Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says

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As a remote, older professional now, my career nevertheless supports the premise of this article: in-office was beneficial when I started out.<p>My first job had a strong lunch culture, providing an environment for serendipitous conversations, daily. Over time, I bumped into folks I never would have met in the normal scope of my role, across finance, legal, SRE, support, sales, data science, etc.<p>In turn, as a young professional, I was able to develop a mental model for how businesses &quot;work&quot;, why they&#x27;re organized how they are, and how (good) culture can bind everyone together towards a profitable outcome. I made some friends and acquaintances that I&#x27;m still in touch with to this day.<p>As a remote, older professional now, I don&#x27;t necessarily &quot;need&quot; these serendipitous conversations anymore, although I miss the general socialization. But I do feel like they&#x27;re an essential &quot;ladder&quot; that every subsequent generation of professionals should be able to access, and that it&#x27;s a moral obligation for me to &quot;pay it forward&quot;.<p>For remote work to be &quot;fair&quot; to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.

I am totally for remote work but this is absolutely a real problem, and I see my junior engineers suffer tremendously from it. One asked me what made me so successful at my job, and there were many factors but being in the office really did help me. Success here doesn’t just mean solving chunks of problems from jira tickets but creating entirely new products and solutions which have then gone on to become important parts of the organizations offerings. This was only possible because of my initial years where I was constantly absorbing and brainstorming with folks in the office on a daily basis. We really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment.<p>One of the ideas I’m thinking about is to hire only within a metropolitan area, but keep remote. Every month we just organize a 3 day retreat where everyone’s expected to attend it, which could be in a resort or a hotel even. This might satisfy the interaction and brainstorming itch while still keeping everyone happy with their remote arrangements.

As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career, this does not match my experience. Perhaps it’s the organizations I’ve been at, or the field I’m in, but I have had no issues getting feedback or up to speed on things. Stuff like code review, which the article mentions, benefit in no way from in-person vs remote work set-ups. Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. The only junior employees that I’ve seen struggle in with remote work are those who<p>1) are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee<p>2) don’t even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn’t work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)<p>3) Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It’s easy to ask for feedback, or for problems that you can work on, or if you can pair with someone else on a problem they are working on so you can get some experience. None of that is really enabled or disabled by working from office&#x2F;remote.<p>If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school&#x2F;college. There are students I knew that were successful using resources that aren’t handed to them, like the internet. Others seemed to exclusively study via study groups, study guides, and going to the professor&#x2F;TA during office hours, and without these. Once you enter the work force, the second kind of student has those resources pulled out from underneath them and very quickly has to learn to be the first kind of student, or they will struggle. I think remote vs in office doesn’t make much of a difference for the first kind, but in office feels more like a stop-gap for the second kind until they become more senior and acclimate. That’s just speculation on my part though, and is exclusively based on my limited experience and field.

As a business owner it’s just so much more economical to hire remote. No office expense, the pool of talent is so much larger, no relocation expenses, people are happier with the flexible schedules.<p>Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow in this environment because economically it is just so overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner. I predict a surge in downtown living within the next 5 years as offices are converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments and condos. Young people will live there and WFH but get their socialization from the critical mass of young people living around them, learning how to make friends post-college outside of work (which is way healthier as well).<p>It’s way easier to figure out new mechanisms of working to mentor and grow junior employees in a remote environment than it is to fight economics. The economics are just superior and you can’t fight that.

From the paper:<p><pre><code> Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020. </code></pre> They studied just <i>one</i> company.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that the company doesn&#x27;t have a remote-first culture, and that things may have improved in the last 2+ years, as companies have gotten more used to both hybrid and remote-only.

I always feel that discussing remote work in the context of software dev (basically, discuss it on HN) is so heavily skewed to the point of being meaningless.<p>We&#x27;re talking about an industry that has a heavy concentration of, for lack of a better word, shut-ins, who don&#x27;t really like socializing and really excel at work when they are alone and not being bothered. Most of them self-taught to some degree, or entirely. Heavy technical knowledge and strong ability to deal with technical hurdle of remote work. Probably have a bad internet addiction too, and attribute most of their knowledge to it. The nature of the work also <i>heavily</i> lends itself to being remote, and why there were even people in the 90&#x27;s(!) who were doing remote developer work.<p>But take another field, like say marketing, that has lots of extroverted types and lots of meetings with heavy emphasis on visual things, that no one was doing remote prior to 2020, and suddenly remote work becomes a much more grinding endeavor that can really chew up juniors. These people are not shut-in computer geeks and their work is not a fit for those types by a long shot. As much as they may hate the commute and insist that remote work is fine, the fact of the matter is that the type of work really doesn&#x27;t lend itself to remote working.<p>TL;DR: These articles about remote work failing aren&#x27;t really talking about software jobs, and your experience as someone who has worked remote dev work for 15 years isn&#x27;t really relevant. You work a job that is almost tailor made for remote work.

