Autonomous working has proven to be a game changer for myself and others in my team.
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.
The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together.
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 point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together.
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.
> The article also has no data supporting it. Only feelings. It's very typical for these sort of articles.
My company disbanded its employee productivity research group after they started providing data to the contrary. It's not about facts, it's about forcing the peons to fall in line.
Do we always need non anecdotal data to support every assertion that we make?
I've had many face to face conversations in a room with a whiteboard that couldn't have happened nearly as efficiently if everyone was remote.
Now I do think that the push against work from home in general has very little to do with operating efficiency (if companies cared that much about operating efficiency they wouldn't have developers working in loud open plan offices, drowning out the world around them with headphones), but the argument that there's no utility in face to face meetings is just as meritless.
> Do we always need non anecdotal data to support every assertion that we make?
When the claim is that remote work is a mistake and that its era came to an end... Yes. It's an exceptional claim, and exceptional claims demand exceptional data. Otherwise we should call it bullshit.
> but the argument that there's no utility in face to face meetings is just as meritless.
Probably. I do prefer remote work, and I favor working for companies that allow me to stay remote.
But I think there's place to companies that prefer to work in office, and people that prefer to work in the same physical space as their colleagues.
This balanced take doesn't seem to be very popular, however. I wonder why.
Well de-facto the balanced approach is here already. If you don't like OpenAI, you can go work for Gitlab. The actual interview is not as extreme as the title, and since Altman mentioned they have remote workers too, he seems to be trying to say that 100% remote for everyone is over.
fwiw my personal take is if 100% remote actually worked for the mainstream companies, all of us would have been outsourced to Kenya or Pakistan at 1/10th the cost instead of taking leisurely dog walks between the zoom meetings in Austin, but this simple thought seems to not have crossed the advocates' minds.
That would assume timezone, language, legal, cultural, governmental, and infrastructural differences don't exist between countries. Outsourcing outside your country of incorporation is a completely different challenge compared to remote work within your country of incorporation.
as someone who has personally hired and worked with for several years teams overseas (e.g. an individual in Spain or a team in Eastern Europe), I'm not really seeing that challenge. If our small startup managed to pull it off, then those logistical problems are not quite as bad as they may seem.
You direct hired or hired as contractors? Your HR platform handled global benefits and payroll with little to no added effort or expense? There were no additional legal regulations or compliance issues you had to consider?
I could see a nimble startup pivoting in a way that can make it work. I can also a see large businesses investing in overseas at scale. I don't see smaller or mid-size companies able to reap the same kind of benefits as easily, unless they were setup with it in mind from the start.
In this case, yes. Because otherwise I will just go with my anecdotal observation that this is just about management feeling lonely and with less control.
> I am a lot more productive, and even creative working from home
What’s the data to support this statement? It sounds like a feeling. Do you have data to support whether or not your teammates’ productivity are affected by you being remote?
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 are remote-first companies that have 24/7 channels for anyone to ask questions and discuss things with seniors. There are office-first companies with poor training culture. Commitment to training is the deciding factor.
Only part of my learning was from direct question answering. Seeing how senior people worked also helped a lot. E.g. over hearing a design discussion or seeing how they debugged outages was very helpful to me. Those things are very hard to recreate remotely.
Those things are easier to recreate remotely. You can see their actual screen instead of watching on a projector or over their shoulder. Pair programming is even easy to do remotely, there are IDEs that support it. Hop in any kind of voice call and they can talk you through what they’re doing as they’re doing it.
What I meant is that I learned a lot watching senior members of the team interact. I was like a fly on the wall during their discussions just because I happened to be sitting near their desks when the discussion started. Or when there was an outage, I could overhear how they were debugging the issue.
Also, I've run a remote work company over the pandemic. Maybe you don't feel working remotely is different, but many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online. In person, you can look at someone, see if they're busy, and, if not, approach to start a conversation. Online, you can never tell if someone is available. There is always an element of rejection when it comes to approaching someone online.
> many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online.
Also many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone online vs. in person.
Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people. When I was a junior, a long time ago, I learned most things by trying and studying on my own. I always learned very little from senior engineers directly. I would do a lot better by having them tell me what to look at and exploring stuff alone.
> Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people.
I'm not, at all. In fact, I'm very introverted. I think you're missing a number of nuances to this argument.
It's very true that some people are more comfortable approaching people online vs. in person, but that's actually an argument for in-person work. When you're in-person, you can get insight into your team and learn new things just by being around conversations. You don't need to actively participate in any way. Even if you're more comfortable approaching people online, it's still more overhead to approach people online than it is to sit at your desk literally doing nothing.
Second, saying "many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone online vs. in person" isn't a good argument for two reasons:
1. What you're comfortable with isn't likely to be what's best overall. It's very often that you need to grow your comfort zone to grow as a person. For instance, it can feel very uncomfortable the first time you play a sport or do a hobby in front of others. It definitely feels more comfortable to stay at home. But you'll never get better that way.
2. Apparently, extroverts outnumber introverts by a large margin, so if you had to pick one method of work and apply it to the general population, then it would make sense to pick a method that favors extroverts. I'm not saying in-person working favors extroverts. I think the opposite, actually, because socializing online is harder so only those with a high social drive will actually do it. But I'm just pointing out a logical issue with that statement.
> When you're in-person, you can get insight into your team and learn new things just by being around conversations.
Those are distractions. Those conversations, for the most part, bring no insight and destroy my productivity. As I said, that's not how I learn. You are applying your personal perspective unto others, but what you are describing is alien to me. I learn by experimenting and exploring on my own.
It's the reason why during most of my professional life I had to drown outside noise with headphones.
> It's very often that you need to grow your comfort zone to grow as a person. For instance, it can feel very uncomfortable the first time you play a sport or do a hobby in front of others. It definitely feels more comfortable to stay at home. But you'll never get better that way.
And I got out of my comfort zone many times. Taking on projects that didn't perfectly suited my skills and having to learn new things on the run. Switching roles and finding myself having to take on responsibilities without any proper training or hand over, etc and so forth.
Having my energy and focus drained by navigating meaningless social interaction has nothing to do with "getting out of my comfort zone", but everything to do with being able to maintain the focus I need to be actually productive.
> Apparently, extroverts outnumber introverts by a large margin
I have no idea, and honestly I'm not so sure. I certainly don't think they are the majority in Software Development.
> because socializing online is harder so only those with a high social drive will actually do it. But I'm just pointing out a logical issue with that statement.
I don't need work to socialize, when I have the need for socialization. Just make friends outside of work. Find a hobby. There's plenty of people out there.
