The Problem with Remote Work
An assessment of the drawbacks of remote work using the tools we have
Since early 2020 most software teams decided to go fully remote and switch to fully geographically distributed teams. The sentiment I see in the online discourse is mostly in favor of remote work (from the employees side), with people usually citing the flexibility, lack of commute.
Companies pushing for back to the office policies have a hard time articulating why, normally citing "culture” as the reason.
This article is about why I think remote work changes the work environment dynamics and I will try to articulate the negative part of this trade-off outside of the normal corporate speak.
Remote Collaboration Tools (Zoom, Meet, Slack…)
They are very limited compared to just interacting in-person and here is why:
Only one person is able to talk at any point in time, that works for certain meetings whether it's in person or remote but it doesn't work for other types of meetings like:
All hands or large meetings where there is a large number of participants, you should be able to split your focus but no meeting software allows for that.
Workshops, you should be able to follow, help people next to you, and even have a side conversation. and that's practically impossible in video meeting.
Bandwidth. If there is one point to take from this article it's this point.
In person interactions can involve being able to look at peoples faces and body language and switch seemlessly, you can have a large whiteboard, you could walk to someones laptop and work with them on something and then switch to look at something else. All of those things can be done partially remotely but all you have is N number of screens for output and a front facing camera + maybe sharing one screen as input, and the amount of time to switch between things is longer that just looking at something else in-person. It's obvious the large mismatch in bandwidth here and losing it is not without consequences.
Latency and ability to interject easily, everyone knows that it's easier to talk over each other in a video meeting that in an person meeting, that's precisely because of the delay component (no matter how good everyones connection is) and the bandwitdth point above. There is nothing that could be done here it's just hard to be able to have a group conversaton like you would in a physical room.
People use the hand emoji to raise their hand like it's kindergarden again but this definitely limits the quality of the converation since I'm sure a lot of people would forgo speaking about a point due to the added barrier.
Bad connection. For some people remote work = retirement home, moving to the mountains or some beach with no regard to the quality of their internet connection, and now we all have to suffer because of this.
Zoom fatigue (or really any video conferencing tool), I think this happens due to the points above. Video calls are quite irritating, having to do them for few hours really take a toll on any sane person.
Future tools could mitigate some of these problems but I don't think this is going to happen in the near future.
Async vs Sync
The proponents of remote work usually also advice moving more towards asynchronous modes of communication to be more effective in this environment.
Asyncronous communication is definitely superior in a remote environment, but let's go through the trade-offs in certain contexts.
Decision making will be slower.
Unpredictable but typically fast or generally slow feedback loop for reviews/conversations. Being able to interact in-person (I'm referring to the general same building context than specifically inside the meeting time/room) allows you for better conversation quality.
More attention is needed to how the tasks are divided to be able to work on them asynchronously.
This is very context dependent, the best option is to use async where it's appropriate.
Motivation and Performance
There are several issues here:
Casual interactions throughout the day with colleagues/stakeholders remind you of why you're working on your tasks beyond the paycheck.
Self descipline to keep from the increased level of distractions without the work context since you're at home, I concede that this could be offset by the ability to focus without the office chatter.
Boredom, the office could be boring but living and working in the same space (16+ hours at least of your day) could definitely affect your mood in a negative manner.
Living arrangements becoming more of a work issue, family/kids and also the layout of the living space are now affecting your work performance compared to just going to the office.
All those points are not universal, what I'm saying here is that now we have an extra criteria to look for when looking for quality employees and we have to exclude anyone who can't handle the downsides (knowingly or not).
Mentorship
I'm going to assume here that mentoring people is an effort that requires a lot of synchronous interactions and building rapport together. Due to the limitation described above in the collaboration tools I have seen a deterioration of the experiences of juniors when joining a new team compared to the norm pre-2019.
Hybrid
There are two approaches to the hybrid working model:
Employees have to show up only N number of days in a month/week, but we keep the same distributed team structure. This is the wrost of both worlds and it just makes no sense to me.
Specific teams are not geographically distributed and they show up at a physical location N number of days. In my opinion this mitigates most of the problems with remote work and keeps a bit of flexibility.
The Social Part
This one is left to the end because I think there is enough people talking about it online but nonetheless it's worth mentioning that work colleagues are an important of our social circle especially in the software industry for few reasons:
There is a large number of software engineers where software is both a job and a hobby, which leaves little other time to form a strong social group elsewhere.
Any major tech hub is filled with software engineers who moved (most of them recently due to our expanding industry) from elsewhere, sometimes from other countries and continents. And to be honest part of why people do it is not because of the quality of the job or the salary, it's also to be able to be part of the tech community in that place and benefit from the network already setup.
Takeaways
Remote work does provide an extra level of flexibilitiy and benefits including not having to commute, live in large cities and having strict schedule, but I think the negative trade-offs from the perspective of employees are not usually well thought out in the general discourse and I think analyzing that provides a more accurate picture.