For the people who work remote, is the company fully remote, or is there an office and you just work remotely? I have heard there is a vast gap in culture/productivity between the 2

There's an office. Everyone works remote some of the time, no one all of the time. The recommended guideline is 2 days/week but I usually do 3.

I got to this point at my last job out of boredom. I was getting more work done than people 2-3 promotions ahead of me that were putting in 50+ hours a week of what I like to call "butt in seat time" and I was still getting excellent reviews, so no regrets.

That’s not one of those scenarios. This person seems close to leaving, so if that happens I’d be really glad because it’ll save me a headache.

My company has well over 100k employees. Some work in offices, others work remote. Not sure how often the office folks WFH

Mine has 350k

Woof, I thought AT&T had a lot of people

If you have some data on the productivity difference it would be appreciated if you'd share that data. I can say that a few companies have assembled project teams that work on the same project 24 hours a day from locations in Europe, Asia and North America. So people on these teams are working remotely on the same project as part of the plan.

Most people don't do any work when they WFH, or they are less productive.

I prefer working from work to WFH. I lead a team of 20, and it's a lot quicker to help others out in person. On new developments, it's useful to talk over ideas in person

Agree with all of this, but I do think something like forcing one day of remote work every 2 weeks may be optimal.

There is certain work (stepping back and considering process improvements, general philosophical stuff, etc.) that I feel like is hard to do in an office setting, and if everyone did more of it in a culture that promotes improvement/change then companies can become super-productive more often. Not for every employee.

I've worked remotely for three different companies. The first was a tiny startup (3 people) where I was basically the only technical person, so I'm not sure it counts. The second was Oracle, as part of a fairly small team where I was the only remote person. But, I knew all of the other team members personally because I switched to remote after having moved to a different state. The third, my current company, is a small startup with about 11 total people in dev, 2 of whom are full-time remote, although we all travel to the office for a week every 2-3 months. Even the local people work from home a fair amount of the time.

I can't really answer any question about cultural/productivity gaps on average, or whether it's true that many/most people are less productive working from home, but it seems to me that it probably varies a lot depending on context. I am a lot more productive in my current job than I was at Oracle, and I think some of that has to do with cultural issues that made working remotely for them more challenging. Some of it just has to do with that job sucking.

I think when I first started working remotely more or less full time I had to learn some habits to avoid productivity traps, and it probably took some time, but at this point I don't think I am less productive than I would be in the office, and I don't think any of my coworkers would complain about my being remote. Maybe that doesn't hold true in general or for other people, I don't know.

A few years ago I would have agreed that there was a productivity cost to working remotely that was most apparent in the difference between being able to hash out some ideas face-to-face vs remotely. I feel like my current company uses Zoom conferences and Slack so well that it doesn't feel like an issue at all. I have "face-to-face" meetings with coworkers every day, on just as impromptu of a schedule as if I were there.

caveat: since I now live in a very rural area of a very poor state I am incentivized to say working remotely is awesome and that employers should definitely treat remote employees as first class :P

Productivity cost is probably the wrong way to think about remote work - it's more approriate to consider that primarily remote orgs are soft-capped in terms of complexity and size. It is just difficult to scale up to a large org with primarily remote workers because you run into novel challenges, social, cultural and logistic, everywhere as they scale up. This, combined with the winner-take-all economics of software ensures that great remote jobs will be rare and exist mostly as exceptions in a larger, colocated org.

Also, access goes both ways, remote workers have access to jobs in high-paying areas but have to compete with workers located everywhere in the world.

Yeah, that's a good point.

I've done every combination of partial and full remote for small and large companies. Some conclusions based on my experience:

If you haven't either already worked with or meet with your coworkers on a regular basis, you won't be as productive and any kind of crunch time will turn into a big mess of finger pointing. The human bond has to be there. Note: obviously doesn't count for 1-person teams.

If Friday is your only wfh day, then Friday is a day off. Not that there's anything wrong with that if you get your work done the rest of the week. But let's be honest. Unless it's crunch time no one is doing crap except call in to mandatory meetings on Friday. My old boss used to call me drunk at like noon on Friday to rant about stuff.

Water cooler talk and overhearing cross-conversations is a very real thing - which there's no way to replicate if most of the team is together, but a few are wfh. I think this matters most in big greenfield projects where there's a lot of flying by the seat of your collective pants. A project on a mature tech stack doesn't produce or need as much crosstalk.

It's impossible to lead a team remotely unless everyone is remote, and even then it's almost impossible. Note: by impossible I mean I don't have the skill to do it. And I'm a people person dammit!

WFH 100% of the time gets lonely if you don't have a wife and kids. I'd rather be in the office some.