Clearly we differ on how we feel about approaching people. I’d rather get a simple message. When people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say. And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is to approach your boss and ask to be included in those situations because you’d like to learn how to respond. Your last line sums up how you feel about remote interactions nicely. I’m sorry, I just don’t find that your feelings about online rejections is a good enough reason to drive into an office.
> And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is to approach your boss and ask to be included in those situations because you’d like to learn how to respond.
That's kind of the point though. When you're together, you don't need to think about how to include others in the discussion or talk to your manager. It all happens organically.
> I’m sorry, I just don’t find that your feelings about online rejections is a good enough reason to drive into an office.
Again, this is not my personal feeling. I ran a video conferencing company that served hundreds of thousands of people over the pandemic. I'm telling you the feedback we got from our users. So, you might not be willing to drive to an office for my feelings. But if you're not willing to drive to an office for the majority of your team's feelings, you might just be an asshole?
> There is always an element of rejection when it comes to approaching someone online.
If your primary reason for wanting to be in office is fly on the wall lurking and not wanting to feel rejected then those aren't very good reasons. Ask to be apart of solutions, groups, teams, emergency responses and projects. You'll learn 10x as much working with those co-workers to solve the problem than you would by listening to some coworkers doing it.
> So, you might not be willing to drive to an office for my feelings. But if you're not willing to drive to an office for the majority of your team's feelings, you might just be an asshole?
I work in a group of 10 developers and 0 out of 10 want to be in office, but hey, I don't mind if you want to take shots at me. I'm not against working in an office, I just want to have real reasons why it's needed.
> when people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say.
This is the bad part -- the best stuff to learn from has been filtered out. Text is written with a specific audience in mind, and that audience generally isn't students. You can write a second document sure, but that requires dedicated tome to writing a second document, and even then, the author may not know which details are most important for the student to know
Can we chat about a problem I’m having with the dev server?
Or
When do you think you’ll have free time?
Those questions are all direct and to the point. They didn’t start out with “hey, see the raiders game last night, it was crazy. My dog was so excited from all the yelling she jumped on the table and started eating the chips.”
To be clear. We were talking about reaching out to coworkers.
> What I meant is that I learned a lot watching senior members of the team interact.
This is why I always ask my coworkers to contact me via “open” channels instead of DMs, preferably async ones like PRs (which can start w/o any code or as very rough drafts). At a well run remote company visibility like this should be even easier than having to happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Hm, remote work does not also means asynchronous work. Something can be asynchronous, something can't. In that case it's just a matter of agree some timeframes like normal office hours where anyone can easily join anyone else because anyone should be there like in the office.
It's a matter of discipline not much of physical presence.
> However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, then it's going to be more effective to spend time together.
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).
I work in a small startup doing innovative software/hardware products. Some of the most 'creative' work we have ever done as a team was when the power went out and we finally spent time workshopping what a particular thing should be like with a whiteboard and pieces of paper. That was a defining moment and what we came up with on that day is kind of what we have today.
Some of the best and most valuable insights in our process are captured in recorded IRL onsite sessions with our users. Humans put on a bit of a show when they're remotely connected and that just ruins the process because they just sort of withdraw after they say their bit. I have recordings that prove this - users spontaneously changing their minds or sharing more about how they really feel about something.
I would argue that the best creativity on a team occurs when there are actual meat-skeletons together in a room smelling each others' farts, interrupting each other, eating together, getting excited, getting pissed, whatever etc.
But you are absolutely correct that this is anecdotal and nebulous at best. In the article he mentions how this is better when the product is unclear and unformed yet.
Figuring out what a building should look like is different from pouring the cement. It is unfortunate, but in our specific case the team likes getting that cement poured. They focus and they get a lot of work done, only then it has to be re-done as it turns out everyone actually had very different ideas.
This isn’t necessarily a remote/non-remote work problem, but I think that’s why that guy in the original article talks about the benefits of having people in the office.
Again, how is that a remote problem? Sounds like a leadership, communication & project management problem. Everyone being in an office doesn't magically solve those problems.
> The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together.
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...
Tap their arm/shoulder to get attention. And also I don’t live in a country where you have to think 5 hours about every human interaction lest you get sued.
> However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration,
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.
Please, I've worked on plenty of successful new projects with a fully onsite team. This remote bias is largely for people who don't know how to behave effectively around other people.
Please, I've worked on plenty of successful projects with a team that only existed in a Schrödinger's office - simultaneously onsite and remote, until observed.
This position and momentum work bias is for those who don't know how to behave effectively in a superposition.
It sure is great that this industry doesn't have a larger than normal population of neurodivergent folks, or this might be a real problem for a lot of us!
- 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 rhetoric that remote work is bad for business seems to always come from people whom I suspect have an ulterior motive
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.
The issue is that, for those that do work well remote, they're going to either have to sacrifice[0] by going hybrid or on-site to ensure they can enable team members like yourself, or further limit their group of candidates to those who feel like they'll do well working remote[1].
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.
IMHO that is where the autonomy comes in. If you personally know that you perform better within an office the onus is on you to express that. Granted it does pose the bigger question about a cohesive solution which meets everyone’s needs.
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.
It's an easy one to rectify - the decision makers can be clear about what conflicts of interest they have about these decisions, and shareholders need to push them on it.
There are pros and cons to RTO, and benefiting your investment portfolio is one of them
> 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.
I’m not sure I agree. Our industry isn’t full of people that have more integrity than the general population, and “your problem for hiring the wrong people” is short sighted, or even victim blaming. I’ll share this recent HN post:
I see nothing particularly bad about the post you shared (it's just a personal account of someone that doesn't really care about their job), and the only thing that it tied to remote work is the mention of "multiple full time jobs".
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.
Just saw this article. The guy isn’t doing anything illegal per se, but I would call him dishonest and say he is cheating both companies with his approaches. Few people could work two jobs without needing to apply these techniques.
> But then I have to ask - if his employers are happy enough with his work to keep him around, what is the problem there?
In SW environments, having the time to do more work is supposed to mean actually completing more projects. They hire you to "perform duties for x hours a day", not "complete x tasks/x story points per sprint", so if everyone on a team is taking a similar approach, your velocity might be half or less what it could be if everyone ended up on-site.
> They hire you to "perform duties for x hours a day", not "complete x tasks/x story points per sprint"
Then why hire salaried workers while tracking work via sprints?
>your velocity might be half or less what it could be if everyone ended up on-site.
This is assuming more work actually gets done in an office and that offices don't have their own set of distractions. People can also slack off in an office too, or become so distracted by others that their velocity suffers.
Measuring employee performance seems to be a continual struggle that has no relation to in-office vs remote workers. If you can't accurately measure success & value generation of remote workers, you probably also can't measure office worker's either. Just checking that someone is physically in their seat doesn't actually mean they're adding tangible value.
