OpenAI CEO: Fully Remote Work for Startups is 'One of the Tech Industry's Worst Mistakes' (fortune.com) 207
ChatGPT creator OpenAI is now valued at nearly $30 billion, reports Fortune — adding that CEO Sam Altman "still thinks startups are most effective when employees work together in an office."
The idea of fully remote work becoming the norm has come and gone, he said this week at a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by the fintech company Stripe. "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn't need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity," he told attendees. "I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
He isn't alone in his assessment. Many CEOs have been demanding that remote employees spend more time in the office, among them Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and Robert Thomson at News Corp. During the pandemic, remote work or a hybrid work schedule was the only option for many office workers — and many grew to prefer it to being in the office every workday.
"I do not believe in remote work for startups," Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a venture based on it. Younger workers, he noted, "learn by osmosis" in a way that requires in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them...
Altman said, "I feel pretty strongly that startups need a lot of in-person time, and the more fragile and nuanced and uncertain a set of ideas are, the more time you need together in person."
He isn't alone in his assessment. Many CEOs have been demanding that remote employees spend more time in the office, among them Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and Robert Thomson at News Corp. During the pandemic, remote work or a hybrid work schedule was the only option for many office workers — and many grew to prefer it to being in the office every workday.
"I do not believe in remote work for startups," Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a venture based on it. Younger workers, he noted, "learn by osmosis" in a way that requires in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them...
Altman said, "I feel pretty strongly that startups need a lot of in-person time, and the more fragile and nuanced and uncertain a set of ideas are, the more time you need together in person."
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
It would also be interesting to know how much of their personal portfolio is invested in commercial real estate.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would also be interesting to know how much of their personal portfolio is invested in commercial real estate.
This may be a bigger factor than anybody knows.
Even for small businesses, if you own the freakin' building, that has to have some thumb-on-the-scale effect on your thinking, just seeing your pricey little building sit empty every day.
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It would also be interesting to know how much of their personal portfolio is invested in commercial real estate.
This may be a bigger factor than anybody knows.
Even for small businesses, if you own the freakin' building, that has to have some thumb-on-the-scale effect on your thinking, just seeing your pricey little building sit empty every day.
In other words, the sunk cost fallacy [wikipedia.org] - business owners are not immune to it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Well it's definitely not what it says on the tin either way.
This argument that remote working has failed makes little sense when tech companies made their highest profits and had their highest share prices in history across 2 years of remote working, and it's only when they started forcing people back to the office that confidence in them and profits started to absolutely collapse.
Of course it's easy to wave that off with "but covid!"; yet what about covid made Google more profitable? Companies were shut do
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Fact is, nothing about return to office is going to help most big tech companies improve profitability. The prime driver for some seems to be pushing people out to flood the market with developers in the hope to drive developer salaries down.
You're close. It's to make people scared for their jobs so they won't demand things, like perks, better pay, etc. It is psychological class warfare, with the ultra-wealthy deciding that too many people are having too much luck moving from middle class to borderline wealthy, and balking because their exclusive club is becoming less exclusive.
Interestingly for all the fake news about remote working having failed, I noticed Zuckerberg the other flat out back tracked on his return to office mandate saying people can in fact continue to remote work. It's pretty clear he knows he's lost too much talent, and for all the bluster about firing managers he still ultimately has to appease developers by continuing to allow remote work.
Worse, when companies do things that make people want to leave, they tend to lose the best talent first. The people who are good enough to switch jobs easily, unless
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It would also be interesting to know how much of their personal portfolio is invested in commercial real estate.
This may be a bigger factor than anybody knows.
Even for small businesses, if you own the freakin' building, that has to have some thumb-on-the-scale effect on your thinking, just seeing your pricey little building sit empty every day.
How many small businesses, particularly in IT, actually own their own building?
Not only are IT firms likely to be younger (less time to raise for the capital investment of a building) but their workforce size is a lot more variable. As such rental makes way more sense than ownership.
I suspect most businesses, particularly in IT, rent their offices. It doesn't mean there isn't still some sunk cost going on in maintaining the lease. But at the same time there's denial the other way. Your workforce outgrows th
Re: Wow. (Score:2)
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Though this is certainly a motivation for some of the push to return to the office, I think it is also true that employers naturally suspect their employees will slack off, and feel less able to keep an eye on them when they work remote.
Whether it is true or not doesn't matter. It is in their nature to be controlling.
