The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons.

The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.

The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.

I thought that the title drops the lede so I abreviated the second sentence of the abstract:

  We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output.

That's up to you, but context matters and that simply isn't the title. That finding too is not well supported by the article, sample size = 1 and the company they looked at is not exactly a typical company either. Imnsho this paper is very low quality.

It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. They looked at one entity:

"We study the impact of sitting together in the office for software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer. This firm gave us access to the online feedback that engineers write about each other’s computer code as well as metrics of engineers’ programming output. "

So they base the entirety of this conclusion on code review comments and lines-of-code produced or something like that. That makes the conclusion even less supported than if they had done some actual research.

For a statement like this to hold you would at least need a control and a larger sample.

> Imnsho this paper is very low quality

Compared to like a phase 3 clinical trial, sure. Compared to your average paper, and especially your average business paper I don't think that's the case.

I think there is some room in between those two.

At a minimum you'd expect a few more companies, more sources than just code review and code productivity metrics (this alone disqualifies the study because it centers on just one task: software development) etc.

Would you be saying that if you agreed with the findings?

I have not made up my mind either way so I'm not sure where you pulled that from. I even wrote in another comment upthread: "It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. "

But you probably missed that.

Which seems very consistent with everything I've seen over a fairly long career. I'd add not just co-workers but also other interactions with industry peers.

Where do companies otherwise prioritize long-run development over short-term output? In my experience, generally nowhere. So why would this make managers push RTO more?

Some who already want RTO may use this as an excuse, but I would think it would actually reduce RTO pressure overall, as it confirms less short-term productivity, which is what companies actually care about.

I think this will do exactly nothing for RTO, neither increase nor decrease the push from management.

The decisions around RTO seem to be more “gut feeling” based than data driven. Look at Amazon, a supposedly “data driven company”. During RTO, Andy Jassy admitted there’s no data to back it up but that they “believe” it will help due to improving culture.

Fast forward a year and they just did a first round of layoffs because “culture”. So I guess ultimately RTO was a failure for them that they won’t admit to.

RTO was always about reducing labor costs by incentivizing people to resign.

I think that is only part. The other part is pushback against "uppity" labour.

Because the C-suite needs to justify those 15-year commercial leases, and anything with a veneer of credibility will be used to do so (in addition to simply firing people who don't comply).

> So why would this make managers push RTO more?

> Proximity [office] *increases* development

Do you seriously expect managers to read anything beyond title?

I’m in a big peer group for managers where a lot of us are remote managers. (Let me repeat before the angry downvotes and comments: I am a remote manager and proponent of remote work)

This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.

It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.

The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.

I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.

What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.

New to the company. Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people you wouldn’t normally run into in your corner of Slack, and pick up more info about how the company works.

> If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges.

In person accelerates onboarding for all the reasons I mentioned above. It’s not a game of trust or “carrots”.

This is nonsensical. Most F500 companies are globally distributed. Most of onboarding is gaining access to systems.

It’s far easier and more efficient to search slack, find the person you need to talk to and DM them in your first week than it is to pester the person who sits next to you to figure out how to click the right Sailpoint buttons.

> Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people

Critically, this is impossible if most of the team is already remote. You're not going to make the new guy sit around the office by himself right?

I think hybrid is where we'll end up once the dust settles. Avoiding the daily commutes, but a couple days a week makes a lot of sense.

I say that hiring someone is not an absolute vote of confidence in a person. Even if someone is a veteran worker, most companies have a new employee orientation. Having a "probation period" where someone comes into the office to integrate and meet people and work more collaboratively makes sense to me.

Disclaimer: While I benefit and often like a remote work or hybrid setup, I also know that my career and my ability to absorb new technologies has been crippled by the isolation of remote work. And, my success and my level of knowledge in my field is directly attributed to being physically around a lot of people and several related departments in order to ask questions and mingle with experts.

Remote work sucks for learning, for me - and I know I'm not alone.

Why have managers and reviews and non-automated promotions and security groups if you trusted them enough to hire them...

Well because obviously that trust only goes so far.

The “if you trusted them enough to hire them you should trust them with everything unconditionally” meme is popular, but it’s a very weak argument.

Everyone has to build trust and establish a reputation at any job. Every company treats new employees as probationary, whether they make it explicit or not.

You don’t get hired into a company and immediately have the same trust level as the guy who has been there for 5 years and has a long history of delivering results.

For some issues with new employees you can pivot quickly: If you discover that someone is not good at interacting with databases and is causing downtime and restore from backup situations, you pivot quickly and remove their database privileges while you observe their skill growth.

With remote, you can’t pivot quickly. If you’re 12 weeks in and the new remote hire obviously can’t communicate remotely or focus at home, you can’t pivot quickly and have them work in the office most of the time because remote hires don’t necessarily live by the office. So it’s a slowly earned privilege in companies that aren’t remote-first.

I’m surprised this is a foreign concept. This was actually the common situation with remote work before COVID: Gaining WFH ability was something earned and negotiated over time. It wasn’t widely publicized, but that’s how many of us started working remote.

