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The Remote contingent needs to fight harder than the office contingent because the office paradigm has been the dominant paradigm up until now. In-office work

The Remote contingent needs to fight harder than the office contingent because the office paradigm has been the dominant paradigm up until now. In-office work will realistically be seen as a niche when it's all said and done imho. Similar to LAN parties. It's not the way most people want to do things. Time will tell I guess. But thanks for your anecdote, I hope as time goes on, we begin to see what a niche anecdote it will become.

hotnfresh 3y ago
I’ve just recently encountered a company with a culture that doesn’t interact so well with remote work, and it’s been eye opening. Lots of preference for talking (in person, or call) as soon as a message exchange goes past about two messages, when often what needs to happen is one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly—the talking doesn’t help, either, just wastes more time. Awful weirdly-restrictive chat room organization, which is shocking considering nearly-leaderless online communities manage to arrange those kinds of things better. Everything important gets posted to one-on-one chats or ephemeral and invisible-to-outsiders small group direct messages. The effect is they’ve accidentally made a bunch of stuff opaque and secret that really, really should not be. It’s poison for collaboration. I also get the impression some folks here just kinda… aren’t comfortable with written language. Reading or writing it. It’s so weird to see, but some of the folks who’ve been living this kind of job-life 10+ years, now I get how they think remote can’t possibly be as productive as in-person—but it’s mostly due to dumb mistakes that are also harming collaboration in the office. Most of them have no idea the place is doing things so entirely wrong, or how much better it can be with some simple tweaks.
- lsmeducation 3y ago
  Okay, so why do you think that will get better in person? Just curious. Why is "lets meet in person" the go to solution? Look, the RTO people are LOUDER. Period. They will win this fight if the Remote or Die crew doesn't get loud.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    I think in-person talking papers over a bunch of dysfunction, in this case, at enormous cost in still-much-worse-than-ideal productivity (plus the overhead of offices). But does let things get done more efficiently than if they tried to take that dysfunction into a heavily-remote environment. It also, separately, masks it—people working in-person, but hobbled by bad communication patterns, at least look productive. I’m not claiming this is good, mind you, but that it’s made me understand at least one (I suspect large) segment of the “remote can’t be as good as in-person” side of the argument. If this is how they think “serious business” should or must function, no wonder they’re skeptical of remote work. Meanwhile they’re actually just organizationally bad at communication, in general.
    - lsmeducation 3y ago
      Alright, I guess. In-office had a long time to evolve (half a century I'd say). Remote work kind of only had the COVID years. It's a baby in an incubator. The RTO stuff is kind of like infanticide. So while I understand your perspective, from a war point of view, we have no choice but to protect this baby. They want to cut this experiment off asap. Every little anecdote, every little corporate RTO plan, every little CEO saying shit, is just chipping away at such an infant life. Give it the same chance the office bullshit had, which was decades. I kind of have to be militant about this. Thanks for the other side, but this baby gotta be kept alive. If your team sucks, your team sucks. Doesn't matter if you're in office, or out of office.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        I’m on your side. I just think understanding the “enemy” is usually more beneficial than not. [edit] to explain, I’m using this information to push the organization toward improvements that I can sell without mentioning remote work, but which, if adopted, will surely cause people here to notice a smaller difference between WFH days and in-office days. It may take a while, but this should reduce reluctance to allow long stretches of, or indefinite, remote work.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
- smeej 3y ago
  It is absolutely incredible to me the number of people in professional roles who cannot read and write coherently, even when English is their native language. I cannot tell you how many meetings I've had where someone told me I "wasn't communicating clearly" and I asked them to read the unclear message back to me so I could understand what would make it clearer for them. And then I find out they can't read, at least not fluently. They either skip key words altogether or mistake them for other words. I'm convinced fewer than half of American adults could read a random book out loud, fluidly, without preparation.
  - trane_project 3y ago
    I looked this up and found this report: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill. I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns. Edit: Found the source of this figures (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-2013_9789264204256-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-...) which has data from more contries in the OECD. Japan scores the highest, followed by Finland.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      > Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess) The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention (OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5." The PIAAC definitions of each level are here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_section=3 https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_... and I would estimate that extremely few daily tasks would require (or even be aided by) level 5 literacy proficiency.
- likenesstheft 3y ago
  A culture around frequent calls is toxic. It reeks of insecurity from some people who are afraid of paper trails.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  > one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly This is exactly my observation on zoom/meeting heavy cultures A lot of people cannot put their wants & desires into the written word. With a lot of these people I end up taking contemporaneous notes in a slack message to then send back to them.

