Any valuable knowledge I have about remote work would be eclipsed by the Remote book written by the Basecamp guys, so that's what I'd recommend people read. What I'm reacting to here is the hubris of some people (especially on my LinkedIn feed) to not just share experience but actually give advice on a topic they're completely new to.

imho "experts" on this probably arent going to be saying much unique or helpful for others in the industry who previously have been so resistent to remote work.

I'm surprise that so many people couldn't figure this out without being forced to try it against their will.

I also wonder how Quora's transition will turn out. Every remote-first organization I've seen started out as a remote-first org.

Of course, there are (huge) exceptions for monopoly situations where there's simply nowhere else to take your work/money.

Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time, not socializing, not establishing strong bonds. If personal contact wasn't important, we could raise our kids remotely.

I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it. Have kids? Bad luck. Live in the city because you enjoy city life? Sorry you have to convert you bedroom into your office during the day because you can't afford to have an additional room. You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Please, let us just top playing down the importance of the office. It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

We can workaround and I made many acquaintances online.

Now I have a 5 year child and I turned my bedroom into a office. I just educated her during the last year (before covid) that this is a possibility.

I promised her that after 6pm my schedule is hers and we have fun after that.

Not commuting equals 5 extra hours / week of fun with my dear little girl, playing some games, doing activities like painting, board games and so on.

For me it was very positive.

I was advocate for async comms (PROPERLY using Slack, Teams, etc), but not everyone was on the same page.

Stopping my concentration on code architecture, code writing, managing AWS infrastructure to give random consultancy, or meetings with little purpose was a real point of pain for my productivity

I disagree with your assertion:

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

My own personal experience has been that every 2-3 years I establish a new network of friends. This has all been outside of work and tends to correlate with my personal passion of the time period. By comparison, I have formed considerably fewer work friends.

Of this "churn" (terrible word), 10-20% tend to end up closer friends/friends for life.

On the other hand, I find I have far less in common with most my colleagues. I have found maybe a 1/50 to 1/20 chance of having a meaningful connection with most my colleagues, especially if you set aside professional passions (ie software / startups).

I have worked at everything between megacorp and startup in a garage. I have also worked remotely.

While I like the social aspect of working in an office and building trust and relationships with members outside of my immediate team's interface (eg HR, Finance, Marketing) I also hate working in an office with noise and distractions when I want to focus. I also think commuting is the greatest waste of life there can be.

I personally embrace the optionality remote life brings - I can go abroad for a month or three without needing to take a sabbatical for instance. I can live near a good school without travelling for 2 hours to get to an office.

Tldr YMMV

I understand this is a startup board but I’m all for having founders to work harder in persuading employees that a job is not just a job. (Please record these zoom sessions too - I’m gathering material for the office 2.0)

What works for you, might not work for us.

And what works for us, might not work for you.

Easy.

True, but it's not clear that cost is higher than working in an office over the long term.

In true internet-discussion fashion, there's lots of absolutes people talk about when discussing remote-first, remote-only, and dynamic working. As ever, the answer is "it depends".

Some people will benefit massively, some people will have to sacrifice massively, and most people will live with less extreme and different pros and cons.

> It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team

Depends entirely on the team. I know "it depends" is always a cop-out, but truthfully, any working system is going to depend massively on the work and the team dynamic. Having any of these grandiose statements on how work should be done fall down almost immediately when trying to extrapolate them to more than an individual company (or even beyond a single team in a company).

The issue is that IT is one of the few fields where a large portion of the work can be remotely created and evaluated, and a large percentage of the people on HN/Twitter/Tech Blogs happen to work in or around this industry. Programming, at least, is like writing with much better pay.

You can't remote work restaurants. Or any job where you have be somewhere to do something, or where interpersonal relationships are a key success factor. Remote work is even a challenge in IT, where it's theoretically easier to evaluate and promote talent and where there are proven ways to properly implement telecommuting.

More likely your having to work by converting a kitchen table (wrong height) or your bed room if say you live in a 1 bed flat.

Its even worse if your in a couple or a flat share where several people are competing for space and wifi

> Its even worse if your in a couple or a flat share where several people are competing for space and wifi

Again, we refer back to "it depends". My partner and I live in a 2 bedroom apartment, we now have dedicated proper-sized desks in the living room and in the spare room.

