I can login and out when I need to (meetings/stand ups I obviously need to factor in) which allows me to take an actual break and go somewhere with my dog when I am feeling bogged down/unproductive.
The ability to do this means that, when I return to the desk, I am refreshed and ready to tackle a problem with fresh eyes instead of glazed over and looking at a clock anxiously waiting for my time to jump on a train and commute to my home.
This rhetoric that remote work is bad for business seems to always come from people whom I suspect have an ulterior motive — usually people with investments in real estate and retail businesses which are taking a hit from the lack of lunchtime and rush hour footfall.
My manager once said to me “I hired an adult, so I don’t need to hold your hand” and this has resonated with me since. If you cannot trust your staff to do what is best for you then that is your problem for hiring the wrong people. It isn’t the problem of an entire industry.
If your work can be done in isolation and doesn't require a team to deal with any uncertainty, then by all means work fully remote. However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, then it's going to be more effective to spend time together.
I think it's telling that you talk about 'looking at a clock'. If that's how you spend your office time, then indeed there might be something off. E.g. a controlling manager who wants their minions to be visible and on the clock.
Personally I work one or two days from home. Some team members more, a few even fully remote (but it's noticable that they are more task oriented and less included in any new concepts/roadmaps/designs/etc). The majority of the people spend the same one or two days together in the office where all kinds of formal and informal interactions happen that further the collaborative creative process.
The article also has no data supporting it. Only feelings. It's very typical for these sort of articles.
I am a lot more productive, and even creative working from home, where I have full control of the environment I'm in and not wasting effort on social interactions. Collaboration happens effectively in a remote settings as long as the company embraces it properly.
Since we are discussing feelings about remote work, this is as valid as anything else.
Just have optional office hours, Slack huddles and mob sessions every few days.
Some of my engineers…
- have a open huddle for a few hours a day where anyone can drop into their project while they work
- others make use of our scheduled themed mob sessions (ie. Maintenance Mondays, deployment Thursdays). have a problem, idea or just want to hangout then come by?
- ICs & seniors are required to host at least a weekly office hour to assist juniors or teach something of their choice.
The default doesn’t always have to be return to office for a physical meet.
There’s lots of other options.
Not convinced yet, at this point it just seems to be anecdotes, and pretty nebolous ones at that. I would be open to listen to this position if it was backed up by actual examples like "So we were working on Product X and team Y struggled with remote work in that and that way." Creativity/Innovation is not something fuzzy, but something very real that will result in deadlines not met, lower morale and so on - I will start to consider Altmans et al.'s position once I hear those non-fuzzy experiences. (As someone working in a small startup doing innovative products, and collaboration being crucial).
That used to be my feeling as well. As much as I don't like Zuck in general; we hold our meetings in VR and for us there is no (measurable) difference from being in the office for creative work. While we really struggled on Zoom. After I tried a Quest 2, I decided to just get 15 of them for the team and it just works. Your brain (well our brains, guess there are exceptions) forgets you are not actually sitting in a room with your colleagues to the point where you actually try to physically touch them when working. It works very very well. Never setting foot in the office ever again. Don't really mind if Sam Altman thinks differently...
Please, I've worked on plenty of successful new projects with a distributed team. This in-person bias is largely for people who don't know how to communicate effectively.
- capable and not just good salesmen that got into their positions due to various factors like resume-driven development, obscene levels of networking or nepotism, being in the right place at the right time — and riding that wave — etc.
- have gotten the junior-level giggles out of them — and understand that the simplest solution is the best solution; rather than something needlessly complex because:
(“it won’t scale” (i.e I’m at best bored and want to try something new, and at worst trying to shoehorn something insane to further my resume) ||
“we have to do it this way” (i.e. I read a blog post last night and want it to seem like I’m knowledgeable and not an imposter with zero critical thinking ability) ||
“this is the correct way to do it” (i.e. I’m stalling again because I cannot think of a way to provide business value other than prostelyzing various opinions and philosophies about software engineering, despite there being zero hard and objective data that what I’m saying is in anyway effective for anything more than making me seem like I know what I’m talking about))
At that point, once you have enough maturity and experience (i.e the knack for being able to adapt to circumstances by your lonesome), you do not need to collaborate. You can almost always figure it out by searching online for what is almost always a trivial, already-been-solved issue, or by going for a few walks and mulling it over in your head. If it’s a truly hard problem, you can even sit down somewhere and work it through inside your head.
The only two types of collaboration I’ve ever seen in the workplace is:
1). Someone less learned on a subject picking the brain of someone more learned (fair if the subject is complex, and not easily accessible through literature; but grating if it’s something puerile like how to use a tool — RTFM)
2). Two people brainstorming something and coming to the wrong conclusion because they’re implicitly more interested in socializing correctly than coming up with the right answer. You see this with whiteboards a lot.