I'm not super convinced most people will do more work on-site either, I'm just pointing out the immoral position you put yourself in by working two full-time jobs at once.
I agree that one should not deceive their employer. At the same time, if their employer does not notice a drop in productivity/performance from the employee, what's that say about that company's ability to actually measure employee performance?
I think a lot of companies have poor project management & employee performance measurements, so half the time, people only have half the picture or don't know what the heck people are supposed to be doing and if that's actually getting done. That only becomes more complicated when projects are abandoned and/or requirements shift every quarter.
So people like the guy with two jobs should be fired if management was better. And more employee surveillance is needed to help managers do their jobs better. The other option is integrity and trust.
I agree on the latter, measure deliverables & people's contributions to the deliverables. Having paranoia that someone is working two jobs, so you need people in office or you need to install aggressive spyware is extreme.
At what point does this become just creating meaningless work or pursuing initiatives that mean nothing? Do we know if the companies in the example given even support employee initiatives?
And working on-site does not mean people will be more productive. A lot of people are very good at giving out the impression that they are very busy day in day out even when productivity is rock bottom.
That’s happens and the boss also has the power to fix it. It’s part of that whole responsibility thing. If a majority of a bosses employees are defrauding them, then it sounds like they aren’t good at hiring. If it’s a minority then it’s their job to get rid of those people. It’s shocking to see people complain about coworkers literally not logging in for weeks as why remote doesn’t work. That just means your supervisor’s aren’t doing their job either.
The boss often has little power or agency to fix it. You have never been a middle manager. The amount of red tape you need to go through to fire someone for cause, cover your ass from lawsuits, etc is overwhelming.
Managers are people too, often struggling because they’re squashed between challenging top down directives and the needs of all their reports.
So in dysfunctional organizations force managers to keep poorly performing employees? This is somehow related to remote work how? Such a problem exists regardless of where the employee is working.
The perceived productivity gains have always been complicated because they're anchored in a time when people had nothing better to do.
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.
I assume he’s got either direct or indirect links to commercial realestate; as an owner or investor or something else.
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.
you however, signed an employment contract with them.
if the lease brings down the ship, youll need to jump. rather than push for wfh at your current job, i think youd be better off moving to a wfh competitor instead?
> I assume he’s got either direct or indirect links to commercial realestate; as an owner or investor or something else.
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.
I agree, but shouldn't we expect to see some 100% remote businesses eat the lunch of the old dinosaurs in their highrises? I would think that would be the best proof.
Linux is doing rather well. Not a business but the people building it have eaten's microsft's server market pretty well. That's what happens when you let engineers do their jobs.
I know of a few companies around the uk, one is mythic beasts, a hosting company. Gitlab is also successful, canonical too. Thing is it doesnt matter. If a client needs me onsite to brainstorm then i dont mind it. But there needs to be a valid reason and not just because of an insecure managed’s lack of skill in using modern tech, or worse, to fill voids in people’s lives. Focused work is best done in a quiet place, and for some that’s their own home and their own office. Being surrounded by things you like and a setting you like makes you more productive.
That's true (that this will be an interesting litmus test) but I doubt it can be seen so quickly.
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.
His level of compensation means nothing for his mistaken feelings that in-office is coming back and remote is dead, and it doesn't mean that part of his psyche likes to see butts in chairs to make himself feel like a boss. He's still human.
Obviously the "indirect" part of the post you are responding to applies.
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)
Yes (did not doubt that), but this is of course only one part of the puzzle. Remember that the assumption of the post you responded too suggested incentives tied to real estate (stock in real estate sector might already be enough), and not about salary/stock in OpenAI. What about other engagements, promises made and so on? Has he declared that incentive-wise there is nothing else than OpenAI going on for him?
The full quote is a bit narrower than the title implies;
> "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!
I bet he also advocates for open office plans as well - after all, you need to maximize the team's communication and collaboration in order to maintain your level of creativity. Of course we all know this is rubbish.
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.
> In fact, prior to the pandemic the environment in which I saw the most remote teams was in startups.
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 is just part of the Silicon Valley lore. You know how all those successful start-ups were all started in big office complexes. It is just more creative that way.
It has been obvious for a while now that the optimal workplace was designed in the 18th century.
Just like it was obvious in the 18th century, the optimal loom (the Jacquard) was invented, and no possible improvements to textile manufacture could be made.
It’s not just lore though. Harvard and others have done extensive research and found 100% remote is less effect for most organizations. Is office work the only solution here, no. Is some work cultures work better with remote, sure. However most companies benefit from in person work.
>Where it's disappointing (to me) is that it seems he's just ... giving up.
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.
I agree that the title of the article is misleading, and that Sam Altman is not dismissing remote work entirely, but only for startups and only for full remote.
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.
> He's suggesting that there are problems with remote work for creative teams, but rather than think of ways to solve those problems
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.
Sure, but going out and publicly just going "it's a failed experiment" when you're as influential as he is is different than just not trying to solve it for everyone. It's actively contributing to ending the experiment for everyone and reducing the pressure to try to solve the problems.
The era of remote work is not over. It’s just arrived. We overshot the equilibrium point by a lot during the pandemic height and that will regress back to something closer to long term trend.
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.
>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?
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.
You are still ignoring that a remote-in-country employee is different than a remote-out-of-country employee from a legal, HR & logistical perspective. Hiring someone in Kentucky is not the same lift as hiring someone in Poland or India. There's going to be extra expense and overhead to manage out-of-country employees & the logistics of operations between different countries. Many companies aren't setup to do this. You can't just look at the pay rate.
Additionally you can't just look at the pay rate of an in-office employee. In office requires a commitment to pay for the office, pay for the staff to manage the office, accept a reduced talent pool in some areas, and if you're in an area with a large talent pool, it's probably a high-cost-of-living area, so your rate will not just need to be "a little more", but "a lot more" to be competitive.
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.
It may be difficult. It may be better in some cases. Around the clock pager support might be much easier. You can ship some features quicker by working on them around the clock. You only need 2-4 hours of overlap to cover the majority of meetings.
Good callouts, those are definitely situations where distributed time zones work better! Not sure about running 3 shifts to ship a new feature, but I have no experience in that area. What I am currently experiencing (working with half my team in the same tz, half is 10-12 hours off) is that it adds complexity. For example, when we coordinate handoffs between time zones, we have to be really explicit about dates and times. Delays tend to be more costly - instead of 1d delay, things become 2 if someone is out sick and doesn't deliver their critical path dependency.
It's a tradeoff, does require additional coordination and thinking things through. It's somewhat similar to remote work, tbh - it adds complexity but you also get benefits. Depending on each situation, the value added/cost parameters change.