Appreciate not everyone has the space to do that, but that's kinda the point. I'm not really an advocate for full time remote myself, I think agile working is the best of both worlds.

The company has an office with maybe 50% desk capacity for employees, then employees cycle in and out throughout the week on a cadence that suits them. Everything's still set up to be remote-first (virtual meetings, no massive in-person all-hands etc...) but you can choose to use an office or your home. Or a coffee shop, or an airport lounge, or a park, or...

(and in before "what if everyone comes in on the same day" - I used to work in a place that had 60% the number of desks for employees, I never once struggled to find a place to sit. To the extent they're subletting a whole floor due to lack of usage).

There's also nothing stopping companies paying a coworking stipend to those that want it in lieu of an office. And booking out a large conference hall once a year for everyone to come together.

Essentially, most things are at least semi-solvable and no decision on the future of work should be taken based solely on how we've currently set ourselves up.

Eh, there’s enough anecdata to swing this in either direction.

I have not grown up in the US, so I’ve truly started my social network from scratch when I began my professional career almost two decades ago. The people I’ve become friendly at work make poor friends.

Perhaps my definition of “friend” is different than yours, but I expect to have a trust based relationship with a friend. If I’m having trouble at home or trouble with money, I expect my friend to hear me out, offer a shoulder and maybe give me some advice.

I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here.

Remember: when a “friendship” begins in a context of making money, it’s most likely no friendship at all. Surely there’s the opportunity for an occasional exception to slip past this rule, but don’t you go around thinking that it happens as a base case.

Lastly, work isn’t the only place where adults interact. I’ve met lots of people through my kid. School and sports teams and other places where my child is involved: there are human adults there too. Those other parents are better than colleagues in many ways. For one thing, you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.

And what happened to meetups? Yes, the pandemic has put a damper on those, but they’ll be back eventually.

Edit: PS: Had I not been working remotely, I’d never have found the time to show up to my kid’s sports practice or school committee meetings. Commute and office shenanigans always eat up that time. That’s just life. One door closes and another opens.

This discussion reminds me of Richard Hamming's anecdote about open and closed doors: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html.

I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication (the closest I could find was a consulting-ish company online), but I'm sure that small companies in a larger number of fields could, theoretically, go remote work first.

I saw the words "evergreen communication" in a job posting this week, and they stuck with me. I've no idea if this is a common expression, but it seems to make sense to me. My interpretation of it is: words said during an in-person conversation tend to fade away into participants' imperfect memories as soon as they're said. Words that make up written communication (Slack, wiki, ...) tend to stick around, thus allowing others to who weren't directly around for the conversation to benefit from the knowledge later on.

"Asynchronous communication" likely refers to the same thing.

I suppose it is a problem to form proper relationships with people outside of work if you're not left with any time outside of work though, so for some people being sociable in the office is a good way to mask that work life balance issue in the short term.

It could also just be an age thing, when I was younger I would have probably preferred to be in the office, but now I want to be with my family as much as I can be and removing things like the commute makes a huge difference in available time.

Coworking spaces offer this plus - depending on the space - potential friendships with people in your field. I was at a space for awhile and there was a great group of fellow software people who all sat together.

You are the poster child of everything that's wrong with late-stage capitalism. You not only want to force people to produce profit for you. You want to indoctrinate them. You want them to have a small mcdonalds/apple/google logo in place of their heart, otherwise they will lose identity.

How dare people not to be happy about those companies values! How dare they!!!

Also there is nothing personal in that message. And this is not the first time that some displeased person flags my message just because he feels unsecure and have difficulty to properly interpret the text posted.

In some cases when I post the same message again, it gets a very positive reception.

The fact that messages are flagged and removed despite of the positive reception goes to show how fascist and indoctrinated this community is, and also how capricious you are and goes to show that the rules are up to interpretation so posting a link does not clarify anything.

In fact you are the one who is doing the personal attack in this case if you think about it. So maybe it's time that you live by the rules that you preach?

Now that all my friends are working from home, we have more of a desire to meet on a weekly basis. We've been going on short after work hikes together regularly.

We also hold weekly zoom calls to play online board games or chat about what's going on in our lives.

Lastly, for people who have hobbies that still allow social distancing, you can still go to some meetups and have fun. My friend is still playing tennis / badminton and having her normal after match meal.

