<story><title>I hope work from home continues</title><url>https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/4/6/some-of-the-reasons-i-hope-work-from-home-continues-and-i-never-have-to-return-to-an-office</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I worry a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; about how this cuts the bottom rungs off the ladder for junior developers. Senior developers can be very productive without frequent access to in-person help, and are valuable enough that they can get work-from-home if they want. But junior developers have more frequent questions, need to absorb software engineering culture, and need to have more work and task structure created for them. Remote work is really hard for them.</text></item><item><author>trentnix</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.&lt;p&gt;I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Truth is, I can&amp;#x27;t imagine I&amp;#x27;ll ever take another job that expects me to show up to an actual office everyday. I&amp;#x27;m sure I&amp;#x27;m not the only one.</text></item><item><author>protonimitate</author><text>I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.&lt;p&gt;Cost issues aside, I&amp;#x27;ve always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid&amp;#x2F;flexible schedule and location policy. I&amp;#x27;m currently full time remote (I&amp;#x27;m on the East Coast working for a West Coast company). My previous company had its main office in my current city, but allowed a super flexible choose-where-you-work-from policy. It was the best.&lt;p&gt;Didn&amp;#x27;t feel like dealing with the commute or had a ton of heads down work to do? Stay at home. Wanted to go in to be present for meetings? Easy. Start the day at the office and go home to finish off the day and avoid the commute? Sure.&lt;p&gt;Of course they made it possible by actively managing it. No meetings before 11am ET (to accomodate those in different TZs). Every scheduled meeting required a Zoom&amp;#x2F;conference link. Dedicated offices were set up as &amp;quot;conference rooms&amp;quot; so remote people could call in. And of course, people all the way up the ladder worked from home at least some of the time.&lt;p&gt;Being full remote doesn&amp;#x27;t work for everyone. Providing a space for those who want it is such a huge quality of life bonus imo. But the biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion, despite your employees working preferences. This is the hardest thing to do, especially at scale.</text></item><item><author>blunte</author><text>Wow, the author has a pretty miserable company :(.&lt;p&gt;That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company.&lt;p&gt;I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when).  Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the birds, etc., while working, is just about as happy as I can be while also working on stuff that doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter much.&lt;p&gt;As I begin to form my own company, one of my priorities is to allow my employees to have at least some of their time completely at their own discretion.  They choose when and where they work as long as they can attend some important anchor meetings (and obviously be productive).  And for the social aspect, weekend or week-long dev retreats are ideal.  4 hours of intense serious work, plus a couple of hours of colleague social interaction, and the rest left to the individual to spend however they like, is the kind of situation I would have not even been able to dream of when I was younger.&lt;p&gt;And from a bean-counter owner perspective, do not underestimate the employee loyalty and overachievement motivation you can get by giving some nice free trips, nice free food, and quality equipment.&lt;p&gt;Big companies lack this freedom to treat their creative talent not because they cannot afford it but because the people in charge tend to not be creative thinkers.  This is why most interesting things happen in smaller companies (and ultimately tend to get bought by the laggard big companies).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vp8989</author><text>Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.&lt;p&gt;If it&amp;#x27;s disseminated via oral lore it&amp;#x27;s expensive to change and is often misinterpreted across a large enough org.&lt;p&gt;A silent killer of engineering orgs is bad practices that stick around because that&amp;#x27;s the way it&amp;#x27;s always been done. No one knows why because it wasn&amp;#x27;t written down. The only way to fix that is for someone high enough to provide blessing, but maybe none of those things are individually disruptive enough to get the CTO involved. So everyone eats the costs in perpetuity.&lt;p&gt;Much easier to just write everything down.&lt;p&gt;Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.</text></comment>
