Remote work will never been an absolute thing. It depends on context, personal habits/preferences and most importantly: experience doing it over time.
I personally cannot work from home. COVID has made it worse as kids are home BUT even if I had the whole house to myself, I just cannot work from home. I NEED a dedicated office outside my house (yes I already have an office room in my house). Reason is simple. I don't have the discipline to work from home. I get distracted too easily. So I m not a good candidate for WFH. Do I want the flexibility when needed ? Of course. But do I WANT to work from home all the time ? Hell no.
I would say the future of work is not just remote. The future of work is "employers allowing more flexibility in work location" but as an employer myself, I am personally not in favor of 100% remote. That's me I know but sorry, not everyone is cut out for remote work.
Could this office be remote? If so, you've missed the difference between remote work and working from home. I work remote and have an office 5 minutes away in town. I share it with others, but before that I had a personal office in town. Both versions are better for focus than being at home.
Yes I know what you mean. I also do need to work closely with my co-workers/team as much as possible. For me, that face to face appeal is just too important. yes not always but I would prefer it at least 70-30.
You claim that you can't work remote because working from home doesn't work for you. When it becomes clear that working remote doesn't mean working from home, you clain that you actually can't work remote for another reason.
This is a common phenomenom, though I don't know a name for it. You seem to be finding justifications for your preference (in this case, to work at a company office), but my experience think there is some other real reason. What is it?
I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency? Do you have an quantitative estimate of those losses, and a quantitative estimate of other efficiency gains/losses due to working remote? Do they take into account that it takes a while to readjust? If not, you just have a preference, and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.
> You seem to be finding justifications for your [ ... ] but my experience think there is some other real reason. What is it?
People _can_ have multiple deal-breakers, multiple reasons for not liking something, when you try to ask why, they usually give you _one_ of those reasons, instead of writing an essay with multiple bullet-points on why they don't like it. This is most likely just in the interest of saving time, and not to hide or avoid the _real_ reason. Also, sometimes, people take position by an intuitive feeling, hard to put into words, an understanding built by absorbing evidence and confirming hypotheses in the background over a long period of time. This, probably, is especially prone to confirmation bias if one's not careful.
> I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency?
For many people, this is about maintaining a healthy psychological state, for which, social interactions _are_ essential. It is _not_ about measuring efficiency. Productivity is hard to quantitatively measure in a lot of contexts, but it is easy to notice when your mental state is deteriorating in loneliness. Also, in general, worse mental state will likely mean lower performance.
Communication using video and audio and text can get you far, but for some reason it is not a substitute for the subtleties of face-to-face interaction. The communication bandwidth is just not there, a real life office is just much more immersive. Not to mention that online interactions tend to be more limited in duration. You'd be around people for an hour, and alone for seven. While in an office, you're around people _the whole time_.
> you just have a preference
Yes this is true. People are different, and prefer different environments. People vary in background, temperament, responsibilities. Some are more extroverted, some prefer longer periods of alone time. Some are mentally stable and resilient, some tend to easily spiral into depression. And some jobs just lend themselves better to remote work. Between an active extroverted salesman, and an easy-going introverted software developer, you know who's more likely to prefer working remotely.
> and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.
This is a challenge at the moment, as those who do work outside of their homes have been forced back into them due to travel restrictions (which is what most of the suddenly-remote workforce is also managing).
Oh jeez, it's sanity-inducing to hear someone say all this. 100% agree. I'm jealous of all these people who rave about remote work. But every time I've tried working away from my coworkers, I've felt like a massive failure.
I'm mostly going to write this next bit in case it resonates with someone else, because reading your message made me feel validated, and I'd love to pay it forward :)
Back when I used to work in an office, even one day WFH would make me start to feel unhinged from my normal office reality. I'd come in, expecting people to be mad at me or disappointed in me for some minor thing -- or having something I'd felt frustrated with that I now needed to resolve -- all things that never happened when I'd work in-person. But when I'd come in on the day after, no one would ever be mad or disappointed with me as I'd thought they were, and if I asked, they'd say there was absolutely nothing to worry about.
It's something about my propensity for cycling on async communication when I can't get realtime feedback -- I'm so proud of my soft skills in-person, and I'm very tuned and empathic, but working remote... I freeze up, or misread signals or just feel apprehensive and make myself frustrated in seeking clarity, to the point of being a pain for myself or others.
Also, I'm much more accountable to myself when people are walking around me, and interrupting my distractions. Every mild "disruption" (even just a person passing through the room behind me) actually gives me a chance to recalibrate and refocus on my desired task.
Just wanted to chime in and say never is a big word in tech, VR/AR might be good enough in 1-2 decades to provide 99% of the benefit of a shared office environment.
That said, I can really relate to the challenge of keeping personal and professional separate when working from home... I keep thinking of setting up a separate room or taking a laptop outside but it is painful giving up comfortable the multi-monitor setup on my main workstation.
That can be solved, by renting a desk or dedicated office in a co-working space. I work remotely FT, and if my company paid for it, I would get a spot in a coworking space. I have a dedicated office at home, but I work from coffee shops, breweries wherever I feel like.
Well, in many parts of the country that additional room would not be very expensive to build or you could just buy a place with extra bedrooms. In the bay area though, it's definitely a luxury.
Nobody minds if that's what works for you. We object when you force it on employees because it's what works for you, regardless of what works for them.
I imagine the GP also objects when remote work die-hards force remote work on people like them. According to the article, almost half of remote workers want to work for a company where all workers are remote, leaving people like GP commenter out in the cold.
It seems large groups from both sides are unwilling to meet in the middle.