I don't really understand this. While I like my colleagues, they're just that - co-workers. I'm never really been interested in socialising with them outside of the workplace.

I've moved to a new country and the way I've found friends (without even putting much effort into it) was through activities and shared interests outside of work.

My point is that kayaking is just one means of meeting people and forming relationships. The idea that an office is one of our only opportunities to make relationships is just absurd. My experience with relationships in office is that most of the time they are very hollow and superficial. Also, if most of your relationships come from the office and your career, you are limiting yourself to a narrower field of ideas. If the main people you hang around are managers and software developers, then you are going to miss out on a lot of other viewpoints. Through kayaking, I've made close friends with people from all walks of life. We were out to eat one night at a restaurant, and at our table sat a plumber, a realtor, an orthopedic surgeon, an electrical engineer, and an FBI agent!

Sure, when you work with good people, youre right. But these aren't the majority.

I'd guess, that the best what can happen to the average employee is more time for their loved ones and less time with at best boring and worst toxic people.

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Whose adult life? Because in mine, I have a very active social life outside of work, so the office comprises a tiny minority of the people I meet as an adult. On top of that, if you work at at a small company like I have, then there are no opportunities to make new relationships. Who are you thinking of meeting in an office where it's you and 3-4 other people, day in and day out, for years?

The office is not the only way to meet people, and for people who can't or don't need to rely on the office for their social lives, nothing is lost on that point by going remote

> For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time, not socializing, not establishing strong bonds.

That sounds like a company problem, not a remote problem. I love my employer and my team, and get along fine with video calls etc. I'm not at work to hang out and have fun, I'm here to do my job and get paid, then go live my personal life.

> It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

That's specifically what some people, like myself, want to feel

> You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Here you conveniently disregard everybody who doesn't support your argument. Let's describe the office for people like me, who have absolutely 0 (zero) interest or need for an office: "You don't like to be around people, and you feel more energetic and productive when you can choose your working environment, don't have to commute, and can sleep until 8:59AM if you want to? Well, sorry, your team isn't remote"

> Please, let us just top playing down the importance of the office. It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

I think a fairer thing to ask is: please, stop treating all people and companies as having the same qualities and preferences. If you want to work in an office and it makes your life better, that's great. But what you may consider great conditions might literally be the worst part of life for others. There is no single solution.

Then there's all the extra time and energy you have from no commute. I socialise far more frequently since working from home then when I was commuting into London for instance.

> Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

It may be that way for some people, but it doesn't have to be that way. I've been working remotely full time for a bit over 10 years and I have not felt this at all. For people who don't have a healthy community around them, what you say would be true. But the solution is not to force people to go to on-site work, it's to have healthy communities. Work should be a way for people to make a living, and sure, can provide social opportunities, but it should never be your main source of relationships. Most people already depend on their employer for income, making them depend on it for friends too seems terrible to me.

> For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time, not socializing, not establishing strong bonds. If personal contact wasn't important, we could raise our kids remotely.

Not true at all in my experience, and I'm on my third full time remote work. I've always had great team bonding, even with people I have never met in person. I maintain a very good relationship (i.e., I speak very often) with former colleagues. I don't think the comparison with raising kids is valid. You can't compare successfully collaborating with other adults to achieve a common goal with raising your children.

> I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

I'm not sure why this is a problem though? It is just a job. If you identify yourself with the company and think it's more than just a job, you'll be in for a nasty surprise. I get money in exchange for my dedication, to the best of my abilities, to do some tasks. I'm not the company, and the company isn't me. As I said before, I do have great relationships with my colleagues. This is independent. In fact, both having a great relationship with colleagues and knowing that "it's just a job" is what has helped me extend my support network in a way that I always have a few doors to knock on should I need a hand, and I have my door always available and have given a hand to others when needed.

> Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it. Have kids? Bad luck. Live in the city because you enjoy city life? Sorry you have to convert you bedroom into your office during the day because you can't afford to have an additional room. You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Your first sentence is exactly as it is. The rest of the paragraph directly contradicts it though. Have kids? It's great! I have 2, and I would not trade being around them as they grow up for any amount of money in the world. My oldest is 14 and as I said, I've been working remotely full time for a bit over 10, so I know what I'm talking about. In my specific case, working from home has been a blessing that has let me be there for them every single time except the very few moments in which I had face to face meetings in some other country.

