Honestly, at least Apple laid out their intentions. People can leave or stay, but the policy is clear.

At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...

If your hybrid is mandatory then you can expect to be back to full time 5 days in a years time approx.

As a manager, these types of comments and sentiments are so incredibly frustrating for me.

This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.

Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.

But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.

And the funny thing is, I absolutely understand the suspicion! It's just that, as a person in a leadership position, it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.

Hence why I admire what Apple has done, here. They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy, and now they're letting the staff make their decision about how they want to react to that policy. Whether you agree with the policy or not, that's far better than ambiguity or constant flip-flopping.

> It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.

Absolutely true. Employees do not trust management for good reasons, because they have experience with management not being open and honest with them (speaking generally here, of course there are exceptions).

Management's goals are often counter to those of the employees. Whereas workers want good pay, flexibility, work/life balance, and so on. Management wants control, pay people less, have them work more, and so on. Many managers pretend they care about what the workers want, only to force on to them what they want. People pick up on that bait and switch after a few times. Again, speaking generally here, this isn't universal, but it is common.

> Management's goals are often counter to those of the employees. Whereas workers want good pay, flexibility, work/life balance, and so on. Management wants control, pay people less, have them work more, and so on. Many managers pretend they care about what the workers want, only to force on to them what they want. People pick up on that bait and switch after a few times. Again, speaking generally here, this isn't universal, but it is common.

Yes, there are companies that behave this way. And there are many companies that don't. As you say, it's not universal.

The question is: What kind of company is Apple?

I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.

>The question is: What kind of company is Apple?

>I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.

It is the kind of company that colludes with other employers to illegally gain advantage when negotiating with employees about pay and quality of life at work.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...

If you want to believe people at Apple have changed, go for it. But in my opinion, it always behooves sellers of labor that buyers of labor are always playing an adversarial game. And vice versa of course.

You have to assume this type of bait and switch when companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have spent so much money on their flagship campuses, that will have to be torn down and rebuilt as they were custom designed by architects in neomodernist styles as proxy corporate peens =/

> Yes, there are companies that behave this way. And there are many companies that don't.

Can you name some companies that don’t? Very few companies with more than a few employees are more concerned about the bottom line of their employees than the corporation. This is by design due to management training in business schools, motivation by managers to control and yield power over others to signal their prowess, and basic greed by business stakeholders to maximize their returns to name just a few reasons.

Except that I have. I've been on both sides of this issue and stand by these comments.

What they are describing is literally the objective objectives of a company's management. It's not some fluffy 'cultural values' thing that changes based on what the company's philosophy is. I've held exec positions at startups and ... well, I don't need to have held those positions to tell you this. (These authority contests are so frustratingly silly. We're not 5 year olds.)

> It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.

Usually the result of past "Say one thing, do another" sort of experiences. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.

In the past decade or so, for instance, a lot of the rush to "open office" (which is Hell on Earth for the sort of deep work a lot of tech types are typically paid to do) has been surrounded with all sorts of talk about the benefits of people and ideas colliding and such... mostly coming from people who have an office with a door that closes.

There's a place and time for those ideas, and it's the various "watercooler" places a typical office has - break room, lounge area, etc. "I am not working on something, let's BS on some ideas!" But there's a time and place for "not having random conversations," and it would be where people try to get work done. It's exceedingly hard to focus on deep work when there are lots of conversations around, and having gone from one extreme to another (open office with probably 100 people in line of sight to my own dedicated shed office), even if you know how bad it is, you don't realize how bad it really is. I listen to a lot less music now, and a lot of what I listen to is quieter and instrumental. In the open office plan, I'd acquired an appreciation for some pretty aggressive metal - because it was better than random conversations. And if I'm in the middle of something, I don't get constantly jacked out of the groove by other people being bored or hungry or such. There are many days out in my shed when I couldn't tell you what time it is without explicitly looking, and on more than one occasion it's been my wife pinging me, "Hey, you coming up to the house for dinner?" I'd been buried in something technical for the last few hours and had no idea it was dinnertime.

But despite all this, a lot of tech companies still try to spin "butts in tiny seats with people all around them" as somehow better.

Anyway, if nobody believes what management is saying, there's probably a very good reason for it.

If you want people to 100% believe it, add it to the employment contracts, with significant payments if the company reneges. However I think you will find that the executives won't go for it.

Yep. Money where your mouth is. Corporate management has a history of only responding to direct incentives, so if they want me to believe anything they say, then they have to give themselves a direct incentive to follow through with it.

> a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.

Then it sounds like they probably do want to a full return to in-office work, but don't think they can get away with it. If the argument from your leadership doesn't begin with "according to these very clear numbers, our profitability as a business has suffered due to remote work," then it's reasonable to consider what the real reason might be: Wanting to exert control, or the sunk cost fallacy of leasing commercial real estate, or a justification for managers to have someone to manage. Who knows? These things are often not well explained. But anything except an existential business risk is a bad reason as far as I am concerned, when the "resources" so clearly want it to go otherwise.

> "according to these very clear numbers, our profitability as a business has suffered due to remote work"

Seems like this has absolutely been the case. FAANG and the like aren't gonna to willingly lose 10-20% of their staff unless in office work was more productive. The business will make their decisions based on what will make them the most money at the end of the day. They aren't politicians seeking power, just profit. If remote is more profitable, we will see remote companies dominate the scene in the next few years, but as of now, all management has to go off of is reports showing productivity went down during WFH.

At my last employer, there was a very clear 10% jump in productivity when we went home, and we were still ordered back. There were tax implications to having an office unoccupied that played into that, but I'd bet the bigger reason was that a lot of managers had nothing to justify their salary by while the introverts they used to manage got along better than before.

Profitable for the company != profitable for a given manager.

> Then it sounds like they probably do want to a full return to in-office work, but don't think they can get away with it.

I said "not the least of which because". I didn't say that was the only reason.

This is precisely the kind of cynical reading-between-the-lines that I'm talking about.

If you are experiencing cynical reading between the lines from your reports, you might want to ask yourself why. Why don't they trust you? Or maybe they think you're sincere but they don't trust senior management? I suspect that they have good reason for that, and you might take a closer look as to why.

You're not telling me anything I haven't already thought about. Remember, this thread started with me saying:

> At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...

The issue in my org is that, starting from the executive level down, everyone is saying "we are not forcing people back to the office", but no official policy has been written and published that lays that down in writing.

Then mouzogu came along implying that, even with a written policy, they still wouldn't believe it, thus the tangent about being frustrated.

But in my own org, today, absolutely staff have good reason to feel uncertain, if only because fear is filling the communication vacuum.

As for karaterobot's comment, they extrapolated a brief remark into a conspiracy theory. Rest assured, when communicating with my staff, there's a lot more nuance that's being conveyed.

> I didn't say that was the only reason.

But, it was the only reason you gave.

From the HN guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I wasn't attempting to give you a complete and thorough explanation of our work-from-home policy or the reasoning behind it, but rather just one (very important) factor that's part of the overall calculus. I believe that was clear from the context.

Meh, engineers tend to be pretty intelligent. If they are being cynical about management then it’s probably founded.

If we're stereotyping, I think you're overestimating human rationality and the power of emotional thinking, which is also a pretty common trait among engineers.

I’m not stereotyping though; I said if engineers are cynical their is probably a reason. I didn’t say all engineers are cynical or all mangers give them a reason to be.

It sounds like you have a disconnect with your ICs if you don’t understand why they don’t trust you.

When the recession hits, yanking hybrid away and demanding full time is an easy way to both A) easily cut staff that cant show up to the office easily (so preselected layoffs) and B) have massive leverage to force the issue sense they cant just go quit to make 20k more now in response

That was the IBM and GE playbook, right?

I used to work with them a lot in a past role, and the remote guys seemed to get disappeared much more quickly than the folks who had a home base.

When your boss is in Brazil or whatever and gets a savings target, he sorts a spreadsheet by salary and utilization and poof!

Yea came here to say the same thing -- you can just imagine the executive level conversations.. "the company is really struggling, and here are these bozo's sitting at home enjoying their life while I am stressed out in this board room... we need to be all rowing the boat in the same direction, and the only way I can see us doing that is by seeing everybody else stressed out along with me at the office..." so yea.. unless the management is also work from home, you can pretty much guess that a recession will cause a whole bunch of "well, when we said work from home forever, we meant like, ya know while the company was running fine.."

> never

Leadership changes. People change their minds. Something can absolutely be a genuine intent today but that could change in a few years.

First, if Apple declared, right now, that full remote was an option, what you say is still true. i.e., in two years, management could decide to take away that benefit.

So I don't see how that kind of reasoning is useful when making an employment decision today. Getting up in arms about a purported future two years from now is just not rational, and is ultimately a byproduct of fear.

More broadly, this has always been true. Employers have always been in an position where they could change the terms of employment, and employees have always been in the position of being able to make a choice as to whether they would be willing to accept those changes. The WFH situation isn't special in that regard.