I read it as this guy failed to build a distributed team that would meet his expectations and now extrapolates it to the entire industry. I have heard similar conclusions from a founder who invested a lot of money in a big fancy office in a great location only to discover that half of the team prefers full remote. The team was ready to work this way, the founder was not.
Broadly speaking, this is the entire RTO vs. RW debate. Over-extrapolation mixed with religious zeal. That there are multiple optima is anathema in this context.
- 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.
> He said, "some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don't let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don't like the open air fentanyl markets either.”
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.
I think that if you live in SF and are a CEO then trying to get people in person makes sense. If you are anywhere else then you gain an awful lot from the recruitment flexibility of remote.
But as a former eng manager at Mozilla used to say, sometimes the best tool for remote work is a plane.
Well, it is kind of funny when a millionaire tech bro tell me that remote work doesn't work to build some silly food delivery applications, when those silly applications run on top of an open source stack that was always heavily built on remote and async settings.
I don’t think that allegory works. That open source stack wasn’t built for the startup. Rather, the startup had a pick of hundreds of open source options and chose the one that worked best. Because there’s no collaboration or relationship between the startup and the OSS projects, of course there’s no need for them to communicate.
But I don’t think anybody would argue that a startup doesn’t need to communicate with it’s employees.
That's why I love free markets. Sam is free to experiment with in-office or hybrid model. If you think remote is best, go for it. Ultimately, market will speak loud and clear. Smart people will learn.
My personal belief is that hybrid is the best model.
Most of the companies that are declaring remote work as a failure weren’t able to establish good processes and culture on this new setup. Most of these companies are also control freak with low-trust attitude on their employees. Personally, it’s far from be a failure and being over, and likely one of the best equalizer (democratize opportunities) and productivity booster that happened in the industry. However it’s certainly not easy to adopt and integrate correctly.
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.
Quite the opposite. Several divisions in my organisation and others in our group have decided to gradually move to a model where about half of us work from home for the medium term, and that number is expected to increase over the next five years.
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.
Why can’t anyone see this for what it is? It’s about power.
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
>The idea of fully remote work becoming the norm has come and gone
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.
Companies are already unable to check if they are utilising their employees time efficiently. People can look awfully busy without doing anything of value.
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.
monitoring your use of company assets at home is plenty 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.
Let’s see what the classics say about this. Mr Conway says, that an organization creates a system in its image. Thus, if the system needs to be very distributed, so does the organization. So unless there is a singular monolithic thing built by a focused local team, a singular monolithic team makes no sense. And a team that’s not like that benefits little from their physical location, as a large chunk of their work is non-physical communication anyway. Even when the other team sits in the same building, who’s going to spend 10 minutes going to another floor when they can just message?
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.
Yes, that's certainly where he gets his reputation on HN from. He's largely considered not-that-impressive off HN (e.g., people who have worked for or with him and I say that as someone in that category).
hah, you've got a point there! It's important to remember that even influential figures in tech aren't infallible, and they too can have a few, let's say, less-than-stellar moments. While Sam's journey with Loopt might not have been a "revolutionary unicorn," his contributions to the industry shouldn't be completely dismissed.
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.
There's also quite a lot of these "remote work doesn't work" posts from C-level execs, board members, etc...that live far away from their company's headquarters. The dissonance is funny.
The people complaining that remote workers are taking on multiple jobs (without evidence) are the same people who act as CEO for multiple companies and serve on multiple boards.
You forgot "eat all the sandwiches". If everybody works from home those folks would have to order their food via one of their delivery startups like any ordinary pleb instead of getting company-paid catered food.
If every organization feels like for improving org outcomes bringing workers to the office is absolutely crucial, then that org should bear the cost as well. The org should pay for gases, pay for time in commute, pay for car and cover it's insurance. For people who moved to colocate with the org, org should pay for their rents too. After all, it's the orgs decision to call workers for it's own profits, why should a worker be paying for this unnecessary expenses when the alternative of remote is very much feasible.
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?
I guess the market will reach an equilibrium. Over time, if workers prefer WFH, they will demand a premium to work in person, so employers will end up paying.
Remote work threatens the foundation of the commercial real estate market. Expect a huge push to get people back into the office - especially if there is softness in the job market.
Are the incentives really there? Obviously the people with the real estate would like this, but if they were really that influential, you'd also see a huge push for private offices (=> more space per employee, more real-estate demand), which alas we don't.
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.
The biggest thing would be for those that own their premises, who would have to take impairments (write downs) on the values of their assets. Their lease liabilities also start to look exorbitant and many will be forced to act on this, cutting these leases and recognize the lease cancellation cost all at once (usually office leases require all payments for the contract term to cancel), taking a large financial knock upfront.
Basically large knocks on their profit in the very short term.
Be that as it may, why would corporations that are tenants rather than landlords make decisions on that basis? Remote work saves companies a lot of money on office space.
The C-suite of the company I worked for during lockdown fretted a lot about the lack of usage of the office space. The problem they had was that they had a long-term lease on the building. They couldn't get out of it, and it burned a lot of money.
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.
Getting 80% of what you're paying for space you don't need is much better than getting 0%. Then you get to claim a big cost reduction this year and a big cost reduction when the lease expires and you can dump the unneeded space entirely.
well, as a counter point, it could be a huge win for real estate if given they could convert the office space into apartments for people which is much needed. I know these buildings aren't setup in regards to plumbing and what not, but we can adapt.
Commercial zoned real estate is typically more expensive than residential because commercial tenants have more money, so the landlords who control zoning boards arrange to keep commercial rents high by limiting the supply even more than they do for residential housing.
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.
Does it threaten it or does it just threaten what's so far been established?
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.
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.
Uh huh right, discovering hidden talents, not micromanagement, no sir!
> Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction
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.
I spent a couple of pandemic years at Dropbox, working fully remote. My team regularly started up Zoom calls and invited junior engineers to participate in design conversations, troubleshooting, etc., because it helped them to both feel invested in the product and to grow as engineers.
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.
Why do you think that requires any more explicit effort? In my experience that works the other way - in the office I would need to know if people are coming and organise appropriately large room / do bookings, etc and the whole meeting changes a bit if there's 5 more people observing. Now it's as easy as a slack message "we're talking about / working on Foo at (link), feel free to join (cc @potentially interested people)".
If they had personal offices big enough (we were 2 in relatively big offices for 3 years at my first company), it's effortless. Since then I've worked with big bank and big oil, in cubicles/open space, and it's indeed way harder than it is remotely.
Open stream of you working on an interesting part of the project (even the tedious parts) is a great advice.
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.
