It seems to me more likely that there will be a few more remote friendly companies, and a very few more remote-only companies after the dust settles, but the real shift will be for most "office based" workers will be the expectation of partially working from home.
There is a big difference between "never going to an office again" and "not going in 5 days a week".
The biggest challenge I've faced being on a remote team (read: not necessarily WFH) is that people who are at the primary physical location are acutely unaware of their remote colleagues. On VCS systems they'll shout and have conversations with each other, they won't focus conversations in chat or make equivalent channels for hallway conversations, and they'll assign work to themselves first.
I'd like to have the option for remote work to be available to me in the future and if we're going to do that then that means people who go into primary locations must learn to play ball with everyone.
1. everyone is 100% remote
2. everyone comes into the office occasionally
Anything else leads to a two-tiered system.
The key was we were always listening to music in our headphones.
It's akin to saying you want good relationships and friendships but without the hassle of all that conversation.
What I expect to really take off, though, is things like managed IT you do from home for some manufacturing company somewhere--small groups embedded or servicing larger companies that can be hired and spun up more cheaply from elsewhere in the country.
Basically, everything that people said would happen (but didn't work out) with globalization in knowledge worker industry, I personally expect to actually happen and work out with "domestication" of it to include a large segment of remote workers. The business considerations are mostly the same, minus the cultural, governmental, and time zone barriers that prevented it from working.
The remote revolution may be overblown in general, but for programmers, the appeal is particularly strong. They've seen the promised land and it turns out it's in a nice home office in Bend OR, not a Bay Area traffic jam.
Yes, but I'd argue there's an even bigger difference between "not going in 5 days a week" and "going in 5 days a week."
As soon as you're remote even just part time, that means all your internal tooling and everything must be remote-compatible. Way more of your communication becomes async-by-default. And if some people are 1-2 days wfh, what's to stop some people from choosing 100% remote? And if that's happening, why limit your hiring to local?
Even part time remote employees is a culture shift.
I do agree that for most companies it probably won't be full remote, but if it just resolves in more flexibility, I'm all for it.
But also, there is a potential semantic difficulty. By remote friendly I am thinking about "open to hiring a single person in a different city/country", not "employees that don't come into the office much".
I would draw a distinction between those, and I'm not convinced we'll see a huge shift in the former.
Completely disagree with this. The future is going towards decentralization of work using tools like virtual reality and other communication mediums that have yet to be created. This area is already hot and huge sums of money are going to be spent to optimize for it.
Workers that rely on the traditional staying in the office to gain relationships and schmooze with the boss will be left behind. Besides, why is it assumed that the bosses will be in the office?
We sit at our desks and communicate via IM & email anyway. The internet has changed reality, and changed a lot of the underlying logic for the status quo. Social distancing for a whole year is one hell of a catalyst.
Meanwhile, there are real economic factors like large housing cost and wage disparities between (often nearby) locations. Reasons why remote isn't always good notwithstanding, underlying economics exerts has a ratchet like influence. ...Not to mention globalisation.
So yes, I agree that the maximalist prediction is overblown. That said, I think this is a complex chain-of-events type of process that is now going to be moving faster. Companies are now more experienced/capable of remote. Employees are more capable of it. People have an understanding of it, how to fix it, etc.
It's a combination of prevailing wind and gust of wind.
These days, most professional employees get a set amount of vacation time, lets say 20 days. In the previous system, if you wanted to fly halfway around the world to visit family or what-have-you, you might use half of those vacation days in one go. Now, if you're only expected to be in the office 1 day per week ("Meeting Monday"), you could take that same trip and use just 2 days of vacation, assuming you're working, or at least a making a passable semblance of working during the rest of that trip. Heck, you could take almost half of the Meeting Mondays for a year if you work the rest of the time.
In some sense, that's no problem. One of the big points of remote work is that it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you get your work done. But the reality is, those occasional in-person days seem to be very important for really connecting with teammates. If Nomad Ned seems to always be missing Meeting Monday but I can rely on Local Larry to be there, I may be much happier and feel more connected with Larry, even if they both take the same number of vacation days per year.
Between geopay, tax rules, wanting employees to be close enough to an office for in-person meetings or emergencies, etc, I think employers are going to become much more invasive in terms of tracking the locations of their employees going forward.
Just work from home :D
I don't think anyone sane would even suggest that unless very specific stuff
Won't really affect me as I was fully remote before this (in spite of being commuting distance from a company office). But I definitely know people who have moved out of the area.
Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to get more desks in their company's current footprint. That obviously got entirely axed March 2020 (over a year of work down the drain), and it's been her job the last year to figure out WFH and what post-COVID-19 workspace looks like.
The executives are wanting people back in the office. They've seen enough they don't like about full WFH that they do want people back in the building at some point when it's safe. But they also don't want everyone in the building at the same time anymore. Basically, they want to operate the building at pre-pandemic capacity of 50% or so, rotating who is in and who isn't.
With that comes some unique space challenges, including but not limited to how does having a desk work if only 50% of people are in the office on a given day. They haven't chosen a final solution yet as there are A LOT of moving pieces, but it has been interesting to watch.