Second, this could go either way. Future leadership could equally decide Apple will go full remote. But the assumption is always that future change will take away the benefit rather than expanding it. That the slippery slope will always be to the worker's detriment. That's just another form of management distrust.

Edit: And oddly, given the current demand for positions in technology companies, that distrust is especially unfounded. Employees have never been more empowered. The sheer demand for labour means that any company instituting a policy that's broadly unpopular will lose staff. Absent a profound change in the labour market, in that context it would be insane for Apple to communicate a hybrid work policy, now, only to renege on it.

> "The sheer demand for labour means that any company instituting a policy that's broadly unpopular will lose staff."

If that were true, we'd all have private offices, or at least the option, instead of open plan office space.

I don't really disagree with any of that although I do think some policies are stickier than others. It's probably easier to adjust the terms of hybrid work than it is to tell remote workers who can't commute to an office that they have to move if they want to stay with the company.

But, yes, in general I wouldn't make decisions based on what could happen in 2-3 years unless I really saw the writing on the wall and wanted to proactively spare myself the pain.

>But the assumption is always that future change will take away the benefit rather than expanding it. That the slippery slope will always be to the worker's detriment.

This seems like a reasonable assumption unless the labor seller is in very high demand relative to supply.

> This seems like a reasonable assumption unless the labor seller is in very high demand relative to supply.

Which is precisely the situation we're in right now.

I would say that it's not just a lack of trust in your specific organization's management intentions. It's also related to how much we've all seen management throughout the Western world react with horror to the idea that the people they're supposed to be telling what to do might not be physically within their view for weeks or months at a time...or ever!

There's unquestionably a very strong strain of "management" in our culture that consists almost solely of a) distrusting the employees, b) therefore trying to physically monitor them at all times, and c) justifying their own existence by calling for many hours of (in-person) meetings every week. Personally, the institution I work for has claimed—in defiance of all logic and obvious reality—that certain jobs here can only be done in the office, all the time, and thus anyone in these jobs (which is basically everything below Director-level) seeking to work remote even part of the time will be denied.

Your company many not even have any of these people. I don't know. But so many of us have heard the stories from so many others who do have management like this that we would be stupid not to be wary of any manager—on up to the C-suite/owner/board—who seems unenthusiastic about remote work.

>This is pure supposition based on no evidence.

Unfortunately for your argument, their policy speaks to their attitude, which is "fuck what you think". Anyone with a basic understanding of human power dynamics correctly interprets this policy as "in a year all you peasants will be back with your arses in your seats where we can see you". The statement is the evidence.

>But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.

The fact that you have a problem with this proves our point. You are not approaching this from the perspective of "how can I empower my team to do their best work and make us all a ton of money". Your frustration is "I know better and these idiots won't do what they are told".

And the fact that you claim to be unable to understand these basic ideas means that either (a) you do understand and are lying or (b) are incompetent, and in either case, your team has come to the correct conclusion.

I look forward to hiring a ton of Apple devs while also being disappointed that macOS will continue to get worse.

> This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.

What do you think the lack of trust comes from? We have a large body of evidence that management does things in exactly this way. You can argue that this evidence isn't germane, but you can't argue that it doesn't exist.

I wish I knew!

The technology industry in general is one with some of the most empowered workers in the economy. The incredible imbalance in labour supply-and-demand means that salaries and benefits are sky high, work conditions tend to be quite favourable, and employees have a ton of options in selecting employers that have positive work environments.

And yet there are some who seem to think that tech workers are continuously under attack from heartless corporations looking to maximize profits at all costs, even at the expense of workers.

Absolutely, if you're working in, I dunno, service or manufacturing industries where labour supply is high and anti-union efforts have resulted in a rollback of labour rights, there is every reason to be concerned.

But in tech? I genuinely have no idea where this perception comes from or how it can be justified given the current structure of the labour market.

If the main reason tech workers have good working conditions is an under-supply of talent, that suggests that management is fundamentally not trustable. If that is the case, then when things go the other way we can expect to not have good working conditions.

I've found things made more sense once I realized that the political structure of modern corporations is essentially a kingdom. I think the cynicism of management comes from a combination of factors. First is that the individual contributors have no political voice, so decisions are made for them and they just have to live with the results. Second is that without the individual contributors there is no product, so the ICs fulfill management's goals, but nobody (on a structural level; individual managers may vary) is even asking the ICs what they want. Third, management routinely makes decisions that make the ICs life less pleasant [1], and frequently the ICs know of / are using / know they have the capability to build a system that they want. Fourth, management naturally attracts the people who want power; leaders enable those under them, but rulers tell their underlings what to do. Between the nature of the job and the failings of people, management tends to attract rulers, not leaders. Fifth, tech people tend be individualistic / mavericks, and those kind of people dislike being ruled, especially when the rules are lousy.

This could probably be summarized as ICs want autonomy, mastery, and competency (see Dan Pink). Many tech people got into tech on their own, so have a high sense of autonomy; the corporate structure tends to squelch autonomy. To make it worse, management does not appear to value the ICs, even though the king wouldn't eat if the farmers didn't farm. But ICs have no power within the system, so the best they can do is go quit.

Cynicism is the refuge of the powerless.

[1] The most egregious example I've seen was one very large company had needed a QA system. The IT department liked a particular software package, and apparently nobody else liked it. Probably because it was completely unfit for bug tracking. So, naturally, the company got the package IT wanted. Using it was completely miserable.

It’s because we know exactly how precarious the situation is. If the demand for labor dropped significantly, do you think companies would maintain the status quo working conditions? Or would we see many more instances of worker exploitation?

> It’s because we know exactly how precarious the situation is.

The labour market for tech has been on fire for nearly 20 years now. There was barely a blip during the 2008 crash that evaporated huge chunks of the economy. During COVID demand for labour went up despite massive disruptions in the economy. I swear I've been reading articles about labour supply shortages in tech for as long as I've been in the industry.

I honestly have no idea where this fear comes from.

Please, I'm very curious to know: in what way is the situation for engineering labour "precarious"?

It's not clear how high the barrier to entry to software is; if the barrier is low, we can expect wages to drop, long-term. People are (reportedly) getting six figure jobs from a six week bootcamp, which could be troubling to people getting paid only somewhat higher for 20 years of experience. And since remote work is clearly here to stay, why would companies hire for US salaries when they could hire somewhere else in the world for less?

There's also concern about whether the stack I have experience with will be around in five years (particularly bad in the Web arena), concern about will I be able to get a job after I'm forty, concern about will I be able to get a job if I have to whiteboard leetcode exercises, etc.

Plus, if you have a mortgage in a high cost of living area (likely if you are in tech) with a family of four, say, your burn rate is pretty high, which is fear-inducing. How long can you afford to pay a $1 million mortgage with no job? Even if you think you will probably be okay, there is a non-negligible (with unknown probability) that you might not find a job and, say, lose your house. There is a potentially huge tail-risk in switch jobs. So even if the market is good in general, there is a risk that if it is not good for you there might be a disaster. On top of this, you read about plenty of layoffs when the economy turns poor, so you know the company is not likely to care about your personal situation. Whether or not the situation is actually precarious, the risk makes you feel like it is.

(In my case, freelancing has been helpful for the fears, because you look for work so much more frequently, and your perspective on your work options, and even what you are selling changes.)

> even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response

Which in turn makes the executive team suspicious which makes them hint at even just one day a month which makes people suspicious which ...

I dont have any solutions - but I agree with you.

> They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy

That is all you can do while hoping that both sides (and yes in this case there are good people and bad people on both sides) chill the fuck out.

Flexible working means giving people an option, and when it is mandatory a justification.

Flexibility is not forcing people to come some arbitrary number of days because reasons.

I mean it seems all the reasons are laid out in your response.

Just reordering them:

> I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office

> the executive team has been ambiguous

> it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise

You can claim all you want but if the CEO and all the chief officers are not the one making it all clear and not just taking about it at a standup but in black and white on paper. Then it means nothing and what you claim means nothing too to your employees. Like someone said next step after that is to put it in the contract.

Also it’s up to you and the other managers and officers, and not the people bellow you, to create a trusting environment and trust with your team. It’s frustrating you to hear comments like that but it should be instead a red flag for you about the health of your team. Because it’s even more stressful and frustrating to be in the very seat of an employee where there is no trust at their work and the leaders are vague about critical part of their work life and don’t care and (not pointing finger at you but just saying) are just frustrated when they voice their concerns instead of listening and acting as leaders.

Its the kind of thing that needs to be codified in the handbook and come from the top. I know middle managers that make these kind of decisions right now at their companies and feel the same way, but the calculus that gets missed is that until its codified in the manual, the HR processes, and is said from the executive c-suite level, it will always appear suspicious, because the course would be easy to reverse on everyone if we take it as a pinkie promise or handshake agreement.

Same reason I don't like "well let teams decide". It doesn't force the business processes to update themselves to the divergent realities, it pushes all of the burden onto teams and individuals instead, which is not good in aggregate for these sorts of things.

