One of the best things that IT provides to people is freedom. There are 2 main types of freedom, which have more subtypes, but let’s focus on the 2 big ones. Geographic freedom and financial freedom. The majority of IT workers have two, but some have just one or none of them. There isn’t a way to say which one is better, personally speaking, one without the other is pretty useless. But the point is: in the last 3 years, the number of IT workers with these two types of freedom has improved. A LOT.
For those who started working with IT in the last 3 years or less, we haven’t had these opportunities to work remotely since always. I started my career in 2017 and I worked on-site for 3 years, not because I chose, obviously, but because at that time, we didn’t even think about this. Working remotely was WAY too far from us (with us, I mean the non-big-tech workers).
Then, all of a sudden, in early 2020, the world turns upside down. Everything is closing, lockdowns, flights canceled, and quarantines. Even with all of that happening, the companies couldn’t stop. Just because of this, the majority of companies, of every kind, realized that: “maybe, we don’t need to be physically together to work on computers with the internet”. I know how ironically it sounds, and I know how obvious it seems now, but it was REALLY just at that moment they realized this.
Now cutting to 2023, we have this situation: the majority of companies are still working remotely, and doing great. Some companies have cut a lot of expenses with remote work, in many ways. I found this one very interesting. Spotify allowed 6.5k people to work from anywhere in the world, and: their turnover rate dropped. If you don’t think this is a great thing, take time and think, how much money do you think it costs to hire a senior engineer? spoiler: a lot.
But nowadays, I noticed a strange movement on the web, more precisely on twitter, trying to convince people the exact opposite (I don’t need to say that these people are CEOs and their fanboys, do I?). These people are saying that remote work reduced productivity, company profits, team works, and interpersonal relations. Ironically, their opinions are against this article, and this one, and this one. See, I’m not saying they’re wrong, I’m saying that: if one company is not dealing with the loss of productivity with remote work, how could remote work be the villain of productivity? There is just no way that remote work itself is the root of the problem. As Sergio Pereira said:
Office vs Remote is NOT the core conversation we should be having. Meetings vs async are what we should be talking about. That’s the root cause of burnout.
I just completely agree with this. But I think this is just another symptom, not the cause itself.
It was never about productivity
At first, it is not so simple to measure productivity in software engineering, this is a huge field of discussion and I’ll not discuss this for now. But something interesting about this discussion around remote work is: It was never about productivity. It was always about life-quality. No one thought about working from home because “I’m more productive at home”. This was never the point, and it’s okay, we’re not machines seeking productivity at all cost. We’re humans, we want to have a good life, we want to be happy. We don’t want to need to live our lives in crowded cities just because of work; we want to live wherever we want. We don’t want to wake up 6am to have time to be stuck in a traffic jam just to arrive the office at 9am; we want to wake up 6am to do things for us: exercise, study, read, write. On-site work takes us the most precious thing in file: time. I bet you that a person with a nice life-quality will be more productive than a unhappy person, it doesn’t matter how type of work their into.
The solution for this, could be hybrid work. But a real hybrid work, not these things some companies are doing to require people to work X days per week on site; this is not hybrid, this still is on-site work. In a real hybrid work, you can choose between remote and on-site, not just have pre-selected days in which you are forced to do so. With a real hybrid work, anyone could choose what they want, and what they really like and are happy with, so you’ll have the best of the two. Happy employees, some remote, some on-site and everyone satisfied by their choices. Managers know that, CEOs knows that, the reason why they don’t do this is not because of productivity. It never was. This is just the excuse their using nowadays, because this creates a pressure on the employees, this makes them feeling guilty when the companies’ results aren’t good. This is just a strategy to bring everyone back in the first crises ahead.
The real villain
To start digging to find the real villain, let’s do an exercise: what is the difference between remote and on-site work in the same company? Think about it for a while. Is the deployment process different? No; the type of communication? Neither, in both ways the engineers use slack (or something similar); maybe meetings,although in some companies even with on-site work, the meetings are completely online. The biggest difference is, and I can say it for sure, for managers. Managers, on remote work, have to work for real. It is not easy to establish a culture, manage onboardings for new members, give feedback, obtain feedback from employees to know how they’re feeling about the company, and so on. Ain’t it funny? The ones saying remote work “doesn’t work”, are the only ones whose work changed and required them to work more. And, in the meantime, the companies in which managers work (and like their work) are not feeling this lack of productivity. Maybe your company isn’t adapting to remote work because you’re too lazy to work and establish a strong remote culture; or because you can’t get feedback from your engineers to know their career goals and what they’re feeling; maybe because you’re too disorganized to schedule 1:1 meetings with your team, and because of that you lost control of your team’s expectations and your company is facing lots of turnovers. Maybe, just maybe, remote work isn’t the real villain. Maybe the problem with your company is your managers.