I also live in the city, and I've never had to convert my bedroom into an office. After moving from a house (where I had a dedicated office) to an apartment, my office is now in the living room, but that doesn't bother me at all.

The last sentence is strictly true too actually, if you're a people's person, you surely won't enjoy working remotely. Let me tell you something though: if you're an introvert who plays very nice in teams but would rather not be around people (except for family or close friends) all day, working in an office has a very high host that gets visible in the medium term.

So please, let us just stop assuming we're all the same. Some people love working in an office surrounded by other people, others don't. If anything, I hope COVID perhaps is showing the extroverts and super social how bad it can feel to be forced to work in an environment that doesn't suite you, so that, once people can go back to "normal", they try to make arrangements that take every individual into consideration.

Not for me, I was very lucky to make the jump a long time ago, but for anybody else who may be like me (and I know I'm not alone) and must surely be enjoying this period of not having to go to an office.

How long are we talking? Modulo a short stint, I've been remote for over a decade now and don't see any of these problems.

The mistake a lot of "anti-remote" folks are making right now is to mistake good, well-planned remote work with whatever their employer managed to put in place over a couple of days back in March. They are not the same.

Eh, I met my wife at a running club. My longest-term friends were made prior to work. My current friends are mostly from cycling and camping. I'm not social with any of my co-workers.

they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job.

I felt this way when I was at the office, and I feel this way now that I'm WFH. My job funds the rest of my life. That's it. Why should I get attached to a job? It's a fickle thing - the owners can fire me on a whim. It's a not a social relationship, it's a purely monetary one - in trade for cold hard cash, I do some work. There's no long-term contract there. There's no expectation that this will last indefinitely. I get paid, I do work, and hopefully the owner gets her new Tesla (or boat or whatever)

Unrelated to the WFH vs. Office topic (WFH works for me, but I am an open source lifer and used to distributed community - and got amazing friendships out of it), but: This is a mindset I never understood or could relate to.

Doesn't it make you depressed that you need to spend 8+ hours of your life on something you don't really care about? It's time you don't get back, ever. For me the #1 req for a job is that I care and think it's worth doing, because it's part of my life.

I'm not attacking your values there, I'm just wondering how you can be OK with the time loss. I think it also reads on having a healthy relationship with the employer as an employee - do your best not to waste my time.

I believe it's best for people to learn to separate their employer from their identity.

The fact that you can't work at a place unless you get some shot of dopamine associated with the perception of "this is worth it" doesn't mean everyone has that particular hang-up.

Ultimately, what do you get out of "this is worth it"? You don't get anything. Or, rather, the important thing you get is a paycheck, just like everyone else.

You'll answer, "I get the satisfaction that..." That dopamine addiction isn't any more meaningful than a cigarette hit.

When our ancestors were out hunting mammoths I imagine there was one who said to the others, "I hate this shit. Don't you think we should be spending time doing something we like?" And his friend said "Meh. It's not bad, and I like to eat."

I just don't feel particularly attached to it. If I was RIFed tomorrow, I'd be anxious about finding a new job, but wouldn't feel any great sense of loss.

FWIW, my career started in 1999, so I barely got my feet wet before the dot-bomb implosion (followed my 9/11, acquisition by a PE group, then 2008, then ownership change to another PE group, etc). It's blatantly obvious that C-level, BOD, etc only have the interests of their employees in mind while that happens to align with their own self-interest. I'm just a cog in the machine. I'm ok with that - I'm a well paid cog and it lets me do things like travel the world, buy expensive toys, and live on a golf course.

Yeah, I hate the loss of time, but haven't found a good alternative. I don't want my hobbies to become work - I think I'd just end up hating them.

Then again, my remote work was designed that way, not some half-assed thrown-together-at-a-moment's-notice poor-man's copy of a centralized office system. If you don't plan to succeed you're probably not going to succeed. That does not make the goal unworthy, but it does makes your effort unworthy.

I think feeling “identified with your company” is kind of pathological. If remote work gets more people to realise it’s just a job, it’s not their company, and they shouldn’t work themselves to death over it, good.

In fact its more the problem in forming a team than the company

But there plenty of people who actually love the place they work and the people they work with and do it with healthy work/life balance without the stupid company shirts. Hard to imagine for you, just like it's hard to me to imagine caring about my local community.

e: and the parent of this chain is a CEO. Three guesses as to why he finds it a negative that an employee doesn’t really care who they work for.