For example, M$’s Roslyn a few noobs were trying to figure out what data structure to use for representing syntax nodes and the solution they come up all these years ago was utterly silly (red and green trees) — solely because they were white boarding the problem out, and trying to come to a consensus (and to keep the vibes good, maaan) rather than to find the best answer.
Both are subpar from an efficiency standpoint, but great from a career standpoint.
N.B. If it’s not already apparent, I’ve grown tired of “collaboration.” I’ve grown tired of seeing it create more problems. And I’ve grown tired of the intellectual dishonesty around it.
This sort of perspective is killing any real chance of having a productive conversation about the topic. There's a chance a person very similar to you simply disagrees with you on a very complex topic. There's pros and cons to the office and WFH alike. You clearly do well with WFH, and have good reasons for it. A junior engineer like me did not, so I have a different perspective.
The next exhaustive part of the debate (which you didn't bring up, I'm simply anticipating), is the retort that my team just didn't do WFH correctly, or that Covid was a confounding factor.
0: which is a big sacrifice, since even 2 day hybrid can mean spending tens of hours a month sitting in a car or on transit, not engaging in either productive or self-sustaining activity, and it actively limits where people can live, further propping up cities with housing supply issues due to single-family zoning and a lack of rent control.
1: Not to say this is you, but I can imagine many candidates saying "yes" / "I excel in remote and on-site" to "do you believe you'll be productive in a remote role" even if they aren't sure this is the case for them, in order to look qualified for every open position.
When I was in my previous role one of the engineers and I would literally jump on a video call and just leave it on while we worked. If he had a question it could be asked naturally and we could also have the workplace chitchat.
One of my close friends is a firm believer in hybrid working and we discuss this a lot. I think the important thing is communicating with each other and trying to provide an environment which enables your staff to do their best work.
The complexity is added by the fact someone like myself going into the office would be less beneficial to a junior.
This is solely as the WFH preferring employee would not be in the best place to provide advice due to them feeling like they are not being given the working conditions they require.
It’s a tough balancing act.
For me, personally, I am happy to go to social meetings and make it known to everyone they can message/call me on slack anytime — even if I am offline give it a crack.
Workshops are another tool which I feel bridges the gap. Instead of forcing people to go to the office on the off chance they might have a conversation with someone, make a day of it. Provide the grounds for those conversations to happen.
As we dive deeper and the debate is opened it will be interesting to see how it all pans out but I know a lot of devs/engineers are not going to budge on this one.
There are pros and cons to RTO, and benefiting your investment portfolio is one of them
Or you're just a bad manager.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767280
Remote work only makes sense when everyone has integrity, but that seems less and less likely in my experience, sadly.
But then I have to ask - if his employers are happy enough with his work to keep him around, what is the problem there?
Keep in mind, I am also the sort of guy that doesn't rage against employers doing layoffs when they have record profits. It's a natural cycle of business.
Once you take personal feelings off the table and see it all as business relationships, everything is alright. As long as nothing illegal is being done, of course.
The other side of it, and it's complicated in the same way, is the industry collectively made a lot of bad decisions working from home in 2021, and we're paying for it now.
It makes literally 0 business sense to be forking out anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand per employee per month to give them a space to work, when that can just be avoided.
The amount of cost and overheads involved; from insurance to upkeep to rent to OHS - a work space is probably the next biggest expense for a company after salaries. One that can be pruned with very little pushback. And unlike an employee, that’s an expense that’s usually on much, much longer terms (decades in a lot of instances).
No alleged productivity gains are worth the time / cost, other than managers wanting to see the kingdom they rule over or they sit to gain from paying that money somehow.
There is a lot of resource intense duplication to provide office spaces, office furniture, office computers… oh look I have that stuff at home.
Information loss due to generational churn is societies entropy.
The elite are just people. This reality does not put a divine mandate on me to serve some people who happen to be alive when I am.
This isn't necessarily the case.
Most of the people calling for an end to remote work do not, I suspect, fall into this category—they're managers and execs of all kinds of companies.
What they get out of it isn't more money. It's more control. It's a return to a world where "verify by eye that the employee has their butt in their seat" is an acceptable method of "managing". It's a validation of their worldview that employees are all lazy slackers who are constantly looking for ways to defraud the company.
And underlying all of that, it's simply a return to the world they knew before. This new world, where workers get to work remotely and be responsible for themselves, is Different, and therefore Confusing and/or Scary.
Every massive tech company that reigns today was built at least a decade ago.
Almost everybody went remote 3 years ago (though some were already), and now the dinosaurs (but maybe also lots of imitate-the-big-guys companies, too?) are walking it back.
So I think it will take more time to be able to differentiate those results.
Your bias is clouding your judgement.
