There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Lots of people in the HN comments really drinking that “in-person is better” Kool aid.
Who would expect that from hackernews, a place that used to cater towards engineers and is now dominated with startup bros and wannabe CEOs, are also touting the “in-person” is better?
I think in-person is better for culture and team building. That mindset works when workers stay at a job their whole career.
It used to be that you could stay at one job your whole career and be fine. That hasn’t been the case for decades now though. Workers started getting treated like they were expendable cogs in the machine, and so now workers treat employers the same way. Switching jobs is the best way to be successful and make more money.
So employers want it both ways. They want to treat employees poorly and still expect a good team culture to form to retain workers. They have to pick one.
I’ve got an amazing team at work and it’s 100% remote. Wanna know how? A couple of employees turned out to be real clowns and it relaxed the atmosphere and pushed the majority to start getting involved in the chat and now people are joking around and having fun while there are more serious periods when people are asking questions.
People need to get that stick out of their ass, they wouldn’t be 100% professional at the office, they don’t need to be 100% professional remotely.
Maybe, but I also think a lot of remote workers are almost getting to the point where they don’t want to work with people, but an automated system that brings them work to perform that they later submit to the system.
You don’t need to pretend to be interested in a sports team or fake sympathy if a coworker’s kid gets sick. Your employer may be a cog, but so are your coworkers. So coworkers treat each other like cogs or NPC’s because that is all they are now.
For work that needs a lot of coordination between workers, or for mentoring new people, in-person is helpful. When I was a new engineer being able to work closely with more senior people was really helpful, both from a technical perspective and from a perspective of learning culture and expectations. With more senior people and work that mostly involves sitting by ourselves, remote has been incredible from both a comfort and a productive perspective.
It could be for some things, especially for larger scale coordination. That a company like Zoom, which could easily dogfood its productivity tools to create better ones wants engineers back in the office at least part of the time may indicate that there are some issues with full remote.
What managers and CEOs don’t get is that you better have a problem that requires loads of “team spirit” and “culture”, or otherwise the added stress from commuting, in-person interactions, not being at your own place, etc… is going to be a drag for regular work.
So you either really really have a problem that requires people to be in office or you are better off letting people choose where to they work.
That assumes that regular work doesn’t require coordination or can’t be helped by knowing there other people they work with and remembering that their coworkers are human.
I’ve had junior staff self-report that they don’t ask as many questions as they should when working even though instant messaging, video calls, and screen sharing tools are there. They also don’t always know there may be others they can ask as those relationships take longer to develop full remote.
I’ve got one coworker who sounds nice in the office but will scream at those working under them on video calls for an extended period of time. They like working remote, but others aren’t exactly a fan of it.
I’ve seen email chains go from coordination to accusation to fighting because there isn’t as much room to maneuver and be wrong in email or Slack compared to being in person.
That isn’t “team spirit” exactly, but maybe an attempt to create a more collaborative “culture”. And coordination is part of the work, even if it doesn’t feel like “work”.
I wonder how a tiny company such as Microsoft is able to pull it off? We’ve been fully work-from-home-or-office pre-pandemic and no one seems to care as long as your team’s results are fine.
Hybrid or is full remote still acceptable?
Also, it would be interesting to know if some teams lost the ability to do full remote because of performance and what were the decisions that would trigger that.
Lmao they exploded during covid so most of their employees have never been inside an office. It’s not much of a return… Did they have to purchase new office space to do this?