So, they will always hate remote work and will always resist it and push for its abolition. The reasons stated will vary and aren't actually relevant, compared to these two reasons.
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sure there are outliers, but they get filtered quick and shown the door.
Re: Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes I am. Deal with it.
No human I met is worth a second of jail time, so they are all still alive.
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, I know that kind of person quite well. I just don't get why some people get angry at something people do that has no impact on them. That's something I really don't get. It's not like I tell people to sit at home and not interact with each other. If they so please, go ahead. Just please don't interact with me unless necessary.
As you might imagine, I had my fair share of these people, especially the kind that thinks I'm unhappy because I don't stick my cadaver into the middle of other humans. No, I'm not. There is absolutely no reason for me to do so. And no, you're not helping me by forcing that situation onto me and I will enjoy it if I only notice just how awesome it is. I have been in that situation, I did not enjoy it, and no, I wasn't just in the wrong company.
I was in company. That's bad enough.
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Sounds lovely. How's the internet connection?
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
The public is unaware who has actual expertise on things. Hence they mistakenly believe that if somebody "important" says something, they actually know what they are talking about. And the press follows that, these days often with no fact-checking whatsoever. Kind of a giant "argument from authorty" clustefuck.
That's a great way to put it. (Score:3)
But saying "who has the actual expertise" is a great way to call out how utterly incompetent the people running our lives actually are.
Re: Wow. (Score:2)
Yep. Sales is all about making up plausable lies on the fly and managing WFH staff would require actual effort to plan things properly.
Re: Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Most executives are talk before work kind of people.
Most of the ones I've met are talk before, during, and after work kind of people. In fact, it seems like that might be all they know how to do.
Re: Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like all the "back to the office" executives talk about their feelings and impressions. This news story is no different. Plenty of "he thinks" and "he believes".
A few do cite one-sided data that people learn from others. While true, it is not comparative, and we have plenty of companies where paired programming and mentorship go on with two or three people chatting for 6+ hours per day.
The strongest voices supporting work from home cite data rather than opinion. Stanford University finds a 13% difference in general, with many hugely positive outliers. Prodoscore pulled before/after data for 30,000 workers and in addition to a 22% improvement of satisfaction and several months better retention, wfh improved performance generally by 5%, with a trend that productive people became far more productive, non-productive people drifted even more. Study after study comparing them find significant improvements across many categories. This is actually supported by data and studies, not the gut feeling of people who own buildings.
Re: Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason the on-site crowd does "think" and "believe" is that they are simply wrong and stuck in the dark past. They cannot admit that, so they try to argue from authority. This is just as invalid as always.
Two sided response [Re: Wow.] (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a little dismayed at how completely one-sided the responses here are. You would think that there are no positives to human interaction at all.
My personal take on it is that there are some situations where in-person work is better; but many others where remote is fine. There are particular types of people who work fine remotely, but not all.
But that the particular article being discussed was not about remote work generally; it was specifically about start-ups. Yes, I can easily believe that for the specific case of a start-up, when processes and proceedures are still being hammered out, where even the nature of the business case is still open to taking unexpected turns to take advantage of customers that the founders hadn't even though of, in this case yes, in person will be better specifically for the reasons given.
If you're putting together a team from people who haven't any experience working together, being together helps. And if you're building prototypes, solidworks models are useful, but there's nothing as valuable as actually picking up hardware in your hands and poking around with it, and being there when the skilled engineers pick it up and poke around with it.
...but even there, the people actually doing the technical (non-hardware) work could probably work remotely. But even here, this works assuming that they are experienced, and know how to collaborate remotely.
Slashdotters seem to reason "I work well remotely, therefore everybody does. I know how to effectively use tools to collaborate remotely, therefore everybody does". Not true.
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Coincidentally, on Friday (before anyone saw this article) I was talking to a married couple of friends of mine, who work at two separate fully-remote companies. I brought up the IBM chairman's statement the other day against remote work. And my friends pointedly said they couldn't imagine why anyone would not do full-remote nowadays, specifically for the case of startups.
Why spend the majority of your investment on office space that does no one any good? Why not spend it all on acquiring the best talent, a
Re:Two sided response [Re: Wow.] (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was remote for two weeks at the start of the pandemic. It was pure hell. The lack of human interaction, being tempted by all the distractions that I have in my own home, I got pretty much nothing done. Plus seeing the same 4 walls 24 hours a day was like living in prison. I also missed the distraction that was my commute each way.
