AFAIK, the office rental fees are huge. Buying an office in big cities (no matter which country) is also extremely costly.
My experience as a developer is no more than 18 months (1.5 years). So, I don’t think I can analyze the situation very well. But almost everything I have done as a developer for my work could also be done remotely. In fact, in my last job, I was more productive at home.
I can’t deny that there is a positive psychological effect of being in the office and being “together” with other colleagues. But is it really worth it? Maybe, the companies can rent office on a weekly basis for meetings. A certain time frame each week the office is used by a certain company. So, the companies will pay less. The employers won’t have to travel. Traveling is also an issue and it is sometimes frustrating depending on where you live.
What do you think? I have seen some twitter messages from some developers who say they absolutely hate working remotely. I asked them why but couldn’t get an answer. Maybe, you share their opinion. What would you say?
The real question is: will the pandemic make office work redundant for managers?
And my guess is no. We work in offices because our managers really like to have us under direct observation.
I’ve heard the suggestion that this is because the essence of management is communication, and mangers spend their time in meetings stating and re-stating the obvious until it is proven that everybody is on the same page. But I don’t believe it. I’ve seen more bad managers than good managers, and believe that the essence of management is high level skills at not getting fired. I’ve seen offices closed or moved because management wants that. I’ve seen remote working closed down because management wants that.
I think it’s extremely unlikely that management will suddenly start accepting remote working. Remote working has been around for decades, and management has resisted it for decades. I don’t see any reason why that will change.
Office costs are generally between 5 - 10% of salaries regardless of location so if an office can make your workers 10% more productive, then it’s a worthwhile investment.
Remote teams has been one of the more trod over religious wars in software development. Despite a few high profile evangelists, most companies have ultimately concluded the pros do not outweigh the cons.
There’s a lot of problems where simply getting the right people into the room and hashing things out is 10 - 100x more efficient than interminable slack conversations, video chats and daily standups, despite all of the advances in collaboration software.
I don’t think this question is confined to software developers - there are many office jobs which, as we’ve found out, can easily be done remotely.
I work in the design industry, where we thrive on collaboration. But we’re working remarkably well through video calls. I even held a remote workshop with a whole host of clients the other day where we’d normally have loads of stuff on the walls - it worked fine.
That doesn’t mean we’ll want to be remote from each other all the time, but it does beg the question of whether the 9-5 standard in the office is really relevant anymore.
I think this is a bad time for commercial property investors. I’m sure many companies, mine included, will be looking at our large, empty office and thinking ‘do we really need all this space?’
I have a couple of friends who work at HSBC’s HQ in London, where they deliberately only have desk space for 80% of their workforce. Everyone has to work from home one day a week and they hot desk the rest of the time. I can see that becoming rather tempting as a cost saving.
Well, I’m a manager, in a company that has had a voluntary remote working policy for the last five years, and it works extremely well. In my experience, it makes the workforce feel valued, allows them to balance work and life better, and gives them days where they can get their heads down without interruption. Everyone has the option to work from home one day a week - some love it, some hate it and never do it, but it’s there if needs be. We also have flexible working hours, so if you need to collect your kids or go to the doctor, you can.
We allow remote working and most folks take advantage of it one day a week in normal times. Some work remote all the time, but it’s maybe 5% of our staff. There’s a tremendous amount of work that gets done in shared offices, the Scrum room, hallway conversations, and 1x1. A lot of that *can *be duplicated remotely, but it generally isn’t. People seem to be most productive with some physical co-location. I suspect the amount of remote work will increase, but the productivity gains from being in the same building as your co-workers (in a well functioning team) can’t be ignored.
Plus, we have labs, physical hardware to install and test, and some scarce common resources so some office work is necessary.
No. Software companies have a compulsive belief that when we force people into close physical proximity and take away all their privacy, they will collaborate more closely and have more glorious spontaneous creative ideas. You will joyously work together and collaborate whether your task requires it or not!
As soon as the pandemic is over, all of these LinkedIn posts about “Remote Work Is Fantabulous” will be superseded by the returning fad of close-quarters open office plans where people are packed in like sardines, every noise and sneeze is shared, and physical monitoring of employee movements is highly convenient.
this subject reminds me of the big debate 20 years ago over a new concept called “outsourcing”.
It was going to be the best thing in the world, increasing efficiency and savings, etc, etc.
But I get the impression that it fizzled out as the practical issues became too difficult.
Right now, for the past 4 weeks or so, lots of people are working from home, and it seems to be a good situation. But I wonder: for how long?
If you have an office full of people who have all been working together for a couple years and functioning smoothly, then it may seem easy to keep doing things from home–as long as the old routine is still fresh.
But what will happen when things change?
A newly hired person who doesn’t know the office culture, or the full workings of the business, or the names of the clients, or the right person to turn to to ask a simple question. Sometimes you need a 20 second glance from your co-worker: “is this form signed properly?” Or a one-word answer to a quick question: “Is Bob’s computer called N : or M: in the network?” That client who needed an answer about X–who’s the contact person in their office? Do they need it in writing, or is a phone call enough?"
That’s why offices exist.
