located. If the employee is able to provide the resources needed charge this price to the customers then the employees should get the same pay as any other employee.
Imagine busting your chops to close a complicated project on time only to learn that the junior two postal codes over is paid more than you to do simple tasks.
I would change employer.
In fact, have been in such a situation before. The home office was outside of the city and they later opened an office there. The new city hires were paid more than everyone else at the company. The result was that the company lost all their strong players.
I am now working even further from the city for that same salary they gave the city employees.
A lot of what you say is not false, and it can be frustrating for employees (though it goes both ways - imagine a company headquartered in, say, Chicago, and you lived in SF or NYC - you'd be better off than if you were getting Chicago market-rate)
Hiring full-time remotes in a major way is still a relatively new practice, so we'll see how it all shakes out. It may very well be that actual pay-by-value takes root, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Pricing and markets are curious things, and there is huge inertia.
>Compensation should be based on output performance and the difficulties and complexity of the work being done.
The price of something (compensation) will trend towards however much the opportunity cost is (the second best option). If it doesn't, then (assuming no giant moat) another business will spend less on compensation, be able to sell their product/service for less, and end up with your customers.
>Compensation should be based on output performance and the difficulties and complexity of the work being done.
The output monitoring and quantification necessary for this is practically impossible - the output of programmers is deeply creative and subjective work. At best you can rank-order programmer output and award promotions. This all leads to getting paid efficiency wages and incentives under tournament theory. In short, a good chunk of your pay is a reward above unemployment or your next-best option, so that you are incentivized to work hard and your competitors are incentivized to compete for your slot. It's as economically efficient as piece work if employees aren't risk-averse, so mostly which system to use is based off of whether it's easier to monitor and quantify output versus rank-order and pay to overcome employee risk aversion.
>Why should my pay be less than that of a coworker that does the same exact same job as me simply because this is a remote company?
For better or worse, software developer pay is negotiated. Negotiation results are driven by BATNA - best alternative to negotiated agreement. For coworkers that are approximately as valuable to the company, they should get offered approximately the same efficiency wage above their BATNA. Workers in areas with fewer options available to them necessarily have a worse BATNA, so it remains fair that they get paid less.
Furthermore, although your entire salary gets paid by your current employer, they're only really enriching you by the difference between the pay and your BATNA. It's arguably less fair for remote companies to excessively enrich workers outside of competitive metro areas.
Compensation is based on supply and demand, not some arbitrary rules you made up. In a tech hub there are a lot of high paying employers competing for workers and employers have to offer higher salaries to lure candidates away from other companies. In a cheap area all the local companies pay garbage so you don’t have to pay as much to beat all the other offers.
Except by definition if I'm working remotely the hiring pool is every remote company, plus the local companies. That means the floor on salary is the greater of remote or local.
So in cheap areas you have to pay globally competitive, and in expensive areas you have to beat the locals.
Thus, it never makes sense to reduce pay for someone moving. Your goal should be to keep salaries above that floor, not pay as little as possible.
The remote companies tend not to pay as well as some of the SF and valley firms. It costs less to beat the remote firms than to beat the local competition in the Bay Area.
>>Compensation should be based on output performance and the difficulties and complexity of the work being done.
That should be a factor for sure, but not the only factor. The price of something is not based on simply how valuable that thing is in and of itself. It is also based on the price of alternatives. This should be self-evident everywhere you look.
I joined GitLab in December. Prior to working at GitLab, I worked in New York City and commuted more than an hour in each direction every day. The change to working remotely has exceeded expectations.
My relationships with my children improved significantly within weeks. I'm able to coach my children's sports teams and attend school events and other activities without any issue. I eat better. I exercise more. My garden looks better than ever.
I was attracted to GitLab because of the all-remote structure and the transparency value. After being here for 6 months, I'm even more convinced that this structure is the future of work.
Something I hope companies will consider is that a lot of people think that just by being in the office they are 'working' regardless of whether they are in fact getting anything done.
> a lot of people think that just by being in the office they are 'working' regardless of whether they are in fact getting anything done.
This is the part that annoys me the most. Managers pretend that Seat Time = Productivity when we all know that's not the case. I've watched people sit and talk for hours, then sit and browse the internet or play games for hours. We just had a group of people who were told to stop playing online Chess all day.
Forcing people to come into the office full-time is just management's way of making their jobs easier and making themselves feel better. In my experience, it's a substitute for doing other things that they should be doing, like reviewing code that their team has committed that week, talking to their team about what they're working on, what they're planning to work on, what challenges they're facing, etc.
Having people be 'working' (whether remote or in-office) for a set number of hours versus having people 'working' for a set output of productivity is a totally different conversation than remote vs in-office work. I've previously managed both remote and in-office teams, and I've definitely see all the things you're mentioning, but I also saw plenty of remote workers who saw their job as just "i will sit in front of my computer for X number of hours and as long as I have Slack open, I will call it work". Instead of "Seat Time", it's "Screen Open Time". There is nothing inherent about remote work that makes people more productive. Unfortunately, I often saw the opposite.
And you're right that it makes management's job easier. It is management's job to make sure that their teams are producing work, and the unfortunate reality of a lot of workers is that unless they have the threat of someone walking by and seeing that they aren't being productive, they will end up wasting a lot of time. This doesn't mesh well with remote work. Not everyone is like that, but many are, and that's enough to ruin the remote work experience for everyone.
> Managers pretend that Seat Time = Productivity when we all know that's not the case
Who are these managers cand how can I get a job working for them.
All I have to do is show up, no goals, no performance reviews, no castigation ver failing to deliver value through working software...
Okay, snark aside, if we throw away the completely clueless managers who don't actually manage people, we have to look at managers who want you in the office AND want the job done.
We may have criticisms for them, but we surely cannot say that they think that seat time equals productivity. The very fact that they manage performance with other metrics tells us that they don't think seat time equals productivity.
So... I am not saying that some managers aren't in need of percussive cluestick application, nor am I saying that working on offices is the OneTrueWayToShipWorkingSoftware, but I am suggesting that the argument is richer and deeper than "Managers think seat time equals productivity."
Conversely, as a previous manager of remote teams, something I hope companies will consider is that a lot of remote workers think that just by having their laptop open they are 'working' regardless of whether they are in fact getting anything done. And unfortunately, when you have a remote worker like this, it is a lot harder to rectify the situation than it is to rectify a slacking in-office worker.
> I've heard that InVision has people work east coast hours but that doesn't show in their job listings.
As an early rising, that sounds so amazing. Living in the west coast, waking up early to work, and then having the whole rest of the day/daylight to enjoy when you're free at 2-3pm PST. Sounds too perfect. ha
I've been at GitLab about 2 years. While I've worked remote and on teams with remote members, there is a huge difference when everyone is remote.
I'd estimiate that I am 2x-3x more productive than any job I've had before because of the all-remote culuture. I get to work less and produce more outcomes. Documenting everything and having documentation from others is a major reason for this.
To be honest you didn't really provide a good counter argument except some (IMO) relatively minor benefits and none of the negatives. Yes I read the culture page you linked too but some of the disadvantages you list are IMO _huge_. Especially this one:
_Team members in different time zones may have to compromise on meeting times._
There is almost _nothing_ worse than this trap, especially if even a small majority of your team is in an inconvenient timezone, daily "standup" at 6:30am? ompany meeting at 1:30am here and there? You can keep it.