I&#x27;ve been working remotely for about 9 years now, and have progressed from &quot;designer who knows jQuery&quot; to senior frontend dev. This criticism is true but not insurmountable.<p>Working remotely requires more active communication and explicit processes to make sure you&#x27;re filling the deficits, but this can be done. Do code reviews on your merge requests, talk on Slack, do a Live Share in VSCode.<p>And make the most of your in-person visits: I&#x27;ve had people tell me that I seem to know more people in the company then some of the people who are in the office regularly because I make it a point to make my rounds, introduce myself, and talk to people when I&#x27;m there.

I worked really hard in school, and when I got my golden ticket to silicon valley I was so excited to leave the corn fields and start my new life. I knew zero people in the Bay Area, but my coworkers and roommates (and roommates’ friends) were enough of a social circle for me; I loved my work and my team. One year later, CA lockdowns hit and <i>everyone</i> I knew left CA or moved back to familys’ million dollar homes. I was left adrift, not wanting to go back to the cornfields, expecting things to reasonably end soon, working remotely, and alone. They did not reasonably end: I grew more and more depressed and isolated. I tried but zero in-network providers were taking new patients for therapy&#x2F;psychologists, and the (sigh) remote therapy options just felt more isolating. I vividly remember having a good conversation on betterhelp, only for the call to end and just be left there sitting alone in my room, silence.. I talked to managers about it, but they told me I should watch more Netflix, and likely just furthered the decision to lay me off.<p>Getting laid off was the best thing to happen to me. The work culture that led to it being done over zoom, was the worst.

There&#x27;s a lot to say about in-person collaboration and knowledge transfer through osmosis, but I think this quote from the article highlights the crux of it<p>&gt; <i>When you’re remote, you’re out of sight, out of mind</i><p>The people in the office are having lunch together, they&#x27;re talking and laughing, participating in office birthday celebrations and get togethers after work. Even something as simple as a warm smile and a &quot;good morning&quot; has a cumulative impact on those around you. Your presence is a contribution to the cultural mosaic of the company in a visceral way.<p>It&#x27;s a lot easier to lay off someone you&#x27;ve never met and a lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they&#x27;re also someone you can have lunch or drinks with. The business world is just as much about politics as it is about productivity and if you find yourself far away from court, you&#x27;ll inevitably deal with the consequences of those who are present to assert their influence.

Even though I’ve personally taken the trade off of remote work, it’s always seemed intuitively obvious to me that there are also massive benefits to being in-person because collaboration, chance conversations, and feedback are more likely to happen naturally and because communication bandwidth is far higher face to face.<p>The trade-offs are largely around whether those things are desirable. Sometimes they aren’t. But also sometimes they are. And I’ve never understood why there seems to be such a dogmatic insistences that remote is better <i>on all fronts</i> and there can be no acknowledged benefits to in-office work.

This is quite transparently FUD. Clearly many people have a vested interest in commercial real estate occupancy being high and are pushing this narrative to inflate the value of their currently declining investments.

How was any of this hidden? It was plain a day from the start of the pandemic that not being present, not building social relationships and just being a name in a chatroom is going to have consequences in the velocity of your career.<p>Anyone claiming otherwise is lying to you because they don&#x27;t want to lose the perk of the flexibility and don&#x27;t personally care about their own trajectory at that point in their lives (nothing wrong with that, just wrong to claim its without tradeoffs).

