<story><title>Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/business/remote-work-feedback.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>disport</author><text>As a remote, older professional now, my career nevertheless supports the premise of this article: in-office was beneficial when I started out.&lt;p&gt;My first job had a strong lunch culture, providing an environment for serendipitous conversations, daily. Over time, I bumped into folks I never would have met in the normal scope of my role, across finance, legal, SRE, support, sales, data science, etc.&lt;p&gt;In turn, as a young professional, I was able to develop a mental model for how businesses &amp;quot;work&amp;quot;, why they&amp;#x27;re organized how they are, and how (good) culture can bind everyone together towards a profitable outcome. I made some friends and acquaintances that I&amp;#x27;m still in touch with to this day.&lt;p&gt;As a remote, older professional now, I don&amp;#x27;t necessarily &amp;quot;need&amp;quot; these serendipitous conversations anymore, although I miss the general socialization. But I do feel like they&amp;#x27;re an essential &amp;quot;ladder&amp;quot; that every subsequent generation of professionals should be able to access, and that it&amp;#x27;s a moral obligation for me to &amp;quot;pay it forward&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;For remote work to be &amp;quot;fair&amp;quot; to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmatt</author><text>I think leadership at many of these companies have their wires crossed in terms of messaging but also expectations and ideas about what they want to extract out of employees&lt;p&gt;They always start with return to office = productivity, which people push back on, because the office is full of 2 hour lunch breaks and water cooler discussions about fantasy football. Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the &amp;quot;overemployed&amp;quot; and people running errands during a work day. If we&amp;#x27;re talking lines of codes written nothing beats working at home for most&lt;p&gt;But you&amp;#x27;re right, there is a ton to learn during those 2 hour lunches, pulling people in to impromptu meetings, and socializing as a whole&lt;p&gt;The messaging needs to be fixed, expectations adjusted, people should be empowered to both work heads down at home, and do less head down work at the office</text></comment>
<story><title>Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/business/remote-work-feedback.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>disport</author><text>As a remote, older professional now, my career nevertheless supports the premise of this article: in-office was beneficial when I started out.&lt;p&gt;My first job had a strong lunch culture, providing an environment for serendipitous conversations, daily. Over time, I bumped into folks I never would have met in the normal scope of my role, across finance, legal, SRE, support, sales, data science, etc.&lt;p&gt;In turn, as a young professional, I was able to develop a mental model for how businesses &amp;quot;work&amp;quot;, why they&amp;#x27;re organized how they are, and how (good) culture can bind everyone together towards a profitable outcome. I made some friends and acquaintances that I&amp;#x27;m still in touch with to this day.&lt;p&gt;As a remote, older professional now, I don&amp;#x27;t necessarily &amp;quot;need&amp;quot; these serendipitous conversations anymore, although I miss the general socialization. But I do feel like they&amp;#x27;re an essential &amp;quot;ladder&amp;quot; that every subsequent generation of professionals should be able to access, and that it&amp;#x27;s a moral obligation for me to &amp;quot;pay it forward&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;For remote work to be &amp;quot;fair&amp;quot; to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>o_nate</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m an older professional now working in a hybrid arrangement, but I very much concur with the parent comment. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine how my early career would have gone without being able to put in the time in the office. Its a cliche, but work culture really does exist, and it&amp;#x27;s about social cues and rules of courtesy. These mores are not taught in school but are absolutely essential to working effectively in an office. I would suspect this socialization is even more important for people who perhaps come from families where no parent was a white-collar office worker. I was lucky to start out at places where it was common for teams to eat lunch together. These unofficial interactions were just as important as regular work interactions in helping me to understand the psychology of my more experienced colleagues, what was polite, and what was taboo.</text></comment>