Your last sentence seems to indicate that you know more than us - if so, enlighten us please about the incentive situation of Mr. Altman. (Whose products I value quite a lot, I will say)
> "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn't need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. "I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
There are two points here - firstly he's talking about 'full remote' so hybrid work is still on the table, and secondly he's talking mostly about startups rather than established companies. With those caveats in mind what he says is a lot less controversial. But still a little.
Where it's disappointing (to me) is that it seems he's just ... giving up. He's suggesting that there are problems with remote work for creative teams, but rather than think of ways to solve those problems he's defaulting to the not-much-better-for-creativity-and-far-worse-for-other-things 'solution' of working in offices. That's kind of rubbish. Sam Altman is a clever guy who has a ton of experience working in startups, and the suggestion that he hasn't ever seen one work well and can't think of anything other than 'everyone in the same room' isn't very exciting.
What's especially sad is that he said this stuff while he was in an office. Surely that's the most creative place!
We also know there's a need for teams to be able to come together. We've discovered it's best to have set times and of course ad-hoc times to collaborate - to essentially come together the way we did back when we were in the office. And yes, today's tools allow us to do that. Being remote and never coming together save maybe for a daily standup is just as bad as working in a cubicle all day and never interacting with your team.
Either way, remote teams work and work well - even in startups. In fact, prior to the pandemic the environment in which I saw the most remote teams was in startups. It's strange people are now saying that's the worst environment for remote teams. Makes me think they have another agenda.
Mind sharing some examples? Among the startups I know (big and small), they were all in-office. Some famous examples - Robinhood, Stripe, Figma, Coinbase, Confluent...
It has been obvious for a while now that the optimal workplace was designed in the 18th century.
His job isn't to solve the remote work problem but to run a company effectively. Given the current job market and glut of engineers looking for jobs solving the remote work problem won't provide much if any competitive advantage. That may change in the future but right now isn't the future.
He's talking about the remote work problem, and he's suggesting a solution to it...
I think that remote work is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and that different roles and tasks may require different levels of interaction and synchronicity. For example, some activities where there is a lot of ambiguity or uncertainty may benefit from more collaborative and tighter feedback loop, while others may require more independence and concentration. Some aspects of in-person communication, such as non-verbal cues and implicit knowledge, may be lost or distorted online.
In one side, you have something like game development where outside of some indies who have been successful working remotely, you have many examples of failed or delayed projects due to remote work issues. Devops? Oh yes, let me do that from Florida or North Dakota, if you have the infrastructure and culture to support it.
Remote work has its advantages and opportunities, but also its drawbacks and risks. I think that startups may suffer from remote work if they are not careful and intentional, rather than optimistic thinking that they will figure out along the way.
I hate this mindset (and I enjoy remote work). It's not his job to solve remote work for everyone. He probably (definitely) has other topics he's more interested in.
Interested enough to chime in on a debate that he can't contribute anything meaningful at any rate.
The above line seems to contradict the part about '..worst mistake of the tech industry'
Article isn't that clear.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-want...
Who would expect that?
Sounds like Mike Judge needs to bring Silicon Valley back because reality has jumped the shark and made the original series seem mundane in retrospect. He needs to up the ante.
I think if you see companies shying away from remote work it'll really just be because it isn't proving effective -- because companies will be losing out on huge recruiting and cost-advantages in doing so.
I've been working remote for a while, and I'm still pretty skeptical. It's definitely a lot harder to build relationships, which are super-important, I think.
Maybe a hybrid model with lots of frequent in-person work retreats could be ideal.
They had a political problem with investors (why are you wasting all this money of office space that nobody is going to?) and getting people back into the office was the easiest way to take that heat off of them.
They did eventually force everyone back in the office, but I had moved on shortly before that happened.
If demand falls off the price will decline. They might respond by rezoning some commercial into residential, which would be great for residential buyers, but the existing landlords would not be pleased by anything that makes any real estate more affordable (i.e. less valuable).
Which is, of course, good. But they're going to try to prevent it any way they can.
Presumably less demand for space will reduce cost of that space allowing for smaller, newer, experimental businesses to be able to buy into that space.
Commercial space can become less about being a place to work or to store a bunch of products to sell, to places where people meet and hangout, to train and collaborate, and to build synergies between businesses that benefit from sharing resources.
Unfortunately, when I look at Altman's track record as a pundit (as opposed to as a startup developer), this kind of schoolboy error is what I usually see.
Video calls are a poor replacement to real life interactions. Otherwise the air travel industry would have been crippled by now.
No matter how much the HN crowd vociferously defends remote work, it’s simply an inferior mode of operation for many creative jobs.
People are not machines. We’re evolved to congregate and share space, to read body language, share meals, interact with zero latency.
Those things are valuable, and barring some huge leap in technology, we give them up when we go remote.