The problem from my perspective is that there is just too many people working in the US and Europe, so APEC members always end up being the ones to accommodate (not necessarily of course, but it is most practical).
You can't really avoid this in a company with global presence. Forget the whole "remote" thing. If your company has an office in SF and one in Tokyo, people in the two offices will have to sync sometimes. That's a fact.
That has nothing to do with being a remote company. It has everything to do with being a company that has people in more than one location. Most companies (especially in tech) beyond a few hundred employees have multiple locations - sometimes those locations are similar timezones (ex: SF & Seattle), but often they are very not the same.
In my case, my company has offices in San Francisco and Eastern Europe. 10 hours apart. Meetings at 8am for me are 6pm for them. So basically everyone has to compromise somewhat. As long as you go into things with understanding that this is the case, it's not that bad - especially if there is flexibility.
If you're working west coast USA to India (a common occurrence), it's 12.5 hours difference.
GitLabber here with my own remote story relative to Sid's comment:
> It saves people commuting time and gives them more flexibility to care for family, go to the gym at a convenient time, travel more, and deal with sick children.
I have 4 young children at home. When I came back to GitLab after having my fourth I noted in our Thanks channel - 'Much easier transition coming back from paternity then I’ve ever had. Being at home & being able to step away to help is so much better than commuting into an office and not being able to help at all.'
> It saves people commuting time and gives them more flexibility to care for family, go to the gym at a convenient time, travel more, and deal with sick children.
I'll add that it also makes it much easier for households with two incomes. If both partners are career professionals, then there's the ever-present challenge of finding a metro offering concurrent opportunities. Often times one partner will have to sacrifice career opportunities so that the other can relocate to take a better job.
Unfortunately because of longstanding cultural norms, the side that sacrifices is usually the wife. So there's also the angle that a more remote-centric economy would help promote gender equality.
The part I'm passionate about is the ability to provide employment in areas that need jobs. It creates a real opportunity for struggling rural or non-metropolitan area communities to benefit as well.
GitLab Team member since Feb 2019 here. I've worked remotely for the past 11 years now, but this is my first experience at an all-remote company.
A few points--I've experienced managers who have both supported my working remote, acknowledging that the proper tools, organization and workstyle make it possible for anyone to be successful while working remotely, but I've also had managers (at my previous employer, who I'd call a "distributed" company) who maybe just 'tolerated' my being remote because of the results I was able to produce. I heard about how I might miss opportunities because of lack of face-time with execs, and sat through calls where I was the only one not in the room and the conference room speaker pod felt like it was miles away. In the end, collaborative tools and individuals who deliver results are going to be successful regardless of location, IMO.
But, all-remote puts us all on a level playing field, so no one is missing out on opportunities for growth, advancement or development, because we’re all sitting in the same exact place. Then, it’s our skills, expertise and drive that set us apart, not our location.
And, on a personal note, as a working mother, all-remote and async comms means I can start when I get my kids off to school and be finished and waiting for them when they get off the bus. And, when someone is sick and needs to stay home, I no longer feel like it’s a huge, stressful obstacle that I need to work around, or apologize for, or even, pretend as though it’s not happening (check out this entry from our handbook “Having pets, children, significant others, friends, and family visible during video chats is encouraged. If they are human, ask them to wave at your remote team member to say "Hi"”: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#video-calls. Being able to focus on my family AND my career at the same time? That’s kind of priceless.
One thing I've always been curious about is how you compensate remote employees that tend to move around a lot. Not necessarily full "digital nomads", but ones who say, have a mailing address in NYC or SF and spend > 50% of the year in Thailand or Europe. Is the location factor based exclusively on where the employee is paying taxes?
I’m remote and my company pays SF rates no matter where you live, though I know a lot of companies localize based on employee location.
I’m guessing people that are splitting time between the US and Europe are probably having their entire salary/paychecks deposited into an account in one country or the other to make the tax situation more bearable at the end of the year.
Statements like “Please get approval at least a month before you move” always rub me entirely the wrong way.
If I’m working remote it’s because I don’t want to be bound to a certain location, and whether or not I move is none of the companies’s business as long as I fulfill my duties.
Although GitLab is especially egregious in that it pays different rates based on location, I'm not sure that it's practical from a legal perspective to say where you live is none of the companies business. If you're an employee (as opposed to a contractor), the company has certain legal obligations that may change depending on what state or country you call home.
Or... if you're working remote it's because you like the peace and quiet of working in a private space ... and enjoy not having a 2 hour commute a day. There are more than one reason to do anything.
Now I'm sure if you were interviewing at GitLab, you'd know about this policy in advance (because it's public) and could plan accordingly. Or ...hey... ask your manager to be if they'd have any problem with you being a digital nomad on the job. The policy basically says you only need approval... so you could ask.
There are a few companies that exist to provide exactly that service, which kind of look like temp agencies. Gitlab uses CXC Global in my country, for example.
I work for a company in the bay area that has about 1/4 of our employees as remote now, and 5 years ago had none. A PEO like SOI/Trinet is what makes this possible
We have both remote and office employees. We have offices around the world and it's very common for people who formally work there to mostly work from home anyway, because we're so remote-friendly that it doesn't matter. So in many ways we're more all-remote than anything else. The offices are optional, a nice bonus for when you feel like going there.
Interesting, good to know. Or, well, it would be if I applied for one of the Mozilla jobs in Portland I periodically see. Just saw Staff Engineer pop up and it looks appealing, but even with 20 years of experience I don't know that I'd feel qualified applying.
Our team has slowly, by accident shifted to remote first during summers, when our deadlines are the furthest out. First one person moved, and we let them stay on and work remotely. Then another. Then two of three of the remaining individual contributors switched to core hours, but are otherwise gone. Now my boss has been remote for two weeks.
It’s interesting in that it happened without discussion and without proactively addressing the new cultural issues that arose.
Communication has dropped unless you’re on a call, and you never know who is on what call so it’s difficult to gauge the tempo of work any given day. Communication has become a “procedure” that must be intentionally addressed, which leads to awkward conversations about the weather in our daily standup that has morphed into a call to keep in touch for the people that are off site and don’t want to be politically left out. It wastes my time. A lot is lost in translation. Productive spontaneous conversation between more than two people is basically gone. A lot of work has disappeared into Slack DMs instof channels, visibility lost there.
I understand a lot of this could be fixed with cultural and procedural changes. But I find it weird that you have to implement procedures and controls to replace something you get for free when you are all physically in the same place. And from my experience at least, getting it wrong has absolutely been bad for our team’s work product. Based on this experience I’ll never be working on a remote team again
> A lot of work has disappeared into Slack DMs instof channels, visibility lost there.
We announce DM stats in our monthly company meeting. Our goal is everything in a public channel unless it absolutely is a private matter.
> something you get for free when you are all physically in the same place.
But did you really? Were all those conversations documented? What I realized is that many conversations end up being around what was talked about and what was the decision made X months ago. Many other conversations were around communicating said decision to someone else or someone new. All these telephone game style conversations go away if you can forward someone an email chain.
I’ve never run into a colleague from another department on an email chain. It happens frequently in our office kitchen. I don’t that that, or the ability to simply walk over to someone’s desk should be discounted.
Working in a bigger place you may not have the same physical access. The smaller the place the more opportunity for cross department chatter remote or in person.