And that's for good reason, really. The reality is that in-office workers have an inherent advantage when it comes to activities that require interaction between people, such as promotions or work assignments. People who want to work remotely are going to want everyone to work remote so that they aren't disadvantaged when it comes to those things, but then we are left with the problem of one group forcing their way of working on the other group.
> The reality is that in-office workers have an inherent advantage when it comes to activities that require interaction between people, such as promotions or work assignments.
I don't think those two things are an inherent advantage, rather, it's the reality of managers that don't understand how to remote work.
If "work assignments" require in-person communication, it seems like something is severely broken with your work assignment system and/or process. For software development, to me, that is basically tickets, kanban/scrum/whatever, and the regular communication that takes place to discuss. This communication doesn't need to be "in-person" to work, which brings me to the next point: meetings.
Having remote people exposes many problems with meetings. One is having too many meetings, ad-hoc meetings, or agenda-less meetings. These are problems in-person too, but they're not as directly noticeable.
The other meeting problem comes more from how the meetings take place. The most remote-friendly orgs have a rule like "one person remote, everyone remote" which basically means everyone does the meeting with a webcam and headset, even if they're in the office. At a minimum, meeting rooms need good audio/video (as in: no PSTN speakerphones, and no laptop mics or webcams allowed), and all meeting invites are always sent with an online meeting URL, at a minimum the day before.
There can be inherit advantage in being in-person both for ad-hoc technical discussions and building personal relationships, but if those are job advantages I think it's also a management failure. Ad-hoc technical discussions should quickly be moved online and inclusive of remote people, and that's something a manager should be constantly encouraging/enforcing. It should also without saying that a manager that favors employees for promotions with whom they have better personal relationships isn't doing their job properly (and note this isn't directly a "remote worker" problem).
> People who want to work remotely are going to want everyone to work remote so that they aren't disadvantaged when it comes to those things, but then we are left with the problem of one group forcing their way of working on the other group.
> We object when you force it on employees because it's what works for you, regardless of what works for them.
I think I'm a bit old school. My outlook can be summed up like this: If you like your job, and you want to keep your job, you'll do what your boss asks unless it's illegal or immoral.
So if my boss told me I had to work in an office, I'd weight that against the "if you want to keep your job" portion of the above, and decide if that's for me. If not, I quit and go find something where WFH is an option. If so, I go work in the office. Most likely I'd work in the office until I found something else or management realized that they were losing employees and changed the policy (I suppose in that way we can "force" the business to conform to our whims).
Perhaps that's a privileged point of view, or makes me a drone. But my life isn't work; I work to live, not live to work, so minor inconveniences at work don't derail my life; it's just a job, something I do to afford more important things.
For the record, I've worked from home for the last 9 years, and I have coworkers who had a really tough time adapting to WFH; they had to weigh if the trouble to change was worth it for them. Some felt it wasn't worth the trouble and left, many found it was and stayed.
Sure, nothing strange about that. But having to quit a job because management can't get their heads around remote work is inconvenient for everyone involved. It would be much better if that weren't necessary, no? That's the "objection" I meant.
My last org had a really bad wfh policy, inconsistently enforced across teams. I ended up leaving over it (mostly). There are a lot of things that won't get done because I'm not around to do them, and they'll lose a good bit of money over it. Seems like a weird hill for them to die on, but they did so. I wish they hadn't.
> you'll do what your boss asks unless it's illegal or immoral.
As an employee your primary obligation is not to your boss, but to the owners of the company.
If your boss is ordering you to do something that is detrimental to the company, you should fix the situation. But not necessarily follow the orders of your boss.
I understand that, but for too long the narrative has been exclusively controlled by people like you, even though your views are in the minority, apparently. Remote should be the default, with occasional office presence so people can get to know each other. Please stop trying to enforce your views on people. Of course there will always be some amount of person to person contact, but that should not be the mandated "normal". In fact, if everyone who couldn't stomach working remotely were fired, the increase in productivity and the unmatched health benefits to everyone else would probably more than make up for it. I do not wish to live my life as a serf, I want to be a free man. If that sounds so horrible to you, maybe you're the problem.
I've worked remotely for nearly 2 years now. The majority of that time I was the only remote engineer in a company of ~80 engineers. We went fully remote just over a month ago and it has been a huge quality of life boost for me. Before everyone went remote the communication was pretty lopsided where I had to make sure I was over communicating and inserting myself strategically. Now that everyone is remote it is a lot more natural with everyone on the same playing field
Yeah, same experience. For the first time I'm on equal footing with the rest of the company. I knew what I was getting into from the start, and I can get along just fine being the only remote person, but I won't deny this has me thinking about going with a fully remote company when this is all over.
I worked remotely 17 years for a large SV tech corp doing work that was global in nature. 5 years in, they instituted a policy of having salary modifiers based on where you lived for both remote and onsite employees. Your salary wouldn't immediately change, but when it came time for increases, your compensation rate was considered. I had no problem with this policy because I lived on the side of a mountain and my house cost 1/5th a Bay Area home. Instead of a 1.5hour commute home, I would have a 1.5hr mountain bike ride out my back door. Now, the salary difference wasn't 50%, it was more like 25%, but I would have taken 50% to not have to live in the Bay Area.
The real downside was that I had minimal mobility because most of the tech world is still in the dark ages of management by proximity. Doing a job search in the startup world in the age of Covid, I assumed that there would be an explosion of WFH jobs, but most are not.
“But I would have taken 50% less to not have to live in the Bay Area”
The even crazier notion is this - you shouldn’t have to concede anything. If they landed a dev in SF, they’d be willing to pay them the appropriate SF comp.