The only utility I can see is if you need to run for appointments that are easier to do when working from home, but this is less about remote work and more about flexible working hours.
[0] Having worked in a team with distributed offices, a fairly large company like your partner's can definitely solve this.
You can definitely increase the radius of where you can live but you're right that you can't go live in a mountain town.
My main issue with this is that you can't set up your desk how you like it anymore. You can't set the desk height, you get a chair that's differently broken every day, often a different sized screen, you can't ensure to seat nearby the people you need to collaborate with, you can't put up some decoration or printed cheatsheets…
May god have mercy on you if your company lets sales and product who are constantly chatting on calls (often at high volume) into your desk area when you're trying to focus on programming or design...
1) The company has a small technical corner, but is mostly a non-technical org.
2) The average age of the company is quite a bit older than one more focused on technology might stereotypically be and, at the risk of sounding ageist, has proven to be far less interested in engaging with modern technologies that would make WFH smooth/productive.
Post-pandemic they have said that is being scrapped since there is too much chance of infecting people from shared work areas. So back to you have a fixed desk. Only, despite adding 2 million more square feet of office space to campus last year, there really isn’t enough room for everyone.
I pity the people who are having to figure this out.
I've heard of companies hot-desking like this so they can have fewer desks than total employees, splitting each desk between people whose schedules are "out of phase" with each other. It sounds basically intolerable.
I'm somewhat less sensitive to many common office complaints than a lot of sw engineers I've worked with, but if this were something my employer announced I'd be on my way out immediately.
But if you're doing two days a week in the office, all your meetings will move into those days so they can happen in person, so you'll miss having your own desk less.
i dont know if rotation or full wfh forever is a good idea, but i must say that pandemic or not, offices (at least the open kind) at anything above 50% capacity are horrible places to work... the noise, distractions and reduced oxygen levels are brain-killing...
I'm more productive than ever. I'm happier than ever. I'm eating healthier. I sleep better. My marriage is stronger. My finances are kicking ass.
I won't give this up.
Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to setup zoom calls every time I need to talk to someone more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer. I'm less productive than ever. I'm more depressed than ever. I'm eating poorly and drinking more. I almost don't sleep anymore. I just want to spend few hours by myself instead of being constantly around my family members. My finances are unchanged.
I won't give this up. Give me a schedule, a break from home to work, let me see and meet people.
Go to the office if you want (to be "by yourself"? a bit weird but whatever) and let your coworker stay home if they prefer that.
Sounds like your problems are caused by something a bit more profound than a few zoom calls a day.
If you hate your family so much why don't you move in with roommates? I don't talk to my family either.
When life is good, share it.
57% seems more accurate: "But once the crisis is over, most (57%) of those who were working before the outbreak and who intend to stay part of the workforce say they want to be able to continue working from home."
Actual survey results: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/economy/articles-reports/2020/09...
Some of the people I've enjoyed working with the most have really struggled with the 100% remote dynamic during the pandemic. They have different personalities which have made it hard for them to be stuck at home, but those personalities make them great team members too. I'm not sure I'd want to just never work with people like that again.
My experience is that this behavior doesn't get translated to remote-only workplaces. Casual in-person conversation doesn't shift to chat platforms, it just happens less frequently.
People being remote that miss out on office chit-chat aren't actually missing out on something if their coworkers can help it. I think these interactions are incredibly important for people who value them, and fear of "leaving out" remote workers isn't a very good reason to prevent them.
The most effective workplaces I've been at that have had successful remote workers are the teams that try to consistently involve those people. It's not a set of rules or trainings that makes people do this, it's a mix of cultural values and individual conscientiousness.
A decent workaround is to have entirely remote teams and entirely in-office teams. That way people can be on teams where they feel like being remote is not a detriment to their careers (because ALL discussion takes place online) and people who prefer working in-person don't have to force everything onto Slack just to have the remote people feel included.
It seems like the fairest is to offer both and let the employees decide if the tradeoffs are worth it, then?
And that sentiment might also change post-COVID.
I also wonder what this means for people who aren't in the best situation to work remotely.
IMO WFH is a lot easier on smaller teams/org's, where you have deep expertise. It is not a pancea, but it certainly is better then no WFH.
We're working out how to mix up WFH with WFW to try and get the benefits of both.
For context, I'm also much more extroverted than the average developer - I suspect that also has something to do with my absolute dislike of full remote working.
So in every one of these threads, HN is all of a sudden nostalgic for two hours a day commuting, shelling out-of-pocket for parking, eating junk food for lunch every day...
Offices cost money. This is why WFH isn't going away. Even people who are required to go into the office periodically might find themselves sharing temp space with others who use the same (reduced) space on alternating days.
As you can tell from this comment, I love WFH and will never go back....and it doesn't look like I'll have to. While the poor office dwellers are sitting in their cars, I'm enjoying a nice morning run.
* Synchronous high-bandwidth communication (read: meeting, ideally with a shared whiteboard) is pretty handy sometimes.