Yeah really. That’s called documentation. Some of my ideas are dumb and a waste of time. They don’t need to be documented to suggest to some future person they need to waste their time reading through to get to the point. If anything productive comes out of the conversation it should be documented. Including how decisions were made in some instances. But I don’t want to read through banter and try to decipher what someone meant out of context years later because all I have is a Slack convo that was a “conversation” not “documentation”. In conversation I have certain expectations of the known context and background the person I’m speaking with is aware of. When writing documentation those details are different. Conversation logs are not documentation. I would argue an email forwarded to me out of context has a higher risk of telephone game style error introduction than properly written documentation. Also in person there is a lot of non verbal, non explicit communication. That is mostly lost.
It's not, though. It's actually quite costly. I agree with you that implementing procedures is annoying and that collaboration suffers somewhat; that is a cost too. But getting everyone to a single building every day is expensive in many ways as well.
It seems like the added cost/time of communications for a remote group is less than the cumulative commute times for everyone, but it has to be a priority and part of the deal.
Because it's much harder to keep people motivated and it's harder to create an environment with efficient communication.
--------------------------------------------
EDIT: I actually love the idea of remote work and I would love it to succeed. I believe that if a company is 100% remote and adopts it processes accordingly, it might work.
I still think that for a traditional onsite business, it's very, very hard to include remote people into the process in a way that keeps them happy and included.
PS: You also have to distinguish between "remote" and "async", which do not necessarily need to go hand in hand.
Having clocked several years with remote-only companies and several years with traditional onsite jobs, I would say that, ironically, remote companies have better communication. On any given 8-hour workday, I would probably clock several hours' worth of communication in various shapes and forms at remote companies. For onsite, many of my days might be spent sitting next to a bunch of people in an open plan office not ever exchanging a word.
Not at all: In my experience communication is 50% of the job as a software engineer. It's 100% of the job as a software engineering manager of sorts.
And remote communication is way more efficient. Things like text chat, comments in ticket systems or project management systems like asana etc are "soft interrupts" that I find surprisingly frictionless. I can stay in concentration until I've reached a natural interrupt of sorts, then answer chat messages or read up on tickets, ask clarifying questions or loop in more people (sending out a soft interrupt, but not waiting for replies), get back into concentration, and restart the loop at the next interrupt.
The alternative: It is now 9:35am. You know you have to leave at 9:55 to get to your 10:00 meeting in the meeting room that's 5 minutes away. But 20 minutes is not enough to get into concentration, so you spend that time procrastinating. At 10:00 you're there. At 10:10, the asshole who is always late shows up. The meeting takes 50 minutes, because the only reason to EVER end a meeting is getting kicked out of the meeting room. In this case it was booked for the 10:00-11:00 slot. You spend 5 more minutes walking back to your desk. Within the 50mins of meeting time, you were talking for 5 minutes. 10 minutes of the other speakers' time contained information you actually needed. You arrive at your desk at 11:05. That's 90 minutes flushed down the tube that could have been 15 minutes' worth of text chat, and the timing basically prevents deep work for maybe that first half of that workday.
Totally agree, although sometimes I feel like I might as well work remote when people sitting next to me start talking to me on Slack. Yes, I'm wearing noise-cancelling headphones most of the time, but that's because we have a very noisy open office with support and sales people and music.
> Because it's much harder to keep people motivated...
What? Are the beatings about to commence?
I stay motivated because I enjoy the product I work on. I stay motivated because I'm trusted to complete the work I promise to complete. If a company hires well, they won't have to "keep people motivated."
> ... and it's harder to create an environment with efficient communication.
Not really. Follow up every important conversation with an email. Do that and you're 99% there.
Not every employee has an abundance of intrinsic motivation that pushes them through the day. Many, many people require some extrinsic motivation. In practice, at a reasonably sane workplace, most of this motivation comes from peer pressure of watching your coworkers work hard, not from a manager swinging a hammer.
But the extrinsic motivation of colocated coworkers is still very important for many people.
I can definitely see that in a non remote first company, but what about a company where remote is in their DNA? I spent some time reading through alley.co ‘s manual on this yesterday and it seems like if you put a lot of thought into it you could mitigate some of that.
Yes, you need to put in some thought but it's possible, even for a large organization. Here at Cisco it's about half/half and it lets us dogfood our own collab tools (Webex Teams, telepresence gear, etc).
I would say it is different, not harder. It requires different styles of leadership and communication, and when you do gather in person, your time needs to be spent differently. It only seems hard if you've never done it and have to learn new habits while losing old ones.
I'm a VP of an established remote-first company, 50+ developers, all US-based. For the most part, remote-first has been a great benefit for us, but there are no silver bullets.
Other than the issues mentioned elsewhere re: HR/Payroll complications, our biggest issue is finding junior talent and facilitating individual growth. For the most part we skew towards people who have some amount of remote work experience, which means skewing towards more experienced team members. That can have some knock-on effects that need to be managed: more experienced typically means greater salary, fewer juniors means less visible organizational structure around things like "I manage and mentor a team of 5" which can be disorienting for new hires, and can limit mentorship growth for senior team members.
For many senior developers, those knock-on effects could be viewed as positives, but we need to be sensitive to the overall composition of the team.
I haven't seen any greater motivational issues at remote-first vs a traditional management position. Like most any job, your motivation is largely a factor of your engagement. It's just as easy to drift on-site, with smoke breaks, lunch breaks, ping pong matches, chatting with your officemates about last night's NBA finals, etc etc.
This is something I rarely see talked about. How do you hire a grad or junior dev who is remote? How do you mentor them and (over years) help them grow into a senior dev?
From where I sit, "remote first" is all too often a code word for "only senior devs need apply".
Yep, I've mentored junior developers over video chat and Slack. If they have good communication skills (which is much needed for remote!) then they can write questions or ask to be shown something remotely just as well as in person.
In our experience, the day-to-day mechanics aren't too terribly different, but it requires more planning and management commitment. All the things that everyone SAYS they do when the bring on grad/junior devs, matter more, because the spray-and-pray of "hire 10 juniors and throw them in the ring and hope for osmosis" fails pretty badly.
When we bring on a junior, it's typically targeting a specific effort, with a specific team/mentor structure, and a desired exit strategy - at the end of X months, we expect the person will be capable of Y and Z, at which point they can fill these rolls in this other planned effort.
The mainline developer track isn't too tough to negotiate (a Java Dev 1 can do X, a Java Dev 2 can do Y, and so forth), but the harder part of the journey is cultivating breadth. Getting them experience with setting up a build system, or alternate OS familiarity, or learning color theory, or how to interpret a security scan.
Remote worker off and on for 30 years from both sides: alone at home and in the office supervising others working remotely.
There are obviously many pros and cons, but in my experience, there is one huge overriding factor most likely to determine remote success: workers' ability and willingness to read and write.
In my most successful remote relationships, almost everything was written down, written well, and read well. I'm talking about all the usual suspects: business requirements, functional specifications, technical specifications, project plans, stories, post-mortems, meeting agendas, code reviews, and of course, test plans.
But then again, this has little to do with working remote. You MUST write all of these things down anyway: I have witnessed over and over again a high correlation between writing and reading well and project success, remote or not.
If has never really mattered what methodologies or tools were used (yes, email is fine, so are waterfall and agile). You HAVE to write things down in the software building world.
Using this line of thinking, remote can actually make your team more effective. You have to get good and reading and writing to succeed. You have much less option of meeting, or huddling, or whatever they call those crutches these days. Write it down and all that fluffy overhead goes away.