You could pre-commit to it. For example, you could sign a contract that if the company mandates a full return to work in the next 10 years, they will also increase everyone's base salary by 50%. That would be prohibitively expensive, so the company will never do it.

I totally agree with you. If the manager can't grant such a thing then he has no power over it, the employees have no reason to trust the upper hierarchy either, even if they trust their direct manager.

> we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.

Unless you are in the c-suite and are also the board, you can't make those promises. Your job is to say these things and gain employee trust, only to have a different set of orders come from on high.

In which case I quit along with the rest of my staff and find another job.

If my management expects me to renege on a commitment that they've told me I can make, then I can't trust management any more than my staff can, and I will no longer be willing to work for that company.

Honestly, it's like folks around here don't grok that a) employees are actually empowered, and b) management knows that.

I hear this from line managers at every company I have worked for, at FAANGs and non-FAANGs. It is romantically naive. Unless you are working for a small tight knit org run by leader with solid moral character, management will always renege.

Fool me 7 times ...

> it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.

Six months from now you get a new CEO and they want asses in seats immediately. What do you say then?

How much less are you believed about remote work than other situations where the recipient of the news has to trust you, and whose quality of life will suffer if you’re wrong or dishonest?

Without transparency and some level of clarity, you cannot expect trust from others and the cynics will remain cynical.

And if hybrid is not mandatory you can expect to be making Cincinnati salaries in few years.

Nobody is going to pay Bay Area salaries so you can live in the woods of Idaho or whatever.

The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch. It all adds up when having to go back to the office. I hate that we had to return to the office because it was like getting a big pay cut. Even the 3 day a week thing, it's like what's the point? We can work from home obviously, what more does going in 3 times a week accomplish other than punish you, showing you how much it sucks to go to the office. All it really feels like is punishment forcing you to be under some managers thumb.

> The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch.

I'm all for remote work but calling it "time theft" feels a bit weird.

You knew these things were a requirement when you signed your contract, right? If you didn't want these things then why didn't you either made a point of them in contract negotiations or simply went to a company that allowed remote work from the start?

It's a deliberate turn of the typical management canard that workers constantly commit "time theft" by not being on-task for the entirety of an eight-hour day.

Coming over from Paris where I took a bus to work for 30-40 minutes on some days, I thought it would be more of the same, but a bit longer. Turns out that both highways through silicon valley are bumpier in places than Paris cobblestone, and that if you combine the variance in bus times, the walk from my place to bus stop, and the walk from bus stop to the office, it doubled my overall commute time. I didn't know how tired I would be at the end of each day when I signed the contract, was incredibly happy with the end of the commute when the pandemic started, and am glad to be back in Europe now.

It’s time theft if you put in 40 hours of work a week while at home but then you’re told to do 8 hours a week of commuting and by the way you still have to do 40 hours of work. I think “time theft” sums it up nicely. You had something and then it was taken away.

It feels just as weird as calling things daylight robbery, i.e. not at all.

> You knew these things were a requirement when you signed your contract, right

This is not entirely fair. Pre-pandemic, remote work was much more difficult to find.

True, but in this example, the pandemic provided an effective increase in pay to the employee while catering less for the needs of the employer. From an employer's perspective, the fair thing would be to either have the employee end their temporary privileges when the pandemic is over (i.e. return to the office), or "meet in the middle" and propose a salary cut to the employee.

I'm not saying this is how employers should react, but I found the arguments presented here just really one-sided and wanted to show where such a line of arguments lead.

I think reality is a bit more complex; the employer can turn this into an upside as well by saving expenses for office space, and possibly benefitting from the increased productivity of people who are more productive at home. And I think it's reasonable that employees ask their employers to look into these upsides.

Not impossible, so pre-pandemic it was too hard to prevent the egregious time theft you complain about?

Fair point for some people.

Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling?

This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work.

Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid developers.

If only employers provided a space dedicated to working?

Correct, they can and should provide funds so that employees can rent out coworking spaces that are located near where they live, as opposed to commuting far to the physical office.

I like this idea. If I already have a home office, so I get paid this extra fund too? Or does my coworker only get it because he doesn’t have a home office?

Maybe everyone gets paid it because teams might want to use the WeWork for local in-person collaboration rather than meeting at HQ, if it's logistically easier. Some team members might have home offices but others do not.

They _do_ provide funds for this. Whether or not you use those funds to pay for a coworking space is your choice.

I'll just throw out there when I started developing all I had was one crappy laptop and headphones and the way I ended up working was by going to the Starbucks down the street getting a hot chocolate and a scone and going to town for hours at a time. Of course that wouldn't work as well for meetings but it was simpler times back then.

Although now I've got an idea to make coffee shops produce more revenue I'm realizing if the CEO of Starbucks is reading this give me a call.

Various coffee shops gain some extra revenue by selling wifi keys separately from the coffee

I realize this won't fly with many companies, but at a previous role I treated commute time (~1.5 hours/day) as work time. Not 8.5 hours work with commute on top of that.

We're all workers, and we should be supporting one another. Everyone has different concerns, but if you have a boss you have more in common with others who have bosses.

Worker solidarity raises us all up. Support workers in improving their workplaces rather than blowing them off for making slightly more.

Blindly offering solidarity with absurd claims makes everyone involved look petulant. Be careful who you cast your lot with.

Better to say, "I don't fully understand your concerns, but I support you" than be a crab in a bucket pulling all the other crabs down.

Someday you'll have concerns about your job and you'll wish tech workers stood by you on the picket lines.

I don't pretend to understand all the grievances of nurses, concrete pourers, or railyard workers, but when they say "this is a problem for us" I'm there in support.

This may be true, but should we all strive to appear rational at all times? Maybe the most rational thing is for workers to always stick together.

WFH is not just an issue for those who are working in Apple. I work in a country where-in the combined commute time going back and forth to the office is 3 to 4 hours a day.

It doesn't make sense to go back to the office for five days a week when we've been working productively during the pandemic already for two years.

I don't make 6 figures lol. If I made 6 figures I'd pay someone to drive my ass to work and back.

People want to have their cake and eat it too. Silicon Valley companies pay very well because cost of living is very high in the area and they _need_ to pay well to attract talent in that area. If remote work becomes the norm, pay will start to even out across the country. If you live in a place that didn't pay well before, you'll be better off, but if you live in a high cost of work area, you'll probably be worse off. It's just an inevitable truth of how the market functions.... maybe your company says they'll keep salaries the same no matter where you work, but let's see how that plays out in ten years from now.

To that end, 2 days a week in office seems like a great compromise. Personally, I wouldn't want a long commute to work, so I'd pay a lot to be near my office if I'm going in 5 days a week, but for 2 days a week, I'd have much less problem with say a 1 to 1.5 hour-each-way commute, which drastically opens up options for where I can live. And by requiring people to live in the area, these companies will still need to pay competitive salaries for that area, so this seems like a pretty good compromise.

Silicon Valley companies pay very well because _other_ Silicon Valley companies pay very well. Fast food companies don't pay anywhere near as well even though the cost of living is the same for those employees.

The demand for good engineers far outstrips the supply, so companies are forced to compete with each other, which is why you get lots of other perks other than salary (free gym, free lunch, free dry cleaning, etc). Any big tech co that decide to pay the same regardless of location will have a huge advantage recruiting and maintaining remote employees. If a remote employee's only option is to jump to another FAANG company for a 15% salary decrease, what motivation will there be to leave?

They pay well because demand for engineers is high. Cost of living is high because engineers have bought all the stock in the area.

You've got the order backwards.

If they find that it's hard to attract talent, they'll also pay well for remote. But if they don't, angrily worded letters are not going to be the thing that makes the difference. People are going to have to start voting with their feet before Apple will see the supposed error of their compensation formula.

Many companies are. Traditional, old school companies like Google and Apple are slow to move here, but many tech companies are moving to a "we pay you your value, not your cost of living".

I've only seen one (Airbnb) but perhaps there are others I've missed. I don't think we will be able to know how it is going to play out for a couple of years. They may validly intend to do what they say today, but market forces may ultimately force them to change their approach. I'm happy to wait and see personally.

Hasn't Gitlab successfully been a remote-first company for years before the pandemic? https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/resource...

There's no forward or backward. It's a feedback loop.

Its a cycle. It’s undeniable that Bay Area salaries are higher than elsewhere. They pay what they need to pay to get good engineers _in that location_. I’d venture to guess that Apple employees in other countries (or even other parts of the US) make less.

"They pay well because demand for engineers is high"

Do they pay their teams in Canada, India, China, etc. as much as SV? No.

Lower barriers to communication and the building of shared conceptual models of the domain will make a team much more effective.

An engineering team in the same timezone whose members have a similar general context for how they approach work will be able to do all of that more easily.

In my mind, that explains much of the difference.

Of course, there are fully-remote teams and companies that work hard to overcome some of those obstacles, but it seems to be non-trivial to do so successfully.

