People who love remote work seem to be senior, well established employees who were already fully ramped up and had a social foundation in SV before the pandemic. I left my entire life behind after college to relocate to SV; I loved working with talented engineers and gained so much experience and mentorship in 2019. But remote work was isolating and lonely, mentorship went to zero, and it has caused me a lot of stress realizing that remote work is never going away. It was very sad, but I had to leave SV behind to find a career with people who cared about my success again, rather than preferring remote work for themselves at the expense of less experience engineers having to ping and zoom for every question, with less authentic relationships being formed. Remote work might seem like employees vs the boss, but there are people like me who actually loved their jobs, and now can only do them through a screen alone in a bedroom.
As a senior engineer I completely agree with this. A few days/week remote is fine. But full time remote is a disaster for junior engineers.
As you alluded to, it's not just easier access to senior engineers. It's also feeling like you're part of something that matters. I've been lucky to have those kinds of jobs in the past. Now I just have a job, I'm fully remote, and I hate it. It would be even worse if I was just starting out.
I suspect that some companies will eventually migrate back to a hybrid model because of this. I can't be the only senior engineer who feels this way.
> Work is something I reluctantly do to fund the things I actually care about. It sure as hell isn’t my entire life or cause for existence.
Some of us prefer to care about our work. 40 hours per week is a lot of time to spend on something you don’t care about. Caring about your work isn’t the same as it being your “entire life or cause for existence”. Our lives can consist of many different interests.
>Caring about your work isn’t the same as it being your “entire life or cause for existence”.
Nor is all work "things you care about" even if you love your job, unless you own the entity. Even if you had a passion for picking up garbage, you'd rather be doing it your way than the way your boss is doing it.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to spend non-working hours on something that isn't exploiting you...
The issue is seeing employment as exploitation instead of a trade, and giving up (or denying?) one’s own agency in it.
An Exchange of someone’s time and focus for predictability, direction, and money.
Most people who do janitorial work would hate having to run a janitorial business. It’s a lot of work organizing everything, doing sales, dealing with legal issues, etc. etc.
If someone wants to do a days work and get a days pay, that’s all stuff that gets in the way.
It’s also a lot of stuff that is waaaay outside the skill set required to do the work they are able and willing to do.
Funny that, but I’ve worked at many places that definitely didn’t make a profit! And some that definitely did. Taking risk, organizing and figuring out things in a way that is focused and works, and tying the parts together so the sum is greater than the parts is what makes most businesses profitable.
Are some companies run or managed by exploitive assholes? Sure. Are some folks doing labor exploitive assholes? You bet.
But it’s always more fun to tear down those who have what we don’t and blame them for every problem and isn’t it?
The paychecks came regardless, or they learned that labor has its own power too.
Never felt exploited about it either, and moved somewhere else or just took a break and did what I wanted if I started to feel like it might be. We don’t really need all the trappings we often convince ourselves we need, and it’s a lot lighter without them.
And never once starved for it.
But then, I’ve had to dig trenches before and change diapers and didn’t get paid for that, but then family is pretty communist that way. We all have to make our way, one way or another.
You’re welcome to look at life as harsh and nasty as you want, but you reap what you sow. And that outlook is sowing very bitter seeds indeed.
Reading between the lines, it seems like you seem to think that entropy, and therefore the need to do things to continue to survive, is a form of wrong the world has done to you.
that society has a mechanism that allows for one to exchange something others have for something they want, without having to do all the things everywhere on their own, means that society is turning them into a slave somehow.
Which hey, maybe? But stepping back and looking at historical context, it’s pretty laughable.
And in the vein of ‘beliefs that help’ vs ‘beliefs that don’t’ - how does that help you or anyone else right now?
IMO I don't think it's mentally healthy to not at least 'enjoy' your work and have decent professional relationships with your coworkers. Work is a significant part of your life and to be socially disconnected and emotionally discordant about what your doing is not good.
>IMO I don't think it's mentally healthy to not at least 'enjoy' your work and have decent professional relationships with your coworkers.
You can have "decent professional relationships" with coworkers while remote. Virtual beer (I prefer scotch) drinking sessions work great, for example. And also opens your circle to ppl continents away.
>Work is a significant part of your life and to be socially disconnected and emotionally discordant about what your doing is not good.
Physical proximity is not necessary for social connection. Especially when it seems every app has webconference (slack too).
Also, frequency of needed connection differs if you're an introvert vs extrovert. Larger society typically views the latter as 'normal' & the former as 'ill-adjusted', but I wouldn't expect that tendency on HN(?)
Equally, someone who moves straight to SV (or equivalent tech hub) is probably significantly more career-focused than someone who stays put, or moves to a city, so it's unsurprisingly SV is seeing more office work than other regions.
Right, seniors who live in the suburbs like remote. Juniors who tend to live near the office have less to gain in a remote environment and a lot more to lose.
Ten years ago I was a junior and never quite managed to have a good commute- it was always too expensive, or my startup collapsed and then I had to go somewhere else, etc.
> It's also feeling like you're a part of something that matters.
Maybe this assumption needs to change?
I do think you and the OP you replied to are correct about it being more difficult for junior engineers, but at the same time it selects for people who don’t need someone to tell them what to do, which would be a good thing for a company depending on the role and such.
If a junior engineer isn't pestering me with questions, I know they aren't learning much. Also they overhear stuff and get drawn into conversations. Or more senior engineers join in conversations between them and another senior.
All of this is a challenge over zoom.
As far as being a part of something that matters, if I'm going to do a job for 8 hours a day, I'd like for it be as fulfilling as possible. For me that means pressure, teamwork, and at least some in-person interaction. I realize not everyone is the same.
I think this attitude of making sure each junior engineer has someone senior answer every question as soon as it comes up is doing a disservice to our junior engineers. One of the most important qualities of a senior engineer is that they can independently solve an open ended problem, especially one they haven't solved before.
Being senior means you have learned how to learn. You don't get this skill by asking a bunch of questions, you get it by answering your own questions without having someone else to rely on. This is a skill we should foster in our junior engineers as early as possible, and being available as a shoulder to tap on every 15 minutes actively prevents that skill from developing.