Wanna go "remote-first"? Learn how to "read-and-write-first". The rest is gravy.
I've had exactly this issue. I was working remotely a couple of years ago and the project manager couldn't effectively communicate (we were all remote in different parts of the US).
The result was a disaster and the project manager playing the blame game. I eventually left.
I think that being flexible is much more important than having specifically remote employees. I personally would love if I could work even 2 days a week from home, giving me a lot more flexibility to clear up life admin (when's the last time anyone had time to go to the bank when it's open? not taking PTO for that...).
Agreed. Sometimes I have heads-down days, where I really just want to immerse myself, and being around coworkers is distracting. And sometimes I have less structured days when informal conversations are more necessary. These are roughly analogous to stages of a sprint or project, so they're roughly synchronized across the team. Fully onsite and fully remote are both suboptimal.
In a professional environment, I've always been able to take off for such things whenever I wanted without such things. "Hey, boss, I have to run to the bank. Be right back," was all that was required. I really didn't even have to tell the boss. Often a co-worker or a secretary would do.
All of these can be viewed as fallacies to another who has experienced long stretches of remote-only work. It is simply one person's take.
Why aren't more companies remote-first? It isn't as popular as it sounds like it is in tech circles, it isn't a silver bullet to the "problem" of work, and it comes with its own set of unique challenges and problems.
In my experience it can work well for tech-centric companies where everyone, or almost everyone is working behind a computer all day. But in most companies where you might have factory workers, call centres, retail outlets, etc, it begins to make less sense. If you have the office space you may as well use it, and often developers will be required to work closely with other departments in the business - this can get difficult when they're all working remotely.
I've worked fully remote and part-remote for almost 10 years and really all I want is flexibility. Can I start a little later when I need to so long as I make back the time? Can I work remotely for a week or two if I need to visit family? These things alone are probably worth $5,000 - $10,000 per year to me.
We should also consider working remote full0time can be extremely isolating, and prolonged periods with little to no human contact in my experience was bad for my mental health. I worked in one place for over 5 years and felt like I never really got to know anyone. I made no real friends. And at times I felt like I was little more than a code monkey writing the next piece of code with no sense of a shared goal or purpose - which you often get when working closely with a team.
It can also be difficult to separate work and home life for some people, especially if you have a family and kids. I don't, but at times my partner might invite her friends or family around - some of whom do have children. Whenever this happened it was extremely difficult for me to get anything done. A few times I even had family come into my office while I was in a meeting with my boss which is far from ideal.
These things are all manageable of course, and I'm sure working fully remote works for some people, but for me I'm much happier working remotely a couple of times a week with some flexibility in my work times.
went through a lot of the same stuff. Its tough to be isolated and mental health is a large driver of why I didn't want to continue working alone on a (small) SaaS app.
We just need to lose the idea of an 8 hour work day. It's an anachronism from the industrial revolution. Make me come in at 10AM, have standup, maybe a meeting or two, have lunch with colleagues, then everyone leaves by 2PM to work on their respective tasks. The problem with full work from home is that some people take advantage of it more than others, and you lose out on a lot of the "firm effect" that comes with face to face communication. The problem with 9-5 is rush hour, burn out, and inefficiency. Force everyone to show up 5 days a week for 4 hours and you get all the benefits of both.
My previous job was like that where half of the team lived in the same town but worked remote. I'd say it was idyllic to be able to ask some questions in person, and have lunch time comraderie. People came in to get work done or socialize and when you were ready, you can resume work at home or a coffee shop and felt no pressure to be there.
Well, not all. No broadened talent pool, and you still have commutes. IIRC that's something like 25min each way on average, so (math math math) you're saving people on the order of 200 hours a year by eliminating them, plus gas, car maintenance, maybe making dropping a car possible for two-car households, and we're talking probably 400+ person-hours a year saved, in actual commute time and in hours worked just to pay for commuting.
I wish this was addressed more as a massive cost that only the employee must take on in order to even have a job.
People have to risk their lives using a machine that they have to source themselves to come into an office everyday while not being compensated for that time, danger, and financial investment.
>We just need to lose the idea of an 8 hour work day. It's an anachronism from the industrial revolution.
That depends heavily on the industry. We share desks with another shift and run 3 shifts a day Monday-Friday and 2 shifts on Saturday because we are dealing with inbound international freight.
Police, fire, medical, retail, etc etc.
People on HN tend to be extremely myopic and think that every other person on the planet pecks away at code all day wrapped up in their hoodies.
Interesting you would say that. One of the biggest reasons I would want to work remote is because I can't afford to live in the town that I work in. Small town in Montana big city prices... no, I would definitely want to be able to choose where I live.
Elastic is like this, except 1500 folks instead of 80.
We are in over 50 countries, we are 1,500 folks, and we are all distributed, people don't really use offices (esp. not those of us in R&D roles) and almost everyone works from their homes.
You get a generous stipend if you want to rent an office like WeWork, etc.
We generally gather twice a year in person, but we're not bound by offices so we can gather anywhere there's a large enough hotel or two.
I've been with Elastic for 3+ years and after doing remote consulting for ~7 years I can say this company is one of the best, if not the best, at getting distributed work right
BrentOzar gives a great answer about financial/legal issues, and sytse gives another great answer about investor risk. I'll add some thoughts from a more "down in the trenches" (and ten-year remote developer) perspective.
First, remote work just isn't for everyone or for every situation. Some people thrive on frequent interaction with others, and just don't have the same energy when they have less. Some get outright depressed. Teaching/mentoring also requires frequent interaction, which is an issue for a team with a lot of new people. Sometimes online interaction is an adequate substitute. Sometimes it's not. Also, some people simply don't focus as well and let themselves get distracted too much when they can't literally see and hear others working around them.
Second, dealing with remote workers requires a change of habits that many find unwelcome. You have to write more and speak less. When you do speak via phone or VC, you have to learn new conversational protocols. Our subconscious protocols for when it's OK to start speaking and when to listen tend to break down a bit especially with high delay or poor connection quality, so people have to work a bit to make sure everyone gets their say.
Anyone who works remotely also has to be hyper-aware of time zones. If folks on the US west coast never want to meet before lunch, it's going to cause friction with people on the east coast who would rather not have meetings after 5pm almost every day. Similarly, if those west-coasters like to do solo work at the beginning of the day and collaborative work at the end (a common pattern for reasons I don't fully understand) they're going to hit that full-day round trip latency for questions and code reviews more often. And that's all with only a three-hour difference. In general, it gets even worse when larger differences are involved.
I've been working remotely for a decade. It works for me largely because of how I am and because I very actively try to teach my colleagues about how to make it work. Sometimes it barely works, and I wouldn't count on it working for a different person or a different team/project.
As long as startups insist on noisy, open environments I'll work remote. Just like some people can have a conversation while the TV is on some people can work in that environment. And everybody seems to have to adapt to those people nowadays.
Currently I'm one of the most productive developers in the company and some people really think I make a ton of hours to get to that level, but the only thing I have are the mornings that are wife and child free and then the afternoons with meetings and other distractions.
It really takes four hours of clean concentrated remote work to get there. You can only imagine what would happen if I had four hours more of that in a day.
The people at the top like to be seen and heard, feel their own impact, and they don't trust their employees to work if they can't see them.
Obviously that's a broad generalization and untrue of places that do allow remote work. And often middle management is happy with remote work, but execs limit it.