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Re:Two sided response [Re: Wow.] (Score:4, Insightful)
My very small company went fully remote at the start of the pandemic. But we started and continue twice weekly Zoom calls to which all employees are invited. There is no agenda -- these calls are intended to be social discussions, not work discussions (although work issues do sometimes intrude). My own team also has a daily call to discuss work.
I think these calls have helped people to remain connected and productive. Yes, we spend quite a lot of time in these calls, but how much time do people spend at the water cooler, or similar?
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I have been full remote since the start of the pandemic and I love it. I get a lot of work done and I have more time overall due to not having a commute. However, I also do things with people in real life. Work is not where much of my socializing happens.
It is even easier now to do pair programming that it was before the pandemic. We use tools like vscode live share and teams to do live pair programing from anywhere in the world.
Re: Two sided response [Re: Wow.] (Score:2)
If you are lacking in interaction, you are doing WFH wrong. People who love social can have constant video chat. We have a bunch of social Slack channels on various topics, plus an open chat huddle for people to just shoot the bull.
At startups you can have constant communication and collaboration, open mics and cameras as often as you want to the point it is too much preventing work. Not paying for an office space saves a few thousand a month, depending on size and location, maybe enabling hiring one more
When it works, it works [Re: Two sided response] (Score:2)
The argument just devolves into "it works when it works."
If you try to find these "study after study"s purportedly showing that "the productive people are more productive in WFH home environments," you'll find that these are a biased s
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Different jobs, different requirements (Score:2)
I can interact with humans just fine over slack, or voice, or video. I have no need to taste, touch or smell them.
Good for you. So, work from home works for one person, doing one particular job with one particular team. And from that one data point, it is not possible to conclude that work from home is best for all people for all jobs and all possible teams.
I'll also quibble that I only have your opinion that you're interacting "just fine" in your job. You are biased. Most people think that they are better workers than average.
Was this working at a start-up, by the way (which is what the question was about)? Did the
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Re: Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like all the "back to the office" executives talk about their feelings and impressions. This news story is no different. Plenty of "he thinks" and "he believes".
A few do cite one-sided data that people learn from others. While true, it is not comparative, and we have plenty of companies where paired programming and mentorship go on with two or three people chatting for 6+ hours per day.
If you're complaining about people not using data I'm not sure that anecdotes about pair programming is the way to start.
The strongest voices supporting work from home cite data rather than opinion.
Your data is completely irrelevant.
We're talking about tech startups and you're citing a study of a large travel agency in China [stanford.edu].
Like I figured it was a tech worker study, but then I looked it up and a travel agency? For one thing I suspect the majority of their job is client interaction, which is phone/email regardless of WFH, so not a big change there. And the troubleshooting is probably fairly well defined problems so it's not like you're helping someone else out with a new API.
This on the other hand is a discussion about startups specifically.
In a startup you're trying to not only figure out the foundation of the main product, but you're also discussing potential customers, possible pivots, figuring out how to establish workflows, learning new tech, internal responsibilities, etc, etc.
It's basically a huge list of ill-defined questions for you and your co-founders to figure out. This requires a lot of high quality nuanced communication, much easier to do face-to-face.
The other huge factor is the personal aspect. Being motivated is a normal company is kinda easy, you have managers with clear authority and you don't need to worry about the business so much since if it fails you just sub that paycheck for another.
But a startup has none of that, you lose the personal bond and accountability between co-founders, people get discouraged, they get demotivated, they put in less time, and eventually they get other jobs.
If you're working remotely they this basically works out as people increasingly ghosting the company and it's harder to detect and deal with than in-person.
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I've been working remotely - mostly for startups - since 2012. I've worked in a number of roles.
This is what I've observed, in general.
1) Technical people do just fine, even optimally,
2) Remote staff are usually cheaper than office staff, both in terms of overall cost and salary: you don't need to supply them with office space, and you don't have to pay nearly as much for eg. state employment/unemployment taxes (depending on which states they're living in).
3) Hiring remote staff provides an opportunity to h
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I'd say #3 is more important now because a lot of people have gotten used to remote work and now live far from tech hubs. Some live with their families. Others have spouses that need to work on-location. They're not going to move for personal reasons.
And #8 is not a real difference. People may be at the office for 8 hours, but they absolutely do not work for those full 8 hours.