Would working totally remote, but paying for quarterly tickets and accommodation to gather all staff (from all over the world) for a week to meet and brainstorm, be cheaper than hiring locally and renting?<p>I know someone who worked for a danish company, they has a similar scheme but every six months... worked really well for the most part. The company would hold retreats all over Europe, and since it combined both business and employee perks (stay at a nice resort), worked like a charm for them.<p>____<p>But it also highlighted an interesting issue, that might act as a counterpoint for the whole thing.<p>The problem was my acquaintance was a Pakistani citizen like me... and visa for us is a really big headache.<p>Not a big deal for an EU company to announce only a week or two before where the retreat would be held this time, and most of their workforce, who all had relatively strong passports, also didn&#x27;t face major issues.<p>But the earliest he himself could get any form of schengen visa was like 3 months after the retreat, so too late for the first one and too early for the second one, whenever and wherever that would be decided.<p>I think it worked out for him after sometime, but remote work is not all sunshine and roses.

Hm. I started working remotely at age 24 years back. This article just doesn&#x27;t reflect my experiences whatsoever. One data point doesn&#x27;t mean I&#x27;m right, just that this article seems written from an odd perspective from my perspective.

I love the photographs in this article, of young professionals smiling and having a great time in the open plan office. It&#x27;s been a few years, but I seem to recall a different vibe prevailing in offices like that. I guess you can&#x27;t take a picture of someone internally fuming because the person they&#x27;re sharing a desk with can&#x27;t stop drumming his fingers on the table and farting. I guess you can&#x27;t have a photoshoot of someone working in the stairwell because it&#x27;s the only place they can concentrate, since all the meeting rooms are already occupied by other people who can&#x27;t get work done at their desks.

First, there are the cliches: &quot;face to face meetings are better&quot;, &quot;spontaneous collaboration&quot;, &quot;out of sight, out of mind&quot;.<p>Then, there is the non-sequitur of people quit when the pandemic hit, it was because remote. Maybe it was a shit company already and remote just made it worse enough, did you control for that?<p>Last, but no least, what the hell do economists know about human behavior to do a study on how remote work affects it? It would be like me doing a study on ... Well, anything, I&#x27;m a college dropout, I&#x27;m not qualified to do any scientific research. But I still learned enough to spot a weak argument at best.

I started my career in my early 20s at a junior-unfriendly office. Senior guy next to me literally bought some noise-cancelling headphones to avoid talking to people. I hated that place.<p>Getting a 100% remote job is still the best decision I&#x27;ve made in my career. It has allowed me to make way above market average money and work with incredible professionals from all over the world, despite living in a country with a mediocre IT market.

I&#x27;m not here to assign blames, it seems to me the younger generation somehow missing a lot of life skills.<p>I was both a student and TA in college back in the days. My experience has been, those who go to Office Hours or TA hours usually perform better than those who don&#x27;t (unless you are one of those folks who are just smart and know how to work hard). In my junior&#x2F;senior year, I consistently went to office hours and TA hours, my grades got significantly better. This goes for my students as well.<p>Remote problem is like that as well. No one is parenting you anymore, your success and failure is based on your action. If you are a junior, schedule calls with your senior, two to three hours a week, prepare your questions and see what you get out of it. Don&#x27;t wait for your managers or seniors to contact you.<p>I will say this, there are companies&#x2F;seniors&#x2F;managers that are shit at helping juniors, just like shitty professors and TAs.

I think there&#x27;s a valid argument for the premise because office and remote environments are very different and people default to working like they&#x27;re in an office, but this piece reads like shit.<p>&gt; <i>At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?”</i><p>All I could think when I read this first paragraph is, &quot;she sounds incompetent&quot;. Feedback 10x a day makes zero sense once you have basic competence. You need much longer feedback loops for more complex and important skills.<p>Feedback is guidance. If you need guidance 10x a day...<p>30m once a week is a lot of time for feedback (Perhaps too much) if you&#x27;re smart about using the time, and it&#x27;s way more useful than 10x a day.

Dramatic reduction in networking opportunities does have negative impacts.<p>Organizations have to be more intentional about making it happen, as it won’t happen by itself anymore.

Something relevant here: The New York Times is a Real State company now. They manage the real State they had in the center of New York that is more valuable that all the printing presses in the US.<p>So this company is highly biased against Remote Work. If people can work from home, they don&#x27;t need the super expensive Offices in the center of the city, prices go down and NYT loses money.

&quot;At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?”<p>almost no one does that. Me smells a marketing piece done for property owners.