For some jobs and work cultures, those things don’t matter as much — those companies can self select into remote work and save on office costs.
But for American engineers especially, the more you encapsulate yourself into an interface of pull requests and slack messages, the more you’re handing power to corporations in the long run.
I can and have hired quality developers in EU, GB, and South America at heavily discounted rates because without an office, what’s the difference?
Even interviewing and managing people in Asia is much easier as a result of zoom, slack, figma, etc.
I find it so odd that American software engineers don’t see this. Time zone is not a moat, I promise you.
On the other hand we didn't evolve to spend eight hours a day staring at a screen. Nor to spend two hours a day sat in a car commuting.
Great, you've confirmed remote work works and can produce high quality results without an office. You've failed to bring up the other challenges beyond timezone of hiring outside your country of incorporation, it's not just timezones that creates challenges, but even timezones and keeping global teams in sync has its overhead. If you're also going to hire globally, then it looks even more daft to have people go into an office to "collaborate" with people who are in bed on the other side of the world.
"Ability to sit in an office" should never be a bullet point on anyone's resume.
If you’re remote anyways, you won’t get the in person advantages so you might as well pay less.
In many cases, I would be happy to pay more for in person.
It may not be a moat, but it does serve as constant friction that adds latency. Sometimes you can plan your way so latency doesn't slow things down too much - but anything that requires operational coordination is going to be very difficult.
edit: Like, I'm only half snarky. He ran like one ok company and then got pretty much coronated into OpenAI.
edit: edit: Like really. It was a company that let you share your phone location. Revolutionary unicorn to the moon on steroids for sure.
Hard work, a good plan, and a good idea are what buy you the lottery ticket. But it's still a lottery.
That being said, it's always healthy to question and scrutinize the opinions of tech leaders, as their perspectives can sometimes be out-of-touch with the reality experienced by the average worker. So, let's just say Sam's take on remote work might be one of those moments where we take it with a grain of salt and a hint of humor.
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1. Swoop in, make a lot of aggressive noise, shit on everyone and then fly off to the golf course.
Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a venture based on it. Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them.
Having spent a considerable number of hours in the last year explicitly doing work with / training junior staff... That's just silly.
Start open streams of your work. Give short presentations. Invite junior people when you do something interesting. It's really not a lot of effort and in-person is definitely not required.
The trouble is that this takes explicit effort from senior engineers, whereas in-office teams don't require the same consideration.
So, while I fully believe remote work can teach junior engineers as well as in-person work, I don't think it always does teach them especially well, and I suspect that will always be a challenge.
And you get questions that you would never get in person about your configuration (the last one was about passing our oidc provider in the terminal without having Togo to the web page), your plug-ins and your methods.
Sometimes you learn more than you teach. Which is a bit harder to do in open spaces/cubicles (my only experience with real office with real doors was when I was a junior and to me, the experience is as good, or even better than WFH if you do not count the commute time.
Sounds like a poor management style to me
This robs junior people of valuable one on one mentorship and makes it extremely difficult to gain domain expertise and break into niche fields.
Are you a corporate entity based on VC money? If not then he's not talking about you.
edit: As all the layoffs even with record revenues show employees are merely a means to an end for employers.
You're thinking about it as an individual.
But is your company's productivity better? Is your team's productivity better? That's ultimately what will come down to.
It's fair to say that HN is overwhelmingly pro-remote work. This is because coding is uniquely "not bad" for remote work. And there are many coders on HN.
But pretty much every other department is worse off with 100% remote work, in my opinion.
Even software development hits a remote-only wall eventually because you don't create those relationships in person. Everyone is just a mercenary. Very little culture or care is created.
The article mentions:
> "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn't need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. "I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
He's talking multiple points here.
1) Everybody (!) go full (!!) remote forever (!!!). These are three extreme points; everybody (as opposed to nobody or the grey area 'some people'), full (as opposed to never or the grey area 'sometimes'), forever (as opposed to never or the grey area 'for some time').
2) Then he goes on about startups specifically.
3) That there would be no loss of creativity.
#1 is a very extreme standpoint (its a cute staw man :) which is easy to counter. Because, no, remote working didn't work for everybody. We can stop the discussion there already. So its meant to get the picture in your head of 'yeah, it didn't work for X or Y'.
Then, #3 seems to still refer to #2 and is specifically about startups. Loss of creativity is a general statement. If there's a loss of creativity for one person, two personae, or one team, and the rest is working happy and productive remotely then the statement holds up. Here's the kicker: where's the gains? Isn't it a huge sum of plus and minus?
Nowhere do these statements back up themselves with actual data and either way, it appears to be an argument against working fully remotely, for everyone, forever, in startups. Yawn.