* Timezones really do matter. If you want a sync meeting that includes people in Europe, the US, and APAC, someone will have a bad time. If you want quick turnaround on code reviews, having 8-12 hour time zone differences is a significant barrier. Even a "4-hour" difference for meeting time purposes can be a huge problem in this sense: it's 9pm on Thursday where you are (US West coast), but your coworkers' weekend has started (in New Zealand), so any code reviews you ask for on Friday morning you won't see until you get back to work on Monday. And any code reviews they ask for on their Monday morning won't happen until you get back to work on their Tuesday.
* Language matters. Even if everyone involved speaks English to some extent, it's a _lot_ easier to follow some accents than others, especially on an imperfect (read: teleconference) audio feed. Which accents depends on which people.
* Shared context matters, just in terms of understanding requirements. This can be developed, but it takes time. People from more similar backgrounds often require less time to get to mutual understanding around this sort of thing. This needs to be weighed against blinkered thinking and lack of diversity in perspectives, of course.
I love working remotely, and am used to the scheduling issues around this sort of thing, but there are a _lot_ of issues that come with hiring someone halfway across the globe that you don't get with hiring someone also working remotely but in the same city or at least speaking more or less your accent of your language and within an hour or two timezone distance. The fact that the latter works for a particular position does not imply the former will.
If this rule is permanent, companies may not be able to afford office space. WFH may become "new normal" bcos it is only thing company can afford.
In old days, flu spread in office like wild fire. Companies outsourced negative externalities (sick leave and sick holidays) to their employees. Now we have way more transmissible viruses and probably new regulations.
That’s incorrect and largely irrelevant. We have one virus that’s more dangerous, but not necessarily more transmissible than the flu, measles, or the common cold (and demonstrably less transmissible than many viruses).
Unless you are of the irrational belief that we have somehow reached a point in history when serial deadly pandemics are the norm instead of the exception, then there’s no reason that we can’t go back to a world where we can work in person again...
Wether we want to or not is the relevant question.
Hygiene rules will change, and companies have to adapt.
In mixed onsite / remote teams, the remote employees can be seriously disadvantaged regarding access to information, participation in decision-making, etc.
Some of the comments above mention this effect, and my own personal experience has very painfully confirmed it. It was a truly awful experience for me. I suspect it's what lead to the maxim, "If anyone is remote, then everyone must be remote."
I think if a company is serious about a mix, there needs to be optimization around this. Like, remote Mondays and Fridays, if you want to be remote. Meetings on Tue/Thu. Something like that.
- I hear of Bay Area tech companies throwing stupid high salaries at senior devs in smaller local firms -> more consolidation in tech
- how non people centric will work become? I feel being 100% remote I have even less of a relationship with anyone at home. I’m a commodity doing work. Maybe there’s more of a temptation to get that commodity cheaper elsewhere
Do not think for a second that you are not already disposable
i just don't consider roles that aren't remote, even if they are in my metropolitan area.
i'm not gonna waste 8 hours a day in an office, away from things and people who actually matter.
Why are you sure about that? Because that's how you feel?
It's been tolerated and embraced by organizations because their feared dip in productivity never surfaced -- in fact, some organizations found themselves more productive. But employees are taking less vacation and putting in more hours since their social options are greatly restricted due to the pandemic.
So what happens to the perception of productivity in late 2021/2022 when people start burning through all that banked vacation time and start socializing again instead of putting in an extra hour or two in the evening before bed? I could see employers panicking.
Unless there is an analysis that shows there are energy benefits to centralizing your workforce(more efficient coffee machines, lighting, HVAC, etc), the pressure will be there to let them stay at home.
Depending on a bunch of factors, remote work could be much more pleasant or taxing during school closures than it might be during 'normal' times.
I guess a similar point could be made even just about spouses both doing remote work at the same time, or even roommates.
At the individual level, productivity in office VS at home varies depending on your personal circumstances, preferences, and role. I hope larger companies realize that a one-size-fits-all policy isn't the best solution.
Instead, I'd like them to allow individual teams to decide what options they want to allow within the team (full-time in office, work from home N days/week, full-time remote, etc.) Then the team can develop norms and processes for work and communication that make sense.
I'm in hardware, so I still have to make trips to the office. Those are way more fun. And those trips turn into social events. It's like catching up with friends.
Normally we'd downweight such a submission as a follow-up [1] on an extremely repetitive topic [2], but this thread turned out to be quite a bit better and more thoughtful than usual, so I've changed the URL instead to an article about the survey.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The boundaries between private and work life became fuzzy and there’s this implicit expectation that one will be available all the time- where can you be apart from home? And that’s not healthy.
It has also been challenging to families with kids as they need to juggle between work For home and work from home. I’ve now seen folks responding to emails and queries as though we work different time zones!
I’m in tech and my team are mostly waiting to get back into office. But I believe that working on prem or wfh should be a choice.
We'll see whose opinions matter more when this is over... workers or executives.
I’d love it if my office went to a 1-2 days/week on-site schedule, where face to face time is predictable and regular, and we can all be productive and relatively zoom free the other 3-4 days.
A hybrid approach, if managed right, would be ideal.