This really only applies at a company which is “in office first”. I’ve gone from being a junior to a lead fully remote. The only time I have had an issue is when all other team members were office based and the work culture was based on that.<p>When a company is remote first this issue goes away.

No, you just open Zoom and share screen and everything&#x27;s at least as good as in the office days when everyone was so distracted by interruptions that they could barely work.

From the article - &quot;but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code)&quot;<p>Sooooo...literally just measuring how many comments are being added to the code? That feels like both a really poor measurement for feedback, and also really easily addressable (heck, if you really want that in person feel, make it so PRs are done synchronously; someone hops onto a zoom and the writer presents their code, talking through the changes).

After 3 years at home I wouldn&#x27;t mind being a TWAT (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), provided I liked my colleagues and the cute account managers were in. But if I went back in and there was little social interaction I&#x27;d rather stay home.

It&#x27;s so much easier to take your laptop over to a senior colleague and ask them to help you debug something in person. There&#x27;s much more friction to asking for a call, waiting for them to respond, sending them the invite, perhaps waiting for them to get to a phone room if they happen to be in the office, setting up screen sharing (with its minute and fuzzy type), and having to type things in yourself.

This is big, serious and meaningful. It is tangent to the main problem on making remote work to properly work: formalize communication and iteration.<p>Management needs to make a conscious, methodological and deliberated effort to stimulate communication.<p>Dialog channels must be pried open in the remote era. There is a proper workplace culture for remote work. An organization doesn&#x27;t just wander into remote with the same practices and culture of office work. My suggestions:<p>* rules for asynchronous communication. This includes a development methodology with full support on CI&#x2F;CD techniques, issues tracking, code reviews, clear documentation, etc.<p>* people should be available on Slack&#x2F;Dischord on pre defined times. You know the &quot;my doors are open&quot;, &quot;cubicles are meant to stimulate cooperation&quot; slogans? In remote work these informal channels must be explicit<p>* There should be overlapping timezones in the team.<p>* stimulate frequent meetings with a maximum of five people, where people should talk not only about work but also personal subjects of their choice. This stimulates camaraderie and personal trust.

Relationships and quick chat get built and done on Slack. My professional network is a web of in-work, Signal chats, professional Slacks&#x2F;Discords. I have a massively largely and more substantive professional information network that benefits me and my employer than I do if I kept all the focus in the office and on what Mike my manager fed me during hallway interactions.<p>Proactivity to the above is worth hiring for, but works fine if you do. This all comes down to “since I don’t want to DM someone and set up zoom calls, and travel to the office once a week a quarter, let’s make everyone start commuting in.”<p>This article describes people who don’t know how to do that well or want to leverage alternative routes to achieve. Or, using number of GitHub comments as a measure for good feedback is about as logical as number of slack comments per day. Engineers know these metrics are tracked for performance and compensation.

Management: You don&#x27;t want to work remotely Employees: Yes we do Management: No you don&#x27;t, look at all these studies about how bad it is for us? Employees: We don&#x27;t care Management: No you don&#x27;t, look at all these studies about how bad it is for you, sorta, in some minor aspects?<p>Some people want to work remotely, other people don&#x27;t, and management&#x2F;corpos HATE it because they invested in massive office leases&#x2F;are listening to their rich investor friends who have money tied in urban office real estate.<p>I&#x27;m sick of these propaganda pieces, you&#x27;re not going to convince the people who want something that they don&#x27;t want it this way. IDGAF how much my &quot;career&quot; will suffer, I like spending my day hugging my wife and gardening when I don&#x27;t have work on my desk. FOH.

I don&#x27;t have an answer for this, really, and I can see it. Still, I think if workers prefer a certain way of working, they aren&#x27;t cattle, or just a number, and they should be allowed to make this decision for themselves.<p>I&#x27;m older, financially set, and have a partner with a good job, so I can&#x27;t make that call for others. Part of how I got to this place was by leveraging professional relationships along the way. I was never more than a couple of phone calls away from something if I was starving. If I didn&#x27;t have that I&#x27;d just be a house husband I guess. Or maybe a NEET.<p>10 years ago, I would have told youngers to get their ass back to work and never have lunch alone. Now that I&#x27;m rounding the corner towards retirement, I can&#x27;t give that same advice in good faith.