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The context is startups... And in that context it makes sense to have the people involved in close proximity. In an established company most people are in a position where they know what to do - it's routine - and can do it remotely assuming it's not physical labor of some sort. When starting up from scratch, you're still figuring out what roles people will have in the company and there's a benefit to more immediate access and free flow of ideas beyond "doing your job".
Hard for predators to be effective wfh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hard for predators to be effective wfh (Score:5, Insightful)
Sexual predators and toxic office behavior is harder for bad leadership to pull off when people are wfh and there's a paper trail or when toxic interactions can be recorded / documented easily. IMO that's the REAL reason they hate wfh.
Or even just the withering look, the whispered comment, the snubbing at the proverbial water cooler ... all of that kind of stuff is much harder to pull off. Doesn't have to rise to the predator level.
Not to mention that bosses don't get as much ego boost from only remote fawning.
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Sexual predators and toxic office behavior is harder for bad leadership to pull off when people are wfh and there's a paper trail or when toxic interactions can be recorded / documented easily. IMO that's the REAL reason they hate wfh.
Or even just the withering look, the whispered comment, the snubbing at the proverbial water cooler ...
You even thought to post about that "withering look" and other stuff that is an important part of your need to work at home?
This kind of thing happens any place where three or more humans congregate.
It is also where someone finally said the quiet part out loud. There is often a problem that some people have. Maybe it is extreme sensitivity, or over analyzing things to find something negative in every situation.
The closest I can come to figuring it out is one person we hired years ago. One of the fir
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All I suggest is that some of the more misanthropic folks in here might give some thought to the possibility that they might be experiencing issues with interacting with other humans.
Some of us are pretty far on the spectrum and it probably plays into why we chose our professions (I do software development). I love what I do and don't actually hate people, but high school behavior and corporate politics has been hell on my nerves.
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All I suggest is that some of the more misanthropic folks in here might give some thought to the possibility that they might be experiencing issues with interacting with other humans.
Some of us are pretty far on the spectrum and it probably plays into why we chose our professions (I do software development). I love what I do and don't actually hate people, but high school behavior and corporate politics has been hell on my nerves.
And thank you for the insightful reply. To me that is a good assessment.
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You even thought to post about that "withering look" and other stuff that is an important part of your need to work at home?
You misunderstand.
I assure you that I am quite up to withstanding the withering look, lol, and all the rest.
We were speculating as to why some managerial types irrationally hate WFH. It may be that they miss some of these tools in the toolchest.
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I feel like you're deliberately missing or avoiding the point: it's simply harder for sexual harassment and predatory behaviour to occur remotely. Period, end of story.
People that enjoy that feeling of power don't like remote work. They don't like that they can't physically intimidate people.
I've worked in the games industry my whole career, and the amount of office gossip and drama that goes on in a big office is crazy. I think we've all read plenty about toxic studios with executives that harass women ove
Re: Hard for predators to be effective wfh (Score:2)
I've seen so much of that. Both c-levels giving promotions and benefits in return for sex and women employed as "managers" of something but essentially working as company funded prostitutes.
One day the IRS is going to decide that sexual services are a taxable benefit like the company funding your kids school or buying you holidays.
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Sexual predators and toxic office behavior is harder for bad leadership to pull off when people are wfh and there's a paper trail or when toxic interactions can be recorded / documented easily. IMO that's the REAL reason they hate wfh.
Quite frankly I believe it has a hell of a lot more to do with tens of thousands of former cube farmer people police we used to believe had value before a global pandemic proved otherwise.
That and a few trillion in corporate real estate that became rather worthless...well you have plenty of reasons Greed is pulling it's usual fuckery.
Your example we can only hope still lives as a fractional problem by comparison.
Check out Jean Lave (Score:5, Interesting)
We may be introverted &/or a bit "on the spectrum" but we still need to work better with others to complete complex projects. Some of us may not like it but that doesn't stop it from being true.
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And, has she studied what advantages and disadvantages remote work has as well and what disadvantages work in the office has, or is this an entirely one-sided thing, i.e. meaningless?
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And, has she studied what advantages and disadvantages remote work has as well and what disadvantages work in the office has, or is this an entirely one-sided thing, i.e. meaningless?
Yeah, exactly.
I work closely together with people every day. I just do it from my living room.
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Their observations are usually insightful, spot on, and they tend to make a lot of p
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Which end of the spectrum involves launching a character attack on someone you've never met and whose circumstances you can't possibly know?
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Which end of the spectrum involves launching a character attack on someone you've never met and whose circumstances you can't possibly know?