When you actually look at the claim Altman can defend from his own experience, it's not that remote work doesn't work for "the tech industry"; it's that remote work doesn't work for early stage startups. But most of "the tech industry" is not early stage startups. Most of the people working in the tech industry could still be working remotely, while at the same time the small fraction of them that are working at early stage startups could be working in person in an office (or hangout space, or whatever), and the tech industry would do just fine.
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.
So two friends living in two different places can never build a product and then business around it together. They must be sitting within one meter proximity or the magic potion doesn't work.
Why don't you show us successful startups where people built it fully remotely without meeting each other in person? Sam is claiming that in early stage startups, one need some in-person interaction which I fully agree with.
I don't want to out myself, but the company I work for is a smallish startup (<100 people now) that has revenue, and closed a multimillion dollar round last year. Most of the people there have never met in person (I've been there for >2 years and have not met any of my coworkers, and only one is in my country, at the opposite end)
While some of the execs have met in person now, the whole thing was bootstrapped by a handful of people before they met.
> Sam is claiming that in early stage startups, one need some in-person interaction
He's claiming that, but that's not all he's claiming. His claim about remote work being a big mistake for the tech industry is much broader than just early stage startups. But as far as I can tell, he has no real basis for his claim except for early stage startups; so his claim could be true for them but false for the tech industry as a whole.
I do not know much about startups.. but there are many, many successful projects that have been fully remote - Linux, GNU, Debian, etc. Almost all open source projects I know of do not need an office space.
Yeah, if you are just pumping out generic jira ticket work which doesn't require interaction with anyone else, of course remote works well. If you are actually trying to move fast, throw ideas around, and collaborate, nothing beats being in the same room.
Video calls are a poor replacement to real life interactions. Otherwise the air travel industry would have been crippled by now.
Video calls are a perfect replacement, those that can't do it generally either have: a poor video call culture (people avoiding calls etc., Not turning on video, calls been seen as way too formal and rigid) or just can't use technology effectively.
He does claim that, but you can extend it to early-state projects, even at big companies. It also makes onboarding harder, so you have to include that factor, too.
> He further added that OpenAI’s some of the best talents are working remotely. He said, "some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don't let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don't like the open air fentanyl markets either.”
The above line seems to contradict the part about '..worst mistake of the tech industry'
Hey, it could be worse! People could be working for Altman's other plaything Worldcoin, collecting retinal scans of the poor and desperate in India, Indonesia and parts of Africa and handing out company scrip as 'compensation'.
If wanted to be open and honest he would be attaching the wealthiest and paltry wealth and corporate taxes, not those on the bottom suffering from medical conditions like chemical addiction.
I think claiming something is a problem while doing the thing that you say is a problem and in doing so generating the largest and fastest pile of valuation $$$$ in the history of man kind is a problem.
Hypocrisy from the guy who is both publicly an AI doomer with a stocked AI apocalypse retreat and an AI firm CEO promoting his product as either near or actually being AGI?
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.
Given what we've seen of Altman's success [1], what's more likely: that he believes something so nonsensical, or that this article is badly written and the GP comment inaccurate?
[1] To be clear, I have doubts about just how far LLM's can continue to improve and how much they will really transform the world; but the influence of OpenAI so far is plain for all to see.
It's almost like Sam Altman is desperately trying to downplay the significance of remote work, while simultaneously relying on it for OpenAI's success. What a paradox, amirite?
> Open source development has been running on remote work forever and it’s doing great.
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.
There is a difference between software development and running a business. As in, "hustle to figure out this complicated operational problem or die running out of money in a month", vs "a grab bag of nice-to-have tickets for the next year or so". Besides the fact that many open-source projects like Linux also had a ton of corporate contribution from in-office workers.
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.
The nuance here is that sometimes work from home is more productive, sometimes office is more productive.
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.
> "The more unclear and early the product is, the more in-person time the team needs to grind together"
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.
I worked 40% remote from 2002 until the pandemic, when I (like all my colleagues) went to 100% wfh. Now we don't even have an office anymore. I've never been more productive, or happier with my work. In my experience, Sam Altman is just wrong.
I kinda agree that very early, small teams, should be in person. But OpenAI has ~375 employees. They're 7 years old. A team of that size has hierarchy, it has middle management. There's plenty of room to have people working remotely in that size of an org. Especially when it increases your hiring pool so much. If you just need hackers, throw a net in Palo Alto and you'll catch 5. But if you need the best person to implement a infiniband backbone who also has familiarity with sparse network training? Well they live in Finland.
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).
At what point has Sam Altman ever tried running a fully remote company? OpenAI has leased a building in downtown SF. He already bet on one outcome, the words that follow are justification for it.
Nah, I'm good. I have been much more productive at home than I've ever been in the office. Happier too; I'm saving 2 hours of travel time per day, that I now get to spend on my hobbies. Not going back.
Right there with ya! Staying home has so many perks. And hey, let's not forget the environmental impact: less commuting means less pollution and fewer traffic jams. Plus, by embracing remote work, we're not just lining the pockets of big landlords and property owners. We're taking control of our time, our space, and our lives, all while doing our bit for the planet. No turning back now!
I mean, for reference this is the guy who thought Worldcoin was a good idea, so I’m not sure that people need pay _that_ much attention to his opinions on random stuff.
(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.)
> Person said X which was wrong, so what he says about Y must be wrong too.
You could argue that the linked post in indulging in the reverse (a form of appeal to (false) authority): Person said X which is right, so what they say about Y must be right too. Altman has no particular authority here anymore than anyone else who works at a midsized company; that anyone bothered to write an article about his take is due to him being well-known in _completely different_ fields.
> Then why are you commenting on an article about what he is saying?
The article itself is an example of a sort of broken thinking which has become annoyingly common in HN-land, and is interesting for that reason, _not_ for its actual content.
I can definitely understand how there's more collaborative bandwidth when you have a small group in a room, focused on a large, complex project such as early stages at a startup. However, I don't think that's necessary once you've broken up the tasks and started executing. Once you're at that stage, being crammed together in an office where everyone's trying to do head-down work on their own is a productivity killer.
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.
More collaborative bandwidth, basically video calls aren't being used effectively, people are too rigid in how they use it and too reserved in what they say. People see calls as this formal thing, like it's still a novelty or something. Leave the call running when you go for a break, open up a whiteboard on a separate screen. There's plenty of ways to overcome this, people just aren't using the tools effectively, we need some video call training.
I also find a corner office, high floor, prime aspect with a view over a major metropolis to be beneficial to my productivity. 500sq ft++, with private bathroom should do it. Also outdoor roof space, optional but it really is the difference between 5x and 10x for me.