The problem isn&#x27;t remote work. The problem is tradional in-office management and leadership that don&#x27;t understand remote isn&#x27;t just add Slack or add Teams and you&#x27;re a remote-able team.<p>There&#x27;s more to it than that.<p>But once again leadership blames the proles for getting it wrong.

One thing my remote team does that I think helps massively with this is we have a zoom room that&#x27;s always open and we use it for regular meetings like standup, sprint planning, etc. When the meeting is over, you can hop (many do) but you can also stay as long as you want. Even as a write this, I&#x27;m in the zoom meeting. You can go camera off, but if you ever have even a small question it&#x27;s encouraged to ask. This has helped massively with keeping an open communication channel that feels organic and synchronous. I highly recommend this, but the key is it&#x27;s fully optional, it&#x27;s camera optional, it&#x27;s mic optional, and there&#x27;s zero punishment for not being there.

The study used as the basis for this article looked at one set of workers at one company. This is hardly worthy of a writeup in a local industry rag, let alone the NYT, but the point of this and similar pieces is to empower owners over workers.

I work remotely and am a big proponent of remote work but onboarding is definitely a huge challenge. Getting young people up to speed is doable if you are using a lot of standard frameworks about which you can find information about on the internet. But it gets really if you need very specialized hardware and software and also use processes that are required by regulation. I work 8n medical devices and I have noticed a lot of our offshore don’t really understand things even after years. It’s probably solvable but you need management that understands this and puts resources into onboarding processes.

It happened to me when I was junior engineer during covid, honestly I came out as a better developer since I learned how to get answers from the code, I got much better at navigating different codebases. Though it was still a drag sometimes and I felt my manager didn&#x27;t do enough to create an environment where junior engineers could thrive in.<p>I found that there were 2 kind of seniors - genuinely helpful ones, total assholes. These assholes will never help you, if you ping them they pretend to not see it and the helpful ones are always so busy they can&#x27;t get any time to help you.

There&#x27;s a couple of reasons I can think of: &quot;young professionals&quot; are more likely to be flat sharing or living somewhere that&#x27;s sub-optimal for remote work, and the other is access to grey-beards like myself for questions about the system and so on.<p>50 yr old me versus 25 yr old me: flat vs house with office, knew my way around Solaris and Windows, but not much experience in large systems or databases and so on.<p>And the IT world is so much bigger than 90s. Back then, it was Solaris or NT4. Oracle and Sybase. VB and C++.

Do we have a word&#x2F;phrase to describe the rather obvious fight over remote-work that broke out roughly 2 years ago? I still remember the mechanics. Covid-19 forced management to go all-in on remote-work, which was a god-sent for those which always wanted to have more of it. Now, these people (rightfully so) realized that with the end of the pandemic, their newly acquired &quot;right to work remote&quot; would be endangered, so we started to see dogfights over the concept. The one side emphatically arguing for remote-work because they were seeing their new acquisition endangered, while the other side trying to get back to work with other people. That said, in my opinion, the discussion wouldn&#x27;t have to be so energetically loaded if both sides would realize that it all boils down to CHOICE! If people were not forced to go one or another way, they could actually choose what fits them best, and there would be no need to fight over what is right or wrong. This article wouldn&#x27;t even have to be written. Because if WFH is not mandated, people choose what they prefer, and missed opportunities are much less relevant as long as you are walking a path you actually decided to walk on.

It&#x27;s amazing how much better teams are at remote work now than in 2018. However... It&#x27;s still just not as efficient as in-person fact-to-face ad-hoc meetings. The &quot;water cooler discussion forum&quot; is very real. Informational cross-pollination between teams and between levels of the org structure simply aren&#x27;t happening as much with remote work. The siloing has locked companies into rigid plans that cannot respond to change.

I am burnt out on remote work and have been burnt out on in-person work. Now I am just trying to plan a way out from all of this via self-employment.