<story><title>I hope work from home continues</title><url>https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/4/6/some-of-the-reasons-i-hope-work-from-home-continues-and-i-never-have-to-return-to-an-office</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I worry a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; about how this cuts the bottom rungs off the ladder for junior developers. Senior developers can be very productive without frequent access to in-person help, and are valuable enough that they can get work-from-home if they want. But junior developers have more frequent questions, need to absorb software engineering culture, and need to have more work and task structure created for them. Remote work is really hard for them.</text></item><item><author>trentnix</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.&lt;p&gt;I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Truth is, I can&amp;#x27;t imagine I&amp;#x27;ll ever take another job that expects me to show up to an actual office everyday. I&amp;#x27;m sure I&amp;#x27;m not the only one.</text></item><item><author>protonimitate</author><text>I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.&lt;p&gt;Cost issues aside, I&amp;#x27;ve always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid&amp;#x2F;flexible schedule and location policy. I&amp;#x27;m currently full time remote (I&amp;#x27;m on the East Coast working for a West Coast company). My previous company had its main office in my current city, but allowed a super flexible choose-where-you-work-from policy. It was the best.&lt;p&gt;Didn&amp;#x27;t feel like dealing with the commute or had a ton of heads down work to do? Stay at home. Wanted to go in to be present for meetings? Easy. Start the day at the office and go home to finish off the day and avoid the commute? Sure.&lt;p&gt;Of course they made it possible by actively managing it. No meetings before 11am ET (to accomodate those in different TZs). Every scheduled meeting required a Zoom&amp;#x2F;conference link. Dedicated offices were set up as &amp;quot;conference rooms&amp;quot; so remote people could call in. And of course, people all the way up the ladder worked from home at least some of the time.&lt;p&gt;Being full remote doesn&amp;#x27;t work for everyone. Providing a space for those who want it is such a huge quality of life bonus imo. But the biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion, despite your employees working preferences. This is the hardest thing to do, especially at scale.</text></item><item><author>blunte</author><text>Wow, the author has a pretty miserable company :(.&lt;p&gt;That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company.&lt;p&gt;I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when).  Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the birds, etc., while working, is just about as happy as I can be while also working on stuff that doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter much.&lt;p&gt;As I begin to form my own company, one of my priorities is to allow my employees to have at least some of their time completely at their own discretion.  They choose when and where they work as long as they can attend some important anchor meetings (and obviously be productive).  And for the social aspect, weekend or week-long dev retreats are ideal.  4 hours of intense serious work, plus a couple of hours of colleague social interaction, and the rest left to the individual to spend however they like, is the kind of situation I would have not even been able to dream of when I was younger.&lt;p&gt;And from a bean-counter owner perspective, do not underestimate the employee loyalty and overachievement motivation you can get by giving some nice free trips, nice free food, and quality equipment.&lt;p&gt;Big companies lack this freedom to treat their creative talent not because they cannot afford it but because the people in charge tend to not be creative thinkers.  This is why most interesting things happen in smaller companies (and ultimately tend to get bought by the laggard big companies).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickelcitymario</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure this is true. It&amp;#x27;s a reasonable concern, but in practice I don&amp;#x27;t think it turns out this way.&lt;p&gt;Two points, entirely anecdotal:&lt;p&gt;1) A few years back, I sort of &amp;quot;restarted&amp;quot; as a Salesforce developer. I had well over a decade of web dev experience, but I was new to SF. Everything about it was unique to this environment. I worked in an office, but my boss worked from home (ironically enough). So I was effectively remote working with him from the get go, and I found it worked really well.&lt;p&gt;2) My kids learn a remarkable amount of stuff on their own: Minecraft, Roblox, Scratch. All these programming environments that they&amp;#x27;ve become really proficient at, and entirely on their own. This is effectively remote work. There was no one holding their hand.&lt;p&gt;I think the bigger issue is going to be getting employers to trust that the junior is working well. In truth, most junior employees probably don&amp;#x27;t have the maturity and discipline to be productive remotely. I certainly wouldn&amp;#x27;t have back when I was 18-22. I would have taken every chance I could to goof off, and not even considered whether that was a problem.&lt;p&gt;That kind work ethic (i.e. a bad one) tends to get beaten out of you pretty quick in the early days of a professional career. But a lot (most?) people fresh out of college still have that student mentality of viewing &amp;quot;adults&amp;quot; (bosses, teachers, parents) as authority figures to be rebelled against to some extent. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t trust someone with that mentality to be productive unsupervised.&lt;p&gt;The natural counter point is that if you can&amp;#x27;t be trusted, you shouldn&amp;#x27;t be hired. But I think that&amp;#x27;s a mistake. There&amp;#x27;s an awful lot of talented and smart young people who need a break or two in order to develop the appropriate work ethic and achieve their potential.&lt;p&gt;All of which is to say, I share your concern about opportunities for junior developers (and junior workers in general), but for different reasons.</text></comment>