> But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win?
How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers.
Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.
> How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so?
If you have never worked in that way, let me tell you it's the absolute worst situation.
I'd rather go back to the office instead of having it work like that.
People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
If a company has remote workers, the company ought to be remote first otherwise it's horrible for everybody and resentment is the only thing you reap from it.
This happens worse for me in the remote world. In the office I can see when Alice and Bob are talking about something important to my work and roll my chair over. I can't tell when my remote coworkers are meeting about things I should be included in but was forgotten, and they do this All The Time.
Agreed. I've worked remotely and in-person. Both are nice once you develop the right processes.
But having half the team in one office and the other half remote seemed to be the worst of both. When I was remote I felt relief when everyone else in the discussion turned out to be remote as well, and when I was in-person it was similarly nice when we realized that everyone in the meeting was physically present.
So it's not surprising to me that companies would gravitate one way or the other.
Better hybrid processes have probably been normalized to some degree during the pandemic. But it's still probably true that if you're one of a couple people on an otherwise co-located team that are remote, that's probably not a great situation to be in long-term. You'll almost inevitably miss out on a lot and the co-located team members will always be making accommodations for you.
> People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
Er, they've been doing that even pre-pandemic, and even when I'm in the same room.
>People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
That happened a lot even during the in-office days as well. People with more seniority and influence would whiteboard new ideas and then bring you up to speed on the next daily standup on what they decided.
If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day. If you have some stellar feedback, you can bring it up then and I'm sure they'll consider it.
And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
> Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
Why aren't your developers empowered to say "I don't need to be there" to a meeting?
Why aren't your developers in the loop enough on things they're not participating in such that can still notice if an appropriate SME is being excluded?
Every job where I've grown responsibility, I find that not only did those interactions become possible, they've became expected of me.
Y'know, you were making some good points, but then you went and tarred all "developers" with one black brush.
That's incredibly condescending and reductionist, and it says a lot more about you than it does about "developers", either any individuals or in the aggregate.
Maybe try thinking of people as individuals, rather than lumping all "developers" together as one unreasonable bundle of pointless complainers...?
I'm sorry; you don't get to say "developers are like this," and then backtrack and say "I didn't use the word "all", so obviously I'm only talking about the bad ones!" That's just one step above "Hey man, why are you so upset about being called bigoted slurs? I'm only joking!"
I also think you might need to look up what a Mary Sue actually is[0]. Hint: It's not "someone who reacts poorly to criticism," nor even "someone who wants unrealistic things for themselves." (It also has an extremely loaded and sexist history.)
The word you might be looking for is prima donna rather than Mary Sue. I'd certainly agree that there are quite a few of those in the software industry.
> If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day. If you have some stellar feedback, you can bring it up then and I'm sure they'll consider it.
Not who you are replying to but sure - I am actually in such a position where I get the summary of what I need to do second-hand; it is great - mainly because the person I get it from is another senior developer so he knows the pitfalls; that also means he is able to lay the roadmap of what I need to do which makes things so much more easier.
Another time, it was a manager who was originally a developer and was quite hands-on - same experience.
> And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
100% agree.
> Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
> Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
When you have decision makers that neither have the technical chops nor consult those that have them, things usually get complicated. Because then they miss the technical perspective, don't know what is feasible and what is not, commit things that are technically not prudent, forget to take into account the potential pitfalls etc etc - all of those things have a significant impact on the hands-on person down the line i.e. the developer. All decision makers are obviously not like that - those with the awareness and humility about not having the technical insights, include developers in the meetings to cover such aspects and that solves many issues upfront for both the project and the developers.
Speaking for myself, I don't love being in those meetings but sure appreciate that being present provides the opportunity of handling things at design stage so that they don't come back and bite me closer to delivery. Are there power-hungry limelight-seeking developers who do it for visibility/building image? Sure, but I haven't seen as many of them as I have seen managers with such tendencies. And if we say that there is nothing wrong with vying for visibility and image building etc and all those things are just signs of healthy competition/ambition - well, then that applies as much to developers as it does to managers.
Your last paragraphs are describing a bad management problem which is orthogonal to roping in devs in all the meetings where decisions get made. Bad decisions can be made with or without you anyway.
My last paragraphs were trying to respond to the following bit:
> > Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
I personally only consider full remote position because even policies like "one day in the office every two weeks" would force me to live quite close to the city in which the office is and I absolutely want to avoid that if I can (and the market says I can)
To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.”
Some people prefer working at companies that are 100% in person. Some prefer 100% remote. Some are OK with some type of hybrid arrangement.
If a person is working at a company with policies they don’t like, either they work to get the policies changed, they find a job with policies they do like, or they live with the policies they dislike and keep the current job.
Just like people who prefer in-person work aren’t going to get their way at all companies, people who prefer remote work aren’t going to get their way at all companies.
> It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.”
If only it was that simple. There's pressure everywhere. Even governments try to push people back to the office with some mantra about e.g. saving the city.
If only it was just a choice.
At the end of the day most management never come into the office all the time. They do what they like. They have 0 implications so if they have dinner with a government official and was told it's best to ask the staff back then they do it. That's all.
I think that "hybrid" is the worst of both worlds. If you attend the office you spend most of your time on video calls to people working from home. Need to run a workshop? You still have to plan it in a hybrid way using Miro and video conferencing for the couple of people who will make an excuse not to come into the office.
And at bigger companies, you're almost certainly dealing with people in multiple locations and even timezones anyway. For many of us, we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from.
> we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from.
This has been every place I've worked for the last decade, honestly. Even before WFH was a thing, all meetings took place over videoconferencing and most discussions took place over email and chat even with the people in the cube next to yours.
Working from home didn't seem like a major shift to me because no work or communications flows changed with it.
I suspect a lot of people very invested in the remote/non-remote question are either at a smaller company where everyone is on a floor or two of a building or are on very self-contained co-located teams at a larger company. As you say, my situation for the last decade has been working with people who are in three different office locations + remote, my being on the road a large percentage of the time, others being on the road a lot, etc. I drove into the office sometimes (it's not that bad a commute). But really I could go in and not see anyone I knew on a given day especially as the company grew. I basically stopped going in at all maybe 6 years or so ago.
I am sure there are individual situations where it works great, but I am currently hybrid ( 4 remote ;1 in office ) and it is genuinely killing me in terms of messed up body rhythm. Wednesday ( my day in ) throws my entire week into disarray as I try to fight it with extra doses of caffeine. And given that I am now finishing a messy project that necessitated some allnighters, I am now constantly behind on sleep debt. I am frankly fed up to the point that I am looking for a new fully remote position so that I can show it to my manager ( who is not really on board for remote work, but begrudgingly accepts some exceptions ).
It is only now that I am restarting my normal body cycle again. I should not have to put up with that bs.
And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win?
How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers.
Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.