> Altman also spoke about the future of AI. According to Altman, AI needs to be treated with “extreme seriousness” as the tech might have “existential risk” attached to it.
I really, really wish that OpenAI would start behaving as if they believed this.
They have a philosophy which may be wrong but is not entirely incoherent (expose risk as capacity becomes available, so we aren't caught off-guard by high-capacity risks we can't recover from).
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.
> GPT-4 is vastly better aligned than any of the other LLMs.
If I'm being completely honest, I can't judge that at all, because it's far from clear to me what, specifically, people mean by "alignment" when they use that term. And I'm pretty sure that different people are meaning different things.
Yet there are thousands of fully remote companies, plenty of startups that were highly successful as remote only and either IPOd or were acquired as fully remote. Including my current company, and many companies we all work with daily.
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.
The main thing is that banks are failing without a vibrant commercial real estate market. Of course the common men and women are too stupid to understand that according to these CEOs , so all they can do is make up some bullshit ideas about how lazy people are working remotely and how productivity suffers ( /s look at the revenue trends of lost companies during 2020-21-22). It would be much better and honest to simply say let’s all get together to prop up the banks.
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
This hasn't been my experience on a completely remote team that was remote (/ multi-city-office) way pre-pandemic. I think culturally you can just do remote wrong or you can do remote right and the SF-mindset-centric scene around here seems (in my experience) to not really lean all the way in on doing it right.
At many large companies there have been a ton of mergers and acquisitions over the last 10 years, and most meetings are already on Teams/Zoom/etc because the workers in the team are in different cities and often different continents. Even in the office many of us are just on Zoom/teams/etc for meetings.
Companies have already had mostly distributed teams for a while; this is just about control.
I am so tired of people in this community making vague and unbacked up feelings of how things are... In any other industry this sort of magical thinking would be called out as completely unscientific. You have the money to do actual studies and even hoards of startups to be able to test it. Release the raw numbers and do the study, don't just make things up based on your theory and a quote or an essay.
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.
How would you study it exactly? Start-ups fail all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with their organisation or even execution. And if you prove that some succeed with it and some fail with it, as you suggest, then you've proven nothing.
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.
If it can't be measured does it exist? Back to magical thinking again. Maybe you are right there are too many variables at play to make pithy statements about any of this either way.
I think YC could at least release anonymised data about all the companies so that people could at least do some analysis to see if statements like this are at least in line with the data. As we know human beings are extremely good at spotting patterns and even better at fooling themselves.
When I was an associate/junior I longed for remote work but seniors tried to keep me in the office as much as they could. Now that I am a senior I advocate for remote work to enable associates/juniors that want to work from home to do so. We have offices and whoever wants to do so can work from the office. Many associates/juniors use that opportunity but still the general consensus is that flexibility is the key here - they maybe come to the office once or twice a week.
Flexibility brings uncertainty, and if you are not sure about who's going to be there in the office, there's not much value proposition to go and check.
If you know for sure that all/most people are going to be there, this equation changes considerably.
That being said, I think it makes sense to reduce physical presence to ~2-3 days a week, unless having two work environments is cumbersome.
We always communicate and somehow end up in the office together. There's always a way. Many weeks someone says 'I'll be in the office on this day. Anyone else coming in?' And then a few people say yep, let's do it.
I disagree with the premise that valuable one on one mentorship requires a physical presence. I've done a lot of mentoring over Slack and Zoom, and at least on my side, it was a rewarding experience.
I think there's a mismatch between C-suite people, especially in startups, who believe that their company is a mission-driven force for effecting change in the world, something that workers can attach themselves to for meaning and purpose, and individual contributors who think the company is OK and maybe a little silly and are happy to help it along for remuneration, but aren't about to make it a load-bearing part of a spiritually fulfilling life. Most companies aren't that meaningful.
I came to this thread ready to say that this guy is a moron (and I'm still withholding judgement on that[1]) but there is a fundamental truth here: you have to be good at the tooling.
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.
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.
The debate around this usually turns pretty unproductive because many of the people who are pro-WFH are unwilling to entertain the idea that working from home is just a net negative for the company. Any pushes for WFH gets blamed on either middle managers who have nothing better to do than micromanage you, or Big Corporate Office who has millions on the line.
> working from home is just a net negative for the company
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.
Lol, nobody asked for his expert opinion on something which has been happening ever since the internet whether it is outsourcing, freelancing or entrepreneurship which by itself begins without renting/buying an office until you need it absolutely. Let people/companies decide what works for them
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.
Quality, speed and price is all that matters. How does remote work fill that out for your company's business? The age old, "you can only optimize for two of the three".
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.
Not all remote work is equal, and as a matter of fact if done poorly (read: if you work the same as in the office, but remote) it can be much worse than onsite.
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.
That's not what the article says. The quote was specifically about startups 'going full remote forever'. That's way different to saying the era of remote work is over.
The headline will lead to confirmation bias among those who only learned to manage by proximity. I do think Sam Altman has expressed something, though, that my teams and I have been feeling acutely over these past few years. The quote: "the more fragile and nuanced and uncertain a set of ideas are, the more time you need together in person" - when my team is tackling something that resists applying formula or process, we do seem to make progress quicker in person than remote. That said, those truly ambiguous ideas make up a small percentage of our work.
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.
Remote work has been the norm for at least 15 years. Ever since tech companies realized they could get cheaper coders in India, we've been working in distributed teams.
Cool! Another idiot to avoid working for. I like it when bad workplaces and incompetent bosses advertise themselves. Makes my next
job search that much easier.
It's fine to have an opinion/preference about the topic. I'm ok with CEOs thinking remote is a mistake, the same way they should be ok with people (maybe even the best people you could hire in some cases) not even glancing at their job offers for not being remote friendly.
I worked for a 100% remote company during the pandemic. It was the least productive job I had. So much time was wasted waiting for people to respond it was driving me crazy. People would disappear for hours at a time and the “asynchronous” working was accepted as the norm. I didn’t even have an office I could drive to to meet other employees. I quit after a few months.
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.
I'm fascinated by the discussions around creativity and remote work both on this forum and elsewhere.
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.
Perhaps if he had employees less distracted by office banter they would be able to set up a payment system for their subscription that doesn't mysteriously disappear after the first month.
I don't mind the article as I take the points as the location of work should match the stages and culture of the team/business. In a weird parallel to "the difference between a house and a home".
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.
> some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don't let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI!
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?
If the headline were succinct there'd be no point in reading the article:
"Sam Altman says startups need in-person work to get going."
Here in the real world, we'll happily keep the policy of "remote first, but not remote only" where we occasionally do get together in a shared workspace for high-bandwidth exchanges of ideas. But I won't be tearing my home office down any time soon.