They are already starting adjust salaries for cost of living in the zip codes where remote workers live. They still pay more because the field is competitive, but companies (including Facebook and Google) aren’t paying Palo Alto salaries to remote workers in low cost of living areas.

You are completely missing out on the market impact of large corporate (Blackrock) and overseas investors.

>Silicon Valley companies pay very well because cost of living is very high in the area

Isnt this backwards? Isnt the cost of living high because the companies pay so much?

I should preface my comment by saying that I generally agree that full WFH is a very reasonable request, but I can only partly follow their reasoning on the diversity factor:

>"... will change the makeup of our workforce [to] younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"

Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is unless it became more diverse during COVID as a result of flexible WFH options.

I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow.

>*"requiring everyone to relocate to the office their team

Again this shouldn't make things any worse than pre-COVID. Given that full WFH was stated as temporary then no one should need to relocate to accommodate a partial in-person requirement. Not unless they unwisely moved away during the lockdown despite things being temporary or are new hires who also failed to take the temporary status into account.

To reiterate, I'm very sympathetic to their overall complaint, but it appears that they might be doing their case a disservice by implying that this will make some things worse than they already are or were before.

Yes, it was an issue before COVID, but people who are disabled, or people who have processing differences that make dealing with the distractions of an open plan office extremely difficult (that's the "neuro-normative" part), or people who have to juggle children and a job, or people who can't afford to live close enough to have a short commute, had it much better when working from home and naturally don't want to give that up.

And for some people it's the other way around. I have a colleague who has two young children and a small apartment, and it was very tough for him when work from home and school from home was mandatory.

Thanks, that clarifies things a bit. And I can understand not wanting to give up an improvement over pre-COVID times-- I agree it shouldn't be necessary. I guess I was just confused that they seem to be implying that a partial return to in-person would make things worse than pre-covid.

> Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is unless it became more diverse during COVID as a result of flexible WFH options.

> I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow.

I suspect race, gender, and height biases are a big deal and substantially mitigated by various kinds of remote work, but I don't have much more to add about these things.

About "neuro-normative," I have ADHD. Open plan offices, while they are a blight upon the productivity of every worker, are substantially worse for me than for other people. Apple literally prevents teams from communicating with other teams. The combination of open plan offices, secrecy, and demands to come to the office and listen to salespeople on calls all day but not discuss your work with more than a few other people is truly mind-blowing.

> >"... will change the makeup of our workforce [to] younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"

> Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is…

Don’t disagree with you, but I interpreted their point of comparison to be what would be if there were more WFH flexibility, rather than what is/was.

I am also sympathetic to that line of thinking because while I support diversity efforts, it strikes me that they are often framed around how to make more individuals who are underrepresented in an industry join a company (where they will be still be underrepresented) by relocating to a new community (where they will also be underrepresented), while losing the support of their previously local friends & family. Large companies that care about diversity could instead focus more on opening offices in diverse parts of the country in order create more attractive jobs within those communities, rather than simply bemoaning the challenge of getting underrepresented people to uproot their lives for them. Hopefully increased WFH opportunities will help address this issue.

Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? There is no value in body-language when communicating? I'm all for fully WFH policies, but I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience. I've been working remote for over a decade and will never work from an office again, but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.

Before my time, the company did some kind of retreat of 2 days, with sleeping in,for all 40 of the IT staff. The idea was to get them to know each other,as they where dispatched to 20+ divisions and only spoke by phone. There was no work to be done there, no cringy corporate stuff, just a mountain of food and drinks. It must have been expensive.

We're now 20 years later, and they're still referring to it. But when any noninvited ask anything, they all get very very very vague. Whatever happened on the retreat, stays on the retreat. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anything illegal or untoward happened.

It worked. They became a tight social network. Ask anyone anything, and the right person and info magically appears. Even 20 years later, in a very political corporation, the trust built that weekend still persists.

> a very political corporation

Not saying the retreat was a wholesale bad idea, but it sounds to me like part of the reason it's political could be because there's an in-group and out-group derived from the retreat.

Can't add much detail her, except this group of 50 people is tiny compared to the whole IT team, and political was a problem long before the retreat.

I'm a remote work advocate.

> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions?

Of course it's not an exact equivalent, but it doesn't need to be. Anecdotally speaking, the number of whiteboard meetings I had that I wanted to have were about 1 per year. Remote workers use tools like Notion, Miro, Jetbrains Code With me which have many/more of the advantages of a whiteboard.

> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?

This one is company specific, but I don't need to be in the office to go to lunch with my colleagues. In my last office job, I had lunch with 2-3 colleagues maybe twice a week. In my current all remote job, I meet my colleagues once every other week for lunch, and I _still_ meet my previous job colleagues for lunch once a week or so.

> There is no value in body-language when communicating?

Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. With remote work, webcams do a reasonable job of picking up the "I'mn really uncomfortable with something you've just said" and "holy crap they've hit it out of the park". Again, in previous office job, a non-trivial amount of communication _in_ meetings happened in private slack groups that were messaging during the meeting - that still happens today. The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard, as most remote teams tend to practice async communciation practices (which are not required but are often combined with remote work)

> Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value.

That's... not all that body language conveys?

Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion".

Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth. They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.

You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs.

> The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard

And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.

And that's ignoring the fact that written communication lacks critical nuance (which ends up being poorly filled in with things like emojis) that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.

> You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs.

I dont know where you got the idea that I'm pretending there's not trade offs, that's exactly my point.

> Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth.

And those still existed in the office. if I had a nickel for every time someone senior dialled into a call from their car with a kid in the back of it,I could buy a latte. Meanwhile, zoom and meet both have tools to help alleviate those concerns (raising hands, and queues of such).

> They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.

Again, it's tradeoffs. The tradeoffs are appropriate for work conversations, but maybe not for having a deep relationship question with my partner.

> And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.

I mean, yes? Written communication is pretty much a hard requirement for most office jobs, and anyone who struggles with it will struggle with email and mant other forms of communication.

> written communication lacks critical nuance

Hard disagree here. Good written communication skills can be as nuanced as verbal communication. Besides, nuance is by definition ambiguity. Communicating in a workplace by refusing to say things is a crutch, and is a recipe for disaster.

> Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion".

I'm autistic. My body language conveys things that are interpreted incorrectly by nearly everyone, particularly in management. This leads to me having to explain repeatedly that no, that's not what I'm experiencing at all, please stop.

When people don't get those cues from me, they understand me better, not worse.

To make it more general, non-autistic people also sometimes have trouble with body language. The non-controversial point is most humans fall somewhere on the spectrum where they're able to read others' body language - with a minority being outliers.

I think this varies significantly from person to person. I learned social skills the hard way and pay very close attention to facial expressions and tone of voice. Both of those carry across clearly for me... if the video is good. This does not degrade gracefully over poor internet connections.

But I find the real loss is hallway conversations and seeing the body language of the people I'm are not talking to.

Going fully-remote requires deliberate changes to the company culture to make implicit things like meeting in the hallway happen remotely. This is not easy and requires more upkeep by everyone than just showing up at the office.

It sounds like your meetings need more structure.

The value for being in the office for me was in the spontaneous connections with folks that weren't in my immediate work unit. Those connections have lead to every job I have had. The best kinds of jobs are the ones that come to you and you don't have to interview for; and you just aren't going to get anywhere near the numbers of those opportunities without "pressing the flesh".

If that's not a concern for you then have at it. But if you are at the start or mid way through your career, are motivated and still hungry for advancement I'd be VERY careful of spending too much time full time remote.

I understand, but I must say that it doesn't sound very efficient to be working in an office for 8 hours every day in order to have useful spontaneous connections every once in a while. Meetups and other events also provide such interactions without having to be there all the time while coding, writing, etc.

Yeah the discussion is so dishonest on both ends at this point. The complaint that returning to the office will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce is maybe the most absurd attempt yet to destroy RTO plans.

At the end of the day employers want to see what their employees are doing and employees want to avoid insane commutes / high COL rents / not feel like they are being spied on all the time, in part cause they maybe do 4 hours of work a day anyway. That's what's driving this. The rest is noise.

>At the end of the day employers want to see what their employees are doing and employees want to avoid insane commutes / high COL rents / not feel like they are being spied on all the time, in part cause they maybe do 4 hours of work a day anyway. That's what's driving this. The rest is noise.

This is probably the most honest take I've read. Also, it's been proven WFH on a grand scale is effective over the past 2 years, so many arguments against the efficacy of WFH crumbled over Covid. Bottom line is employers who don't want to allow WFH will have a smaller and more expensive pool than they are accustomed to. There are enough WFH opportunities that going to the office is no longer a given. The current debate is employees who want to WFH that are currently employed by companies who don't want employees to WFH. It will iron itself out in a year or two one way or the other.

FWIW, I've gone to the office 100% of the time maybe 1/2 of my 20+ year career, mostly early on. I've managed to negotiate work from home days, both in the 90s, 00s, and 10s. I WFH full time today. I meet the guys for lunch every week. It's nice and it gets me out of the house. We're a small team though.