Rather, I believe its a lack of trust towards employees. In the end, their productivity gets loosely qualified anyway, so its probably the QQ from some middle management or disgruntled over-performer who's trying to be relevant. You can say politics should stay out of work, well... this is politics on the work-floor.
Getting the control back, post COVID-19, I already knew was coming when COVID-19 started and remote work was implemented. I knew that when COVID-19 pandemic would end, some would want to go back to 'ye olde', regardless if it were better or not, regardless if it worked better or worse for the individual(s) below their rank. Because, bad managers are control freaks.
On top of that, you can start your work day on the same moment you'd start your commute, and end the workday on the moment you'd end your commute. And then you just slack a little bit more in between. You'll easily turn more efficient because slacking is a great way to enter the diffused mode of thinking of the brain (in reality, its actually working). Something like a walk in the park at lunch to get your head clear, getting inspired and ready for the next couple of hours? Working. So from my PoV, its actually free labor, but so can a commute be.
But I don’t think anybody would argue that a startup doesn’t need to communicate with it’s employees.
My personal belief is that hybrid is the best model.
Open source development has been running on remote work forever and it’s doing great.
The recent article about OpenAI and Google having their lunch eaten by a bunch of remote hobbyist show how this thinking is flawed.
One bias is that most open source projects are people solving their own problems. They have a deep understanding of the issues at hand and the developers working on a product are also the one using it. This is also why the open source community produces a lot of developers oriented tools. It is also why a lot of remote companies are working themselves in for the tech sector.
Compare that with a company that produces software for other industries. The developers working on a product are not the one ultimately using it. One of their main challenges is to ensure that the problems/goals faced by the users are ultimately properly understood by the product teams and developers. This is far more complex and requires far more communication the further away the dev is from being an expert in the target field.
I want open source language models to be good and succeed but be realistic.
I really, really wish that OpenAI would start behaving as if they believed this.
And let's be honest, GPT-4 is vastly better aligned than any of the other LLMs. Not a super high bar, but it's a bar.
- RTO Bosses telling others it’s time to return to the office or news articles about their opinion.
- RW Individuals in the comments saying that they are remote and it’s actually working great, these bosses can go to hell
I work on a team that’s split, with some people choosing to go to the office once or twice a week. For our team it seems to be working very well, but as a fully remote worker, I’m firmly in category 2.
The idea has always been there, it was never new, and it didn’t go anywhere and I don’t think it’s going anywhere either.
And then the article says
>and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
Followed by at the end
>He also worries some might be freeing up time by using A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4—time that his company isn’t utilizing.
So, I think the technology IS too good for remote work that companies couldn’t tell if they’re properly enslaving their employees or not, that they fear those employees are still maintaining the required productivity output without being miserable for once.
And at some point you want to use strict monitoring (perhaps assisted by AI) to keep tabs on them, they can just as easily work from home. But I doubt that's legal.
like, companies can force you to keep your camera on. they already track away time, number of keystrokes per hour, and can parse your MS Teams calls and provide transcripts -- they even do this for end users.
Legal Hold software already does this if you need to flag a user. It's not GPT-4 but you can get pretty good insights into what your workers are or are not doing.
I mean, meetings were held online, discussion took place through chat, etc., between people literally sitting in cubes next to each other. Everything is just more efficient and less disruptive that way.
Working from home changed no work processes at all, at least where I worked, introduced no additional social separation, and yielded large benefits for individuals, teams, and the company.
His general comment is about full 100% transition from in office to remote.
I agree with this. You need SOME time in person, especially with an early stage startup.
In the pre-pandemic world, remote communication tools allowed us to streamline our work processes, making them more efficient and less disruptive. As you pointed out, this level of efficiency has been achieved even when sitting in adjacent cubes. The shift to a fully remote environment simply built upon these practices, ultimately reaping benefits for individuals, teams, and the company as a whole.
An interesting point to consider is the potential for increased focus and productivity in a remote setting. Without the distractions of a traditional office environment, individuals can better tailor their workspaces and schedules to suit their personal preferences and needs. This level of customization can lead to a heightened sense of ownership over one's work, which in turn boosts motivation and productivity.
Another aspect to ponder is the impact of remote work on employee retention. Companies that embrace remote work may find themselves better equipped to retain top talent by offering an additional layer of flexibility that is highly valued by many professionals. This not only benefits the employees but also saves the company from the costs associated with turnover and training new hires.
In essence, remote work is more than a fleeting trend; it's an evolution of the modern workspace that has been in motion long before it became a necessity. Embracing this shift will undoubtedly yield benefits on both individual and organizational levels, all while maintaining a high level of efficiency.
I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that the reporting is terrible, not that the guy is an idiot and can not stick to a consistent thought process in the course of a single 30 minute panel at a conference.
But as a former eng manager at Mozilla used to say, sometimes the best tool for remote work is a plane.