All open source projects are remote, including Linux. That's a rather exceptional. Not a company but shows that great, complex, engineering can be built remotely. Probably because engineers need focus and time to think. Gitlab is also fully remote.
That seems like a dumb thing to say about an experience so many of us have. My productivity, health and state of mind were all better when I worked from home. Why is Altman lying to me?
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.
That simply mirrors corporate culture. For all the chest-beating to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of companies are not "families" or "bands of friends" - they're groups of people there to make money. When the company has no loyalty or compassion towards employees, employees will do the same to the company.
People don't form loyalty or compassion towards the organization, but they inevitably do towards each other. If you put a bunch of people together on a task, then no matter how they got there - for money, for fame, or forced to do so - they generally do develop shared bonds and do things because of their teammates. Heck, in war when push comes to shove, soldiers aren't really motivated to die for their country but rather for their squadmates - even if they were simply placed there randomly as recruits some weeks earlier, and even if they are literal mercenaries.
So for most neurotypical people simply being on at a job for some time is sufficient to form a shared local culture and camaraderie. But that does not happen remotely, not unless people go out of their way to build similar bonds explicitly; the natural process requires being physically close and communicating during routine activities, not just to exchange strictly necessary information.
That's not been my experience. I've worked both in offices and full time from home for a long time.
You most definitely do share local culture and camaraderie with others working from home. I constantly spend my time on chats, calls, meetings and in pair programming sessions.
We definitely have private jokes, productivity tips and everything else that would go on in an office setting.
This whole argument just stinks of people in private offices wanting the plebs in a shared space so they can maintain status.
There's quantified evidence that shared office spaces suck for productivity. If Altman, Igor and the rest want to force people back into offices they should gather some hard counter-evidence. Right now it just sounds like excuses for micromanagement.
I agree with your overall point, but I think you're framing it too strongly. It absolutely is possible to form a shared culture remotely. Many open source projects have demonstrated this as well as various forum and chat communities. However, it requires a different kind of socializing, one that not everyone is adept at or interested in.
The amount of time people spend with their guild/squad, and especially the years they spend with the same persons exceeds the time/duration they spend at the same place of work.
> Everyone is just a mercenary. Very little culture or care is created.
As they should be. I like and am friends with my colleagues. But I am under no delusional that I would be let go immediately if the profit motive of my company didn't justify my being there.
The point is that companies with people who care and developed culture is expected to outperform companies where people just feel like they're mercenaries.
There is no question that companies with motivated employees who care about the success of the company and those he/she works with are more likely to outcompete companies that don't have same time.
Good companies mask the fact that yes, everyone is just a mercenary. It's easier to mask this fact when people work in person.
The vast majority of companies' politics / culture is absolutely toxic. Everyone can see through it but pretends they can't because they are mercenaries. Office Space and Dilbert have resonated for decades for a reason.
Who wants to play office team building games with some random office supplies? Nobody.
Hah. That's funny, but that's not what I meant. I mean when they play silly games like who can bowl a tennis ball into a trash can, who can build the biggest pencil tower, who can build a paper airplane that can fly the furthest, etc.
"Office supplies," we might have created a new term for an "office NPC."
Regardless of productivity (I think it's been shown to be better for WFH or at least equivalent), companies do not like WFH because it gives some power back to the worker.
Culture and relationships can absolutely be built remotely, but it does require leadership to be deliberate. Another thing highlighted by WFH is just how bad leadership was/is.
Spot on, wfh is the practical answer that managers are useless for the most part, and most workers can actually work together and be productive without the circus that a lot of companies do as a “team building” activity. But wfh took some of the power play that companies used to do, and they want that back.
Not sure about the generic 'manager', but leadership is not useless. In person allows a lot of bad managers/leaders to just skate by b/c everyone is in the same office, and things sort of get done by virtue of location. Remote highlights poor leadership.
Thinking only Software development is the only thing can be done is a little of a downplay, there are TONs of job that can be effectively done remotely, from project/product management, data analytics, engineering design (not just software), strategic and risk analysis, sales, marketing, and the list goes on, it’s probably only blue collar jobs are the exceptions for the most part. Even a pilot can be done remotely, during the pandemic we built a drone system for pilots to fly drones remotely from anywhere, and that’s just an example of how things are now.
> "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.
I understand your frustration and disappointment with Altman's statement. However, it's important to remember that everyone's experience with working from home can vary greatly. While it may have been beneficial for you, it may not have been the same for others. It's also possible that Altman's statement was based on research or data that supports his claim. It's always good to keep an open mind and consider different perspectives.
> Altman's statement was based on research or data that supports his claim
If it was based on research or data, they wouldn't hesitate to rub it on everyone's faces.
It's not. It's just feelings. The ruling class has abject fear of losing control over the peasantry. That the plebs have all of a sudden a benefit that was only available to the elites rubs them the wrong way.
Wow, qwertyuiop_, seems like you're tryna connect the dots to make it some big conspiracy. Newsflash, buddy: it ain't about some puppeteer controlling everyone.
I’m approaching the point where I feel similarly about WFH deniers as I do about vaccine deniers. We performed an immediate GLOBAL switch to fully remote work and corporate life went on largely unaffected. We have the experimental data strongly supporting that it does not hurt the ability of most workers to function (exceptions apply).
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.
If you actually look at the quote and not the flamebait title, he says the "experiment" of there being no loss to creativity with remote work is over, and that the tech isn't there yet for early-stage startups.
If people don’t have a good justification for regularly killing and maiming their employees regularly in car accidents, I don’t want to hear hand waves arguments about “work from home was an experiment”!
Sounds like Sam Altman might have some commercial real estate he needs to avoid collapsing. Frankly I couldn’t care less what he says, I’ll retire before I go to an office.
It’s really hard to “step up” remotely. Getting your foot in the door, getting promoted to senior, becoming a manager, are much easier if you are in person.
The mistake was doing the transition suddenly with no foresight or planning. Remote is possible but the systems and culture need to be ready for it first.
My take is this person is saying their organization does remote poorly and the more junior engineers aren't set up for success. That has nothing to do with remote work at large and feels more like a reflection of the structures in place in that particular situation.
We do remote fine, but it is simply impractical to expect success from jrs in a remote work environment. They need more support and side-by-side guidance to succeed. It's a downward spiral for anyone except the most exceptionally engaged.
Cities in the past have had many reasons to exists, almost all are essentially disappeared but some social aspects of them it's valuable for those who rule:
- 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.
- 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.
I could not disagree more. At least for the last decade in the places I've worked (major tech companies), everyone has been doing "remote work" anyway even though they were in the office.
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.