I think it is perfectly resonable to mentor a junior developer using a single, daily video meeting of 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a time they can use to ask questions about their previous day, bounce ideas, etc. If a question comes up later, they can spend the day trying to solve it and report on it in the next daily meeting.
The best thing you can do for your junior engineer is to find a stream of work which challenges them at the right level (not too much, but just enough), and let them go independently while keeping some guard rails. This should not require many hours of 1:1 face time.
I understand this approach might not work for some juniors who can only learn in a highly social context with a mentor in the room. But I think it can work for many juniors, and actually be beneficial in the long run.
It depends and it’s a balance. Too many questions is a bad sign because it means they aren’t investing time into solving problems on their own (like math, try for 3 minutes give up and look at the back of the book).
The nice thing about Slack/Zoom combo is that if you have a highly self-directed engineer and a self-starter then they can spend time working until they truly feel stuck and then connect and share code snippets and do screen shares and calls. Instead of everything having to be a “stop the world” Q/A session you get a nice async communication channel that allows for various levels of triage.
That being said I certainly find in-person collaboration to be very valuable, but not so valuable as to drive a car and sit in an office where I can’t wear sweatpants or get up whenever I want to make an espresso or run an errand if I’m stuck on a problem for a bit.
In my experience, there’s no such thing as too many questions, so long as they’re of good quality.
The best intern I’ve ever had was would hit me every single morning with a laundry list of questions, but, crucially they were almost 100% things she didn’t yet have the tools or context to find out on her own.
By the end she was asking me questions I hadn’t even thought to ask
I think there is. Asking for things you can look up how to do on the Internet just isn’t a good question, for example. (Like something generic like how to install a package with NPM or something).
> Asking for things you can look up how to do on the Internet just isn’t a good question
That is becoming less true by the day, as forums, blogs, etc., are filled with AI-generated pablum or with simply incorrect content. You still need an expert to tell you right from wrong, and the best option is to have a senior person in your team be that expert.
Either way, you need to bother to try to look up stuff for 5 minutes and figure it out yourself, and for technical content that isn't really the case much. Otherwise you make your mentor annoyed because you didn't even bother to put in the minimum effort and your essentially disrespecting them which creates emotional fallout. Even the bad content gives you some context and will make your question asking work better.
This is like a high school or college classroom where no one asks any question...you know no one understands what is going on. What I would look for is juniors who can ask questions, take a morsel of feedback, run with it for a bit, and then ask another question. (But avoiding giving away solutions right away, since you want it to be a learning experience).
> But full time remote is a disaster for junior engineers.
This is very handwavy.
As a principal engineer, I've worked with junior engineers that have adapted just fine and thrived, even as their first or second job out of college.
But for that to happen, the company's culture has to be willing and able to shift to remote-first and/or fully remote. The more senior people need to role model the way of how to do remote well in a way that counters its (few) disadvantages.
There is definitely a personal component too though. I've also worked with junior engineers that do not work well remotely. But I think that is more personality-based or perhaps maturity-based than seniority-based.
i have different opinion. few college new hires already personal trait and past life experiences that give them solid work ethic and ability to focus.
some see themselves struggle and have awareness to really see this. many of most of them in my experience want to be in office.
then you have remainder who isnt able to dive into company (team) culture or influence it, understand need to deliver and have impact, and become independent contributors. these are good engineers but haven’t figured out that you do have to put in the work.
id say the company I was at and the company I joined are both remote first. remote first means different things to different companies, orgs, and even teams. there’s no canonical definition, if you know one please share it.
I think group 3 I described desperately needs to be in office. these are like the high school kids who didn’t get to experience high school during COVID. unfortunately the environment is so hyper politicized that this wfh thing is sensitive topic and many companies don’t want to properly address problem head on. its being told as binary choice without taking more nuanced approach
> But full time remote is a disaster for junior engineers.
I used to think the same but realized it's more nuanced than that.
There are basically two markets for junior hires: those who can prosper in a remote-first environment (capable of debugging on their own, read doc and ask relevant questions) and those who can't. The contrast is striking. A lot of businesses tried to cut programmer salaried with junior hires from "diverse" pipelines (codeword for bootcamps and certificates) and are now struggling onboarding them in a remote-first environment because of the required handholding.
Of course, what the market hasn't figured out yet, is that there's a premium for the later.
In my opinion, none of it matters. And all of us are expendable. I’ve seen so many projects closed up - and nobody missed them. I’ve seen so many people retire or move on, and they are never missed. Companies are just machines and neither their output nor the cogs of the machine really matter or are missed once they are gone. That is my experience, anyway.
My personal observation is that all companies that succeed, succeed despite themselves.
This is basically why you need Product Market Fit. It forgives all sins.
It is all that matters. You can even completely fuck up a la Southwest and be totally fine.
The trend I'm seeing companies settle into is one where Monday and Friday are work from home days, with Friday being more like a half day or optional day. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are default in-office days. I'm curious how this will impact commercial real estate prices, because while there's less overall utilization, the peak load remains more or less the same.
I think employers should strive for flexibility. My employer allows full remote, but flies us in twice a year for what mostly boils down to “team building.” More local employees have the option to go into the office as much/little as they would like. It seems to be a good balance and I feel like I have decent relationship with the entire team even though I live across the country.
I think you're right, my comment isnt to disagree with you. You can make pairing and constant communication work remotely. However you have to make it work so to speak.
Meaning, there is a little bit more friction. You have to harangue senior engs to pair, you have to be posting in slack more, you have to do all these little things. But when you're in person there is less friction and so it gets done more naturally.
Like if a task is taking longer than expected, sometimes its because it takes longer than expected. In remote world, you have to know when to ask for help. In person, you might be casually complaining about a task and someone who knows a better way can chime in and get you unstuck without you realizing you're stuck.
The challenge is finding enough people to go into the office. Companies got used to hiring anyone in their region, commute stopped being a consideration.
How many people are willing to pay an extra 1-2k per month to live closer to their job? How many of those people are the people you want to hire?
>> How many people are willing to pay an extra 1-2k per month to live closer to their job?