I see responses like "I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways." I think that's the exception amongst developers. Informal ideas are just as easily shared on slack, or by email, or on Jira. In fact, I find that getting someone to write something down means you have get better ideas coming your way (and less noise).
> "but don't abolish co-location just abolish the meetings."
The issue isn't always formal meetings. It's Bob, John, and Shirley coming by your desk. It's Joe and Jane having a conversation 5 feet away from you. It's the weird guy growing strange creatures in the refrigerator with 20 pairs of shoes piled under his desk that comes to bother you every time he's stuck on something instead of working through it himself.
And the time savings! An extra hour of life per day if I don't have to commute - and I take a train a very short distance or bike it (ok, I like the biking). For some of my coworkers, they may gain two hours per day. How much happier and more productive would they be? So much more.
Why aren't more companies remote-first? Because a lot of the people starting companies or in management positions tend to be older and are more accustomed to "The old ways".
Humans are creatures of habit. We like the status quo to stay the same if at all possible. If you've spent 30 years in an office with no remote work, you probably want to keep doing that (you're used to it afterall). You also probably want your subordinates to do the same. After all you've been used to having your boss "right there", your coworkers "right there", your subordinates "right there"... for years
Beyond that, which I honestly think is a large portion of "why". There is also logistical complexity on numerous levels, for numerous types of companies. Such as:
* Laws & Regulations - Especially in heavily regulated spaces like finance & health
* Enterprise Customers - They often are old school and want to see your offices and hordes of people working to justify their multi-million dollar purchases.
* All the pay/insurance/tax/reimbursement stuff mentioned a dozen times in this thread.
* Employees - As noted here in this comment thread, some people LIKE working in an office
* VC/Funding - It's more common now, but supposedly it's still harder to get VC money or funding from banks if the workforce is remote/distributed/virtual (take your pick of terms)
I've been full time remote since 2010 in senior management positions. Meaning that I have direct reports, that have direct reports, who have direct reports, and all are remote. Prior to 2010 I spent 20 years working in traditional office settings.
So I've dealt with just about every possible issue that can be encountered in both "normal" and remote environments and I can say that in every case remote is better. One of my employers had mandatory management training quarterly and I worked there for 9 years, so maybe I'm better prepared to manage employees and remote staff than most managers. I find remote staff much easier to manage, because none of the interpersonal issues need to be dealt with, he's parking in my space, someone is stealing my lunch, they don't bathe, they wear too much cologne/perfume, they are always bugging me, it's too loud, it's too quite, so and so is always late, and on and on and on.
I also find the productivity to be much higher mostly because people can get work done on their schedule and not be stuck in 9-5. If something is due Tuesday I don't care if it's done by at 11:30 Monday night, just so long as it's done and done correctly.
I have a separate dedicated office, I have a couch 4 monitors and a TV for monitoring the world, mostly on Bloomberg TV.
The only knock I have on working from home is that that I'm tired of my office and my house. I hate that my lunch room is my kitchen.
After 60 years of advancements in networked computing we should see not just the performance benefits, but also the lifestyle benefits. I don't see the point of sitting in an open plan office especially when you have cliches of people that choose to speak in native languages about technical subject matter. I'm not benefitting from the distraction, nor is anyone else.
It's nice that remote-only works well for SureSwift, but they're a early stage finance company. As such, they don't really need a ton of collaboration between internal employees. Many firms with similar internal dynamics (some types of consultants, call centers, etc) can, I suspect, be mostly remote. But not every company operates like they that. Many companies even have, gasp, locations that must be staffed! Factories, warehouses, retail outlets, distribution nodes, etc.
I wish pieces like the posted article talked less about the "advantages" of remote work (which seem to be fairly obvious to everyone, no?), and more about the challenges they faced in successfully creating a remote-work culture. And how they overcame those challenges (and what didn't work too). I have found that the effectiveness remote teams is highly dependent on the little details of how they are managed, how communications works, etc. More color on those details might actually be helpful.
I work for a company that has a global presence. Teams are often distributed across a couple locations. We also have some remote workers. We have people in one office who's entire team is in another office. We have people who are the sole person on their team in a given location. There really is no practical difference between working remote or working in a different office at that point.
Yes, face to face interaction has a lot of benefits that are noted throughout these comments but once you've incurred the overhead that comes from having more than a couple locations letting people work remote doesn't have any negative impact.
I can see why some 20-person trendy startup that hasn't had time to figure out how to effectively coordinate across multiple locations doesn't want to hire remote. They don't want to incur that overhead yet. For bigger established companies there's no good reason not to hire remote or at least allow the flexibility to work remote as needed.
I've worked in full-time remote, full-time onsite, and hybrid roles. While there are tradeoffs to each and circumstances generally dictate how successful the setup is, there is one big tradeoff that I don't see discussed as much: Mentoring juniors.
In my experience, it's really, really difficult to train up a junior (doesn't have to be engineering even) in a remote team. Because the feedback loops are more rigid—the passive communication styles of Slack/other remote tools ensure this—it can make teaching a junior, who is going to naturally have 1,000 questions and need high frequency feedback, extremely inefficient and uncomfortable.
Doing partial remoting atm (50% of the time on site) and having spent a year looking for a full remote job I have a few things to testify from the employee side:
1. Partial remote (sometimes) sucks. Ppl in office either feel they getting less or are bored to go the extra mile to accommodate you (remoting is based on better and more communication) or just ignore you cause it's easier to just ask the next desk. And anyhow you are out of any networking/office politics (not necessarily a bad thing though).
2. Fully remote companies are generally of 3 kinds: a. companies you've heard of and they're serious but since they're looking to hire from a global pool they are extremely picky (Maybe it's easier to get into google than getting into Wordpress). b. companies that are OK(ish) but are in the remoting thing just to cut costs, i.e. they pay peanuts c. companies that are outright dodgy and are looking for suckers or vanish in a puff without a sign. Obviously you'd only care for type (a) but so do thousand others out there.
3. If you happen to be tax-resident on a state where they tax-slaughter contractors (e.g. certain EU states with ~ 70% tax) remoting is devolving to a hobby rather than a job that may sustain you and your family. "Moving" to a tax haven comes with high risks and in the end you end up playing accountancy games rather than focusing on your job.
4. You essentially are a contractor. Few if any or remote companies hire you as an employee (but you are paid as an employee). You can be terminated with a minimal notice and no severance. In case of a mixed mode company non-remoters will probably get precedence over you.
5. Remoting is not for everyone. I personally am fine working like that but I totally understand that a lot of people need the motivation, vibrancy, socializing of the office.
6. Remoting is a very good way to balance work/family (but you might end up doing a half-assed job in both all the time).
7. Remoting it the _only_ way to fight off overheated to the point of surreal rental/housing markets like SF, London, Dublin, Munich.
8. Ecologically speaking the gains are just immense. Dunno if there are any statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if commuting to work is one of the biggest polluting activities overall.
9. Remoting is the only way to do _deep_ work. Focus, get in the zone, minimize disruptions and solve hard problems. Office is better for trivial, communication-heavy tasks.
> 2. Fully remote companies are generally of 3 kinds: a. companies you've heard of and they're serious but since they're looking to hire from a global pool they are extremely picky
There are many serious remote companies that will only hire in their country (or worse).
> 4. You essentially are a contractor. Few if any or remote companies hire you as an employee (but you are paid as an employee).