Maybe working from home one or two days a week will become more common because of the pandemic. But for most people, I doubt if it will become full-time.
disclaimer:
Maybe I have no right to chip in here, because I have no experience.( I’ve worked almost my whole life in small businesses in with 3 employees, and a type of work that cannot be done from home anyway-construction engineering.)
This is the kind of environment that I’ve most enjoyed. Flexibility and treating people like responsible adults who can figure things out for themselves is the best approach.
In my current job, I lucked into a team that’s 100% introverts. That’s never happened before. Our office space was quiet as a library. Now that we’re teleworking 100% due to the pandemic, we’ve been collaborating a lot more (via Skype) and even just chatting and getting to know each other. We rarely did casual chitchat when we were in the office!
Everywhere I’ve worked, there’s an article of faith about working at home vs. working in the office, namely that communication is better when everyone’s in the office, because you’re all in the room together in meetings and can read body language, etc… and because you can just talk to your co-workers unimpeded. And there’s a lesser, but still canonical article of faith that there are less distractions in the office versus home.
Until some academic types do studies to prove these things one way or the other, most companies are going to require workers to come in as much as they can. Even the ones that have fairly liberal WFH policies do so mostly because it’s a recruiting/retention tool, not because they have any real belief that it’s actually better at getting the job done.
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You have to filter out the cases where it was not simply a remote team, it was a remote team who:
[ul]
[li]was in a 12-hour shifted time zone[/li][li]spoke little to no English[/li][li]had mostly junior level employees[/li][li]had a high degree of turnover from career-climbing[/li][/ul]
Of course this situation breaks everything. It’s not remote work. It’s cost-cutting by temporarily switching to unmanaged entry-level personnel and hoping that the wage savings outweighs the permanent harm done to morale and the codebase.
Office work hasn’t been needed for software development for years and years. Sure, outsourcing to people simply on the basis that they work for a lower hourly rate hasn’t worked, that’s a different subject altogether. I spent over 40 years developing software and if my time in office amounted to even 10 years I’d be surprised. It wasn’t as easy for everybody back then, I was specializing in microprocessor systems when I started so ever since then I’ve had the hardware at home, for a couple of years I had a VAX in the basement so I didn’t have to move to California again, and I suffered through the stages of modem development, and even acoustic couplers that were slightly faster than just spelling out the code to someone on the phone at the other end. But since the rise of the internet and communication rates and connectivity that used to seem like it came out of the Star Trek universe there’s no reason for developers to spend much time in office, and at plenty of workplaces that do have office space for developers those offices sit empty most of the time. Working remotely saves companies money besides the office space because it’s a perk that a lot of good developers would rather have than money. It’s not just that it’s desirable to work remotely, the cost of commuting can be quite high.
My company has been 60%+ remote when it comes to software developers for years now. Even folks who live close to to the office are free to work from home when they wish.
When COVID showed up, this turned out to be a strategic advantage for us - given we already have both the mindset and the infrastructure to allow remote work, for most of us, it was business-as-usual. We are a HR/Payroll software provider - as such, businesses rely on us for our day-to-day functions. We were able to roll out COVID-related information and functionality, and update our software to handle new laws around COVID (like guaranteed sick leave, etc) much faster than our competitors. We were first-to-market on a lot of those things.
I think where a lot of organizations get muddy on the remote work stuff is not in the work that’s being done, but how to manage it. It’s a different philosophy for managers. You have to have the mindset that you’re managing based on productivity over managing to hours-in-the office, for example. The organization also has to know how to build trust between managers and workerbees when they’re not all in the same place, and you can’t watch them work or see how many hours they put in.
To me, all of those ^^ practices are better than traditional management practices, and result in happier employees and more work getting done. But managers who are used to seeing butts in chairs have a hard time with it and get jittery. I really do hope that one positive thing that could come out of COVID is some employers will realize they can indeed function with people working from home; it’d open up a lot of jobs for those of us who don’t want to live in big urban areas as well as cutting commutes (and the associated pollution). We’ll see though; changing mindsets is a hard sell.
Speaking as someone who led a group with people scattered across fifteen different countries doing a lot of different things, my experience was that the effectiveness of working from home was specific to the job.
Some of the people who worked for me did monthly and quarterly reporting, and investigations into results. There is no question in my mind that those folks were not just equally effective working from home, but were often more effective, especially the highly experienced folks. Obviously there were exceptions, some folks had distractions at home, but in general they and I were very happy with the arrangement, to the point that I had a couple of people working multiple days from home even when our company disapproved of it.
On the other hand, parts of my group did project work where each project was different, and required a lot of preparatory investigation, brainstorming, and study design. sometimes that stage of the work would take four or five months, and that really only worked well when people were in the office.
The other thing I would note, and this is just my own experience, is that a lot of people coming out of college not only do better with in-person training, but also seem to want the in-person experience. There’s a lot to be said earlier in your career for being around a lot of other people doing work, socializing, asking impromptu questions, and frankly building bonds with the department and managers. That will certainly make this summer interesting, when I understand that the interns coming to my old department will be going through a remote-only experience.
Yup. Even if work at home is more productive and results in higher morale, management wants to be able to justify their existence and keep everyone under their thumb.
I haven’t spent a ton of time in corporate America, but in almost every job I had middle management was not really useful or competent. I have no idea how those people get those jobs.