I dont think it is as simple as "willing to pay an extra 1-2k per month". It is with junior engineers w/o families. Once you have families, living closer to the job is way, way harder, esp for tech jobs concentrated in expensive cities. You cant just share a room with a friend when you have children. Also, things like schooling become considerations -- in NYC for example, you arent even guaranteed a seat in your local school (you're guaranteed a seat at "a" school.) It isnt surprising that SWE salaries ballooned in expensive metro areas and there are constantly "shortages" -- the huge premiums either go into super-expensive family housing near the city, private schools, a pied-e-tierre in the city, or some other acrobatics
Aye - I don’t think policy makers have internalized the degree to which wages have become coupled to housing costs. I strongly suspect the recent increase in interest rates may accelerate wage increases as individuals demand more salary to pay for mortgages or rent.
At some point, you either get a recession/depression where prices reset - or wage growth must match cost of living increases. People can’t allocate greater than 100% of income to cost of living indefinitely.
> all the buts will point back to a bad boss, who isn’t fixed by in-person presence.
This reasoning is faulty and nearly circular. "Remote work can't be bad, because if it were, it'd be the fault of the boss, and a bad boss is going to be bad regardless of whether or not you're remote."
That's a neat rhetorical trick for making almost any argument. You're sidestepping the fact that remote work makes mentorship harder and less likely to work. A good boss can make up for that, but not all bosses are good. Most are just average, and it's certainly not the case that managing a fully remote team is easier than managing a fully in-person one. Mentorship, knowledge transfer, and values transfer happen automatically more often than not in person, but they have to be intentionally fostered in a remote setting. That's harder for a manager to pull off. Remote work just makes this kind of stuff harder.
When I worked in person, I could seek out mentorship myself in a natural way by making connections on my own, at lunch for example. Now, I guess what you're saying is that it's my boss's responsibility to schedule those opportunities for me, and if he doesn't, he's a bad boss. Okay -- how does that help me? Should I leave my job if I can't find a way to improve it? What if the next job has the same problem?
Working remotely as a junior or intermediate engineer is basically stacking the deck against yourself. Sure, there are ways to make it work, but on average it works less well, and it's also more likely to just not work at all. Sweeping it under the rug by saying it's the boss's job to make it work does not absolve it of its problems.
Caveat being that not many people get to pick who their boss is, and quite frankly I don't know that I've met too many good bosses that toot their own horn.
At the end of the day, people should have full accountability for their career and actions, but at a junior level there is a poor baseline for what a good trajectory and a bad trajectory looks like, so room for mistakes is bigger...which should allow people to learn faster.
I am specifically zeroing in on that because there just aren't that many good "bosses" out there, and even fewer great leaders...as much as most bosses think they may be good. If you do have a great boss that takes the time and energy to do mentorship, wonderful! But that leaves us with the rest of the workforce that has average and bad managers...I would bet that remote outcomes for that part of the workforce are not great.
There is a severe problem of promoting engineers into management positions and providing no or insufficient training in line management or mentoring, though. A lot of companies with poor training and mentoring culture will get caught out by remote work and struggle to adapt fast enough.
It's true co-located teams do better. Remote is worse. But, for the sake of the climate and environment, we need to eliminate commutes and wasted resources on office buildings.
New companies will be formed that are remote-only from Day 1 and stay that way forever. Employees who like remote work should go to these companies. I believe remote-only is superior, as I observe mentorship and frequent communication within my company, as everyone is dedicated to the remote-only mode.
I believe that in-person office work is not about communication or mentorship but mostly about providing socialization benefits (chatting, going out to lunch) that are not needed for a company to succeed. "Less authentic relationships" has nothing to do with company success and everything to do with your own personal well-being.
The correct move is to build a social life outside of your work - family, friends, community. As a remote only worker my social life is excellent because I did not tie my social well being to any company.
One thing to recognize is that people who moved to SV for work, pretty much by definition, put career ahead of friends, community, and likely family. So it shouldn't be surprising that many of them will not like remote work if the whole reason they moved is nullified.
I feel lucky to have been born and raised in SV. I can have my cake and eat it too - remote work, in person work, whatever - and I can still go out and have lunch with friends I've had for 30+ years.
> One thing to recognize is that people who moved ... for work, pretty much by definition, put career ahead of friends, community, and likely family.
That's a broad and unfair generalization and implication. People decide to move for all sorts of reasons, and then perhaps a job determines a destination. People who move to a cheaper location (which can be young people starting a family or retirees or any life stage in between) are also putting cost or quality of life "ahead of friends, community, and likely family."
If you are a person who makes friends you will make friends in your new community. Ubiquitous networking lets you keep in touch to the level you wish with friends and family. When I go back to my home country I see friends with whom we just pick up mid-conversation as if I'd just been over their home the day before.
Life has been so for thousands of years. Not necessarily a sacrifice as you frame it.
It's a generalization but I'm not sure it's really unfair.
I'm pretty sure that most people moving to SV/SF or most high cost areas really do so because they (or their partner) got a good job offer there, and especially in the case of tech and northern California, because there's a high density of other job possibilities as well.
People do just decide they want to move someplace but I doubt a lot choose the Bay area unless there's a job offer attached.
And more people (probably different people) would live in Manhattan if it weren't so expensive. But they are expensive so people tend not to move to them absent a well-paying job.
> One thing to recognize is that people who moved to SV for work, pretty much by definition, put career ahead of friends, community, and likely family. So it shouldn't be surprising that many of them will not like remote work if the whole reason they moved is nullified.
Shouldn’t they be happy that they can have their cake and eat it now?
Move back closer to those friends and family and keep working your dream job!
I think a lot of younger people want the tech boom at the beginning of the 2010s they missed out on. Tech was still ‘cool’ and the energy in SV/SF was high. That era is over, honestly it started ebbing in 2017.
It takes time to learn, but I found it much healthier to have a social life primarily outside of work.
What happens if you change jobs? Get laid off? What happens if you make a big mistake and the social network you relied on is now angry at you? It can be way more of an emotional roller coaster.
Of course that’s not everyone! There’s still plenty of in-person jobs for people who want or need it but at least there’s more of a fair split now for folks who do not want that.