This doesn't make sense. I am paid as an employee, I am an employee.
On 4, I mean that your legal status is usually a contractor one (i.e. you're not protected by the laws covering workers/employees). Yet you are not paid by the hour or by deliverables as usual contractors are.
In order to try and provide answers to that question:
Because of work organisation and a cargo cult work culture that’s still stuck in late 19th / early 20th century scientific management (a theory conceived for assembly line rather than knowledge work, no less).
Because - while it’s a business’ goal to make profit - the individual agents in an organisation often have different motives: They need to accumulate reputation within the company and that reputation frequently isn’t directly related to attributes such as productivity but rather appearances such as how many people you “manage” or how long you’re sitting in a chair each day.
I believe you are one of the few that have made remote-first work for them.
I've done most of my work for clients remotely. It takes a very specific kind of person to work like that, and sadly it's not sustainable in the long run. Being alone for that many hours a day starts to get old.
Not to mention the communication barriers. You really have to pick the best people to have a workflow similar to an office full of people speaking the same language in the same time and place.
Good for you though. I see great potential for remote-first teams as well, it's just that the talent pool is tricky.
I can imagine that working remotely is really nice if you have only senior developer with a lot of experience who are great communicators.
But how do remote companies deal with junior developers? Do remote companies offer internships, and how do remote companies mentor people fresh out of college?
I've had a couple of interns, and mentored junior developers, and sitting right next to them makes all the difference in the world -- in my experience. I just can't imagine how that should work over Email or Skype. Or is remote just something for people who are more independent?
Effective remote (at least for tech) requires a different culture and often different tool use which make it difficult to be 'hybrid' (i.e some workers are remote and some not). This limits the ability to incrementally adopt remote work and so typically companies have to start with the gene.
Stuff like tapping a co-worker on the shoulder for an ad-hoc question is generally an anti-pattern. It likely knocks them out of flow and means your documentation and internal tools don't allow engineers to answer their own questions. But it's so baked into how companies work that you have to start a new company and train engineers to approach knowledge sharing differently.
Similarly ad-hoc 'fortuitous' discussions around the automated coffee maker to hatch potential new projects/designs/products or whatever company executives think are happening aren't really the best forum for that - they by chance, they aren't necessarily going to be inclusive, and the premise there is that you're essentially expecting work when the goal is to take a break. The expectation seems to be that I may see Bob from $other_team and query him on his current projects while the automated coffee maker takes a few minutes to cough out a latte-like substance but, again, there should be better ways to let me know about potentially useful team intersections rather than bugging bob while he is trying to get a break.
A lot of it really is about what kind of personality you are. I think there are too many people who need external motivation to get in the zone to get things done.
I'm not that person. I would love to work 100% remote, where I can work in my own space without distractions. I'm actually way more productive when I get to work from home (at least with the more low-level tasks like actually coding) -- and from a more selfish perspective, I can slice up my day more efficiently and get my work done WHILE ALSO getting my own things done (exercising during lunch hour and using my own shower!)
But TBH I think the most effective option would be to provide an office and sort of let people come and go as they please, maybe with some incentive to get them into the office on average 2 days a week -- for all of the things others have mentioned here, like collaboration, small talk around the office, "hey can you look at this?", etc. etc. Those things are important, and even though I hate coming into the office, I've noticed lately that there have been a number of days when I was working from home and my team had a lot of pings going back and forth trying to figure things out, and I thought it would've been a lot easier to just pop into the office until the issues were resolved.
Humans are fairly good at face to face communication and bonding.
I think there is a natural inclination to in person teamwork and bonding works better and faster in person.
That doesn't mean it can't be done remotely, it sure can, but I think there are real complications and it is highly dependent on the use case where remote work could be as simple as "yeah do that" and everything is good, or a situation where it takes a great deal more thought and coordination.
I've been on both sides of the spectrum. At first, I couldn't ever imagine working remote. I was an office rat, spent a lot of time at my desk and then socializing with coworkers at happy hours and such. It was a super fun life. When I got the job offer at GitLab, I was super excited about the opportunity and took it in spite of it being remote.
Fast forward to a year later, my perspective has changed. It took me about 3-4 months to adjust but slowly I hit my stride. Today, I can confidently say that I am a lot more productive working all-remote. I don't have to travel or change rooms for meetings, I am fully connected to folks via Slack and Zoom and GitLab issues, and I am working in the comfiest clothes :p. So 8 hours of work in all-remote is equivalent to probably 10 hours in an office.
Socially, I do co-working calls with people, hang out in the slack channels (#dad_jokes and #dog being two favorites), and Zoom as I need to. I never feel left out. I have to say though, I would probably not enjoy being remote when others are in an office because then there is a clear hierarchy of social interactions then.
We’re a remote first company at Out Of Office, though we’re still small (less than 10 employees). It’s the first remote job I’ve had as a software engineer and I find that I’m more productive than I’ve ever been. I have my days where I can’t concentrate but for the most part I’m able to get more done.
We err on the side of too many meetings because we don’t have the luxury of in person conversations, but we encourage people to speak up when the meetings aren’t productive. We also encourage having meetings just to socialize to avoid feeling lonely or get to know each other better. We hold standups on Monday/Wednesday/Friday so Tuesday/Thursday we’re just heads down getting stuff done unless there’s a meeting.
We’re building a product for people we want (or already have) location flexibility so we’re practicing what we preach in a sense. We believe the future of work may not be 100% remote but companies will become location flexible, meaning they still encourage employees to work in office but give them one or two flex days to work from home, a coffee shop, or shared workspace.
The benefits to the employee are quite obvious—greater flexibility in the schedule and they’re able to take care of life events like kids, doctor appointments, running errands, etc.
The benefits to the employer have been shown that it increases employee retention. 84% of workers want location flexibility[1] and companies that support remote workers have 25% lower turnover[2].
I’ve had positive and negative experiences on both side of the fence. There was one company where I had to commute 2 hours to and from which was absolute hell for me. At that place I worked out of a cubicle which I preferred to an open office. But people also tended to just stop behind me and have a full conversation without so much giving any thought to how they may be disrupting my concentration.
Another job I worked remotely without a single problem. The whole time I only met one person from the team but I never felt isolated. It may have helped that it was a young company with young employees.
Another job I worked was a failing business that was eventually swallowed up by a larger corporation. That job was fully remote too and without issues until the merger. I was laid off in preference of a team member who I think was chosen simply due to face time in the corporate office. This was reinforced by other remote workers being laid off as well. It probably didn’t help that this was a more traditional company where very few if any people worked remotely.
I've only ever worked in an early stage startup I founded. We initially were in same office and transitioned to remote over a 3 year period. (only 5 of us).
Early in your career (I wrote all of our product and am 25) working in an office is probably helpful. I am actively job searching now and the top thing I care about is a mentor/peer group.
I want to have people to interact with during work. I spent 3 years mainly writing code secluded from the real world (yes, I was going to things like dinners but that isn't the same in my experience).
I worked in finance before and use to complain about being at the office. Looking back, I had a quiet cubicle where I was mostly left alone to do my work but would take a break every hour and play some put putt golf around the office with the other interns.
I made friends, had a break and did a lot of really great work that summer.
Remote work once you're older and have kids + family + roots might make more sense, and I look forward to that! Especially if it allows flexible time so I could drive kids to school.
But, while young, I prefer office first w flexibility if needed.
Personally I think many in the pro-remote crowd have a limited view of what a software engineering job is.