It’s in their budget. Press harder. Money gives you options, even if you’re not a big spender, it’s security. Why not you?
Right but it's also a race to the bottom. You don't know if the company has another candidate in their cards that will accept a 50% reduction to a SF engineer. With remote work you have a lot more competition.
"More competition" - but the company still has just a finite amount of time to evaluate candidates.
I've been on the hiring side - if you want a very senior engineer and want to vet them properly, there's nothing fast about the process.
You have access to a million senior engineers but who cares if you only have two engineers on your side that are qualified enough to interview them and those engineers are still expected to ship code, do code reviews, alongside doing interviews?
If you can deliver a fantastic interview where you code on demand, talk architecture tradeoffs intelligently, the leverage still belongs to you as the engineer.
In my experience, less than 1/4 of the organisations and projects I help go remote / distributed do it for cost reasons. Most do it for brain power and efficiency. It's easier to recruit globally, especially when you're looking for very good people. We have strong data that asynchronous transparent communication increases efficiency, agency, autonomy, and decreases both the rate and cost of mistakes. It also drastically reduces the necessity of coordination management.
Did you try a counter offer? I would think they would be flexible on this if they are in fact paying people in SF and NYC that much.
I wonder if anyone has tried moving to NYC/SF for a year and then moving back to lower cost of living. Would these remote-only companies really give you a paycut?
Great explanation of a bad practice. A company should pay for the value they get, which is independent of the location. These calculations never seem to take into effect all the cost savings of having a remote person (office building/parking/food/working space/etc). Instead, they almost always mark the employee as a second tier of worker
My company tends to do something similar for starting salaries, but that's because we're a consultancy, and our rates per-market are different.
However: In the long term if employees stay with the company long term, salaries tend to get bumped up to approximately the same. So you might get started lower, but your yearly pay bump will be higher.
> Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy. We believe that it is healthy for the company when unhappy people leave.
What??? Only in SV could a company get away with saying it’s “healthy” to not pay people their value. Usually, golden handcuffs refer to retirement and other benefits, not base compensation.
those arguments look just slightly in bad faith since they act like they're only competing for talent against local non-remote companies for every location when they're not. They're also competing against other remote companies, specially those that don't do location-based comp.
Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy.
Those people will be still be in golden-handcuffs until they find another remote job.
A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.
Come on, you can still pay top dollar globally and hire evenly around the globe if that's what you want. It's just cheaper their way.
Honestly, the whole thing is just a huge rationalization. They could just have said "we adjust for location because we can".
Let's examine this from the other side for a bit: why would a company want to pay for one developer's value in Des Moines an amount of money that could get them two or even three developers of value in Des Moines? What does the company gain by paying for one developer instead of multiple?
The value you bring may be the same, but if you commoditize yourself it's possible your employer will agree. Then react accordingly. Remember, nobody wants a shovel. They want a hole.
If equal-value employees are happy to work for 30% less in NYC than those in Des Moines, why wouldn't an employer prefer that?
You go ahead and keep holding out for your extra 30-50%. I'm very happy to fill that spot. It's not like they pay Des Moines employees $3/hour. Six figures goes a long way out here on the lake.
You want to live-it up reading /r/Frugal by the lake while leaving literally tens-of-thousands on the table, fine. Selling yourself short takes zero effort. There's always someone in line to undercut.
But don't kid yourself - your ability to be thrifty isn't a virtue in this context. You steal experiences from yourself, your family, and you jeopardize your health and safety by not demanding appropriate compensation for the value you bring.
I don't know you, but you're probably a great engineer. And if they can pay some guy on the coast a fantastic salary, then they can find a way to pay you the same fantastic salary.
No need to be thrifty. I live not too far from the Iowa border in a relatively small MN town. I work remote for a company based in SF and know I make a percentage less than the senior engineers that live out there. If I had to guess, I would guess I make about a junior developers salary. That salary goes a long way here. There are very few senior engineering positions that will match what I'm making, but the culture is not the same. I'm maxing out retirement accounts, 401k's, HSA's, Roth IRA's and I'll have a paid of house by the end of the year.
When I got started with my first rental property, a friend gave me some advice. He said, figure out what the market rate is, then charge $50/month less. There will be high demand for your property. You'll never go a month without a renter and you will have the pick of the litter. Your renters will all be high quality because you can afford to be picky. And it will only "cost you" $50 month. It will save you $1000s because your tenants will value the great situation they have. They won't abuse your property. You won't have to advertise for new tenants. You won't have to litigate an eviction.
There are people who can do what I can do who get paid $250,000/year. There are people who can do what I can do who can't find a job because they are holding out for $250,000/year. I'm ok making $50/month less and getting the pick of the litter.
If the company is itself not based in NY or SF, it makes little sense and often isn't possible to offer NY and SF salaries. If remote work became the new standard, it doesn't mean that everyone is suddenly paid SF wages, instead wages will probably start to average out over a long period of time.
> They’re usually looking to discount your salary by 30-50% by some arbitrary cost of living factor.
Discount off of what? The local max in SF?
Google Does this now. Are you angry that Google isn't paying employees the same in SF and India?
Remote IS a benefit. Lack of commute. Full control over workspace. In true remote "full control" over your schedule (lunch with friends. Time shifting work at a whim. More integrated lifestyle.)
Like I said 6 months ago, please attack "physical" company comp with the same vigor as remote company comp.
(I work at GitLab, these views are my own, etc etc etc and I'm still tired of this naive hot take.)
> Yes, yes I am. If Jeff Dean moves to India are his commits suddenly worth 10% of what they were when in the Bay Area?