I don&#x27;t even know what half the people do at my company. Productivity has no doubt fallen to historic lows. I def feel like 5% of the people are doing 75% of the work. I agree with the article that junior employees are not setup to succeed in this environment which will ultimately result in companies hiring less junior people (fine with me, tired of babysitting).

first world problems.<p>a huge number of employees are punished for socializing &#x2F; having &quot;random&quot; meetings at work. why arent you at your cube &#x2F; chair doing your job instead of wandering around talking to people?<p>the metrics a lot of companies use purposely look for that and punish it. and tech-bros should understand this because they developed a lot of those tools.<p>the lunch breaks are 20-30 minutes, the cafeteria is replaced with shitty vending machines, breakrooms have taken away all the chairs, the ones that are left have some giant TV blaring reality TV 24&#x2F;7. people get in trouble for spending too much time in the shitter.<p>buildings are sectioned off, you have to have a badge to go anywhere and do anything. if you are in the wrong area you are a security risk and could be written up.<p>dunno if people realize what tiny tiny fraction of the workforce has these jobs where they are supposed to randomly walk around and talk to each other about problems.

I feel like this is a management problem that needs to be solved. As the context has changed so should management style.

&gt; Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what broad learnings you can derive from such a narrow study. Individual firms have seen wildly different WFH outcomes based on how they implemented it.

Let me guess, and going back to the office is the only solution, isn&#x27;t it?

I can see that they will say anything just to get people to sit in the office, commute downtown or wherever and justify commercial real-estate.<p>Reality is that people are much happier when they can work from home. Not every profession and position can do this and maybe those who need to show up should be paid more tbh.<p>Economical and ecological impact of working from home is huge, positively huge. Companies get to expand without huge fixed costs for example.<p>Articles like this are created to promote world that has been and is not coming back.

Our plane of reference for our coworkers and interactions with them is now confined to the two-dimensional nature of our screens, rather than the three-dimensional world we &quot;used&quot; to see and interact with them in.<p>This is another interesting way our cultural changes in work may affect our experience because of our biology. The spatial data that contribute to declarative, episodic memory in amygdala-hippocampal memory formation, for example.

What a timely article. While I&#x27;m not a junior, I did take a down-level at my current job because it&#x27;s a completely different field. So, even though I&#x27;m not junior, I&#x27;ve felt the affects of this as well.<p>However, the main problem I&#x27;ve had is social isolation. I&#x27;m going to be quitting my remote job and don&#x27;t plan to work fully remote again for the foreseeable future.

&quot;Hidden Penalty&quot; is less feedback. But mostly the kind of feedback allistic people worry about. That not the kind of in-depth feedback that can make a real career difference, it&#x27;s the &quot;your pant legs are too short&quot; kind of feedback that is important in the shallow sense of being a good corporate drone.

This is why every company should adopt hybrid. Its just totally unfair on young professionals starting out&#x2F;

I think I learned more from the fellow juniors in my first couple of jobs than I ever did from managers&#x2F;supervisors&#x2F;seniors - remote work is easy for me now that I’m mostly “baked” but think it would have been a huge detriment for me early career.

At this point, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it comes to light that such research is funded by hedge funds owning the commercial real estate you &quot;absolutely have to have for the poor young professionals.&quot;

I think feedback is a minor point, much more important in my mind is the morale-boost you get from working in the office alongside colleagues that in my experience is completely missing from remote-work

If you want to stand out, the traditional way of just showing up to an office isn’t really enough.<p>Write company blog posts, hold demos of new tech, have 1 on 1 talks regularly. You have to think like a content creator.

This was stated early on as a downside.

For now, jobs that can be performed remotely should also be the easiest to automate.<p>We&#x27;ll see how long it takes.

Propaganda piece from economists. Hello CBRE. I&#x27;m part of the demographic they claim and it couldn&#x27;t be further from the truth for me. In remote env, if your seniors (management or peers) opt for their productivity 100% over training juniors then you have a shitty team and that&#x27;s hardly unique to remote work. In fact, you will likely spend more years wasted commuting into office doing nothing as opposed to having more time to experiment, hypothesize, and learn. Good teams make it policy and process to lift everyone. They have networking events in person and remote. They accept the situations that as adults and leaders we don&#x27;t need mom and dad to hold us so we can go down the slide and write a pr. Bad teams hyperfixate on metrics like cr revisions, drown newbies on complexity impossible, ambiguity black holes projects. Again, these things happen in the office too, so why is this study focusing on an issue prescribing it unique to remote? I don&#x27;t know.