hotnfresh 3y ago

I’ve just recently encountered a company with a culture that doesn’t interact so well with remote work, and it’s been eye opening. Lots of preference for talking (in person, or call) as soon as a message exchange goes past about two messages, when often what needs to happen is one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly—the talking doesn’t help, either, just wastes more time. Awful weirdly-restrictive chat room organization, which is shocking considering nearly-leaderless online communities manage to arrange those kinds of things better. Everything important gets posted to one-on-one chats or ephemeral and invisible-to-outsiders small group direct messages. The effect is they’ve accidentally made a bunch of stuff opaque and secret that really, really should not be. It’s poison for collaboration. I also get the impression some folks here just kinda… aren’t comfortable with written language. Reading or writing it. It’s so weird to see, but some of the folks who’ve been living this kind of job-life 10+ years, now I get how they think remote can’t possibly be as productive as in-person—but it’s mostly due to dumb mistakes that are also harming collaboration in the office. Most of them have no idea the place is doing things so entirely wrong, or how much better it can be with some simple tweaks.

lsmeducation 3y ago
Okay, so why do you think that will get better in person? Just curious. Why is "lets meet in person" the go to solution? Look, the RTO people are LOUDER. Period. They will win this fight if the Remote or Die crew doesn't get loud.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  I think in-person talking papers over a bunch of dysfunction, in this case, at enormous cost in still-much-worse-than-ideal productivity (plus the overhead of offices). But does let things get done more efficiently than if they tried to take that dysfunction into a heavily-remote environment. It also, separately, masks it—people working in-person, but hobbled by bad communication patterns, at least look productive. I’m not claiming this is good, mind you, but that it’s made me understand at least one (I suspect large) segment of the “remote can’t be as good as in-person” side of the argument. If this is how they think “serious business” should or must function, no wonder they’re skeptical of remote work. Meanwhile they’re actually just organizationally bad at communication, in general.
  - lsmeducation 3y ago
    Alright, I guess. In-office had a long time to evolve (half a century I'd say). Remote work kind of only had the COVID years. It's a baby in an incubator. The RTO stuff is kind of like infanticide. So while I understand your perspective, from a war point of view, we have no choice but to protect this baby. They want to cut this experiment off asap. Every little anecdote, every little corporate RTO plan, every little CEO saying shit, is just chipping away at such an infant life. Give it the same chance the office bullshit had, which was decades. I kind of have to be militant about this. Thanks for the other side, but this baby gotta be kept alive. If your team sucks, your team sucks. Doesn't matter if you're in office, or out of office.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      I’m on your side. I just think understanding the “enemy” is usually more beneficial than not. [edit] to explain, I’m using this information to push the organization toward improvements that I can sell without mentioning remote work, but which, if adopted, will surely cause people here to notice a smaller difference between WFH days and in-office days. It may take a while, but this should reduce reluctance to allow long stretches of, or indefinite, remote work.
- ecshafer 3y ago
smeej 3y ago
It is absolutely incredible to me the number of people in professional roles who cannot read and write coherently, even when English is their native language. I cannot tell you how many meetings I've had where someone told me I "wasn't communicating clearly" and I asked them to read the unclear message back to me so I could understand what would make it clearer for them. And then I find out they can't read, at least not fluently. They either skip key words altogether or mistake them for other words. I'm convinced fewer than half of American adults could read a random book out loud, fluidly, without preparation.
- trane_project 3y ago
  I looked this up and found this report: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill. I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns. Edit: Found the source of this figures (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-2013_9789264204256-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-...) which has data from more contries in the OECD. Japan scores the highest, followed by Finland.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    > Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess) The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention (OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5." The PIAAC definitions of each level are here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_section=3 https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_... and I would estimate that extremely few daily tasks would require (or even be aided by) level 5 literacy proficiency.
likenesstheft 3y ago
A culture around frequent calls is toxic. It reeks of insecurity from some people who are afraid of paper trails.
steveBK123 3y ago
> one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly This is exactly my observation on zoom/meeting heavy cultures A lot of people cannot put their wants & desires into the written word. With a lot of these people I end up taking contemporaneous notes in a slack message to then send back to them.