Building trust is a gradual thing. You give some, you get some, you do that long enough and you will have a lot of trust. You can still lose it all in a heartbeat. But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.

'Trust comes on foot, but leaves by horse'.

> But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.

I always tell juniors that even if their company doesn't have an explicit probationary period, they should assume their behavior and results are being carefully monitored for the first year to watch for signs of a bad hire.

Hiring someone is never equivalent to having full trust in them. Reputations don't start at 100% on day 1, they start as a neutral value that you need to build up over time. You also need to avoid breaking it down. It's much faster to destroy a reputation than build it up.

I've only ever worked remote professionally and I've got a track record, when I apply to a new role there's no question that I can adapt to working remotely at X company.

If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk

I knew this was going to turn into a shoot the messenger (or downvote the messenger) situation.

Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.

Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.

> We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.

Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?

> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.

A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.

> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?

Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?

Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.

I've worked at a bank where one of the oft heard jokes was that 'I spend 8 hours per day there but I really wouldn't want to work there'. It was true too. 145 people in the IT department, and absolutely nothing got done.

This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.

Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.

On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.

> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?

Of course, but that's obviously a deflection.

In person hires can't physically be in two offices at the same time.

In person employees can't get a new in-person job and then not resign from their last job because they want to extract as many paychecks as they can before they get caught and fired.

In person employees can't substitute in a hired interview taker for the interview and then hope nobody notices their voice sounds too different when they start the job.

These are all real things that we've encountered with remote work (and more)

Saying X can also happen in Y! Is a classic fallacious argument used by people who want you to think two things are equal, when in fact they can have very different probabilities and risk profiles.

When I was working at a hybrid company we even had a few cases where people either couldn't focus at home (kids, family, distractions) or were insufferably combative in chat. Bringing them into the office solved it.

The two environments are not equal, no matter how many times someone tries to deflect with "That problem can also happen in the office!"

I am not going to continue this conversation, I hope you understand.

That doesn't happen remote either. Unless management is utterly incompetent, another variable a study like this should probably compensate for by increasing the sample size and pool diversity.

> That doesn't happen remote either.

I don't know where you got this idea, but this happens all the time. The two most common topics in the remote channel of the big management peer group I'm in are:

1. People cheating on remote interviews (including substituting another person to take the interview)

2. People getting multiple jobs and being too obviously distracted to get work done, or the increasingly common getting a new job and not resigning from the last job because they know they can collect potentially $100K+ in paychecks and/or severance by waiting to get let go instead.

If you don't believe these things happen in remote jobs then I understand your resistance throughout this thread to any suggestion that remote and in-office are different.

It absolutely happens, and often. I don't know when the last time you tried to hire was but things are absolutely brutal right now. The most common is personnel who think they can get away with an hour or two of work a day (whether they're working multiple jobs or just screwing around at home is hard to say). Second is bait-and-switch where the interviewee is not the person who shows up day 1.. after four (!) incidents in a quarter we had to mandate at least one in-person interview during the hiring process which seems to have helped.

> A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons

So how come those who can handle it are being punished?

Valid question, but it's quite obvious: The shift to WFH was sudden and rushed, so now the number of people who need to be brought back in the office is huge.

You can't go through a company and retroactively subtract a benefit from ~half of the people without getting completely buried under discrimination lawsuits from angry people who think you forced them into the office but let Bob WFH because you're illegally discriminating.

So the companies are changing the policy for everyone and then granting "exceptions" on a case by case basis going forward, using newly defined criteria.

Again, please don't downvote the messenger. I'm just describing what's happening, not saying I approve.

I mean, layoffs are always sudden and rushed, but companies don't seem to mind thrusting people into that new situation. Also, I'm sorry, but we've had about six years to figure this out (i.e. to get Zoom volume licensing). Any company that hasn't figured out how to set up a VPN and video chat by now is uh... slow.

> This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.

Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.

Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.

Is my remote experiences strange or do other remote workers not have some sort of chat where people ask if you've got a minute and drop in a video conference link if they need a quick chat on something?

No idea, but yes, that's exactly how we do it. We've been full remote since COVID and honestly, I don't think any of us would want it any other way but we're a very small team so not representative of larger trends.

> Capital is something you expend

Or hoard

This is only a harm if you are ambitious and career-oriented. I'm remote and know it won't be conducive to promotion, but I also get to:

1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,

2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),

3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,

4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and

5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.

Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.

The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.

In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.

That's not what it is about though. There is plenty of evidence that there are pros and cons both to WFH and work-at-the-office, assuming the work lends itself to work-from-home to begin with. This is at best a datapoint and not so much a grand conclusion worthy one at that.

The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...

In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.

As for the code review data they analyzed:

"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed- back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow- up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "

I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.

> [has benefits]

Long-term and for the company. Of course I’m going to dismiss it lol, why the fuck would I want to be left holding the bag?

Nobody's stopping you from commuting an hour each way into a beige box with the coldest fluorescent lighting ever. If you really want to inhale someone else's rhinovirus, by all means, be my guest! Just don't force me to do the same.