Every company, big or small, was able to leverage MS Teams or Zoom just fine. It is only in manufacturing and similar sectors where you need on-site due to the nature of the work. Software Engineering for Web, Desktop, etc. is easily remote-friendly.
The problem goes beyond "low-trust" attitude or productivity. Guys like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are Lord Farquad/King Joffrey in real life. The typical corporate setup is a pyramid and these guys have placed themselves on the top. What on earth is happening in the office that is going to magically improve company performance? Is it the slow internet, the persistent disruptions (... i mean collaboration?), the long tiring commutes, or the power-hungry management? Oh yea, its the power-hungry management. Ya see, we work in their castle but the kings don't feel important unless we send them praises (unwillingly) and endure them breathing down our necks. How can they assess our performance without monitoring us?
Tbh, its not even about remote work. You can have miserable remote work experiences too. But it makes it so much harder for these psychos to abuse you and get anything out of it when you're comfortably sat at home. I wouldn't mind going to the office if the concept of a boss ceased to exist. Make it opt-in and arrange with your coworkers what/when/how you'll deliver.
Edit: In Sam Altman's case he is saying early stage startups/products need people to grind together more closely. Again, that's true for physical products but not for Web/Desktop/Software.
The problem these organizations have is not that they have people working from home - they don’t really care about that, the problem is that the type of person who runs a company craves the power, and they don’t feel like they’re wielding it when everyone works from their laptops and over zoom.
It’s not about the money nor is it about the product. Very few tech companies have never cared about the product after they weren’t startups anymore. No, it’s about having power over others, and control.
They have to make big financial decisions about what to do with office buildings, for one, and need to make sure that if they pay for the offices, that they get value from them.
It's risky to drop the buildings and then need them later
Allowing workers to work remotely or in-office is the choice of the organisation. Since, it's a choice... It should come with a price tag associated with it.
Alternatively, of govt as well feel that workers are needed back in the office, all of the above expenses should be allowed to claim back during taxation.
My simple question is how fair is it for workers to pay for the luxury choices made by their respective employers?
Off-shoring, near-shoring. Where some of your colleagues are permanently virtual-only.
Cross-company collaboration. Specifically a lot of work involving dealing with external parties like vendors. Due to companies outsourcing many of their processes and systems.
Family situations becoming more complicated when couples both work, thus many work schedules no longer being a simple 5x8.
Commoditization of digital collaboration: email, chat, teams/zoom calls.
The rise of multi-tasking: many people are pulled in 20 directions.
When you add up all these effects, a return to the office is not a return to glory. I loved the way I worked 20 years ago: small group of people, local only, focused work, deep relations with co-workers, fun, spontaneous ideation, etc.
When I "return to the office" now, I see people with headsets in calls. Roughly 4-6 hours per day, and then there is messaging and email still. Working together barely seems to happen for the simple reason that actual work seems to barely happen. It's just calls and chat now. A productivity pandemic and I'm shocked how leaders do not intervene at all.
Maybe they can't. Maybe our world and work has simply become too complex.
When initially figuring out what the “problem” actually is then it is better when people are together.
When the problem has been well defined, and people just need to run with the project: work from home is better.
If project needs pivoting or redefining, back to office is again better.
The further along a project is, the better work from home becomes. This is because all members of team have a solid foundation of why the project matters, so they can be free to work with less interactions.
I agree and that statement from Sam makes sense to me.
Early on, it's great to work face to face. But once a project's or a Startup's direction is set, important decisions have been made and all leaders are on board, it's great to work remotely.
I'd say it's also good for new hires, especially juniors, to be on-site for a few months before going full remote.
Luckily we don't have to rely on gurus or influencers to decide this. Companies will succeed or they won't and my bet is that plenty will succeed with significant remote headcount and Altman will be shown to be wrong.
That team should decide based on their needs at the time whether meeting in-person will help them ship faster. It could speed them up or it could slow them down. Some work is just throwing a prototype together to demo (in person might help flesh out the right idea). Other work is investigative/diagnostic (multiple people staring at a screen, searching for a root cause will slow them down).
(I personally dislike remote work and won’t do it again now it’s no longer mandatory, but it seems to work for some people. Many companies have had permanent remote workers for years without the sky falling.)
I am sure there is some neat name for this kind of fallacy. Person said X which was wrong, so what he says about Y must be wrong too.
> I’m not sure that people need pay _that_ much attention
Lol. Then why are you commenting on an article about what he is saying?
When MS came on the scene, my understanding is that their recruiting strategy was to get top talent and give everyone their own office, with a door. The thinking was that you're hiring people to focus on a problem, so give them a quiet place where they can work in peace. With that approach, MS proceeded to wallop the rest of the tech sector to the point that they were considered too successful. Fast forward to the final days of the pre-pandemic world, everyone forgot that lesson and was deeply entrenched in the cargo cult of open plan offices. Going back to that dynamic for mid-stage/mature business is a huge blunder.