If you have a job where your entire job is to crank out some website in Rails or to be the only person building some billing system then sure, remote can make sense. These jobs tend to be on smaller teams with limited scope.
But projects can easily get to a size where you need to:
- Collaborate with other engineering teams
- Work with people on the business side
- Work with product managers, data scientists, comms people, etc
- Gather requirements because what you have is fairly vague
- Determine if what you're doing is having the intended impact and adjusting as necessary
While remote can still work in these cases it's much, much harder. It's even harder when you have two teams in different sites even if you're in the same time zone.l
Some pro-remote people also say "I don't need the social interaction", which I think misses the point. You might not but what about your teammates? Doing things like having lunch with your team, going on an offsite, etc actually matters. It helps build a better working relationship.
This is I think particularly the case for more junior engineers. If one is two desks over from you and swearing at their computer then you can see that and intervene. If all the senior people are remote, who is going to do that?
So if you really want to live in [small town X] here and work at home to drop your kids off at school or whatever, that's fine but there's no getting passed the fact that you'll always have less opportunities and only a subset (a small one IMHO) of jobs will be suitable for that. And you just have to accept that.
Fully disagree and your opening line is a little bit patronising. Let me try the same!
Presumably the pro-remote crowd are working for tiny little companies where their engineering teams, product managers, data scientists, comms people, etc all fit in the same diddy little office.
But projects can easily get to a size where you need to:
- Collaborate with various government departments
- Work with people in other suppliers
- Work with people across an international supply chain
- Gather requirements because what you have is fairly vague (isn't this every project ever?)
While local work can still work in these cases, it's much, much harder. It's even harder when you have to fly people across time zones.
---
Look, this is all silly IMHO - it doesn't have to be this way.
The company I work with is setup for remote first, employees get a rundown of how we use tooling to solve all the communication issues that could arise. You can even sit in voice conference with other devs so you can actually hear each other swearing at code - if you choose to. But if people want to colocate the company will pay for them to have office space in a WeWork or similar.
FWIW, I make 4x working remote what I ever did for a local company. And the work is more interesting. Accept that!
I think its a case of argue for your limitations, and there yours to have. All of the bullet points you list can easily be solved with the many tools that are freely available.
"Some pro-remote people also say "I don't need the social interaction"
I think this is a good point. It's important to meet people in person and then you learn the niches of their character and won't find yourself trying to find translate the intent of someone typing in slack ("is that sarcasm or are they really upset?"). My engineering remote team resolves this by us having twice yearly meet ups, where we all spend a week together eating, drinking and discussing strategy.
Remote isn't flawless. A/V systems are still plagued with issues, tons of people don't have the discipline required, even more people don't live in an environment that allows it (eg: having proper office space), lots of people have family a t home that will not respect their work time, etc.
It has plenty of benefits of course, and I can absolutely see how someone can make the argument that the above is a small price to pay for the benefits. They may not be wrong, either. But you have a way of working that has been the norm since the dawn of time, and you have a new way that is still debatable if it's worth it, and the obvious reaction for many is to keep the statue quo.
And then there's just preferences. My current company is making a big shift to allow more remote work. Many people, myself included, don't work well in that environment. We're adapting, but if a situation happened and I ended up leaving my current job, I'd actively seek another office-first company.
To work remotely and collaborate well, it takes some extra effort and care. When you are present in the office, you can forego that care and still get the job done (albeit poorly). People generally don't have the skill or discipline for remote work/collaboration. With a little bit of coaching, it can be learnt easily but that itself requires effort from both parties. And of course, how teams function, how you get visibility and recognition for your work, and how you are rewarded - all these will be affected by switching to remote – without solid/convincing answers for these - people will be hesitant to go for it. These are the barriers, IMO.
Personally, my commute is super long and I get most of my intense deep work done at home (or during commute itself). I wouldn't mind a world where I had to go meet my colleagues for a couple of weeks at a quarterly offsite and work from home rest of the time. That would be perfect balance for me.
I think a big issue is that the costs and benefits are unevenly distributed: the benefits fall mainly on the employee, while the costs are disproportionately on their boss (since managing remote workers can be considerably harder). Since the boss is the one making the hiring decision, this asymmetry means remote hires are a tough sell.
I'm still new to the all remote lifestyle, but so far I have really been loving it. I work for GitLab, which is entirely all remote and has no central office space. I suspect that may be different from a hybrid approach.
Aside from the benefits of being able to be around more with my family and to better handle life events, I've found that I enjoying working this way much more.
Working asynchronously forces people to really think about how and what they communicate. I've found that people, including myself, are much more prepared and thoughtful in their work.
I also find that there are way less distractions and that meetings with my coworkers are much more enjoyable. I thought I would have a hard time with the random 'coffee chat' but have come to really value them. It's a great way to be social and meet people, without the pressure of having to do it every day.
Discipline. For every one for whom (they believe) remote work unburdens them of social interaction and unwanted stimuli ergo unleashing a Jedi flow state of crazy creativity and productivity...there are others for whom this idea doesn't hold up...like at all. They are more distracted, aloof, and frankly they try to do just enough to somewhat register as a viable employee. They don't engage unless engaged, and they tell a lot of stories when pressed as to why assignment X is still incomplete. Were they working furiously but blocked by A,B,C? Maybe...who knows...all I can say is the lack of proximity _does_ embolden those who are inclined to be lazy and full of excuses. Some at least marginally productive employees do go full on dead weight under these circumstances, IMO.
Anecdotal...but that's par for the course in this thread.
I think the article might be looking at this from the wrong direction. It's making a straw-man argument by taking a bunch of the advantages of remote work and saying that everyone should do it. It's ignoring the downsides of remote work (i.e. social isolation, communication hurdles).
It's possible there is a Darwinian effect going on. If remote-first companies are at such a competitive advantage, why aren't there more of them? I don't have a reason, but the lack of remote-first companies suggests that they are at a competitive disadvantage that is preventing them from proliferating or scaling. It's possible that due to underlying psychological factors, most humans are more productive when working face-to-face with other people in an office.
I agree with the points the article touched. Convenience, environmental conscious, and the variety of location choices are awesome.
It’s also awesome from a management perspective. Everything being async and online makes sense for a tech business. Plus creativity wise it allows us a lot more time for deep thinking.
There is regulations though we can improve. For example, for w2 you need to register your LLC in some of the states where you have employees working from. It makes w2 a big burden specially when you have people are moving around. Or smaller things. Like having to have a poster about labor laws in your office in Texas. It really doesn’t make when everyone is remote.
I’d love for the world to reframe the remote-vs-commute thing. It’s really network-first or not. If you are network first (some kind of tool is your primary and best-organized repository of information) then people can make the trade offs that work best for them.
The remote worker is going to need a development workstation that can't be accessed by a non-employee. It'll have to be in a room with a lock and an alarm. Houses shared with family members make this difficult.
The remote worker is going to need access to the internal network. This means they need a business-class router that can do an encrypted VPN. Trusting the workstation to do this is unsafe.
Voice and video also needs to go through that encrypted VPN. Possibly the workstation can provide for this. Whatever the choice of solution, it might need to be always running to accept incoming calls.