I'm roughly in the middle of the spectrum. Which means I don't specifically needconstant interactions with other humans, but I understand that there are times that one needs must interact. As I've told many before, my present work involves roughly half at home, and the other half on location. This works about as perfectly as can be envisioned. Yay for working at home! Now to the other part. If a person posts I was beat up in an alleyway and now suffers ptsd, I'll get them the benefit of the doubt. And as s
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The fact you wrote out so much of a post just proves you are deeply autistic and should reflect on that. Your ego is consuming you.
You have issue with autism?
Verbosity?
This better?
Re: Check out Jean Lave (Score:3)
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Learning passively like this is not exclusive to in office work. It is culture. Remote work has no requirements to be isolated. Pair programming is just as effective in person as it is remotely in every instance Iâ(TM)ve done it. What hinders that communication is the work culture to shove people into closets and keep then from making those kinds of connections. And that has nothing to do with remote or not and everything to do with bad culture which happens in offices as well.
Who were you working for, Josef Stalin? Your claims of being stuffed in closets and not allowed to interact with other people and that is work culture is not remotely real work culture.
Anyhow, I'm a firm believer that people who demand to only work at home should only work from home. This keeps you happy, and keeps others happy as well.
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Who were you working for, Josef Stalin? [...] I'm a firm believer that people who demand to only work at home should only work from home.
I'm a firm believer that some people who demands to work at the office should remain at home.
Ah, AC - I have a different opinion. They should be allowed to find other employment.
It's like I say. Everyone makes me happy. Some when the enter the room, and some when they leave it.
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Working remotely doesn't prevent working together though. You act like people are somehow banned from talking if they're not physically in a room.
In cubicle based offices you're not interacting with anyone else the vast majority of the time anyway.
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How does that work when I'm in my office with the door closed. Or worse in an "open" office with my headphones on trying to block out the cacophony of 100 random conversations so I can code or read a spec.
In my 25 years of tech I've never worked on a team that wasn't spread across 3 different cities anyway. So all work has been "remote" work regardless of whether it was via VPN. The only exception was when I worked at a small DoD contractor that had only 1 location and for obvious reasons, some work could o
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She's shown how workers learn huge amounts from colleagues while working side-by-side....
When I'm in the office and I have a question for a coworker, I email, voice chat, or instant message them. When I'm working from home and I have a question for a coworker, I email, voice chat, or instant message them. In both scenarios, our workspaces are frequently too far apart for the (usually cringe-inducing) in-person meeting.
In the office, though, the focus-killing ambient annoyances make it more difficult to carry out post-contact activities. At home, there is no such problem. I think this study is
Interesting (Score:3)
Interesting to see dinosaur workforce strategy being touted by a startup CEO. Perhaps ChatGPT is advising him to invest in commercial real estate....
Another CEO of 8 figure company with at least a 7 (Score:2)
If all the interactions are recorded (Score:2)
Of course he would (Score:2)
Remote work gives you freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes you wonder if just over a third of "smart money" has crowded realestate and remote work has completely fucked their gold goose up.
Remote work gives you freedom. It really does.
Freedom to buy land or property which is remote and can be paid for in 10-15 years on an average salary.
Freedom not to be stuck in endless congestion and air pollution.
Freedom not to pay extortionate rail fee, medium-term slavery car finance options or sharing your income with oil pumps.
Freedom to recieve whatever deliveries you'd be chasing notes for otherwise.
The freedom to use your own kitchen and have whatever food or drink you'd like.
It gives you freedom from high price concentrations in popular areas due to ever increasing realestate prices forcing a chain that tends to land on the consumer.
Specifically for young people I say this; find reasons to keep the extra money in your pocket and working for you instead of making it work for some fossil that has mortgaged multiple properties thinking it'll always pay for itself is now desperate to pass the higher interest rates to you.
Insist on remote working.
So much remote shilling (Score:2, Insightful)
There is so much remote work shilling on this website.
How many articles will it take for people to accept the reality that remote work doesn't work?
Sure, it may work for your IT contractor middle-level job. That's not what actually matters in the grand scheme of things though.
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It wouldn't work at the chemical plant either. Nor at the mine I used to work at.
Sometimes you need to lay hands on the machinery. And the mad scramble that ensues when the power goes off is certainly not going to work on-line.
But for a large number of jobs where shoving data around is the whole job, remote can do fine. I could watch the chemical plant remotely just fine in normal operations and call in changes to the operators as needed.