No, but his options have probably changed and negotiating positions have probably shifted. Have you considered that others may view compensation as a negotiation?
It sounds like you're operating from some variant of the labor theory of value and treating this approach as a moral imperative. If value is realized, compensation should be according to value, and nothing else should matter. Is that an accurate summary of your position?
If that's accurate, might I suggest that this position is something an entrepreneur is ideally positioned to use to their advantage? Surely the world is full of excellent software engineers who would jump at the chance to be paid according to their value.
What is more likely: Jeff Dean negotiating his salary and perks with whichever company and living where ever he likes or whining about salary inequity across different regions in the world?
A-level players will try and get compensation what they think they deserve by negotiating discreetly. However most of the CRUD peddlers who are not in tech hubs remain aware they are not going to get Silicon valley salaries while living in some remote Indian town.
Push back on the employer. You bring value regardless of location. They desperately need your services. If you make the cut, you have the leverage in the negotiation.
Quit being “Midwest nice” and you will probably get much more than you thought.
Gitlab isn't helped in public perception by proudly putting a precise calculation up front, especially while for years having totally off-base adjustments in there (I.e. suggesting people in the second-most expensive city in my country should get ~20 % less than people in a city with about half the actual CoL - although I believe someone realized that didn't make sense at some point). I'd also guess that to many, the difference when moving probably weighs more than salary when starting fresh.
And yes, I'd criticize my current employer too if they'd try to cut my salary for moving.
I looked a while back and they seemed to have eliminated the silliest inequities in the US at least, e.g. state levels being based off the primary tech hub in many cases. (So you could live in a smaller city or rural area in many states and get paid based off the pay rate in Boston or Portland.) But, as I say, the last time I glanced some of that seems to have changed although I assume there are still ways to game it to some degree if you're open to living somewhere just to get the best GitLab bang for the buck.
Google isn’t remote-only, although I bet plenty of people are angry that they do the same work as someone who lives near an ocean, but get paid less.
Here’s a question I had on GitLab’s policy:
Let’s say I move to SF for a few months starting out at GitLab. I then move back to a lower cost of living area, for family reasons. Is the paycut immediate, or is there some room for negotiation? Surely very few people are going to be happy have a loss of pay.
Surely, if you provide great value to Gitlab you should be smart enough to be happy with a paycut. Rent alone could be $25-40,000/year difference. Commute could be 200-400 hours/year less.
Take the $25K cut and buy a house with a pool.
If your cost of living goes down 25% and your standard of living goes up 25%, wouldn't it be silly of you to be unhappy about a 20% loss of pay?
For those working for a company that does cost of living adjustments, look into getting a virtual mailbox from https://www.anytimemailbox.com/ and "move" to your new address in Seattle, Washington. Its a great tier-1 city which will raise your income by 30%. Washington also has no state income tax. The only downside is the weather, but since you don't actually live there you can avoid that and just get yourself a nice zoom backdrop of a rainy city.
This could actually be a great startup idea - virtual "hacker houses" located in expensive cities that people can use as virtual home bases. We will take 5% of your tier-1 income to handle all your paperwork so you can be free to live where ever you want.
I'm pretty sure this would be quite illegal to do to avoid state income taxes - usually you need to spend something like X% of your time in that state. Not sure about the legality of using it to get extra pay from your employer.
Very interesting study, thank you Gitlab. It would be great if the results were true and the trend could prevail in the long term. I'm one of these 16% "working remotely all the time" since six years (working frequently remote for ten years before already). I have more than enough interesting work, but I regularly had to deal with companies that were not interested in cooperation because I was not willing to work at least 50% on site. I am curious to see if Corona will change this attitude. I live in german speaking Europe, and perhaps the culture here is simply not yet ready for it.
I'm located in Switzerland, do my own acquisition and I have long-standing, stable cooperations with companies where I am known and trusted. I also regularly receive requests from recruiters where I am in the database; this usually happens the same way; their clients (in Switzerland and Germany) are very interested until the moment they realize that I am not interested in working physically on site with them (in addition I appear too expensive for most German clients). This is not a problem for me because I am established and can afford it. But for the younger ones, who have to build their business relationships first, the aforementioned mentality of the clients makes it very difficult to work in this way. The argument that you work three to ten times as efficiently as any local employee in an open-plan office and that this makes the project cheaper, even though the hourly rate is higher (just to name a few advantages), is something that hardly anyone who doesn't know you wants to hear.
I've made this point before but the future of remote work has and will continue to have no dependence on what workers like nor will it on how "productive" workers are. Office's have perpetually been getting worse for workers(offices -> cubicles -> open office). So it's very clear companies have never chosen one office solution to another because it is the preference of the worker.
As for the argument of changes to "productivity". For starters very few of us work in roles where productivity is a directly measurable thing. Sure you can argue about commits, lines of code, ship times, but those are all nowhere near as measurable as "widgets-per-hour". On top of this we all know that a huge portion of roles out there are arguably not productive at all (and if they are it's very hard to measure). And again, when in the history of work has declining worker productivity been solved by improving conditions for the worker? If you company goes remote and you don't work as well that way, do you think your boss is going to go "oh! I'd better talk to leadership about getting those offices again!"?
The entire reason offices still exist is because of culture. For years every SV startup I knew said they needed an office in SF because the "VCs like to see that". There has been a lot of inertia towards offices.
Now that Covid19 has broken that assumption for a bit, I think we'll see a rapid shift to remote teams because it quickly becomes clear that offices are a liability. Anecdotally I already know one start up that can no longer afford their office and so are breaking their lease with no sense of what they'll do next (so remote is the default), and a well established, very traditional office culture firm that is already stating that everyone being in the office full time will not be the norm coming out of this.