I think the picture is pretty clear at this point and further discussion is pretty pointless as it just results in the same points keep being brought up:
Junior/single/ADHD/work-is-social-circle: REMOTE BAD
Senior/married (esp with kids)/prefers-non-work-social-circle: REMOTE GOOD
I’m senior/married/kids and I hate full time remote. I don’t want to go in every day but 2-3 days a week is great. I just find it very hard to connect with people over screens.
I think this is pretty accurate other than the ADHD part.
Work from home is vastly superior to the distractions of an office (especially open offices) for me. At home, I have much more control over interruptions and noise, and completely eliminate the constant activity around me.
I actually never realized how badly ADHD hurt my productivity until I started working remotely and the constant distractions severely decreased.
I'm one of those ADHD people that needs chaos around me to focus. So open offices work great for me. I recently read that this is a thing with some people, but I can't remember the term.
For me, Senior/Single/ADHD/prefers-non-work-social-circle: REMOTE GOOD
But the issue raised in this thread is very real, with full remote I've see both junior training as well as new employee ramp up considerably slowed down, and there's no clear alternative to knowledge gained from random hallway conversations.
But then how do companies capture both? Offices with only junior, single, social seekers kind of defeats all the benefits that those people are searching for. Do we just leave the first group behind to better benefit the second group?
I'd gladly live near office if I could afford a decent house and schools for a family. Companies won't pay that to make it happen, so yes, I guess it's sorry/not sorry junior devs?
If companies want people to come into the office, they could pay them more and make it a condition of employment. In some sense they were getting a free ride for a long time by forcing senior employees to waste hours commuting for the benefits of in person mentorship. After all, upskilling junior engineers benefits the company much more than the senior engineer who is taking time away from doing stuff relevant to their own technical skills. Now the market has shifted: you want that, you pay more for it.
And make the conditions not suck! At the very very least this means an office with a door that closes? And ideally blinds on interior windows.
I’ve been remote for 8 years now and doubt I could ever go back, but above would be like a bare minimum to even consider - that and a minimum of a 25% comp bump over a remote option.
I'd be willing to bet a lot more would prefer to have only remote than only in person work, on both demographics. And even if not, seniors are just more important to retain anyway.
I'm in my 40s, unattached. Strong introvert. I didn't realize how much I missed going into the office until a few of us had half day in person meeting at office.
I wanted to do more of it. Sadly, the office was still mostly empty, so there was no point going in. I left the job. There were other reasons of course, but I want my next job to be at least in-person 3 days a week.
I'm a bit in the same boat. I recently switched to full remote work. In retrospect, I think it was a bad decision. I don't feel I'm a part of the company anymore, and staying home feels lonely.
Ironically, I liked to go to the office when my team actually wasn't there! I like to socialise with people from different teams but seeing my teammates is sometimes stressful. Also, I'm a slow thinker and I often prefer to work on problems asynchronously.
> Ironically, I liked to go to the office when my team actually wasn't there! I like to socialise with people from different teams but seeing my teammates is sometimes stressful.
Have you considered a coworking space? Some of the criticisms I see of remote work basically boil down to being completely isolated at home, or a home not being a conducive working environment (as opposed to feeling like they are more productive in office, enjoy being around their coworkers, etc.) I think in these cases the solution isn't necessarily to go into the office, but to simply get out of the house to work. For many this might be a happy medium, allowing you to get out of your home for a good chunk of the day, into an environment with amenities for working, and possibilities for socializing with others, while allowing flexibility to live far away from the office, shortening commutes or housing costs, and not having your daily social life tied to coworkers, which has downsides.
You know, pre-covid when everyone worked at office Mon-Thursday, I also liked going into the office on Friday when no one was around. Something calming about working in a deserted 1500 person office building.
I'm also slow thinker as well. I do terrible during those post-it note brainstorming sessions where you have to come up with ideas in response to something. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to work my way up to management.:)
I'm a remote worker who likes a good (emphasis good) office environment better than working at home. But I prefer WFH nonetheless—because I don't like the office enough to pay five stressful hours of my waking time for it per week (for the commute).
That's nearly five percent of my waking hours per week (does hit 5%, if traffic's unusually bad one or two of those days), including weekends. It's more than 6% of my waking hours on a weekday. That's a pretty steep cost, especially since the activity's in no way pleasant and I'm not compensated for it. Then factor in how many hours I'd spend working just to pay for the means to commute....
It seems a bit cynical to imply that people who care about mentoring juniors prefer to work in an office and selfish people prefer to work remote. Having mentored dozens of engineers, remotely and onsite, my evidence suggests neither approach is entirely superior for everyone, it depends on mentor and mentee.
It's just that, your preference - it doesn't have to be sinister or heroic, more or less effective. Some people prefer an office and some don't. That's valid enough on its own, isn't it?
I realise we are both sharing anecdotes, but I was at GitLab from about 250 employees to 1500 or so. It was all remote from the beginning, and it definitely wasn’t all senior, fully ramped employees with pre-established work social networks in Silicon Valley (or any other single place for that matter). There was mentorship, as well as social events and travel.
I’m sure your experience is factual, but maybe it’s not a universal truth or something generally applicable about remote work.
One thing for sure I would feel down about is if I moved somewhere I didn’t like to advance my career, and then everyone there started working remotely making the whole move pointless.
SF is disgusting, and SV in general is so expensive to live in and enjoy. It feels unsustainable for a region to profit so much from remote work that itself is so bad to live in if you aren’t already successful. People can just ignore the homeless WFH and uber to their bars and restaurants, with staff who can’t even afford to live there, I had to leave.
> People who love remote work seem to be senior, well established employees who were already fully ramped up and had a social foundation in SV before the pandemic. I left my entire life behind after college to relocate to SV
The other ones who love it are the vast sea of workers who chose to stay near family and friends rather than leaving to chase money in expensive coastal cities. Not being constrained to 3rd-tier-landlocked-city rates is great.
[EDIT] Ah, you mean specifically the ones already in (or recently-late-of) SV who love it. I'll leave the comment but it's less-on-topic than I thought on my first reading.
Remote work is definitely not going to be universal. My company (in Seattle) shifted away from remote work starting in July 2021, and formally went back to 5 days in the office per week as the norm July 2022. My friends on the east coast report that their companies are also moving back to in-person work at least 3 days a week.