You don't have to drink the Koolaid and all that, but if you can feel a sense of team and belonging from your job there is only positive effects, provided that you don't confuse that with blind loyalty.

At one point I've had 5 jobs in 7 years. But I still thoroughly enjoyed my time at those 5 companies and I made friends from all of them, many of whom I talk to until today. You would call me "pathological" but honestly I would absolutely hate to work anywhere with a bunch of people like you.

Just like a job isn't your whole life, but people also shouldn't be so vehemently against actually liking their job and their coworkers.

Team is about 25 people with another 200-300 contractors in a given month and I count six major concurrent projects right now.

> Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Completely false. I now have people in New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that I've built good friendships with in my all-remote company. It's actually opened up routes to friendships I didn't think were possible. I would also argue that it's actually better when I'm not just locked into making friends at work, there's more incentive to make friends outside of work too now which is great for pushing me out of my comfort zone.

> For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time, not socializing, not establishing strong bonds. If personal contact wasn't important, we could raise our kids remotely.

Same as above. We have "happy hour" sessions at my current job where we all socialize and bring a beer to chat over Zoom. Outside of that, we bs and socialize daily in various meetings or across Slack. Again this all depends on you and your team members. If you want it to happen, make it happen.

> I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

I don't know about you, but for me an office job also ends up being "just a job". Personally I couldn't care less about "feeling identified with the company". I have zero loyalty to my employers and my friendships are not restricted to arbitrary boundaries defined by where I work.

> Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it. Have kids? Bad luck. Live in the city because you enjoy city life? Sorry you have to convert you bedroom into your office during the day because you can't afford to have an additional room. You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Haha this is rich. I've had to deal with the opposite problem for years where the vast majority of employers are office-only and my family needs require a remote setup. I had to make arrangements with my boss to work remotely and constantly live in anxiety fearing anytime the company had a re-org and I got a new boss, the arrangement would end and fuck up my life (and it did). Over the years I've had to limit my search to remote only employers to avoid that scenario. You can do the same and seek out office-only employers.

> It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

Yeah that's great except the benefits for the team have slanted in favor of the team for many years, neglecting benefits for the individuals. There's nothing wrong with balancing out the best of both worlds. Going back to all the points I touched on, you and your team make what you want of it.

Apart from the morning yesterday shift report given on Microsoft Teams. I just send my invoice in for the amount of hours completed. While I'm aware a contractor is suppose to be detached from the company because your hired for a specific reason / project but mentally it's a lot harder not knowing people, what emotions and how to react and webcam is just pointless; the delay and the lag from home connection is just so poor.

I think the usual expression here is don't shit where you eat.

In other words it might serve you well to forge social relationships separately from working relationships.

It's tended to work for me, I'm married, work from home and I haven't had any unfortunate episodes at a work Christmas party. But whatever works for you, I don't think we have to, or even should, all go the same way on this.

Since social distancing guidelines in my country have been relaxed and I've still been working from home, I find I have had more time and incentive to cultivate relationships with people that I actually want to spend time with and who have similar hobbies and interests as me rather than those who I am forced to spend time with in the office.

I've worked remote in various forms since the late 90s. I've formed very important friendships with people halfway around the world I'd have never met in a local office. There's more than one way to socialize, and online socializing has some advantages too, not just drawbacks.

Having suffered from this beyond reasonable levels I assure you, isolation would yield way more benefits than issues.

Now I'm not an extremist and being able to deal with some level of office politics to get a few more bonds is neat. But in my case, work sociology is synonym for hell.

Once you hit kindergarten -- I am the one who picks up my kid from the bus, walks her home from school when she has after school activities, make it to every little performance/play/whatever, eats lunch with her at school every so often, etc. I'm not taking hours out of my work day to do these things -- Mostly just coffee breaks that I would take in the office.

My own childhood was being in full time (7am - 5:30pm) school/care.

Yes, but there are other ways to build relationships. Get involved in your community, donate your time, etc.

> I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

That's a feature not a bug. It is just a job. Look, I enjoy my job. I love the product I'm building. I like the people I work with. Being remote for over a half decade now doesn't change that. But, it's just a job. My life is so much more than just what I do for money.

> Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it. Have kids? Bad luck. Live in the city because you enjoy city life? Sorry you have to convert you bedroom into your office during the day because you can't afford to have an additional room. You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

Huh? We don't have kids but we do foster and we have room for the kids and an office for my wife and I (we do have to share that). We see plenty of people outside of work that seeing co-workers in person doesn't matter.

> Please, let us just top playing down the importance of the office.

How about we stop with one size fits all?

> It is important and it has tons of benefits for the team, as opposed to the benefits for the individuals.

I'm a very productive member of my team. I'm a SME on our most important product. People know they can contact me when they need and I'll have solutions. I'm hugely beneficial to my team (not really trying to toot a horn, just making a point), and nobody has ever once in all the years I've been here complained about me being remote.

As if it was a zero-sum game.

If your only opportunity to make friends is at work, that's a really bad situation and it should be a very high priority in your life to fix it. Get a hobby! Find a shared interest to bond over. Go on dates.

Work should not be your primary source of community.

You mean they think of their job how it should be thought of?

I was curious what the OP's job role was to see if this thought lines up at all. I click on his profile and he is a CEO.

This is a perspective of very work-centric lifestyle. That's not for everybody.

Ditto for city life. I live in a city for my career. Now that remote work is more normal, I can live the life I actually want.

Neither of these conditions is unavoidable, it's all about the social convention. I guess if WFH goes on for long enough, people will change their social expectations.

> after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore

Yeah, freedom has a price, but it's tangible, a remote workforce will be closer to gig workers, which does allow them to jump ship easier for better pay, but also ends the idea of a business as "being a family" (which is mostly a false illusion anyway).

The company I work for produces some really cool products that I really enjoy making. Is that good enough?

> I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

I worked on satellites, and then rockets, and now I'm back to satellites. From an embedded software point of view, they can be made remarkably similar. I'm guessing most kinds of embedded software development feel similar lol. Of course, company culture matters - and by that, I mean how the team behaves, how the management behaves, and how the CEO runs the company. I worked for an idiot CEO once and the managers would yell at each other in meetings. I left quickly because it was a very toxic company.

> Also, working from home is only as convenient as your life situation allows it.

Almost every single company talking about going mostly remote is still having offices as an option for those who need it.

> You are a people's person and feel more energetic and productive when working with others face to face? Well, sorry, your team is mostly remote.

You lost me here. That sounds like an extrovert demanding that everyone bend to their will.

It is in fact just a job. Can be enjoyable, but that's what it is. Losing sight of this can lead to being exploited.

What about church, neighbors, walking in the park, family, etc?

I'm not going to to work to get more buddies, I'm there to make money (and make a difference, if possible).

I don't doubt lots of companies are providing terrible work from home experiences right now but if you're lucky to work for an all remote company from before COVID a lot of your criticism doesn't ring true for me at least. I'm sure there are people it just doesn't work for though, and I respect that might be the case for you. I just don't think a blanket statement "remote work doesn't work in the long term" is very likely to be true.

So, even beyond being fortunate is the weight of what matters to oneself more.

This isn’t a bad thing though. The world is bigger than SV or London.

1. Cram xx% more people in the same place under the pretext of creating a collaborative environment == save xx% on rent. 2. Invest a small percentage of that sum on noise cancelling headphones, because (shocker) people need to be alone from time to time.

No one is arguing that the same won't happen with remote becoming more mainstream. There's value in remote, especially from a utilitarian/equality pov, so we need to be mindful and try not to fall in the same traps (i.e. don't drink the kool-aid).

Yes, there are ways to answer all three of these questions, but I'm not sure if there's a way that's simple, non-invasive, and scalable in organizations dealing with lowest-common-denominator challenges. Many startups and smaller IT companies were already doing remote work before COVID - but, let's face it, many of these companies also had a small enough footprint in terms of head count and job diversity that it was possible for them to manage 10-100 remote employees without running into major issues.

How do you do the same with 5K-10K employees? Yes, FAANG is taking a shot at it, but they also have the benefit of hiring their pick of top-level, motivated talent. Google and Facebook, at least, also have revenue streams that are resilient enough to survive massive mistakes purely through inertia.

This is an interesting natural experiment. I'm glad that it's forcing companies to reassess how they do business. However, I don't know if remote work first is going to persist after the pandemic.

why can't you rely on the existing org chart?