Your comment is ridiculous. I'm an able-bodied white male but I'm also not neuro-normative, nor do I enjoy open office plans. What people do like open office plans? Hasn't this issue been settled yet?

Open office is cheaper than cubicles and allows more employees in one space. That's why it caught on with decision makers.

Some people like it because they thrive on attention and being disruptive, and open offices are optimized for that behavior.

> allows more employees in one space

and that's perhaps only technically true... as soon as you start adding quiet spaces, collaboration spaces, conference rooms, etc. necessary for open office layouts to actually work, the plain 3-4 person office plans (which nobody had for years, i was lucky to have them replaced with open office only during the pandemic) are just plain more efficient. open offices, to the surprise of no one actually working in them, force people to the worst of both worlds: have to commute to work to IM with colleagues anyway to not disrupt the whole office. it's madness.

I think it's worth noting that those things are adaptations that occurred after open concept took over. It's sort of a situation where the industry went a direction and never thought to reconsider, backpedal, and take another path entirely. Instead, we kept modifying our response to our poor decision to try and improve it.

But in the era of WFH the cubicles and private offices make even less sense: if I spend most of my day isolated in a cubicle, then why can't I spend that time in my office at home?

Then you're included as disabled. You have a neurological makeup that increases the difficulty of securing and succeeding in employment. You have almost certaimly been given fewer opportunities than you would if you were neurotypical and good at politics.

Private-sector politicians and frat boys love open-plan offices; most of us are neutral at best, and with age most people come to loathe them.

> Private-sector politicians and frat boys love open-plan offices

Not sure what a "Private-sector politician" is, nor what your intense hatred of open-plan offices has to do with collocated workplaces in general, but I can assure you that the reasons people split across the remote vs. office spectrum is far more diverse than your generic bucketing of "white male jerks == office love; everyone else hates them".

It's kind of ironic that someone has such polarized, uncompromising views on the topic, supported by the reasoning that "they don't reflect and support a diverse and non-binary workforce"

I think private sector politician is intended to mean someone working for a private company but who embodies the worst of politicians: big on personal visibility, short on doing the work.

I'm white, male, straight, neurotypical -- and I vastly prefer remote work and do not plan to go back into the office. So, how does that fit into your narrative?

There are plenty of more substantive reasons to not want to go back beyond "it's not fair".

Surely they're better for disabled people because there are fewer doors to deal with?

And why on earth would open plan be specifically bad for black, female or older people? Do you think open plan offices are all like The Wolf of Wall Street?

I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it.

If you think active, in-person collaboration is a "minor optimization" than it doesn't feel like you're starting from a neutral, open position on this issue.

It seems like someone could start at a neutral, open position and reasonably arrive at that conclusion. Some users commented upthread that IRL whiteboarding is good but infrequent. This matches my experience. I think real productive IRL knowledge transfer or collaboration has been a once-a-month thing for most of my career, and the downsides of doing it in some sort of virtual environment seem smaller than the downsides of spending 1-2 hours per day for everyone.

As an aside, I sort of wonder why the best WoW guilds are fully remote, if in-person collaboration is such an advantage. I spent some time as an IC in one of the best guilds in the world, and being remote didn't seem like such a big deal. Later I spent some time in a leadership position in a much less serious guild (basically as bad as a guild could be and still clear the hardest content in the game) and if you told me I could have everyone in my team spend many hours per week in cars so that we could all hang out together in real life or spend that time learning about how the best players of their classes deal with upcoming encounters, it seems like it would be an easy choice. One might reasonably respond "Well, software is not like world of warcraft! Software is a lot more collaborative!" but in general the level of planning and ad-hoc coordination that goes into boss kills is unrivaled in software outside of companies like Pivotal Labs that spend an entire day on planning each week, communicate liberally throughout the day, and don't seem to end up with substantially more output than other companies as a result. I sort of wonder if this attitude is a cultural accident where much of the discipline of software engineering is made up of people who think that it's bad for people to take time to develop deep expertise in a subject area or people who have allocated so many people to a project that there isn't enough independent-ish work to go around.

As usual, it depends. Imagine a team that sat in one room, communication was terrible. People never had time for questions. Queue the pandemic and everyone working from home and suddenly communication improves tremendously, people who you'd have to pester endlessly for a review or ask about some code they wrote suddenly answer the same day. Your team lead is not on the phone in the room where you're trying to work.

> I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it.

I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.

Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.

You are vastly underestimating the value of 3h (Bay Area average) of out of each week if one commutes 5 days a week. 3h*50wk = 150h - assuming $100 (lowball) bill rate that's $15k. A more median bill rate would likely be about $250 meaning it's probably worth $50k.

> Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.

I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!

Maybe you mean monthly?

Commuting time may not be officially factored into working hours but companies already pay for it in domains like tech where they must compete against each other for employees.

Given the number of companies that offer fully remote or hybrid work, a comparable company that wants their employees in the office five days a week has to provide higher compensation and/or lower standards to meet their staffing needs.

The important question for companies is not whether they want to be in-person/hybrid/remote in abstract, the question is how much they're willing to pay.

> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions?

Of course not. They're an ersatz replacement for the in-person thing. They do the job about 90% as well. Is that a problem? In the corporate world, most things are ersatz, if you're not an executive. Mediocre supplies, mediocre management, mediocre training, mediocre pay... why should we force people to shlep just to pretend their jobs aren't mediocre? A standard-issue corporate job can be done from anywhere.

> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?

Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.

> Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote.

There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!

My friends are not my coworkers and my coworkers are not my friends, nor do very many of my coworkers become my friends. It's a job, not a lifestyle. I'll do team and business lunches and hang outs, and they can be fun, but they are nothing but a distraction from what I'm trying to do.

My manager worked entirely remote for our company since it's inception, literally in a separate time zone. I never met him, I don't even know what his face looks like. I still had better interaction, cooperation, and discussion with him than most of my other coworkers, excepting only someone who was already my friend before this job. When we wanted to discuss something, we brought it up in our teams chat, and they could go one for significant time or topics, sharing opinions, plans, work related thoughts and designs, and often personal improvement things including programming ethics and work adjacent learning presentations.

Don't force me to comply to your interaction style just because you don't understand mine.

What a hostile reply to someone who merely stated to be thankful to work in the same city as their colleagues. If anything to me it feels like you are normalizing your personal experience and implicitly trying to force others to comply to your interaction style.

I'm glad I'm not having to work in an office with this person! ;)

Unapologetically, yes, and I'd take it a step further. Often the online version is more fun and more interactive than a bunch of people uncomfortably thrust into the same room. There are things people suddenly become comfortable saying and doing that they wouldn't normally say or do in person. If you've grown up with gamer friends you know exactly what I'm talking about -- seeing someone's silly avatar light up when they talk versus being in the room with them is sometimes just more fun and more open and more preferable. It gives them the ability to express themselves exactly how they want to express themselves, not limited by their appearance which they only have so much control over. I talked with my nephew about this, since I noticed he and his friends never really have sleepovers and such like our generation did, and he cited this very reason. His friends are just more fun to be around in a Discord call than in person. Furthermore, he is able to socialize a LOT more than my peers were able to at that age--they'll do 4-5 hour discord calls every night.

For very extroverted people, the in-person experience might be superior, but I'd be willing to bet they just haven't put effort into connecting in online spaces. Until you've spent thousands of hours doing so, it's hard to knock it legitimately. On the flip side I've seen introverts really open up in these online scenarios in ways they never normally would, and I'm not about to design my entire life around something my team doesn't even want.

> I talked with my nephew about this, since I noticed he and his friends never really have sleepovers and such like our generation did, and he cited this very reason. His friends are more fun to be around in a Discord call than in person.

To each their own, I suppose, but I find this unhealthy. I would encourage my child to be interactive in person, not to hide behind the computer. I say this as a WFH IT employee who games - the desire to be away from people in person, the desire not to interact with others, the disdain for in-person contact, are all symptoms of a problem in my view.

I don't mean it to say I think less of people who are like this, or that they are worthy of derision. I simply think it is bad for the individual and the community.

One of the things that's different about modern videogames is that it's better to be at home with your own Xbox or PlayStation or PC if you want to play with your friends.

We have 4 Wii controllers because when the kids were younger they could play with friends and the games didn't take a lot of explaining.

Going further back, you needed an opponent, probably because the systems were doing all they could to keep track of the action and couldn't generate an opponent, too.

A couple of times my son has had a friend bring an Xbox and monitor over to play in the same room at the same time. Given that most Xbox's are connected to big (and fragile) TVs, a "LAN party" would be quite a feat.

on one hand, i think the death of couch coop & splitscreen has had a deeply underappreciated impact on how kids choose to recreate & interact, otoh i remember all the elbows thrown over screen cheating or the crummy madcatz controller and can't help but think that kids today are probably having a far more harmonious bonding experience.