I have a slightly different take about this than other folks. Perhaps it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m older and when I entered the workforce, there were very few jobs that <i>could</i> be remote, and even fewer that actually were.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in-office for most of my career (much of that was as a consultant hired for specific projects, and many clients want to <i>see</i> you working), but pre-pandemic I was full-time remote for more than five years, which was mostly positive, but with a few caveats.<p>One of the biggest caveats was that it was more difficult to build strong teams, as your colleagues were just voices (this is before ubiquitous video meetings) on the phone and text in chat and&#x2F;or emails.<p>But that isn&#x27;t limited to work environments either. More and more of our lives are spent online, with less and less human interaction. I suppose that might be a plus for the misanthropes among us, but it seems like that&#x27;s fracturing our social cohesion (I&#x27;m in the US, my experience may not be valid elsewhere).<p>Please note that I am emphatically <i>not</i> prescribing full-time return to the office. Not even close. WFH allowed me to be more productive and not waste 700 hours or so a year sitting on a train commuting. I shudder to think about how much I hated driving to&#x2F;from client sites as a consultant as that&#x27;s even worse than riding the train.<p>No, I don&#x27;t believe that your employer&#x2F;co-workers are &quot;family&quot; (well, unless they actually are but that&#x27;s not usually the case in larger organizations), but humans are social creatures and really do need real, physical human interaction (I&#x27;m not talking about sex which is important, but irrelevant in this context) to maintain a healthy outlook on other humans and society in general.<p>An outlier (at least I hope it is) being the recent spate of people being shot just for attempting contact (knocking on a stranger&#x27;s door) with other humans.<p>What makes folks so suspicious and willing to harm their neighbors? I think it&#x27;s a lack of regular human contact and the constant drumbeat of evil deeds from the news media (how does the old saw go? &quot;If it bleeds, it leads.&quot;). And with the ability to get news from anywhere in the world in near real-time, we constantly hear about the worst of us, but rarely about the mundane, pleasant interactions that people have every day.<p>Perhaps I&#x27;m way off base with this take, but it seems to me that fostering human interaction with physical proximity with one&#x27;s larger society promotes social cohesion.<p>That&#x27;s not to say such interactions <i>must</i> be in the workplace, but for many folks (given car&#x2F;suburban culture), it might the only time they might interact with other humans who aren&#x27;t family or close friends.<p>Which brings to mind Asimov&#x27;s dichotomy (as he combined his &#x27;Robot&#x27; and &#x27;Foundation&#x27; universes), especially in <i>Foundation and Earth</i>[0], where the &quot;Spacers&quot; are so anti-social that they loathe any physical, human interaction whatsoever, whereas the &quot;Settlers&quot; were comfortable being around other humans. I&#x27;m not saying that this is what&#x27;s happening, just that there are some interesting parallels.<p>I don&#x27;t pretend to have all (or even some&#x2F;any) the answers, but interacting with actual human beings usually enhances my view of humanity&#x2F;society&#x2F;local community, while online interactions mostly degrade that view.[1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Foundation_and_Earth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Foundation_and_Earth</a><p>[1] Please note that I&#x27;m not being categorical here. There absolutely are unpleasant&#x2F;evil&#x2F;nasty people in the world who should be avoided. But at least in my experience, most humans are honest, decent people just trying to live a decent life.<p>Edit: clarified prose. Fixed typo.

Yet another study to try to get people back to the office

At this point, I&#x27;m betting this was a paid for study and article by a group interested in keeping corporate real estate values up. I&#x27;ll suspect most articles before this point were too.

Dude why do you guys keep reading this trash company&#x27;s articles? These corporatists are pay to print. They&#x27;ll print anything you pay them to.<p>Stop reading this garbage.<p>I strongly suggest checking out your weekly media assassination, tune in to the best pod in the universe: No Agenda<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcastaddict.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;4175796" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcastaddict.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;4175796</a>

Unpopular opinion based on my personal experience: Remote work is broken and we will slowly see a full return to the office in most cases.<p>Why is it broken? This article points out some of the big reasons but the ones that stand out to me are: Lack of face to face collaboration, Lack of learning via &quot;osmosis&quot;, and the biggest one I do not hear a lot about is the complete lack of social skills that I see from people who have worked from home for the past 3+ years. Some people have become totally incapable of dealing with others due to the fact they have been holed up for so long.

Why to we &quot;really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment&quot;?<p>It simply doesn&#x27;t exist. Remote work, while great for junior engineers who enjoy slacking off and playing video games during meetings, should only be reserved for senior people