I'm willing to bet there are some startups who can do remote really well and others that fail at it, I doubt it's 100% proven that no startup ever can succeed with a large proportion of remote employees.
My hypothesis is that it doesn't make any significant difference once the startup has grown beyond its founders (and they can work however works for them). No idea how to test that.
Meet/Zoom/Mmhmm whatever; they aren't good enough for random collections of people to just like, collaborate or whatever, as if they were in the same room.
However, these tools are way beyond good enough for some collections of people to perform at a far higher level then they could if they had to waste the time required to colocate.
I think that if your team can't work effectively from different locations and across different time zones, then... you might still be able to do some shit and ship some product and make some money! And that's awesome!
But, for most forms of software engineering, that's probably an indicator that you aren't a top tier/world class/very good team. Because the best teams can do that, even at industry-leading companies like Apple where they try to pretend that they don't let people do that.
And the evidence is most of the great software that shipped 2020-2022.
[1]: I mean, he says a lot of other really weird shit, like https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1654351664319709185?s...
Probably because the research doesn't really back that statement up. Plus, the moment you have more than one office, you're effectively working from home even when you're in the office.
And, anecdotally, I've found that people who WFH are more likely to overwork themselves than those who are in the office.
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-return-to-office-remote-work-big-...
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/new-york-elections...
Just like masking and locking down 4 year olds, Everyone is singing the same tune again. Who is their puppeteer.
They are already saving a significant amount of money by giving up our old offices. The mode of engagement between staff and across teams has obviously changed and continues to do so, but productivity is back to pre-Covid levels. We meet in person when there's a real need, say once a week or two.
Even allowing for the possibility that the contents of the article are true (which I seriously doubt ... it reads like sloppy reporting and cheap sensationalism) this is one man's view, biased and coloured by his own interests.
Office architecture is seen as ideologically driven. People like open offices so we do those. People like working from home (or office), so we do that. But office structure is as much part of the architecture of your enterprise as is database or microservice structure. It should aid progress toward a particular goal of the organization and not be subject to any hype in any direction.
Like this is the smart persons problem, being successful at one thing, does not make you an expert on any number of other things.
For example, being an AI luminary does not make your opinion on working conditions or or cars, or whatever else you happen to have an opinion on.
Lots of the covid inspired remote workplaces weren't ready for it. It's a change, and you have to know how to manage a remote company. That may take time and some people in management may not be able to do it.
Sam couldn't make it work. That's a Sam problem, not a remote work problem.
Love how insecure management is just crumbling at the thought of not watching people work in-person or middle management being laid off outright for busy work or bootlicking in person.
All the freelancers, contractors, remote teams, ramen profitable entrepreneurs & outsourcing teams have been remote or not in office all these years. COVID just showed rest of workers how much time & energy was being wasted in mindless commute
In that respect this is just clickbait to me.
Companies have already had mostly distributed teams for a while; this is just about control.
Maybe _perceived_ productivity and creativity is worse in some cases because remote workers can't physically be seen working, but that doesn't mean it's _actually_ worse.
Almost every engineer I know is able to be far more creative and productive working remotely than from an office, regardless of whether or not they need to collaborate closely with others.
Being co-located in the same building has a few advantages especially from a company culture and relationship prospective. But finding great talented people around the HQ becomes a big constrain and it is expensive.
If you run the company "remote-first" so everyone remotely has the same experience, you may argue that the pros are largely outweigh the the cons.
Hybrid is more difficult to make it work but not impossible. The challenge is to keep everything "remote-first" so the remote people are not left behind in any manner.
Starting a company/team "remote-first" since the beginning is easier because workflow can be built remote-first. Transitions to remote-first present more challenges.
You can make anything optimally work over time, but is a fully optimized remote workflow better than a fully optimized in person workflow and at what cost in relative speed, quality and price? Depending on the people and the problems, some work is just naturally suited to in person. Making a generalization that remote work was a mistake is going a bit overboard.
I wrote a booklet about avoiding common pitfalls a few years back[0], and really the approach of the business is the most important thing after employee compatibility.
Lazy clickbait OP.
Given that mass-engagement with AI has opened so many peoples' eyes to how few white collar skills are applied to truly fragile/nuanced/uncertain need, I'm trying to use THAT insight with my organization to evolve what in-person is intended for.
"Bootstrapping considered harmful".
Where did they clone/download these people?
I now work for a company where I’m on site but I work on a team that is remote. I’ve made friends with the people around me and when I can’t get answers from my team I can ask the people around me. Being able to have an adhoc 5 min conversation to explain a very complex idea vs scheduling a zoom hours later saves an immense amount of time.