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The windchill factor in CEO opinions (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not important what is, what matters is how it "feels". Every sentence starts with "I believe", "I feel that", "I think"...
I don't care for your faith based bullshit or whether that dinner you had yesterday doesn't agree with you. Your gut feelings don't matter. Show me facts that any of what you say has anything to do with reality or I don't give a fuck about it.
'Loyalty' (Score:2)
For the initial growth spurt, maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, let's consider phases of a tecnology startup.
You have some guys, 2-5 people, who come up with some sort of idea. Maybe they are already working for someone (remotely or not) and decide to start their own. Or maybe they just met playing Fortnite. Or just couple of college kids at a club. Whatever. Anyway, you'll get probably a couple of architects for the technology, someone who is more of a leader type and perhaps someone who might have some skills in selling things (Think Woz and Jobs, Sid Meier and Bill Stealey, etc).
So you have the stage where you haven't yet really established anything. If your product is all software, then you might even get some prototypes going, at the age of cloud computing you can just run it on Azure or AWS on someones credit card. This can all be done remotely. If it's hardware, you can probably start doing designs and simulations.
At some point, you form a real company and start focusing on building. At this stage, you need some funding. You might get it from a VC or maybe someone's rich parents bankrolls you. Whatever. Anyway, you suddenly have resources to expand, and you also need to get some product out the door and finished. When it reaches this point and you are actually doing things and have rapid expansion, I have to say I agree with the premise. If you suddenly need to start recruiting a lot of people, and want to maintain some cohesion, I'd say it's important to stuff them into the same environment so everyone can get to know their peers, see how they are actually contributing in a freshly-forged team. Of course you might also need lab spaces and such things. Anyway, the key point is that at that point you do not only develop the tech, you also develop ways of working - how do you form teams, how do you track progress, and so on, and those processes might change rather often due to all the growing pains. No, you cannot just fork out cash for Jira and call it done.
However, once the recruitment drive tapers off and development starts chugging along, there really isn't that much need for an office except for things like lab work and perhaps meeting with customers if you need to demo something.
If I'd have a startup, I would get an office space rented with a 1 year fixed-term contract, get the team up and running, and at around 9-month mark downsize to the minimum needed for labs and the like (if headcount has remained stable) or extend it (if headcount keeps increasing - just have the established teams work from home instead).
He's just lying (Score:2)
The takeaway here is how little they value our lives. They're literally willing to dump thousands of tons of extra pollution in the air we breath and force us into long sleep depriving commutes that'll kill many of us in car crashes for some money they don't even need.
We're not people to them. We're commodities.
Depends on the type of work (Score:2)
For jobs of the form - "we have a problem no one has solved before and we need to trade off the complexity of different subsystems", that is much harder to do remotely. It involves a lot of standing in front of whiteboards, talking over coffee, quick informal chats in
Post brought to you by The Commercial Real Estate (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. (Score:4, Funny)
here to stay (Score:2)
The only thing that's for sure here to stay is fads. They come and go, speaking of michaelangelo.
And yet (Score:2)
He fails to realize is that the biggest mistake businesses ever make is that thinking their CEO is a smart or important person. Sam Altman is a fucking moron who doesn't actually do any work.
- corporations are not startups - (Score:2)
All the comments here seem to refer to big CORPORATE environments, ignoring that TFS is talking about STARTUPS. I'm thinking about the two Steves and friends who created Apple. Five or ten seriously dedicated people who are focused on an idea.
What motivates such people is adrenaline. They must work together and they will probably do it for 12+ hours per day until they see certain milestones of progress. 'Remote work' is a ridiculous concept.
Please don't confuse IBM or Microsoft with startups. Don't confuse
Disney, Starbucks, News Corp (Score:3)
among them Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and Robert Thomson at News Corp.
Ah, yes, I've heard of those three small tech startups.
Not all CEOs (Score:3)
Many CEOs are embracing work-from-home. My company's CEO announced last week that the company will be closing all of its US offices, going fully virtual. Many of us are already working from home, the company is just making it the norm.
Re:I 100% agree (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many examples of when it works. Actually needing to go into the office on occasion for face-to-face time is the exception.
Generally - people who want face to face time in an office have inadequate social lives, or are managers wanting to justify their existence by filling up their calendar with useless meetings.
Source: I am mid-40s and have spent half of my adult life working/developing from home.