Also I think COVID has forced companies into trying it when there might have been fear or apprehension before. It takes time/resources/commitment to even try out a work from home policy - but now everyone has been forced into it.
Unfortunately, this means that their first experience with "all remote" will come from a rushed implementation instead of a well-planned one. I fear some managers will draw the wrong conclusion about remote work in general.
A risk. But it doesn't take much to get people on the right path.
1) trust your staff, give them autonomy and agency.
2) asynchronous transparent communication for discussions and decisions.
3) remove friction: few small tools for communication and collaboration, good audio, forum, wiki, git, etc. Services: shopping, childcare, etc.
And a bunch of smaller tricks. But trust, transparency, asynchronous coordination are the major points.
I've helped "rush" groups to full remote with less than 10h "training" during the last few months now that it suddenly became important to a lot of people. More time would have been great, but even a small bit can help a lot.
If you have experience of remote / distributed work, help out and teach others now that they really need it.
#1 is a non-starter for many managers in companies of all sizes. Unfortunately the personality-type that lends itself to accumulating power is not one that thrives off trust.
Working fully remotely? In IT it's no-brainer, why would I spend time on everyday commuting, spend time in office where I can't feel fully comfortable, especially when company come up with open space idea and waste my productivity?
I want to get shit done, receive money and live my life.
Reimbursements? Employer should just pay more in salary, what's the difference if I rent a office or convert part of my home into office?
>Employer should just pay more in salary, what's the difference if I rent a office or convert part of my home into office?
I wish. My experience is that companies advertise "Remote work possible" as some sort of job perk, and use it as justification to actually pay you a lower salary.
People have different preferences. For example, I find it:
- harder to focus working in my own home
- harder to separate home life from work life
- more isolating, as you miss natural office interactions and conversations
Neither way is more superior than the other, and both should be accepted as just preferences and not forced one way or another.
There is a lot of talk about remote work and COVID-19 and for me remote work in the age of COVID-19 ... it has been terrible. Mostly because I have kids, and my wife and I are both trying to work remote, and attend to the kids schooling ... it's a terrible combination for getting anything done on a 'regular' schedule.
I suspect people's remote work during COVID-19 experiences are pretty wide ranging.
You aren't alone. It's easy to conflate "remote" with what's happening right now, but it's not the same. Crisis-induced work-from-home while doubling as a homeschool teacher is not the same as properly organized remote work.
Less to do with home and more to do with everything outside of work impacting work.
Well said! Early into COVID I thought it'd bring a surge in remote work because we'd see how much work really can be done from anywhere.
But COVID-remote work has been way different. I've been a full remote worker for 3 years usually working out of coffee shops, and I'm much less productive now because a) I have to work from home, and b) it's generally harder to stay focused during a global pandemic. And I'm not even a parent.
I do hope those who are working remote for the first time don't associate remote work with a bad work life now.
"All-remote is the purest form of remote work, with each team member on a level playing field. 43% of remote workers feel that it is important to work for a company where all employees are remote."
This is interesting as it runs counter to the opinion you hear a lot that is in the vein of live and let live/give people a choice/different people have different preferences. I do think there's some truth to it. While I don't really have trouble under normal circumstances as someone who is mostly remote with a bunch of people in a conference room on a call, it is a little nicer with everyone individually on the video call. [ADDED: But the company is about 50% remote so there are often people from a variety of locations on a call even if some are in a conference room.]
I think it's certainly true, if only a few people are remote, that can be challenging.
I have worked remotely for a company that was otherwise very much a traditional non-remote environment; I have experience partly distributed teams and now managing a fully remote one.
I think partly remote will always, without an exception, create a significant information asymmetry that will result in non-remote workers becoming the leaders in the company. (plug, sorry:) I have written a small post about migrating to remote: https://blog.patientsknowbest.com/2020/04/01/51-basic-rules-... - even in _theory_ you could fully embrace remote workers if some others see each other in person regularly, the latter group won't, can't and likely, shouldn't stop exchanging information in ways that 1) are more efficient 2) excludes remote workers.
+1 for the information asymmetry. I'm currently working remotely 4 days a week and there are 2 other devs working remotely between 80% and 100% of the time.
One of the main issues is "oral tradition". Information is shared from dev to dev during coffee breaks, and everyone is supposed to somehow know it. The solution is to work as if everyone is working remotely, and in that case that means putting information into writing, either by communicating through archived and searchable channels (ie Slack) or writing docs.
I really don't know what to expect for remote work in the future. The current trap is to think that we are currently doing remove work. We are not, we're doing remote work in a very unusual setup. Kids and partners are at home with us, we can't really leave our house, etc. This is not real WFH.
Additionally, a lot of companies were pushed into that almost over night without preparing for it. No experience with it, no tooling in place, no processes, etc. Maybe a lot of them experienced some loss in productivity due to that and will just conclude that remove work really isn't for them, it sucks.
The 2 things I really hope for:
* people experiencing a personal boost in productivity and better quality of life (mostly due to not having to commute) will be vocal about not going back to the "old ways"
* companies claiming that "proper work/collaboration can only happen in the office" will finally change their tune and end the hypocrisy. When forced to do it, they somehow found a way. Maybe it's time to final end this charade. Especially in tech, the work that can only happen in an office is so marginal.
> 43% of remote workers feel it is important
to work for a company where ALL
employees are remote…
As a full time remote worker, I've also felt that having everyone else is great. In every case I've work with a colocated team, they end up snubbing you in weird ways.