The difference in productivity is night and day. I’m so happy to be back in the office.
What is the fraction of open source code [by which I mean community-maintained and built rather than through a company] that ends up being collaborated on remotely? Aren't projects like Linux and others largely managed through remote means (although there are conferences and such from time to time)? Do we really have a strong case that these projects suffer due to the lack of a single office for people to gather everyday? I'm sure my questions can be split into sub-cases and exceptions.
If I was being general I'd say that leaders need to focus on creating an environment where people feel secure, engaged and connected to each other. And people are empowered to create this environment for others.
What location this is done in shouldn't be the focus.
Offices, factories, beaches, houses don't have the above because buildings don't create it, people do.
> Discussing about the importance of working from office for a startup, Altman noted, “The more unclear and early the product is, the more in-person time the team needs to grind together," he added.
What is a strong sign of conviction? Putting your money behind it. Which is exactly what is not happening here - not only keeping, but being open to increasing the remote working force. So is Sam Altman telling us that... OpenAI is not doing innovative work anymore? Or not valuing collaboration highly?
"Sam Altman says startups need in-person work to get going."
ChatGPT told me about said blog post.
What’s more annoying, is that the execs confuse their own 0.0001% career experience with that of their typical employee. Yes, if you’re running a company and in board meetings and such, then it makes sense to be face-to-face. For your SDEs, DEs, and scientists in the trenches? Not so much.
My interactions with my manager are great and keep me focused. We have zero problems communicating over video. Most other interactions are generally neutral or net-negative, a distraction from the work I would be doing for my manager.
I like these little side interactions, and I enjoy talking with my coworkers, but I don’t think it’s ultimately as beneficial to the bottom line as people think. I can move quite fast when I’m left alone to my own devices.
But the abandonment feeling is there when people arrive asynchronously.
It also requires active participation.
- if you live in a dense area, in a high rise building, you do not really own anything, oh sure you might own an apartment or more than one, but they are just parts of a bigger thing, tied to it. You are not a human in nature with other humans, you are a part of an artificial ecosystem crafted and ruled by some at the top of the pyramid and to live better or you fight them and win (highly unlikely, since you own next to nothing) or you slavishly serve them and climb the hierarchy. Even if you feel free in similar ways, even MORE free in a city where without owning you still can have so many things, there you are just a part of a complex gear system you do not own. In a home you are the king/queen of a small kingdom interacting to survive and flourish with other peers;
- if you live in a city you need services: traffic is a problem, so mass transport is needed, and that's a service, you can't produce food locally nor buy locally produced food, anything need to come from outside, witch are other services. When things goes well almost nobody care about the big and powerful decision allowing them to act freely, when thing goes bad almost all are in an emergency so have not much slack to discuss and decide. Not only humans are pushed to be sheep in a flock they are also bound by the artificial nature of the city as a single complex system/entity;
- peoples in cities are easy surveilled, blocked, handled like a flock. In a low density area surveilling a spread population is VERY expensive and hard, blocking them it's next to impossible, depriving them of anything similarly.
As a result it's possible to force people to the 2030 agenda state of things a small step at a time in a city: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... not outside.
That's the big issue with remote work:
- it have allowed many fleeing the cities and live better outside them;
- it told the value of owning a nice home more than being in a nice apartment in a high rise building, witch means owning anything on top of the ground vs owning just a portion of a building;
- it told that's perfectly possible live and work effectively like that.
Essentially remote work thought that cities are not needed anymore to live well. Unfortunately for some at the top of the social pyramid cities are deeply needed to rule, frame and profit from peoples life.
Since anything that works it's here to stay in a way or another I expect remote work survive, so cities decline to be kind of interment camps without apparent bars, like certain Siberian gulag of the past where mere nature was the bars but only few will been able to remain outside, perhaps with careful actions to deprive them enough to makes life outside too expensive for most.
- Sam Altman
Personally, remote work has given me the flexibility to balance my work and personal life, while also allowing me to collaborate with talented individuals from around the globe. It has broken down barriers and enabled us to build a more diverse and inclusive workforce.
By brushing off remote work, we are ignoring the countless benefits it has brought to both employees and employers. I've seen my own commute times reduced, experienced better work-life balance, and enjoyed improved mental health, all thanks to remote work. Additionally, businesses can save on operational costs due to decreased office space requirements.
The environmental impact of remote work should not be understated either. As someone who used to commute daily, I've come to appreciate how reduced commutes can lead to a significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to a cleaner, more sustainable planet.
Living in a world where technology enables us to collaborate and communicate seamlessly from anywhere, why should we restrict ourselves to the confines of a physical office? Remote work has the power to create better solutions, foster innovation, and improve the overall quality of life for everyone involved.
OpenAI is at 3180 18th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, US. That's a crappy location in the Mission in SF.