I do like that COVID has normalized WFH when I have an appointment or something else I need to get done during the day. But I do think that working in person is better and I'm glad it's returning.
Why do we talk about how it's good for people to have choices except when it comes to choosing to work remotely? It seems like big tech companies are forcing people back into the office so if you need mentorship it's available from established channels.
On the other side of the coin, if you're junior, what's it like uprooting your life and social network for a job at a location with probably much higher rent and no existing social network?
"Lamenting the junior dev" is pretty much the only compassionate argument for in-person work so of course it's brought up a dozen times on any remote thread on HN. It gets unnerving.
Work inherently limits your choices. That’s why they pay you money, it’s an exchange. Likewise I might want to code on Python but my employee has a legacy Java codebase so I’m forced to work with that instead.
I'm finding myself in a similar situation. Moved across the country to an LA tech job for a mostly in-person team less than a year ago. We had a reorg and now most of the new team is remote, manager in eastern time, office empty most days etc. Unsure what to do now to balance career goals.
People who love remote work usually have families. Time is a very limited resource when you have kids. Commuting and socializing with coworkers at lunch or at happy hours gets deprioritized.
> People who love remote work usually have families
There are also a lot of people who just want to avoid the commute. With all its loss of time, cognitive load, wear & tear included. Even the non-introvert people do.
Great point. And I'll bet $100 that people wouldn't mind the office if it was literally across the street.
We don't always 'hate the commute' but what if you could just pop in and out as needed? No waiting? Pick up the kids, drop them at home, then back to the office if you want? Home for lunch? No brutal traffic?
And - people need their own spaces. The cost of squeezing in everyone on a bench is being born a bit in people not wanting to come back. I literally could not get anything done.
The problem is workplaces wanting all day presence like a prison and letting families including elder parents go to the dogs. Workplaces should be flexible.
As a long time software developer, I completely agree on this.
I don't necessarily believe that "the office" and long commutes are the right way to employee workers, but I strongly believe that in person relationships tend to work a lot better for knowledge transfer and leveling up skills of junior employees. A solution, the feasibility of which I'm still actively researching, is a network of decentralized much smaller offices managed by a senior employee to meet other people in the area in person, at least once a week or more if deemed necessary by the group.
The other thing I completely agree on is that it's not employee vs boss.
Many of my colleagues have agreed to a cut of their paycheck to work remotely, which is a net win for every boss out there, they love to pay less for the same output, while also transferring all the expenses and the disadvantages of building a place suited to work at home to the employer. Kinda like a gig economy worker that has to buy a car, pay for the insurance and the maintenance to become a "self employed" Uber driver.
> People who love remote work seem to be senior, well established employees
Being a senior dev also enables you to act almost fully autonomous, making you capable of carrying out a lot of stuff from idea to execution. Its naturally conducive to remote work.
> But remote work was isolating and lonely, mentorship went to zero
That's the one downside of remote work - one has to amp up interactions via online collaboration tools and also non-work social interactions.
> it has caused me a lot of stress realizing that remote work is never going away.
Take heart - you can eventually make remote work work out, or a mixture of hybrid that you prefer. Then the benefits outweigh the disadvantages a lot. Even being able to avoid the commute is a major win.
I frequently do day trips, or at one point monthly rentals, to various cowork offices to get that interaction with “more senior people.” While I couldn’t ask overly specific questions of those around me, we all tend to help each other the best we could. I don’t live in SV (Florida here), but it was kind of interesting. It’s not a complete solution to the problem you’re describing, of course, but it built network and I have some friendships that grew from it. Also YMMV on how social people are around you, we kind of had an unofficial card system, red meant don’t interrupt and green meant I was open for chatting.
I agree. A solution not that great to this but still better than full remote alone is to find a coworking place and start relationships there. You won’t find all the mentorship and it will feel like they can be coworker but unfortunately you will never work with them. But you will still be able to have some social interactions, talk about tech, ask questions, etc…
It is funny to read on HN over the past 5 years went from full everything should be remote, non-Remote is for stupid people to now may be going back to in person collaboration has some remote benefits.
That’s oversimplifying a lot of the discussions people had about how remote work needs to be organized to be productive. Very few people deny that in-person collaboration is useful but there’s more debate about what fraction of in-office time is actually productive.
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It’s not about a social life outside my job, it’s about also loving my work and enjoying what I do. Anyone can trade time for money and use that money outside work. But true success to me is loving both, and to me that’s not possible without authentic relationships at work.
I wonder how much of this might be due to every member of a team being more likely to work out of the same office in a SV located company than in other companies.
The reason I’ve been so bullish on remote work coming out of the pandemic is because multiple jobs I had before the pandemic were very much remote jobs, with the added requirement of having to perform them from an office building 45-60 minutes away from me. My team was distributed across New York, Florida, Texas, and California, so all of our meetings were using Teams or Zoom anyway. The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance.
> The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance.
This exactly. I was already working more or less remotely before the pandemic, but from an office 1 hour from my apartment. I often worked from home anyway and nobody noticed other than my manager, who usually was also working in a different office from me (1 hour drive away) but who insisted that I come into the office whenever possible. Covid gave me the chance to stop wasting my time and energy on the train just to keep up appearances for the person who did my annual performance reviews.
My current job is a bit different. Our team is "global", but several of my coworkers actually work in the office near where I live, so going into the office is actually a nice experience. Also my commute is 1/3 what it used to be, which helps.
Same here. My teams are primarily in Ottawa and Halifax, as well as Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and few stragglers all over the place. Going to office will allow you to talk in person to some of the people but ends up creating massive insulated islands. Remote has put us all on same page and made us communicate, resulting in pervasive awareness.
Operationally we are distinctly more effective remote and I shudder for the inevitable return to office where it'll be "you guys in Halifax can't see this on the 1993 broken polycom speaker phone, but Claus is drawing an updated architecture. Sorry you can't hear him he's also far from phone, we'll catch you up later " (they never do)
> The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance.
This. My gf's company mandated back to the office in mid January 2022 so she went in on the first day...and was the only member of her group to do so. In fact most of the group was in other locations anyway, so she just zoomed from work that day.