This snubbing is just a cultural thing. There's no technical reason remote workers should feel left out if working with another team.
I've found that most colocated team members rarely write well, and often do not track, or even follow up on complex team decisions. When everyone is remote, it often forces some better communication. Frequently, the teams have to "double up" on the media used to communicate, which almost always requires some written communication.
Now that everyone's remote in quarantine, I've heard complaints from the colocators about "having to overcommunicate". But really, it's just learning to communicate well.
This metric of "how many all-remote workers want everyone else to be remote", really seems like a great test for "how well does your company communicate?"
In my case it's the higher ups snubbing the remote workers and deliberately excluding them. I think they're trying to "encourage" non remote work but are actually being shitty.
It's difficult for me to give a true assessment of what remote work would be like in normal times. Since I live alone and social events are cancelled I feel like I'm craving social contact and definitely missing that aspect of work. I also don't have any space in my apartment to work from so I'm set up on the kitchen table.
I do wonder if the exceptional circumstances of the current sudden shift to remote (lack of other human contact, unplanned setups at home) will cause a backlash against remote work.
There may be some backlash, given how painful the transition has been for a lot of people. I think a lot of people are conflating "remote work" with "social distancing". The later is the cause of a lot of your feelings of loneliness. The former can significantly increase your flexibility to maintain quality relationships. As someone who works 100% remotely, this has been an especially lonely period for me as well.
Right now, many people are still getting used to working from home, and many I suspect consider this to be a temporary measure, which has prevented them from getting settled. In a real switch to remote work, you would be properly invested in setting up a long-term productive environment. The beauty of remote work is you would have the agency to experiment and find what habits and schedules makes you the most productive, without the added constraints of the office. This process would probably take several months, and for a while you would miss the structure of the office, but I think it has the possibility to increase your productivity and quality of life.
For me, remote work does not mean that I work alone, it just means I work with a group of other remote workers that I consider to be close friends. I think it has the potential to increase quality social interactions while working, not decrease. In a society where more people are working remotely, I think the ability to forge relationships outside of work will only increase.
I'm guessing there will be a mix of people who had a bad taste because their companies weren't really setup for remote work and they don't have the ability to get out of the house, and some people who find that they are more productive working from home, are able to use the extra hour or two in their day to get other things done, find that the documentation enforced by remote work provides a ton of benefits to their team, etc. To be fair, remote work isn't for everyone and for outgoing people in particular they need to learn how to get in an appropriate level of social interaction (bad right now of course); but as noted by this survey a large portion of remote workers won't even consider going back to work in a co-located office.
Why was the title of this submission changed to the more uninteresting “Remote Work Report” from the original “The Remote Work Report by GitLab: The Future of Work is Remote”?
Someone probably thought the title was too provocative and therefore more likely to touch off the usual back and forth between
-- those who feel they have to evangelize remote work so that there will be more/better paid remote positions for them and
-- those who really hate the current situation (who doesn't) and are worried that not coming into the office will be normalized and many of their co-workers will stop coming in as a result
> those who really hate the current situation (who doesn't)
<raises hand>, in the context of this report. 100% WFH fine with me. Not being able to go just buy local stuff when I want I'm not so keen on, but that's not what this is about.
In my case, I'm almost fully remote but I also usually travel about a third of the time--so I'm a bit stir-crazy. I just meant that it's overall a stressful situation for a lot of people which makes remote tougher overall.
I'm totally for remote work when the context and company is adequate. I just wish salary wasn't as low, these days when a company says 'remote possible' it almost always means you're gonna get paid less.
Remote work should be an absolute thing, mandated by law, or at least strong incentives, to reduce our carbon footprint. Unless you truly need to go to a central location (laboratory, healthcare, etc.), you should work remotely.
I saw a study that said 40% of SF Bay Area jobs could be remote. If all major metros went remote, this would put a dent in our CO2 output.
Advantages of offices, face-to-face interaction, etc. just doesn't matter. Climate change is an existential threat according to the experts, so we should actually take it seriously and modify our society accordingly.
I'm pro remote work, but it's questionable as to why GitLab pushes their remote work ideas so much? Is it to become some sort of remote work consultant? Is it an angle of marketing?
Because it cost them less, and they magically "present" that it's a good thing. They pay different (lower/higher) salaries depending where you are located.
It is the same as Basecamp. Marketing. Everyone hears about your company and knows you are all remote and so people want to work there. You can then pick and choose the best people from across the world.
Even with reports like these, I think it will be tough to convince managers that are set in their ways to open up to allowing their employees to work remotely.
While anecdotal, most companies seem to have approached the current state of affairs as a mild inconvenience that will be gone soon, and aren't looking to keep remote work an option going forward, even though it's working out well, which is a shame.
How do people handle async communications when in differing time zones? The team was forced to work remotely as opposed to an office as a result of SARS-CoV-2. I'm a core developer back in Sydney, with the rest of the company in San Francisco (I'm essentially -7 hours). A lot of team members don't like me not being able to reply when they send a message because they don't like having to context switch from tasks that they're blocked on, meanwhile I have no problems with this aspect as I tend to like to work on things simultaneously and can context switch quickly (could it be my ADHD being a super power here?). How do remote teams deal with this effectively?
We currently have org/dev planning meetings every other day (Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:30am PDT, which is 3:30am my time until sometimes 6am) which I'm up for, but I can't maintain that every day as it gets too much (I wake up around midday Sydney time).
You have three meetings a week that can sometimes last two and a half hours in the middle of the night and no one on your team sees that as an issue?!