WFH very often is like cashing in your chips. You get the sweet non-commute and taking meetings in your underwear. But it's pretty tough to get promoted, especially if you're competing with anyone who's physically onsite.

Taking meetings when you're still hammered from an all night bender is much less risky when wfh.

I don't think there are any good general conclusions about companies that allow or have remote workers. There are so many factors/context to consider that anybody that has a really strong opinion (like not wanting to work for a company that has remote employees, or that remote work is the future that all companies need to embrace) is probably missing a lot of them.

Supporting remote workers is more challenging, but the things you need to do to make it work well are generally things that companies without remote workers should be doing anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if companies that support remote workers well are also generally better places to work at in person.


Totally agreed. Travelling regularly is key.


This is becoming less of a thing. Slack (or equivalents) is huge here because a lot of the ad-hoc conversation moves here. Regular standups becoming fairly standard. More online tools (Trello vs post-it notes on the wall). This is also a good example of things that improve the environment for non-remote people too. Knowledge shouldn't require always half-listening to what your co-workers are saying, never being out sick/away, having to socialize with everybody on your team, etc.

I disagree here. It just requires being a lot more deliberate about a lot of things (like how you track work, check in with people, etc.). Again though, these are things that team leads should be doing anyway - but are often more lax about if the team is all in the same place.

Leading multiple teams (like Director or above) remotely is definitely harder but still doable. It requires a lot more travelling though since you're managing more people and may have little-to-no direct work interactions with a lot of them.


I think this really depends on the company. If you're at a place with a non-trivial number of remote people or that is already dealing with multiple physical offices or that is growing really fast - there are still lots of ways to get promoted.


If I were interviewing for a remote position or interviewing with a company that had remote workers, the things I'd be looking for / asking about are:

* Do all conference rooms have video chat software already set up and easy to use?
* Are there quiet non-conference room places to go for ad-hoc video chats?
* Is worked tracked online (any sort of work tracking / important documents on the wall would be a red flag)?
* How often do teams get together in the same physical place?
* How does work get planned and status tracked?
* What communication tools do people use?
* What are the time zones involved (since time zones are a very different issue than being remote)?

If a company has good answers to these I think its pretty low risk that being remote or having remote co-workers is going to be a big deal.

Sure the 1 in 10 times everything actually works right.

If this is the answer, then definitely pass. But this is a pretty big red flag about the state of things at the company anyway because video conferencing is fairly easy now. Zoom and meet both work reasonably well and have good software for conference rooms with one click joining to scheduled meetings or short urls for ad-how stuff. Easily 95% of my meetings are hassle free.

Even slack video calls work pretty well for ad-hoc video chats.

Zoom works fine, although I have found that in the rooms with 2 big TVs and a fancy voice-following video camera and stuff, that getting that to work is usually a pain in the ass. Zoom on computers is great, the hardware integration is... not.

or the classic problem when you are starting a meeting, have to boot up the windows conference machine and it has a forced update for 10 minutes.

If you have to boot up a windows conference machine, you're not doing it right.

Right - but based on all my experience and all the snarky jokes I see on twitter - very few companies can actually handle full scale video conference integration w/o constant hassles. You'd think in 2018 this would be a solved problem - but no.

Anyone have any opinion on GitLab (hosted locally) vs. GitHub (hosted on their site) with AWS but also some local environments? My new job is currently using local hosted GitLab. But the boss is thinking about switching to remote hosted GitHub. And asking my opinion (!). So any help is mucho appreciated.

One red flag for me is she said sometimes they'll want to trigger builds back to local environments (IE - not always AWS). Punching through those kinds of network connections always seems to be a pain at a big company.

Suzzer, Zoom's doing great. Google has a decent product. I'm sure there are others. I think it is basically a solved problem. Maybe a problem isn't solved until everybody knows its solved? But at this point its probably easier than providing wifi to an office.

So I guess I stand by my belief that if a company can't figure out how to offer a decent video chat experience I wouldn't trust them to do a bunch of other really important things well either.

The problem is you've got rooms two big video screens with dedicated hardware that no one knows how to work except the AV support guy.

And of course if you have two giant conference rooms full of people, and one person on video chat wfh - the conference video software will ALWAYS decide to give the person wfh gigantic screen first class status and shunt one of the conference rooms into a small thumbnail in the corner. And no one ever knows how to fix this.

And the stupid camera is almost impossible to line up straight as any tiny touch sends it flying in one direction or another.

Also no one can ever decide whether to use the built-in sound, or fall back to speaker phone on a conference call. And then at some point someone will have terrible feedback. And maybe at another point someone will go on hold and music will start playing, and you have to get an admin to drop them if you can identify them.

etc. etc. etc. this is just off the top of my head, there are 100s more issues I've seen