I remember even before that, working for FAANG the office complexes were so big that most of her meetings ended up on Zoom anyway even if the participants were elsewhere on the same campus.
I'll do you one better: I've been in a project where our PM was in South Carolina, the bulk of the team in Poland and our single Indian teammate phoned in from Hyderabad.
We were all working remotely at the time, but before the pandemic the Polish team would commute to the office.
I ran a team where myself and the TPM were local in SoCal, QA was remote in NorCal, and developers were in Texas, Chicago, Argentina, and the Netherlands. It worked surprisingly well but that boiled down to 80% having the right set of personalities.
The vacancy rate of offices looks low because the big tech companies are still "occupying" them, but if go into many of them and they still look like ghost towns. Much more that offices in other locations.
It definitely is unsustainable. A lot of wil-e-coyote running off the cliff type of stuff going on. And hey, maybe some places will connect with a cliff on the other side. But I wouldn’t want to be in the commercial real estate space right now.
About 90% of every office and co-working space is empty now, all day, every day here. It’s only slightly busier than during Covid when it was 99%.
Light industrial and retail (strip mall type stuff) is doing well and super busy however.
Here in NYC I've been to a couple of coworking spaces in the past 6 months and was surprised to find them downright bustling, I had trouble finding a quiet space to work. There are definitely serious problems in commercial real estate here, but the coworking situation was unexpected to me.
The thing about coworking is that, for employees at least, it is an actual solution to some of the problems with remote and in-office work, as opposed to the "hybrid" model which manages to be the worst of all worlds. With coworking, you can still have more flexibility to live where you'd like as opposed to being bound to a specific office and the often high COL and long commutes that come with it. Coworking allows one to still separate their home from their office, which some prefer, and it also allows employees to get out of the house and engage with others, socialize, and engage with their community/city, but you aren't forced to do this at your work which will always be tainted by the financial implications of the employee/employer relationship that loom over it all.
One succesful mode of applying coworking spaces seems to be less for heads-down focus time and more for periodic get-together time for teams. These spaces seem not very good as a full-time micro-office due to the noise issues you mention... but as a place to go whiteboard or empathize they seem quite useful. Bonus if there are nearby interesting excursion options, food courts, recreation, etc. and multiple easy-ish commute options. Part of economic development seems to be exploring options for how to dis- and re-aggregate services like this, providing more and smaller transitions across the tradeoff landscape.
Makes sense. I'm in the middle of finding a standalone office so I can do actual meetings and be productive, but it's tempting to keep the co-working space for exactly what you describe. One day here, another day there type of thing for when those things are helpful.
My office (near Toronto) was up for lease renewal about 1.5 years ago. Pre-pandemic about 50% of people were working from home at least some of the time, and by 2021 there were maybe 2-3 people in the office regularly (in a space that could easily have 45). The company was debating what to do but did want some physical space, and possibly would have just stayed considering the investment in build-out, networking (including at least a rack of internal servers and other infrastructure, with dedicated fibre to other company datacenters), video conference rooms, etc. What I heard was the building was trying to nearly double the rent, so this made a pretty easy decision and the place was closed. Servers were migrated to other locations, and everything else was shipped to other offices, given to employees, sold or scrapped.
Now it's 6 months later, and last time I drove by it still has our old sign up, and I can see online the entire space is still available to lease. Seems silly to risk it in the current market and take $0 instead of keep a quiet, established tenant.. but what do I know.
Some of this may be due to incentives in the way property management and owners value commercial property and calculate cash flows and fees.
In many cases, it can make more sense (to some folks) having a vacant property at a nominally high rent (look, we could make this much from this property, hence it’s worth x multiple!) then admitting that is not likely for the foreseeable future (oh shit, this property is now only capable of producing 80% of x, write downs and angry investors incoming).
It sounds weird, but the wil-e-coyote analogy is remarkably apt - in the cartoons, as long as he doesn’t look down, he keeps going just fine!
A business writer friend of mine told me a month or so ago that, based on a sampling of key swipes, office occupancy is down about a third compared to pre-pandemic although I'm sure it varies a lot.
I can't find the reference but, as I recall it was a drop from 65% pre-pandemic (that may seem low because pre-pandemic a lot of people still traveled or otherwise weren't in the office on a typical day) to around 40% these days. I'm told my workplace is quite a bit lower as well.
Yeah, re: my 'lights are on, but nobody home' anecdote from the peninsula - I'm specifically referring to butts in seats. Said seats are currently very relaxed and well aired out compared to typical.
That is a good point. The people who invested in long term leases in the late 90s in malls went bankrupt but the malls mostly stayed around. I assume the same thing will happen with office space. Demolishing the building is expensive, might as well keep the lights on and wait to see if someone wants the space for offices or storage or whatever.
Musk is doing this now by holding up a refinancing of Twitter’s building by defaulting on the rent. Anyone with a big enough war chest can just stop paying, drag it out in court, and wait the owners out. And tech companies have some of the biggest war chests.
Good. Maybe we can mass retrofit old office space into new housing. I know there are issues with office buildings not having the electricity and plumbing or lighting for proper residential, but I'm sure there are a lot of budding architects working on the problem.
It would be great for cities if we had a massive influx of relatively affordable housing.
I was a big fan of this but it's harder than it sounds. After all, we all know of some great commercial conversions from prior generations (most of the southern part of Manhattan, for example).
Unfortunately the big modern office towers often aren't constructed in a way that supports apartment conversion. There are lots of offices in those buildings with no windows, and all the service(i.e bathrooms) are in the core. Retail space is often worse in this regard, especially in malls. The renovation costs often end up higher than demolishing and building anew.
I still think you're on the right track though, it's just that the obvious fix is harder than it looks. But I do believe cities are in for a great renaissance of mixed-use buildings.
Maybe apartments are the wrong paradigm - this sounds perfect for creating something like a dormitory with rooms on the perimeter and shared bathrooms.
It's ridiculous to even consider this in New York, where they could have just been building normal apartments instead of luxury condo towers for the last 10 years.
Price, mostly. Luxury amenities are a consequence thereof.