The key to making big timezone differences work is to make communication as asynchronous as possible and where that can't be done make it as humane as possible. Clearly these meetings can be scheduled in times where both sides should naturally be awake. I work from Iceland with people on the East and West Coast so about the same time difference and I'm mostly in meetings in the early evening although nothing so epicly long. Your colleagues could be doing the same. We also alternate so some are early morning for them and afternoon for me.
For people getting blocked it really depends on what it is but for the most part I do as you do and park what I'm working on and get on with something else. If it's something simple that can be fixed with a bit of back and forth I'd try pre-empting these issues (e.g. are you just being used as a really expensive form of live documentation).
Honestly it sounds like the team is treating you like a "second-class citizen." It seems 100% unreasonable for you to have to attend 3:30am meetings ever let alone twice a month. You need to be able to have a somewhat normal sleep-schedule in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle and to continue to be a productive member of the team and of society. Personally I think you need to re-set some expectations - you're just as much a part of the team as everyone else. Sure you may need to work 1-3 hours outside of "9-5" time to meet in the middle, but so do they. (Unless of course you really like the swing-shift, in which case you need make those hours very consistent and very public.)
My team had 2 remote people who were treated like that for a few months, but they quickly realized it wasn't fair or sustainable and pushed back. So our team-wide meetings got bumped to 9am, and we got good at making decisions that they cared about while they were online. Or we queued up things for them to respond to the following day. It's not as easy as being able to tap someone on the shoulder, but nothing is right now with everyone WFH. Everybody needs to grow up and treat each other with a bit more respect. (/rant but not really)
It sounds like you were in San Francisco prior to the remote work change and went back to Sydney once that happened? If not how did it work when everyone was in the office?
If only one member of a team is in a vastly different time zone I haven't seen it work myself unfortunately. Not that it's absolutely impossible just that you're always going to be the guy out of sync with the team due to the small amount of overlap to work with anyone else. No amount of async communication will ever fix that the majority of the time anyone wants to ask you a simple question they'll have to wait until tomorrow (which for simple questions means they'll just spend time to try to figure it out themselves instead of ask you) and vice versa. Where I've seen vastly different time zones be successful is when the group is more evenly distributed and it turns into rolling pockets of collaboration rather than a stark handoff at the fray of the working day for each party. It doesn't so much matter if a particular time zone has most of the people just that for most of your work day it's possible for you to interact live with a few others the team and vice versa.
If the above doesn't seem possible you'll either have to find the unicorn answer which is going to be very specific to what your team does (e.g. maybe is there a role which takes almost exactly 1 FTE that doesn't actually need to be in the team as much as produce deliverables for them or maybe by sheer rare chance your group is willing and actually functions well with a majority of communication being async), find a way to come to terms with a 3rd shift job, or find a new position that matches your needs better.
I'm US East Coast (effectively, though not formally, remote) and the company--while pretty distributed--tends to be centered on the East Coast timezone. We don't have a lot of people on the West Coast so we mostly schedule morning meetings when we need people in Europe to participate, where we do have a lot of people.
APAC? it's tough. They're on a lot of late night calls though we make do as we have to. (And again, tend to have fairly early AM meetings ET (or late afternoon/evening) if Asia needs to participate.) I'm not in engineering but my guess is that there's a lot less real-time collaboration than with engineering offices/remotes in the US and Europe. One standing meeting I'm in, we alternative between late in the (business) day and early in the (business) day ET.
It's a challenge for suddenly-remote companies which aren't used to working this way, especially if all work communication isn't funneled through a tool that is designed for async workflows. The benefit of a remote organization which was designed as remote is people opt-in to those workflows.
Much has been said about transitioning from colocated to remote, but remote teams would struggle as well if suddenly forced into the office. It's worth recognizing that part of the challenge is the sudden shift in environment, regardless of origin and destination.
The super power you mention has elements of truth to it. Some people naturally prefer to work this way, while others prefer sync. It is tougher on those who prefer sync to suddenly need to work async.
I worked in a team where the maximum time difference between members varied from 12h (when everyone was near their primary residence) to 20h (when some people traveled). We were 100% remote and mostly async, but we had daily meetings and others like grooming, planning etc. I was lucky to be in the middle (Central Europe) so the daily was ~2PM for me, for some it was 9PM, for others 9AM. If you were in a time zone that made it inconvenient (like 3AM in Hawaii) you were not expected to join, just post your daily updates on team's Slack channel. Similar with other meetings, most went fine missing a member or two. Nobody expected you to reply outside of your core working hours and it was cool to create a PR at the end of the work day and wake up to see it reviewed first thing in the morning.
I can see your pain being alone in a distant time zone and honestly the only advice I could give would be to try and agree on time slots that work for both parties.
As we've learned from building for remote teams [1], is that it's really about how you set a process for async communication, and not just about the tools. This is why we've been heads down since the outbreak helping work-from-home teams set the right processes of communication using us and other tools.
It's really around building a healthy culture of working from home, and not encouraging multiple disruptions during the day, and actively doing so, thinking that it unites teams. We wrote a basic guideline [2].
It’s interesting that 87% of people say they are satisfied with current tools and processes that enable remote team communication, yet 35% list collaborating with colleagues and clients as a top challenge. There seems to be a disconnect between those two sections of the report.
Are they mutually exclusive, though? You might think the tools are adequate - or even good -, but not be happy with how other people handle remote collaboration.
My experience has been, that some people really like to call you directly and expect you to take their call, without creating a meeting or asking you if/when you have time. Others (still) have problems with muting/unmuting themselves or realizing that everybody can hear their environment. And I think when you're accustomed to never or very rarely working from home, there are a lot of things you have to do differently, so the learning or adaption curve is kinda steep at the beginning.