Re: I 100% agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: I 100% agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. And most of that "pretend work" becomes strikingly obvious as actually being non-work when you are working remote. I think this is a primary reason why some _workers_ want to work on-site. Yes, this has an adHominem component, I am aware of that. Does not invalidate the whole idea though.
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Re: I 100% agree (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. Work from home makes it harder to pass off the work of others as your own. That's all most management ever do.
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You kind of stigmatize the "use social skills to get things done" somewhat harshly.
I say this as someone who's worked remotely since 2012.
Sometimes, the person who has an idea on how to fix a problem successfully isn't the person who has all the skill to accomplish it. They might have some of it, but need institutional buy-in for success.
Consider program/product managers. Most of their work can arguably be considered "social" work: talking to engineering, customers, and support to figure out the future cour
Requirements gathering is a social skill (Score:2)
I second that. Or they are people who tend to get ahead on their social skills rather than their work skills. It's a lot easier to say you did it than to do it.
Social skills are crucial if you're any good at your job. As a professional software engineer, 50-75% of my time is not spent engineering code. I am good at that and can do it very quickly. I am engineering people...getting requirements, walking them through unspecified edge cases. I've never had a job where all requirements were fully documented before I started my job. At the high-end jobs, I am given a general goal...and my job is to come up with detailed requirements on how to get it done and think
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Matches my experience. I have done a lot of work from home with customer meetings on-site. There never was any good reason to _work_ on site and I never did.
The one exception I see is teaching. This works somewhat remotely, but I think (having done it in person before and after COVID and remotely during COVID) the tech ist just not advanced enough at the moment. A classroom is a lot different from a Teams-meeting. That said, I think it can get there eventually.
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Matches my experience. I have done a lot of work from home with customer meetings on-site. There never was any good reason to _work_ on site and I never did.
The one exception I see is teaching.
Or oil/resource work, or transporting goods, or sporting events, or retail. or bars and Restaurants, or landscaping, or appliance repair. There are many more.
There are a whole lot of people in here who have a really solipsistic view of the world, believing that what they are doing is what everyone else is doing, or at the very best, others are doing unnecessary and pointless work. Or believes like you do, that there is only one exception to the world where no one leaves their home.
Now this isn't to say
Re:I 100% agree (Score:4, Interesting)
What I find is that when I'm sitting next to my coworkers my productivity changes. I'm less deeply focused on the task at hand, but I'm more "in tune" with the vibe of the company if I can say so. This way I'm more likely to make choices that fit the need of the company rather than just fitting the needs of my current task. I'm also more creative since my creativity is amplified by other's. Not so much at home.
All in all, I love a part-home part-office job so that I can get the best of both situations.
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If you care to, I'd encourage you to think about why that is. Why do you make short-sighted choices at home?
I worked remotely over the pandemic, like everyone else and had no problem considering the goals of the project. Then I changed jobs so I could move to a city that I liked better, and I'm several hours removed from most of my colleagues; I will never work in an office with them. But I still take my job very seriously. I've recently started to do more managerial/team lead sort of work, and most of what
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I'm retired now but my last job was at a company for which, since its inception, all employees worked remotely. We did have a small rented office in the city centre but it wasn't used for, as you put it, useless meetings for managers seeking to justify their existence; it was necessary because our clients were other companies and from time to time they would visit and want to vet the team.
Having said that, I worked there for four years and only saw that office three times.
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Yeah, I've worked at home for the vast majority of almost 3 decades now. The people who couldn't understand how that could possibly work were 100% of the time people who also thought everyone at their office were their actual friends and built their entire social lives around those people.
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Generally - people who want face to face time in an office have inadequate social lives, or are managers wanting to justify their existence by filling up their calendar with useless meetings.
Not everyone is the same. I go batshit when I'm stuck at home. I'd much rather be in the office, as that way I can keep my work life and personal life completely separate. I stop thinking about work when I walk out the door and hop in the car, and don't think about it again until I'm back in the office the next morning. That mental separation is critical.
At the start of the pandemic I nearly went crazy due to the lack of human interaction, staring at the same 4 walls all day long, trying to avoid all the di
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I worked in a few small
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Also, when an AI service is replacing the workers in a department, which setup will be easier for them to come in and scope out? Workers consolidated in one place should be easier than a group of geographically distributed
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Existential threat! Doomed. Doomed, I tell you! May as well party like it's 1999. Work? Haha, that's for suckers.
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