However you can't just blame it on demand. These are $16 million condos we are talking about. Functionally they are entirely different goods from apartments intended to be inhabited as a primary residence by people who are not extravagantly wealthy. Moreover, vacancy rates for luxury apartments were high before Covid, and remain high now, even while the rest of the city continues to deal with brutally low vacancy rates in all other housing categories.
So the situation is a little more subtle than "low supply, therefore high prices" and warrants further scrutiny.
I am still waiting for companies to realize that offices in the pre-pandemic sense are a completely unnecessary expense, a drag on productivity and a competitive disadvantage for the organizations that keep clinging on to this idea. It's easy to talk about the importance of meeting face-to-face, when you ignore the opportunity cost of enabling this versus scaling down to more up-to-date spaces that make things like workshops, larger meetings and pair programming truly comfortable, and reinvesting the savings into higher salaries and other benefits. Are the management teams in our industry just waiting for someone to pull the trigger, or are they hoping that no-one will do so, and that everyone will just forget that the pandemic taught us how meaningless commuting to work is?
I am waiting for the exact opposite. I love WFH, my team loves WFH. All of us will tell you how much more productive we are and Individually we might be. As a team…we are definitely not more productive and no one wants to say that uncomfortable part out loud.
Sooner or later that truth will trickle upwards and we will all be back to a commute and cubicles.
> Sooner or later that truth will trickle upwards and we will all be back to a commute and cubicles.
This very might well be the case for your company. However, globally, there are advantages for the employer, and disadvantages for the employee that need to be accounted for. I believe we will start to see salaries diverge between remote and in-office work to adjust for whatever particular situation the company is facing.
Advantages for Company:
- A lower salary can be offered.
- Employees are less Geo-constrained
- Less office space to rent
Disadvantages for Employee:
- Harder for junior employees to learn
- Social isolation
- Lower salary is possible
The situation is likely to be variable from company to company, I have a feeling that soon "remote work" will be an integral part of the identity of each job posting.
Maybe just a management issue, but my team is full of people being really productive at their pet project. When it comes to accomplishing business goals, less so. An effective team needs to effectively work together, and that largely is not happening with remote.
This is just "works on my machine" applied to businesses. If most businesses are struggling with remote work, saying "just get good at it" won't help - they would if they could. Fact is a lot of companies are going to be forced back to in-office because they can't stay competitive otherwise.
I think we agree. WFH itself can work with the right environment, but I question wether certain kinds of companies are realistically capable of fostering that environment. Personally I think that if a company finds that it can't do WFH effectively, it shouldn't even be doing tech, and should contract that work out to a company that can WFH. It's like, a code smell for business.
I think it’s a perception issue. We perceive ourselves to be more productive because we have a bias for WFH. Some folks may actually be, but now the whole is no longer greater than the sum of its parts where once it was.
> I think it’s a perception issue. We perceive ourselves to be more productive because we have a bias for WFH
Even avoiding the time lost in the commute would make someone more productive. If you add how you avoid having to go through the cognitive load, wear & tear that the commute causes, even further.
Perhaps, but that hits more for personal productivity rather than work productivity, although I agree there could be a slight gain to start without the early commute. However, what I have observed in myself in colleagues is there are more midday distractions in WFH (dog walks, answering the door to solicitors, attending to kids, etc…) that don’t generally happen at the office.
> there are more midday distractions in WFH (dog walks, answering the door to solicitors, attending to kids, etc…) that don’t generally happen at the office.
Yes, that's a prominent situation with WFH. People may think that you can 'just do stuff' because you are 'at home'. It takes some adaptation to get things work in an organized way so that they wont get in the way of work.
> As a team…we are definitely not more productive and no one wants to say that uncomfortable part out loud.
Can being in a loud, stacked office in front of computers with a bunch of other people be called 'more productive'?
The only thing that exists in such an environment compared to work from home is the supposedly better communication. But how many times do you communicate with a colleague over the course of a single workday. Nobody wants to be disrupted when they are concentrating. So people already avoid disrupting each other, limiting the interaction during work.
In such an equation, the only thing that is necessary for totally replacing work environment seems to be people getting used to collaborating through chat, voice and videos. That should fix the majority of the issues and only leave the watercooler aspect of the office unaddressed.
> Nobody wants to be disrupted when they are concentrating. So people already avoid disrupting each other, limiting the interaction during work
This is where WFH is worse in my experience. Because someone cannot see that I am behind a closed door or heads down focused, there are more interruptions to me. Even marking yourself unavailable in chat is often not respected, mainly because products like Teams does a pretty shitty job of conveying status and no one pays its status any respect.
> Because someone cannot see that I am behind a closed door or heads down focused, there are more interruptions to me.
Definitely its necessary to have some organization to adapt to wfh must be done in the household and also the household must be made aware that work is work and its not just someone 'studying in his room' like a teenager or college student.
> Even marking yourself unavailable in chat is often not respected
That's an adaptation on the remote workers' side though. With remote, the communication needs to be async. So people should be able to just drop stuff into chat so the remote people can respond whenever they can. Turning off notices while concentrating is a must for any chat app for that reason. You can turn the notifications off, let the messages pile up while you concentrate, then respond to the messages when you are going through a communication cycle. (unless on call though)
You can just ignore their messages and pings when you turn off notifications while you are concentrating - then when you are back you can respond to them. Similarly, you can assume that your messages will be asynchronously processed by your teammates in the same manner. It takes some time to get used to such an async communication style, but it works and its scalable.
> I am still waiting for companies to realize that offices in the pre-pandemic sense are a completely unnecessary expense, a drag on productivity and a competitive disadvantage for the organizations that keep clinging on to this idea.
When their top investors and board members are often also top investors and board members of the firms that own the commercial real estate, it may be hard for them to come to that realization.
Truly challenging work approached with a deep passion is best done in direct collaboration with others. There’s no replacement for the energy that you find from a desperately hard working team that’s working together in person. I’d estimate that 90% of people aren’t interested in working that hard so remote works just fine.
SV has been pumping out money for the last decade so they’ve had to offer cushier environments to attract talent, but now that the free money is drying up I hope that more companies will return to what made SV great in the first place: obsessive work.
We’re already seeing the more committed business owners enforcing in-person work, but there’s been strong push back from employees. Only the companies that are truly creating value will be able to entice enough talent to work there, and many companies will falter in the process, but I think it’s good for us all. It’s like a forest fire that creates space for new growth.