I would respond similarly for my own work situation. We're using Microsoft Teams which is fine and in many ways a big improvement over the hodgepodge of tools we used before remote work en masse was considered viable by my employer. Still, it has changed the dynamic and that is a challenge as it affects individuals differently. Some colleagues have become more communicative, others less so, some want to use the phone more now, others are happy to use channels to post a stream of what they're working on without addressing anyone in particular, etc.
That's essentially how we interpreted it as well. Tools are still important, and useful in the right context, but we're in a period now where tools are not hindering remote proliferation.
Remote work is great and all... because that's our only option.
In the long term, I suspect there may be a greater inclination towards remote work, not as much as this report suggests, but overall work at office is here to stay.
I need to go outside and have a physical seperation between work and home.
Imagine if it were the norm though. You could move out of the Bay Area and afford a home with a dedicated office space. I worked remotely for 17 years and I found ways to create a separation. Sadly, I fear you are right though - there may be a slightly larger WFH push, but inertia of management by proximity will still be the norm.
Well, not a GitLab you couldn't because they'll cut your salary tremendously (40% if I moved to my second home in Oregon). Oregon is a whole lot cheaper than the Bay area, but it's not 40% cheaper.
Or get an office in a co-working facility of some sort. Most of my remote colleagues do work out of their house but I've known people who wanted to create that separation and weren't near a company office so they rented a space. Sometimes companies will even pay for that. (Don't know our policy.)
I've been working remotely for a few years now so a bit biased. But I would say that the COVID situation with regards to remote work has shown how many benefits there would be for the wider society if more people worked from home more often:
* Less traffic
* Less noise pollution
* Less air pollution
* Less stress
* More energy for things outside of work
All these would increase the quality of life for a large part of the population, decrease the number of avoidable lifestyle diseases and deaths, and would help cut the global carbon emissions too.
COVID is not an ideal situation to start your work from home experience but I do hope that some people will find it valuable enough to make more lasting changes after the crisis is behind us.
Labeling work remote or non-remote (on-site?) becomes increasingly irrelevant. Need for physical presence in a given geographical location is mitigated by good planing and quality of tools allowing to share information effectively.
Why dont we stop calling things remote or not, but focus more on improving the tool sets needed to better plan and share thing between humans.
All of these tools are needed wether the team is physically on the same geo location or spread out. What changed now is that its much harder to justify not having them anymore.
I do enjoy being in the office sometimes but not every day. After this is all over I imagine many companies will go “remote work” for at least part of the time. There we’re many naysayer companies that were forced into doing it and now realize work still gets done.
Longer term this whole experience will likely be a step-change in what “office work” looks like moving forward and that probably means a lot less commercial office space needed.
Kinda agree. I could do 3 out of 5 days in the office without any negative impact, in fact it would be positive in terms of productivity and I would generally be happier (which would further up my productivity).
I wouldn't want to work 100% from home either.
Hardest part is client interaction, video conferencing not the same as face to face but its clear now that not all client meetings need to be face to face once people are proficient with the technology and the technology gets better which it will.
Curious on what people think about home working and VR... Will the tech help? Anyone experimenting with VR in this context?
I hesitate to predict how this will play out long-term. I can imagine some companies, rather than expanding, shifting at least in part to partial WFH--even if not full remote--with an office that is oriented towards conference rooms and at least partly unassigned seating. Maybe co-located teams agree to come in on certain days.
This is a great read. I am especially happy that they are not asking for an email to download the report. I understand why some companies are doing this, but I went from web page to reading with no friction.
>>> The Future of Work Is Remote
Yes, in the sub-segment of economy where Gitlab is applicable it's true. It's been true for a long time, even before the Covid-19 virus.
But for a large segment of the economy it isn't.
I need a hair cut, but all barber shops are closed. Can Gitlab help?
I want to go out for a dinner, I'm tired of take-outs. Can Gitlab help? A telecommuting hostess, followed by a telecommuting waitress, followed by a ...
I've been working remotely for the last several years, but it has it's place. It won't fundamentally change what was already happening, except perhaps accelerating the trend.
This feels like a strawman argument. Of course Gitlab aren't suggesting that chefs, barbers, and car mechanics are going to start working entirely remotely and transmitting the product of their work via the internet. Its pretty clear from the article that they're talking in the context of knowledge work.
Indeed. I'd further say that remote work can benefit those occupations that cannot work remotely!
If we imagine that a large percentage of the population doing work that can be done from home is doing so, there will be less traffic on the roads, more time for people to go down to their local coffee shop or restaurant to grab a bite, more real estate for non-WFH companies to rent (possibly with lower costs), or even office buildings that could be converted into habitation (and thus allowing the people whose work has physical components to live closer and lessen their commutes).
Not to mention pollution, quality of life, and a healthier society. Sure, it's not a monumental impact at a global level, but I'd count it as a positive change for the most part.
I personally cannot work from home. COVID has made it worse as kids are home BUT even if I had the whole house to myself, I just cannot work from home. I NEED a dedicated office outside my house (yes I already have an office room in my house). Reason is simple. I don't have the discipline to work from home. I get distracted too easily. So I m not a good candidate for WFH. Do I want the flexibility when needed ? Of course. But do I WANT to work from home all the time ? Hell no.
I would say the future of work is not just remote. The future of work is "employers allowing more flexibility in work location" but as an employer myself, I am personally not in favor of 100% remote. That's me I know but sorry, not everyone is cut out for remote work.