In thech companies, the only valid reason to be in the office is that often times upper management (those who pay bills/salaries) are restless crowd that can’t sit in one place staring at screen and have grand desire to run around the floor watching people “work”.
The rest of your points are absolute bull shit that can all be done remotely.
"The rest of your points are absolute bull shit that can all be done remotely"
I disagree mentoring can be as effective when done remotely. The channel width of face-to-face communication is higher than that of any other method.
Furthermore, there are a lot of things that are communicated from senior to junior accidentally, for example, some simple efficient pattern of using the IDE, that would not get communicated in a remote setting. The skill transfer can happen of course any which way, from junior to senior, whatever - but serendipitous pairing is often the initial requirement for this skill transfer to happen.
> The channel width of face-to-face communication is higher than that of any other method.
Research to that effect? I know some people have that, I know I do not. So this absolute statement is already 1 datapoint (me) off. And I know others (who I mentor) who absorb mentoring far better via remote methods. When someone mentors me, I like to chew the information over, research it etc. This goes for most communication for work related matters; I absorb far less if it is told to me face to face than when I read it and have time to thoroughly understand it all.
I agree somewhat with the rest but that again can be done remotely: we develop almost everything while in chat; this acidental transfer is even far better than face to face imho. In chat someone says something like ‘I refactor this to that by hitting ctrl-something’ ; all people see it, not only the accidental junior next to you but all of them. And later this can be searched by others while the verbal incidental comms is gone forever.
I definitely see the need for face to face meetings, but far less than some people here do. And it would be good to have more research done into this matter: I simply do not see many programmers (and I managed 100s over my professional life) being productive in the setting you suggest. Looking and feeling busy yes (so for the bums on seats type of manager), but productive as in just getting stuff done, in my experience no. But that is anecdotal, like your view, so real research and numbers would be good.
"I simply do not see many programmers (and I managed 100s over my professional life) being productive in the setting you suggest. "
To be precise, I did not suggest anything else beyond people being in the same location. I agree the type of bullshit you describe is plausible in a typical corporate scenario.
Given the reproducibility crisis in modern psychology, I would be hard-pressed to claim most thing dealing with humans as better than "anecdotal". I pass along those anecdotes that I find useful. In this context literary references are not "academic proof" but rather probabilistic proof that someone else shares my view and that it might be applicable to third parties as well.
The face-to-face plus whiteboard offering the widest communication channel -anecdote was taken from Alistair Cockburn's "Agile software development" that can be referred from example here (just look at the graph):
I have no idea how true that is in the general sense, but personally I've found this to be true. I've had and continue having tremendously valuable whiteboard impromptu chats that have clarified a complex topic to all stakeholders, helped me to understand some issue and thus saving worktime, or just helped to create a shared symbolic context for a complex technical discussion that otherwise would have been imprecise and hand-wavy. The fact that you can draw boxes, point at them, and perhaps draw arrows between them in a shared physical space with people just somehow seems to make everything easier.
>The rest of your points are absolute bull shit that can all be done remotely.
But generally won't be. I work for a tech company, and heck, much of those things don't happen even between people in different sites. The two people in our team who are at a different site usually don't learn a lot of things we do simply because over here we all sit in cubes next to one other. When an emergency occurs, we over here will learn about it through osmosis. This is why we now have meetings dedicated for passdowns to the remote workers just so that they learn what we did here. The problem is that they only learn what we think they need to know.
So while I agree with you that everything can happen remotely (and sometimes does), I think it is more likely to happen in person.
"More than half the volunteer group changed their minds about working from home 100 percent of the time--they felt too much isolation."
And bear in mind that is from the group of people who _volunteered_ to work from home. It's reasonable to presume that a nontrivial number of people chose _not_ to volunteer because they valued in-person interactions.
I've worked fully remote before and I loved it. I got tons of work done, had time and energy for doing stuff after work, and generally flourished.
I'm in an office for a few days a week now with a new company, and I genuinely struggle to get work done on those days. I'm interrupted frequently, office mates love having very loud conversations by my desk, and I can't even fix healthy food on demand and instead drag in a lunch box like a child.
But, and here is the important bit, that's my experience. I have coworkers for whom the inverse is true, who would hate being remote at all, and see the office as the only space they can be productive in.
Just like shoes come in different sizes, so too do office working styles. My overwhelming complaint is that I have to fight tooth and nail to work from home, and I usually get the complaint "Well I don't like working from home, so you shouldn't do it either".
It's like I'm trying to justify being left handed. It's ridiculous. What works for me works for me, and I have direct stats that prove that on every basis (benefit of being a dev, work can be measured).
I work 100% from home. Altough I also feel a bit of isolation I kind of enjoy it most of the time and otherwise the benefits easily outweighs the negative stuff like isolation. But that is of course just me, there is no need to force people to work from home (unless the company do not have an office) but the issue is that most companies won't let you even if you want to.
I notice this report doesn't give the specifics. When they worked remotely, did they still have access to easy, painless, video conferencing? We have remote workers; we oftentimes broadcast them in a Bluejeans conference room on a TV near the people working on site, and it really changes the dynamic.
Similarly, I'd be interested in a survey after the fact to determine a person's social life outside of work. If people have an active one apart from work, I suspect 100% remote is more attractive. When a person's main sources of social contact are at work, I can see that taking a major hit; just water cooler chatter and shared lunches and things would be missed more if you don't have regular social activities.
The rest of your points are absolute bull shit that can all be done remotely.