You clearly didn't read the article and came to react from the headline. He says the earlier the stage and the more unclear the more you need to spend time together.
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.
I did read the article, and I did understand it. I just disagree with his position.
> You need SOME time in person
I'll agree with this. But it can be on an as-needed basis, not a regularly scheduled thing. This is how I've done it in my own startups. I had office space for people who wanted to come into the office (many prefer that), but it was not mandatory. We'd have in-person meetings every so often as needed. On average, this was about once per month.
While I understand the sentiment that some in-person time may be beneficial, I'd argue that it's not a strict requirement for a successful work environment. With the advancements in technology and communication tools, we can now maintain strong connections with our colleagues, even without face-to-face interaction. Virtual meetings, team-building activities, and online workshops can serve as effective substitutes for in-person gatherings, allowing teams to stay connected and collaborate effectively.
The key lies in fostering a culture of open communication and trust among team members, regardless of their physical location. By prioritizing these values and leveraging available technology, it's possible to create a cohesive and productive remote work environment without the need for in-person meetings. As the landscape of work evolves, it's essential for us to adapt and explore new ways to connect and collaborate, transcending the boundaries of traditional office settings.
The best and most productive I've ever been (at least felt, but I think the results spoke for themselves as well) was when I was able to go into an office, but did not have to.
There is some tragedy of the commons there though. It was quite convenient to have most everyone in the office on a given day if I decided at 11am it might be nice to switch gears. I also lived literally across the street for one job, and about an average 18 minute door to door commute on public transit for the other. Many others on the teams were in similar living situations so it was easy to call impromptu office days the day before or whatnot as-needed.
I've otherwise worked from home most of my career - but would travel into an office about once a month to see faces and have meetings. Or just go out and have dinners with folks after work. This worked pretty well.
Full remote is tough for me now. I would prefer to be in an office 2-3 days a week, but not forced to be. I do miss the energy of a well functioning team executing together in close proximity.
And to be fair - the worst job I ever had was a 50-90 minute each direction car commute from hell. Literally anything is better than that.
phil21, I see where you're coming from, but let's not forget that we're all different, and what might work for you won't necessarily work for everyone else. It's great that you thrived in that environment, but forcing others into the office because it suits you just ain't the way to go.
There are folks who are far more productive working remotely, and we should respect their preferences too. It's all about balance and understanding that each individual has unique needs when it comes to their work environment.
A hybrid model could be the answer here, allowing people the flexibility to work from the office or home as they see fit. There's no point in squeezing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution. Let's prioritize productivity and well-being over the illusion of a "perfect" office setup.
And yeah, that 50-90 minute commute you mentioned sounds like absolute hell. We can probably all agree that nobody should be subjected to that.
I believe that's exactly what I was advocating for as the most productive. The ability to choose to go into an office at your convenience. It certainly was in my personal experience, and I wish it an option for everyone. I was simply pointing out how impractical and rare that situation tends to be.
And I also have a different perspective having worked from home "before it was cool" starting back in '98. I've spent far more time in my home office by a factor of 10 to 1 at least than in an office.
Keep in mind with WFH you are forcing everyone to your preferences just as much as work from office. There are far more dynamics at play than personal productivity - team and business productivity as a whole is far more important and rarely talked about.
Many times as a manger of a fully WFH team I'd force some grumpy sysadmin in for a few days a week for a month as we knocked out a project. Sure they got "nothing done" those two days according to them, but they unblocked critical projects for the rest of the team during that time that simply was not happening while they were in their "focus cave". To this day they will tell you it was a waste of their time and WFH would have been far more productive. I highly disagree.
As you say, everyone is different. As are situations. Some of the highest velocity teams I've interacted with were a handful of highly skilled seniors geographically distributed. There are projects I can think of I could call a few folks and form a fully remote team, and other projects I'd very much want to be on-prem "mostly office". It all depends.
There is something to be said about looking back the past 25 years. While I remember some fond moments from my spare bedroom, I remember far more from in-office interactions. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about that fact in another 20 years.
Edit: I do wonder how opinions would differ if we invented free teleportation tomorrow. I wonder how much of this is commute vs. actual preferred work environment. For me it's mostly commute - give me a private office people respect and I'd likely prefer it with a teleportation pad in my living room.
Seems to me the market has spoken. Mechanized travel is toxic and expensive. Offices AND homes are toxic and expensive. Personal devices AND job devices are toxic and expensive. There’s a lot of duplication going on to satisfy career roleplay.
What a shock the people who will still be around, growing increasingly frustrated with Boomers and GenX demanding full speed ahead as usual, what a shock those coming up after are choosing a different route.
Around 13-14, teens brains deprioritize moms voice for new information. We are stateful beings. It’s not a stretch the need to seek new information runs our entire lives. Boomers and GenX are selling “more of the same!”
How sad if the latest iteration of the professional managerial class is told to take a hike.
How we don’t see forcing the same old on the kids as tacit ageism against youth, I have no idea. Anyone that’s decided not to join a religion leveraged their free agency to blow off an elders sensibilities. “American Civic Life” of the last 50-60 years is not a divine mandate.
We didn’t sign contracts to prop up VCs choices, or leases.
oh, the irony of accusing someone of not reading the article when it appears you've missed the crux of his argument. He's not advocating for a 100% remote work lifestyle; He's merely emphasizing the significant benefits that remote work has to offer.
Of course, there's value in spending time together, especially for early-stage startups. The creative sparks that fly in face-to-face brainstorming sessions can be unparalleled. However, striking a balance between in-person and remote work is key. It's not an all-or-nothing scenario.
Remote work has proven its worth in productivity, work-life balance, and environmental impact, among other aspects. To ignore those factors in favor of a rigid, in-office culture would be a disservice to the progress we've made thus far.
Let's not be so quick to dismiss remote work as a whole just because of its potential limitations in specific contexts. Rather, let's embrace its benefits, while acknowledging that a hybrid approach can provide the best of both worlds. Ultimately, isn't that what we're all after—finding a balance that maximizes productivity, creativity, and overall well-being?
JohnFen, your observation is as sharp as a finely honed knife. It's true that in many tech companies, remote work practices have been silently integrated into daily office routines for years now.
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 can't help but feel that Sam Altman's statement dismissing remote work as the "worst mistake of the tech industry" is not only greedy but also shortsighted.
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.
Remote work has been a game-changer in promoting diversity and inclusivity, particularly for underrepresented communities such as Black professionals. By breaking down geographic barriers and providing equal access to job opportunities, remote work empowers talented individuals from all backgrounds to excel in their careers. This shift helps to create a more level playing field, fostering innovation and driving progress forward in the tech industry (thus far dominated by whites).
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.