Agreed, but I’d add: 90% of people aren’t interested in working that hard to make a founder life changing money while they’re collecting a salary and adding a bullet point to their resume. And reasonably so.
Most office leases are for 5 to 10 years periods. I’m not surprised they are not seeing huge changes yet. It would be more interesting to find out how much of that space is actually occupied by meatbags. Most offices I went to this year were basically empty chairs.
Seems like the entire WFH/RTO conversation is based around feelings, anecdotes, and personal opinions. For every person saying WFH has been a game changer, you have a person saying RTO is essential for some reason or other.
This is one of the few times I've seen the entire tech sector basically collectively raise their hands and give up on any form of data driven analysis, and go whole turkey into personal conviction as the only guiding factor.
This seems like an area ripe for assessing with metrics. FANG companies onboarded hundreds of thousands of employees over the past 2 years, in addition to their existing workforce. And yet, I haven't seen any CEO anywhere give a compelling case one way or the other with data backed conclusions.
This entire conversation just devolves into "trust me bro" anecdotes and personal opinion, even at the CEO level. It is downright bizarre to me.
What kind of metrics do you think could be used to evaluate WFH versus in-office productivity? Any initial ideas on the pros & cons of the metrics you would use?
General strategies for how to manage employees have always been driven more by gut feeling and emotion than anything else.
People rarely asked for data before adopting "agile" practices, for example. Often they tweaked those practices in ways that would have invalidated any data anyways. They just hopped on a trend.
Ahem, “the average amount of space per lease is decreasing across all types of commercial property.”
Fewer, new commercial projects going up, and smaller office sizes. Vacancy is down if you count the number of leases signed and not the size of the property. So still going down.
The Valley is mostly tech, while SF is more the web shops. SF didn't even have much tech exposure at all until the dotcom boom; in 2000 it was still mostly old line industries (a stock exchange!) and music and other art. People in tech lived up there and commuted to work in the Valley.
I don’t have statistics. It’s in the name though, “silicon” valley. The South Bay is home to the semiconductor industry and its ecosystem.
My own company has about 15k employees in San Jose, and we’re all back to the office full time. Many of us can’t do our jobs from home, it’s hardware work.
The "Silicon" part of Silicon Valley is still very much relevant. Intel, AMD, nVidia, etc. all have major presences down there. There's also a multi-billion dollar industry supporting silicon design shops in various ways, and they're all in SV too.
Just by looking at buildings and job offerings, there seems to be more hardware in the South Bay, vs. the peninsula or SF. Not sure about the Oakland area.
The article defines Silicon Valley as "Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, along with the cities of Fremont and Newark." I would have split out the first two.
This is what makes modern Nimbyism even more destructive.
We’re heading to a new urban death spiral. With no commuters and empty office building. Residential density could salve some of the issues that creates for cities. But nimbyism will of course prevent that, and leave cities the decaying while stodgy citizens delay any solution and argue against density.
No commuters? What city are you referring to? In SF, Muni is packed along my commute to the city. Probably there’s not as much commuting, but there’s certainly quite a bit.
Also, more dense housing actually usually means less commuting. That’s one of the reasons I generally support it. People living closer to work means less commute time resulting in less carbon as well.
My observation in Boston is that driving in by car at rush hour is as bad as it has ever been. Commuter rail ridership seems to be significantly down relative to pre-pandemic so some of the traffic probably comes from that, but it's still very heavy so a lot of people are obviously still commuting in.
I think we could easily go back to the days (not so long ago) when SF was a bedroom community for SV and working in SF was the reverse commute. SF could become a fun place to live and play again.
ALL the dense urban areas on the planet sorely needed that though - they have become literal messes of skyrocketing real estate costs, traffic jams and infrastructure problems along with other problems. A bit of easing could not do harm.
So, official vacancy rates from a leasing perspective. This doesn't cover leased space that nobody's using or that's partially occupied. My understanding is that office leasing tends to be longer term than residential, though I'm not sure what kind of early termination provisions might be typical that would add signal back to the noise.
Some reasons I can think these stats might be misleading:
* Long term leases signed recently (pre-pandemic) that are still in effect (though now that I realize we're almost at the 3 year mark, I suppose this is wearing off). So younger companies that just got started in SV might disproportionately skew our stats.
* Companies prioritizing some cost saving measures (layoffs) over others (real estate).
"Legitimate" reasons I can think of that SV offices might be more in-demand than other places:
* Younger average workforce (?). Anecdotally, younger workers prefer the office, and it feels like younger talent flock to SV early in their career (and/or tech companies discriminate against older workers). Younger workers might prefer the office for all sorts of reasons; social life, fewer fears about illness, etc. Which brings us to...
* Real estate costs mean that fewer people can afford a home office / more of these younger workers share apartments or small homes, so the office is a necessary space to spread out. (plus someone else pays for the A/C and snacks!)
* More need for dual-income / more dual-income "professional" workers, combined with small housing, means more need for space just as in point #2 above.
At least Google plans to add houses but to me that is the key to getting people to return to the office. A home within a 20 minute commute that doesn't cost 1.2 million for a tear down.
> Google is proceeding with its massive multi-billion-dollar Downtown West development that will span roughly 80 acres near Diridon Station and could take about a decade to complete.
Google anticipates up to 25,000 people working in its downtown offices, across 7.3 million square feet of office space. The project plans also call for adding *4,000 homes*, 15 acres of parks, a large community center and its own microgrid.
What a terrible article. Of course there's little "commercial vacancies"; most established companies in the Valley are still keeping their offices open. But just because the office space hasn't been returned (yet), it doesn't mean there are actual human beings inside.
For a different take, check this other article shared earlier today [1], which paints a stark difference (apparently using mobile phone data, which would be a better proxy for "human beings").
You have to actually look at person-days in an office. How many people are technically assigned to that office is pretty much meaningless. I haven't been been into my official office in 3 years (although I've very occasionally gone into another couple company offices).
Could this be partially explained by longer leases in SV on avg prior to Covid? Meaning that actual utilization of office in SF is much lower, but some tenants were locked in longer contracts which have yet to expire.