I remember a distinct evening where I got in trouble because I was at a friend's place and playing Super Mario Kart on the SNES for too long instead of coming home. Had we had an opportunity to play online it wouldn't have been a problem.

I don't really know, I am old enough to have experienced this, and LAN parties in the late 90s were indeed fun, but they took a lot of planning, expenses, and parents driving you there. I've been online since I was 15 and when we finally didn't have to pay by the minute everything was a lot better. No more coordinating for a full weekend, etc. That said, I have zero negative memories of splitscreen, except that the person who owned the game/console was always a lot better due to more practice...

That said, I would say my nephew is significantly more social than most people in my generation were, because he is able to get in 5 hour calls with his friends every night, whereas that might happen only once every few weeks in my case, at best. He's learning and socializing way more than even my most social peers were able to growing up.

But that’s unfortunately a rather useless form of socialization, as most of his life interactions will be face to face. Job, romantic life, etc.

My experience has taught me this is just untrue. My various jobs have been 100% remote for the last 6 years, so being comfortable with video and voice calls is essential to that.

Going back to when I was a high schooler, I was closeted and in boarding school, which admittedly had a significant built-in social life (that was of little interest to me), but I was also able to have a long distance close friendship for years thanks to Google Talk. I dare say some of my most important and formative social moments in my high school years were over Google Talk with my small group of friends. Sure we had antics in the dorm at my boarding school etc., but these were minor and fleeting interactions versus the deep and meaningful relationships I had over Google Talk, and anyone I actually cared about at boarding school also interacted with me that way, a good bit.

there's nothing wrong with online from my perspective, but there is when it's the only form of interaction. If you only spend time online with your close peer group you're never exposed to content far outside of the norm, and you don't get a diversity of communication mediums. You are literally handicapping your ability to communicate.

Coddling social anxiety is not a good argument for WFH. There's a difference between introversion (needing time away from people to recharge) and social anxiety (not speaking up or interacting differently in person vs online). Unless you're banking on some cyberpunk future where people only ever interact online, social anxiety is a maladaptive disorder to be confronted, not a personality quirk.

And FYI there are plenty of extroverted engineers. Some of us actually enjoy team sports as well as technical problems.

You could flip the script right back at the people afraid of interacting with people online.

> Unless you're banking on some cyberpunk future where people only ever interact online

...you're in one!

Yeah... or at least the beginning of one. Let's face it: we're all heading towards neon Japan.

"Coddling?"

Social anxiety is a genuine mental illness, and a protected disability. This kind of arrogant, ableist crap is exactly why we need to destroy the cultural norm that everybody being in the office all the time is the only way to do work.

It sounds like you use "protected" here with the intention of forming part of an argument -- presumably that social anxiety should be protected? Isn't that circular?

I'm using "protected" in the sense that it is a genuine disability, recognized by modern medicine and law, and as such anyone who suffers from it is entitled to the full protection of the ADA in the US.

It also means that anyone disparaging it like that in the workplace is guilty of discrimination against a disabled person, just as if they had called someone with an amputated leg a "worthless cripple", or mocked a hearing-impaired person for not being able to hear them when they whisper in a meeting.

In the United States, 'protected" in this context means 'legally protected', in this case by the ADA. Employers are required to give reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities.

Social anxiety is as much of a mental illness as the fear leaving a bad impression on a date, fear of spiders or fear of doing poorly at an interview and enjoys the same kinds of legal protections. Which is none.

...You do know that social anxiety disorder is a genuine and recognized mental illness, right?

Or are you just one of those people who thinks that all mental illness is just a lack of sufficient gumption?

SAD is not social anxiety, please pay attention to what you’re replying to.

Social anxiety and social anxiety disorder are different like rectangles and squares are different.

I'm inclined to ask what your qualifications for such an opinion are.

This is me. I find it much easier to converse online. I also am content staying in my house for years on end (as COVID has shown) and getting my social interaction from text on a computer screen.

The internet has been my main source of social contact since I was 12 (at which point I just stopped going outside and spent all my time building websites), so I guess I've adapted to this way of living.

> so I guess I've adapted to this way of living.

Humans are almost infinitely adaptable, but if the vast majority of the world doesn't adopt a lifestyle similar to yours I fear you're really going to miss out a big part of what "living" includes. One large component: diversity, both in content and medium.

There's also the real and serious worry about "not going outside". this is terrible for your health and also has a huge corelation with poor diet and lack of exercise. You're so much more than your eyes, hands and brain.

I mean, I was being a little hyperbolic when I said I stopped going outside completely. I actually still played sports throughout High School, but just felt that the majority of my social interaction was through the computer.

During COVID is the first time I really stopped seeing other people (other than my wife and kids) and I actually enjoyed it. I have my own yard and house, so I do go outside on the occasion still, and make sure to get the mail each day. Some days I sit on my porch in the morning, if it feels nice. I do body weight exercises and yoga and I am having a full gym built in my basement.

That said, I still don't see many other people and I don't feel like my social needs are lacking.

I enjoy my life, it is good.

Conversely, If the vast majority of people keep commuting and building skyscrapers just to present some charts and graphs to each other in person because grandpa CEO doesn't know how to use Zoom and HR wants to monitor you at all times, we're going to be wiped out by climate change anyway, so pick your poison I suppose. I, for one, choose survival.

Have you ever done a white boarding session where more than one person was writing on the board at a time?

The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.

In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.

The rest of it you're right, seeing body language is helpful, getting a chance to hang out socially is helpful. But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home given that I already have a social circle.

If work were my social circle, like it was when I was younger, it would be a whole different story.

> Have you ever done a white boarding session where more than one person was writing on the board at a time?

Very often back when I worked in an office.

> The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.

We took pictures of our whiteboards when we needed to save state, it worked great!

> In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.

I'm glad you are able to make it work for you!

> But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home

I'm with you on this! I'll never go back to an office full time.

Insisting on a new solution being "exactly the same" to adopt it pretty much ensures you will never leave the status quo.

All changes in complex systems have tradeoffs. In-person whiteboard sessions can be exhilarating. They also tend to produce imprecise (or no) artifacts that rely heavily on the context of the meeting for interpretation.

I noticed that when our team went remote during COVID and ideation was done by async contributions to design docs, the completeness and reliability of our designs went way up. But again, it's never all positive. If there was a design that was underspecified or not fully understood by the team member leading it, the siloing could lead to analysis paralysis.

> Insisting on a new solution being "exactly the same" to adopt it pretty much ensures you will never leave the status quo.

I'm not sure where you got that I said that, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I've been fully remote for over a decade. I don't in any way insist that fully remote work needs to be exactly the same as in-office work.

Sorry if I misinferred. It seemed implied in the first and forth sentence of your comment.

I think that a lot of those things can be replaced with new techniques as time goes on. Just because this is how we did things yesterday doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do this it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO.

The tooling that has been developed during the pandemic has taken this space forward by leaps and bounds and I expect this to continue.

Instead of focusing on the how, I would focus on the outcomes you are looking for and lets investigate paths forward for those outcomes.

My two cents: There is still body language over video calls, Miro and other whiteboarding solutions work pretty well, not every day needs intense whiteboarding sessions so have onsites when those are required, and good riddance to the lunches with colleagues. If we wanna have lunch let's get on a call and/or have some one-on-one time setup instead of thinking that lunch is somehow a team building exercise.

Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.

> I think that a lot of those things can be replaced with new techniques as time goes on. Just because this is how we did things yesterday doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do this ...

This is a totally fair point, but multi-cursor online whiteboards are not the same as standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming with a colleague. "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc.

> ... it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO.

I agree and understand, but let's not pretend we're not asking everyone to essentially "beta test" WFH and endure the friction of finding these new techniques. There are tradeoffs here and it's not a seamless transition. Remote work is a skill that needs honing, whereas office work is 'the standard'.

> Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.

Working remotely has immense benefits, I agree. I agree so whole-heartedly that I will never work in an office again. That being said, despite all its benefits, there are tradeoffs that don't have equivalents in the WFH world. Anyone that dismisses working from an office entirely is either ignorant or being dishonest, in my opinion.

> "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc.

You keep listing the benefits as if they are problems.

I don't think I understand your comment here - zoom happy hours are not a benefit to me, the other things that they try to replace have more benefit to me.

I can't reply to the reply because of comment depth but not being obligated or dragged to work after work hours, when you are not paid to work, to still continue to work, is a benefit to ones work life balance.

After work drinks and pre-work drinks are just your work getting to consume more of your life than it pays you to do so, whether hourly work time not counted or salaried hours getting diluted.

> After work drinks and pre-work drinks are just your work getting to consume more of your life than it pays you to do so, whether hourly work time not counted or salaried hours getting diluted.

I think we're misunderstanding something here. These benefits have nothing to do about progressing the work's agenda. It's about connecting with my colleagues in a way outside of work. Socializing, increasing our networks and bonding. Sometimes work conversations happen, because it's something we have in common, but I'm certainly not 'working' at these outings.

> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions?

No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously.

> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?

No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.

> There is no value in body language when communicating?

There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.

> I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience

Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.

> but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.

Exactly, and I agree with you. It is much safer.

A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.

> No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously.

Is it obvious though? They're garbage for most of the teams I've worked with. They're tolerable to the rest.

> No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.

Ok, but I'm asserting some valuable things being lost by going fully remote only, it doesn't do either side of the argument any good to be so ambiguous and non-committal to a point.

> There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.

Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though. I'm jealous that you work with such perfect communicators!

> Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.

I totally agree, it is much improved, even if we lost a lot of valuable things in the transition.

> A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.

I did not do any such thing. I'm saying fully remote work is great, but we're losing a lot, so let's not pretend that we aren't. There are facets to in-person work that are completely lost and not translatable to fully remote work.

> Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though

If you aren't neurotypical, then read ribbonfarm. Conflict, double meanings, soft and hard power, etc. will be hard to understand without it. Most body language isn't that serious, but conflict is normal and you'll have a much easier time understanding why someone else starts conflict with you. It's long; first two parts are probably enough but it is generally fairly compelling.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

> whiteboards

Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team leans heavily on Miro, for instance.

> Lunch

Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.

> Body language

Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.

> Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team land heavily on Miro, for instance.

I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room.

> Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.

That's cool and I fully support your desire to do whatever you want on your break. For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!

> Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.

I understand! However I can understand body language and I find a lot of value in it. It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. If we worked in the same office you'd be free to have lunch (or whatever you want to do while I go have lunch) by yourself without judgement from me!

> But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room.

It's better! We pair it with a slack call and collaboratively edit it.

> For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!

And that's an outcome that happens with WFH, too. You don't need to go to lunch together to make friends.

> It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life.

That's good for you; but again, WFH doesn't prohibit you from seeing people. If you need body language then have a video call.

>Not everyone understands or can engage in body language.

Well you sure as hell aren't going to get better at it by throwing up your hands and declaring it just isn't for you. I'm naturally introverted, but when I say that to co-workers they don't believe it - because over the years I have learned to adapt. I'm very extroverted at work - because it's necessary. Yup, I pay a price - it's exhausting and I need time to recharge. But the benefits of adapting to normal work environments instead of demanding the world adapt to me are immeasurable.

There are tons of things I can do now that I couldn't do before. Many of them are unpleasant. But they are necessary and without many of them I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. Good luck with waiting for the world to adapt to you. Let's get back together in 30 years and see how that attitude works for you. I'm sure the universe will have been incredibly unfair to you :p

This whole victim = anything hard/I just don't want to do is getting old. And it devalues people with legitimate issues.

I agree. I wrote a rant and deleted it, because I don't want to post inflammatory content here.

But I'll say that I had social anxiety, and that sometimes it can be overcome (certainly not always). But it will never be overcome without stress, often painful stress; and the cruel harsh world is actually a very good training ground to force you to improve. I'm glad my shortcomings weren't coddled; I'm glad they were viewed as something I'd have to either fix or cope with.

There are degrees of anxiety and other mental/emotional problems. Many are not going to be fixed, some require medication, some are just too severe. But it's a gradient, and some can get better with exposure, and removing that exposure can be detrimental (even though that exposure is unpleasant).

This isn't the point the OP was trying to make and you know that. Lesson one: don't assume the worst about people and don't make hyperbolic arguments in order to be "right". You might have more in-person success that way.

The point they were making was ignoring one of the groups of people that I mentioned, because in order to make their point they _had_ to ignore that class of individual.

> > I'm naturally introverted, but when I say that to co-workers they don't believe it - because over the years I have learned to adapt.

> > There are tons of things I can do now that I couldn't do before. Many of them are unpleasant. But they are necessary and without many of them I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. Good luck with waiting for the world to adapt to you.

Some people _simply cannot adapt_. It is not a possibility.

... No. Many people suffer from partial or full paralysis of facial muscles, neurological conditions that limit expression, and numerous other conditions that will forever and permanently limit their ability to engage in expressive body language.

but these are very rare things. The person you originally responded to did not mean anything against anyone who has these things. I've met many people in my life that were convinced they were unable to do things that they were quite capable of. Stephen Hawking was still quite expressive despite his limitations, although they did come later in life

They ignored that class of individual in their response; individuals who exist and who I've personally worked with and do continue to work with.

> Stephen Hawking was still quite expressive despite his limitations, although they did come later in life

He's a fantastic example of why you don't need to rely on body language to communicate emotion and feeling.

Sure, but have to understand that a limitation of language is that it doesn't convey perfect information. When someone says "anyone can do it", they mean that most people with full-blown "stuck in the house for years" social anxiety, can actually do it, and they meant nothing negative against those who are truly physically disabled. People summarize their thoughts when they speak and try to convey a picture that most people can understand; they are not trying to hurt anyone

When someone says "anyone can do it" I understand that to mean what they said, which is that they believe anyone can do it.

Someone has clarified it twice yet you're still fighting the word "anyone" instead of trying to view it through a reasonable lens. If his point only makes sense because he excluded a very rare group of people, then your point only makes sense because you include a very rare group of people. Have some grace, be excellent to each other.

Their point only makes sense because they excluded a class of individuals that I mentioned in my original response.

I have some grace; I'm willing to include those in my consideration that they have deemed unworthy of consideration.

No they're not. But that is not a reason to make everyone incapable of using body language, by removing offices.

Video calls convey body language. You don't need an office for that.

"Why haven't you just tried not being autistic?"

> Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.

I find that people actually give away more with their body language over whatever conferencing software you may use. When you have all the portraits up on your screen, the little micro things are much easier to spot. I hope I didn't give you even more anxiety! We are just trying to see how people feel in order to manage the situation :)

I use a virtual avatar, so that doesn't bother me at all.

One of my coworkers is a slug with a nice hat; another is an alien.

I think the problem is more that even people who are not artistically inclined can manage to draw a diagram of a few servers and connections. Despite having tried it for 20 years everything I draw with a mouse looks like something done by a 3y old with crayons.

So no, without a tablet to draw on I find online whiteboards 100% useless so far.

This is a rift between digital only natives and digital hybrids. The hybrids know the tradeoffs of both. Digital only don't have the lived experience to know what they're missing.

I think for completeness, you should have three categories, and include the offline-onlys. They, similarly, don't understand all that they're missing.

(Btw, this took me on a tangent trying to figure out the proper way to pluralize 'only'.)

I hadn't thought of this distinction before; thank you for enunciating this point!

can anyone honestly say trying to code in a open office is equivalent to being able to actually focus and write code without distraction in your own office?

There's tradeoffs to everything, the market is going to decide whether remote work is viable or not. Maybe the Apple tier companies can force office work, but startups that are remote are going to be able to snag some great talent who refuse to waste hours of their lives commuting

in my experience the people pushing for return to office are 95% managers who are feeling exposed that they don't really do much and potentially aren't needed. Also people who relied on office politics to survive rather than actually being good at their job

Your lunch break should be a break, not time you're forced to spend with your colleagues.

I agree! You're welcome to do whatever you want. But I am a friendly person and find it easy to make friends with my co-workers and we don't even talk about 'work' most of the time. I still have lunches with my colleagues from years ago that live in the same city, even though we don't work together.

Not every perk is about oppressing your freedom or exploiting your time and labor.

For me the main problem is that going out for lunch in person with coworkers (even ones from other departments I've never met) is completely fine and I like to do that (when I was in the office I did that 3-4 days per week) but when I am having lunch at home I don't like it at all. I can't put my finger on it but it always feels like useless smalltalk and not making any connection where in person that works quite well. And I'm neither pro-office or anti-WFH or even someone who doesn't make friends online... but going out for lunch or a beer or just an afternoon coffee break is something that I can't reproduce via video/audio.

I'm pretty pro wfh, but for a lot of people (myself included), the value of a slack conversation is less than a in-person conversation, so as a recipient I'm less likely to make time for it. That doesn't reflect on the worth I put on the person, but rather the type of communication.

I fully agree, though this is highly team-specific. I've been on teams where I'm delighted to socialize with my coworkers for an hour most days, but I've also been on teams where I desperately needed 'me' time.

Most people are not forced to have lunch with their colleagues, a lot of people enjoy doing so however.

I always went out by myself when I wanted to eat alone, or sat at my desk with headphones in watching Youtube and eating.

You can communicate with people to help them understand you'd like your break to be a solitary one.

Yes, however, even if you're not talking shop, you might build relationships at lunch time that pay off later.

We're a social species. Building relationships is something we do. Is it work? Yes. But it's also something we need to do.

I think in-office culture does work better in a lot of ways, but we as a society spent a century building and optimizing that. We've only been WingFH for a couple years, and it seems (to me) blazingly obvious that it won't take long to adapt to and improve the tools and culture of it to the point that the benefits outweigh what we've lost.