You have a 5-10 person team, and their manager just has to keep that team accountable. The fact that the company has 1000 more teams does not substantially change the nature of checking that every person in the team delivers.

In fact, this is not even different in office work! Either you rely on a punch-in the-employee-is-time model or you will still have to evaluate a person's commitment and competency based on their output.

I mean, sure, maybe employee X has hired a sub-contractor which works in their place while they go to the beach, but as long as work gets done, does it matter?

This isn't really a problem though. The people who really benefit from SV salaries are SV landlords and realtors. If SV companies can pay a remote person 75% of the SV salary instead the company saves some money, shareholders get a bigger dividend, someone gets a tech job where they want to live (maybe on more than the local median), and that's good for everyone.

It's probably an absolutely devastating problem for SV landlords, but they've had it pretty good for a long time so they must have been able to see it coming eventually.

Seriously, I've been working with the US west coast for most t of the last decade (i'm in Europe) and its reall realluy hard because of timezones.

Like I guess Brazil and Argentina would work, but you'll essentially just cause wages to equalise over time.

This will happen to some extent, but it's much more likely that US software engineers pay will normalise first.

I don't think that companies can offshore anything but the trivial tasks which you wouldn't want to do anyway. They're definitely after it and would love to but in my experience I don't see it happening. On the other hand you find yourself competing with very high quality devs from all English-speaking countries in the world.

Dunno. I guess we'll see how it plays out. Either way COVID seems to be driving things now and for foreseable future. Not much you can do.

I don't feel isolated, to the contrary; i have more time for loved ones. I can wake up later. No fighting traffic, or cycling through rainy cold weather to be on time at the train station.

I never wanna visit an office again.

But later:

> So as we are doing this, we’ve run a series of surveys of employees asking things like, ‘How productive do you feel like you’ve been?’ ‘What can we do to make you more productive?’

So you concluded that your workers are productive, but you want to run a survey to find out how productive are they??? WTF?

Of course that isn't the case for everybody: people with families and especially little children seem to be struggling massively.

But there is a noticeable shift it appears. Recruiters seem to be changing their model considering how many companies are becoming remote first. My mail is over-flooded with job offers from every corner of the earth, all of which contain the word "remote" in them. And I get round 20 of them each day. I would have never thought that such a day would come. The black swan strikes again.

>>Of course that isn't the case for everybody: people with families and especially little children seem to be struggling massively.

Some families with little children might be struggling massively not because of WFH, but because many schools mandated remote learning which is difficult for young children to sit through without peer and teacher interaction. The more cynical amongst us would posit that elementary school mostly serves a dual "daycare" purpose alongside the educational mission.

If anything, WFH might be a struggle but would be triply so if parents hadn't been given the option at all. Let's not conflate the WFH privilege (which implicitly assumes such people still have jobs) with the difficulties of providing a workable remote learning solution for young children.

I guess it's also forcing me to learn how to WFH by minimizing the costs many here have pointed out.

Ps. although all other restrictions and societal impacts of strict lockdown is making this a bittersweet moment.

Oh they could, but they knew they'd lose the political games that come with offices and which are a favourite of middle management.

The answers - totally. The questions on the other hand, I'm not entirely convinced. The thought that Q&A has become the de-facto new generation of spam has crossed my mind many times while browsing the web.

We've been using Discord to simulate an office environment, both from the perspectives of talking to people without scheduling a meeting, and from gathering as a group for discussions as needed. Hanging out in Discord is entirely optional. We use Slack to notify people if we need to talk to them, kind of like a shoulder tap in real life if you need to ask somebody a question at their desk.

This has been working pretty well for us. I especially like Discord's Push to Talk feature using a keyboard shortcut.

On one hand, I think it's great that employers and employees are both seeing the benefits of being remote. Less time spent commuting, etc.

On the other hand, it's too bad it's happening to parents at the same time they are having to figure out how to both WFH and parent.

It's not always this crazy, trust me.

At my startup vlokit [0], we are helping customers with async video communication. Problem is people don't want to go out of their comfort zones. They want to continue 'replicating' office environment at home. It kind of falls apart pretty soon.

Companies need to realize remote work is a significant investment in getting your culture right. You need to invest a lot in changing the ways of how you communicate.

And even then you're not guaranteed that it would be success. Because we're still unaware of what we're up against.

[0] https://vlokit.com