I'm about to leave a big tech company to join a remote startup. I'm pretty excited about all of the work environment benefits. That said, I'm a little worried that I'll just get lonely. I'm pretty introverted and get a lot of the social interactions I need at work, and often enjoy coming home and simply _not_ working. My tentative plan is to push myself to get involved in something that requires regular attendance, right now I'm thinking Toastmasters (public speaking isn't something I fear, but I've got a lot of room to improve) or improv. I'd really appreciate any advice from remote veterans.
Here at GitLab we're an all-remote company, and it's been that way since the beginning as I understand it. I've been here about a year now and I've heard so many great stories from people who had remote working change their life for the better. A while back I made a space to collect these, if you're interested in this topic you might find some of these inspring: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/stories/
In my office there are 6 employees. We have group meetings twice a week but otherwise we almost never communicate face to face despite only being 15 feet away from one another. I do enjoy having the option of walking into one of their offices to get a face to face meeting if I need one but I don't see why a call over Skype wouldn't be just as useful.
Currently, I can't afford to live in this town which is insane because there are only 50k people living here. I would love to be able to move to some small town where a house of the same quality and size would only cost me 100k or less rather than 300k or more.
I don't know why big corps don't do it more, because they are so big that most of the employees are de facto doing remote work already.
Most small companies are probably just too bad to do it. I mean they do it with contractors other companies, so it IS possible.
Why?
Most <30 people companies simply don't have any management skills yet. They have to get them when they get a critical mass of employees, but before that, they simply meander around with informal processes. Something doesn't work? Let's go to Joe in the next room and ask him!
I've seen absolutely magical things happen with smart people sharing a proximal space.
I fully acknowledge the merits, tradeoffs, and viability of a remote workforce and have been remote, worked with others who were remote, seeing success and failure in both.
That being said, I've never seen truly magical things happen the way they happen when people are together. For the work, the team, and the way I want the experience for work to feel, nothing beats having folks together in the same space. Of course, YMMV.
The reason why more companies are remote-first is that the manager's schedule is easier to do in the office. Put simply, the people running the teams/companies prefer many of the advantages that being in-person provides.
I'm building out a remote team now - nearly 15 developers - as a division in a regular 'on premise' tech company. And all is going well. However, there is one huge problem I haven't heard any good ideas around - how do I onboard young talent? I can't hire an intern or new college grad into an office by them selves and thinking they can work from their parents basement isn't so hot either.
I work at a 100% remote company, but i think there should be a concept of "company hubs". If you don't live 3 hours from one of the few hubs (or maybe there is a single hub), you're out of the area. Require the employees to come in a couple of times per month/quarter for collaboration and a meal.
When its TOO distributed there are a lot of inefficiencies playing against you (timezones, national holidays).
Why do office workers still have dress codes? Point being that norms take a long time to change. The hippy generation mostly traded in a neck tie for some khakis, with maybe the bonus of casual Friday. The tech industry’s growing domination is just making a dent in allowing blue jeans daily. Still not super common nationwide
I've been fully remote for the past two years at a company that is mostly distributed (we have to have physical operations in markets we operate in, but the tech team is fully remote).
Overall, I love it, and it would be a challenge to go back to the office/commuting lifestyle. However, I still recognize that it is a nascent thing and I'm incredibly fortunate to work where I do. If the business goes under, will I be able to find comparable remote work with good pay?
To hedge that bet, I still live in one of the larger tech hub cities (born and raised here, so I also don't want to leave it). The thought has crossed my mind many times to move to cheaper locales and take advantage of the potential wage arbitrage that would come with it, but in the end, I like my expensive coastal city, and think it's worth the price. And if push comes to shove, I can commute into an office and make a living.
We have periodic offsites where everyone travels to a single place for a week, and those are great to get to know the people behind the webcam. With Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Github, etc., it really doesn't feel that much different than working in an office after awhile. The hardest part is learning that with remote work, you have to intentionally overcommunicate. When you're in an office you can get a sense of the vibe, which basically goes away when you're remote. It's really important for a company to focus on maintaining culture when you don't see each other in person every day.
If I were to found a company, odds are, I'd try to establish it as a remote-first culture (assuming the business could support it, which not all companies will ever be able to do). It just makes sense for a good number of tech startups.
The lifestyle isn't for everyone -- some people really thrive in the office environment, and that's great, but the flexibility of remote work is something I wouldn't trade for the world. I'm sure I'm leaving a little money on the table by not working for a local tech company and commuting, but the 10 hours a week I don't spend commuting are time I can spend with my kids, and I'm saving money in other areas like no gas or bus fare or eating out for lunch every day.
I think remote work is "a" future (not "the" future) and could be a great fit for many companies, especially businesses that do most of their work online. However, offices will never go away completely, and that's fine, too.
The problem is the companies that are remote first aren't hanging their shingle here in the states. They're hanging them in India, China, South Pacific, and other areas that have developer expectations 1/10-1/5 the price they would pay here.
Remote-first is a relatively new idea, that's why. Sure, there are a lot of companies that offer remote days on the schedule, and some international companies that hire certain branches of the business as remote, but the concept of a remote-first company is new and will take time to adopt.
With presence, a manager's minimum qualification is being capable of comparing "number of hours in attendance required" vs. "number of hours present". Remote work raises the required minimum competency of managers, which most companies will avoid at all costs.
In my experience, remote work takes quite a bit of organization which often defaults to hierarchy. Leaner organizations with less management struggle with this. It partially depends on where you want to put your money as an organization.
Its the "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" issue.
In-person employment has "worked" forever, for some definition of "worked." Its difficult to trade something that we all know to something that is new and has a lot of unknowns.
That would be a tough sell for me personally, but it wouldn't have anything to do with the workstation.
1) Flexible hours. I just can't stand the thought of knowing that between the hours of 9 and 6 I know I'm going to be sitting at a desk for the foreseeable future. I need to be able to mix things up.
2) Easy commute and parking.
3) Genuinely good co-workers and environment that I like being around.
I've never worked on a team that actually works well together, that worked from home more than 1 day a week. It's much, much more difficult to stay on the same page and in sync.
Just like nobody ever did their homework? Because after all, nobody sees you not do it and nobody cares if it's not done when it was supposed to be done.
And nobody bats an eye when the feature you talked about in the previous standup or meeting somehow mystically never materialized in the project's repo... nobody cares that you never were there to answer your colleagues' needs.
Or, you know, maybe people can actually get things done even without a surveillance camera monitoring their butt in seat.
The good thing about remote work is that results and communication (i.e. things that matter) are the things people see.
And that is different from how people game any other metric how? You realize that boss buttons and quick alt tabs are a thing with butts-in-seats, so that's not game-proof either.
For all the rhetoric about enhancing communication, I'm pretty sure open offices are mostly about getting people to police their coworkers.
I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.
Sometimes you don't want to formally disperse some information but are happy to let people overhear what you think.
An environment where people can find meeting rooms when they need them, can find peace and quiet when they need them but also generally have co-location means good team cohesion.
If developers are remote, you will find that your code-base becomes the same. That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.
Yes, when working face to face too many (formal) meetings can be a problem, but don't abolish co-location just abolish the meetings.
And don't be a cubicle farm. Yes, if you think the alternative to remote work is an anonymous grey cubicle on the 5th floor of an anonymous office block (or just as bad, the 'trendy' exposed ducts open plan office), then remote work will look like nirvana.
Of course I'd also recommend being somewhere with good public transport and have flexible working hours so people aren't forced into long commutes in poluting personal transport. Also offer and allow occassional remote work to further ease that demand without losing the benefits of co-location.
But whole-team remote work? No thanks!