Apple choosing the office over WFH in 2022 feels a lot like the US choosing coal over solar in the early 2000s - a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy that will look short-sighted embarrassingly soon.

Some of us have been teleworking/WFH to varying degrees for decades now. There are pro's and con's, but it's not all a bed of roses. The earlier on in your career - unless you don't care about advancing from where you are today - the more you should probably balance or lean more towards in office engagement. You simply aren't going to make the same impression on people virtually as you will in person. You're fighting millions of years of evolution/how our brains are wired. You can lie to yourself and tell you it doesn't really matter - and I can tell you from personal experience it's BS. In person interactions have far more impact and staying power - period. I've seen it happen and am convinced I have gotten jobs over others because of it.

If that's not important to you - like you are towards the end of your career and pretty much happy with where you are - then that's a trade off that might not have as big an impact. But it IS a trade off and people need to be honest about it and stop hiding behind ridiculous gobbledygook like the crap that was at the start of that employee letter.

> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions?

I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...

> I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...

That's neat! I hope you don't think your anecdotal evidence discredits my own anecdotal evidence about how useful they are. People use different tools and I'm guessing you're not intending to say folks that have been productively using whiteboards for decades are somehow wrong.

Working remotely is better than all of those things, iff you commit to doing things correctly and writing things down.

Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.

This sounds a bit like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Having lunch with colleagues has nothing to do with 'backchannel communication'. Sometimes it's nice to hear about where we like to go camping, or what cities are nice to visit in their home countries, or ... nothing to do with work or shipping products.

No matter how 'correctly' you think you're doing things, you still haven't convinced me after over a decade of shipping products that online whiteboards are useful, or refuted any of my other points.

Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful.

At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.

> Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful.

Wow! That's pretty extraodinary to me. I wonder how we use them differently?

Companies being paranoid about "losing control of employees" seems overblown. People (at these tech cos anyway) (on average) are very responsible as individuals and motivated to work and grow their careers.

It not obvious what carrot or stick motivates people to deliver. But there has to be a way to achieve what the team|org|company wants even with remote workers. As a company - clearly specify and quantify goals, regularly share metrics of progress, provide better tools for working and focus on the long-term.

Depends on who you are. I cannot really process non-explicit communication all that well nor do I like to whiteboard without access to research, so I prefer a playing field where everything is explicit/where I am researching as we work.

In person I am socially clueless and add next to nothing to the whiteboard.

I hear you and see you. Fully remote sounds like a boon to you!

Not that I think this is a solution for everyone but my personal experience is VR can provide many of these things. It's surprising how much body language comes across just from seeing head tracking in a shared environment and facial expressions are likely shipping this year.

Also, unlike Meet/Zoom, in VR you share everyone's screens at the same time (show a virtual monitor/laptop for each persion, have multiple shared whiteboards, have different people virtually standing in front of different whiteboards, etc....

Is anyone trying to argue it is "exactly the same experience"? Most of the arguments I have heard in favor of remote work is that it is superior experience, on the whole.

> it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience

No one even made that claim. From the open letter:

> We definitely see the benefits of in-person collaboration; the kind of creative process that high bandwidth communication of being in the same room, not limited by technology, enables. But for many of us, this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day.

There is value in working in-office… just not enough for me to give up remote work.

I, personally, get just as much work done working from home. While I do miss the social aspect of the office, it’s just not worth giving up the hours of commute time or dealing with a lot of the in-person bs that work entails.

I realize this is a very privileged position but I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s an option.

Whiteboards can be replaced by digital tools, but as far as I know, companies do not invest to remote work tools enough currently.

There are great tools, which should be available for every worker in home, but that does not happen for some reason?

I don't think anyone is claiming that it's "exactly the same;" I think many people are claiming it's better after considering pros and cons.

"There is no value in body-language when communicating?"

Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me.

You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.

Sure. single-cis-straight-white-neurotypical-abletypical-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).

Feel free to continue to argue that position.

> Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me.

I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only.

> You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.

Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately.

> Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).

When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?

>When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel

Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries". I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.

>Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?

I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.

> Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries".

I suppose I do! I'm not coercing anyone to go to lunch with me, so I'm not really sure what your point is here.

> I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.

Not at all. I'm a results-driven professional and to suggest otherwise is offensive, to be honest.

> I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.

I'm talking about: socializing with my colleagues is one of the many benefits that is lost when we transition to full remote only work. The disabilities, preferences, or whatever other flavor-of-the-moment persecutions you care about is irrelevant to me. I'm going to invite people I enjoy spending time with to lunch and I don't consider the persons gender, sexuality, mental health, or whatever else you are talking about when I invite them to spend their lunch with me. I expect them to be honest and come under their own free will. I can't control anything beyond that.

If you want to spend your lunch with me, great! Let's go chat and learn about each other. If for some reason you find this offensive, or privileged, then I think we would not enjoy lunch together and that's good to learn, too! I wouldn't want to invite you to lunch the next time.

Good luck out there.

>I'm not coercing anyone to go to lunch with me, so I'm not really sure what your point is here.

If you are in a position to influence a promotion, then an invitation to lunch is not simply an invitation to lunch. I would hope that you would be involved, either as a peer or a manager, since you come across generally as pro diversity.

The thing is, #neurodiverse message boards are full of posts like "My manager has asked me to go to lunch and I am terrified. What do I do?" Their fear is that if they don't go, they will be dismissed as not a team player, but if they do go, they may exhibit behaviors that uneducated NTs find disturbing. Many neurodiverse will just mask up and push through it, and many of us are effective at that. The right thing, of course, is to communicate (I wrote "have a conversation" and deleted it, because Autism) but many NDs don't have access to such support systems to even get the advice. If they are on a #nd channel, then we can help them.

So I'd ask you to consider that, unless you have absolutely no power in your organization, then yes, asking someone to lunch is a non-neutral decision ("coercion" is too strong a word) for an ND person that carries risks and stress.

I'm not asking you to stop having lunch with people. I'm asking you to consider ways to interact with ND people and to get familiar with the challenges ND people face.

> You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies,

I sympathize with your point, but object strongly to this analogy on the grounds that being racist is a choice, while benefiting from body language is not a choice. It's also very offensive, but that is a secondary issue.

However, expecting (and demanding) that the other person can interpret your body language is also a choice.

Consider you are the only person in the room who can't speak French. Everyone else can speak French and your native language. Would it be appropriate for them to drop into French whenever you ask a question, talk about it, and then answer in your language? No. Not only would you feel excluded, but you'd also be missing out in vital information required to do your job.

This isn't up for debate. You can argue that installing a wheelchair ramp or not is a choice. Fortunately it is the law. Likewise, accommodating neurodiverse people is the law, at least in the USA and Europe.

If you take the position that "I am neurotypical and it is not my choice, so it is reasonable to expect everyone else to be able to interpret my body language", then in any company in the USA with 15 or more people, your statement would be actionable under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

>However, expecting (and demanding) that the other person can interpret your body language is also a choice.

It's not a choice, it's respecting millions of years of social evolution. You are arguing that the way peoples brains are wired should be ignored to accommodate *you*. Good luck with that.

Also not sure where body language rates up there like someone with an actual physical disability or people just being assholes (your language example). Good luck filing some sort of complaint about being "forced" to interpret body language.

This feels a whole hell of a lot like "this is hard and I don't want to learn how to do it so I'll make up some syndrom to excuse it". Bah.

> This feels a whole hell of a lot like "this is hard and I don't want to learn how to do it so I'll make up some syndrom to excuse it". Bah.

I don't think that's a charitable interpretation and is uncalled for.

It's despicable that you equate "neuro-normative" with "racist".

An important point that’s missed is that working in an office is dramatically worse now than it was when I started my career in the late 90’s.

I had my own office as intern. When I needed focus time (which is a lot of time as a developer), I could close a door.

Especially with Apple’s open-concept HQ, the delta between WFH and office is larger than it has to be.

The market is speaking. Apple pays well below the rest of FAANG already. Because of their policy, they can only recruit from a narrow, already highly-paid pool of developers. I know an Apple manager that is leaving partly because he can’t recruit anyone to come work for him.

> An important point that’s missed is that working in an office is dramatically worse now than it was when I started my career in the late 90’s.

Yeah. I think this is significantly being understated.

There is a VAST difference between "in person" meaning "You have your own office" and "in person" meaning "Open office plan with no dividers at all".

For the first, I wouldn't have much of an issue coming in. For the second, I'd probably take up pitchforks to avoid it.

At Sun everyone had an office, either shared with at most two other people, or private. It was great.

It was not totally missed. The fact that it's so much harder to work in open office than home was in the letter, but sure it should have expanded on it being different from 20 years earlier.

As a Cupertino resident, I'm pretty upset with their WFH policy. At the very least they should have let small teams choose their in office days.

Now I need to keep track of which days of the week they have to be in the office, because traffic in Cupertino will be 2x-3x worse on the days they are in the office.

Their choice of forcing everyone back on the same day is not only bad for their workers, but it's bad for all of their neighbors and the planet.