In Defense of Return to the Office

If you ask me, hybrid is the way to go.

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I typically stay away from hot topics, preferring to stay on the “safe” side with subjects like why Python is terrible (oh no , I mean amazing) and the many great things my father used to say. However, I feel dangerous right now, so I decided to write about today’s hot button topic: Return To Office.

I am somewhat of an old school office warrior, courtesy of the fact that, with brief exceptions, I worked in an office all my life and never suffered any real inconvenience from it.

When I started my career, working from home was just not possible; my home had one analog phone line and it was shared with our restaurant, so I was barely able to call my friends, let alone hook up a (slow) modem and connect to my employer’s mainframes (which wouldn’t be allowed anyway). If I got paged in the middle of the night, I would jump in my car, drive 45 minutes to the office, convince the security guards to let me in, and switch on my 3270 terminal to see what was going on.

When I co-founded an IT company in the mid-1990s, one of the first things we did was rent an office because that's what serious companies did. 

It was also kinda necessary because without the trappings of a real company, the Dutch social security administration would label you a virtual employee of your customers and levy social insurance premiums. Uber is suffering from this right now.

Of course when the Internet came, things became a bit more fluid. However bandwidth was still restricted, video conferencing was not yet possible, and generally companies were not enthusiastic about giving access to their internal networks and systems from outside their company premises For instance, in the early 2000s I divided my time between Holland and Spain and it was very inconvenient that I didn’t have access to my customer's systems from my apartment in Spain. In response to this inconvenience I cobbled together an unofficial inbound SSH facility using an unholy combination of a cron job, some shell scripts, a HTTPS proxy, and some software I wrote to allow SSH to setup and use a tunnel through that HTTPS proxy.

Once, when my sponsor at the customer called me to report some intricate problem that they wanted me to look into, he asked me how I was able to login from Spain. He immediately corrected himself and said the magic words: “Don't tell me, because when you do, I will have to do something about it.”

When the pandemic happened I was one of the last to leave the office. In fact, I was kinda liking the empty office and the absence of lines in the company restaurant :-)

Once everyone started working from home the big shock, which is still reverberating through society, is that we found out it was actually possible for almost all regular white collar office workers to work from home without society crumbling. We had never really thought about it until it was necessary to do so, and then we found out that it worked!

I wonder how many people realize how lucky we were. If the pandemic had happened only ten years earlier, it would probably not have been possible to work from home at the scale and as effectively as we could in 2022. Of course, adaptations had to be made, meeting norms had to relax a bit, working times moved, and lots of rooms tidied, but by and large we just motored along. Sitting together and hanging out at the water cooler was replaced by working together as a vaguely connected distributed cloud of atoms, tied together by TCP/IP connections. It was, in one word, phenomenal. Without meaning to, we found we had built an infrastructure with high speed networks into every home that could support the entire white collar economy to work from home without too many problems.

This description glosses over the fact that many software and site reliability engineering teams had to perform quite a few heroics to make sure that all the relevant systems scaled and were able to match the sudden demand for video conferencing and the like. 

Humans are terrible at estimating the short and long term effects of changes. After an event we tend to think the world will change tremendously in the short term and then when it doesn’t, underestimate the effects of that event in the long term, which are often very significant.

The sudden need to all from from home was one of these events. Relatively quickly, newspaper articles started appearing that boldly stated that the world was never going to be the same again and that we would never ever move back to the office. Apparently, every white collar worker would work from home from now until the heat death of the universe. Some companies embraced this thought as well. Very early on, Mark Zuckerberg announced that working from home would become a permanent option for white collar staff, which created a large sucking sound as tons of people left an overpriced Silicon Valley in favor of places like Austin TX, Portland OR, or some cabin in the Rockies.

Downtowns turned into post-apocalyptic cityscapes with millions of feet of empty office spaces. Downtown restaurants closed, rents in Manhattan dropped, and purveyors of home office and improvement materials flourished.

With the typical enthusiasm of an economy that is always ready to embrace the next big thing, articles started appearing that lauded working from home. People who worked from home were, in the words of Radiohead: Fitter, happier, more productive (though perhaps not “not eating as much”). 

Working from home became the new normal.

I worked from home for about two years and had a hell of a time. We spent the winters working from "home" (an AirBnB) in Arizona and I worked "from home" while visiting friends in Switzerland. My wife worked from home as well, and, whereas if you had asked me in January of 2020 whether our marriage would survive such an arrangement I would have been doubtful, it worked wonderfully well.

However as the pandemic waned, the first cracks were starting to appear. CEOs of a few large companies started saying that they wanted people back in the office. In response they were derided. Millennials, it was said, would never want to work in an office again and working from home was the new normal. These CEOs were control freaks and dinosaurs that had lost touch with the modern world. Fuck these guys, they would never hire any talent ever again with that attitude.

And of course working from home had (and has) a lot going for it. More flexibility, fewer interruptions, no time wasted commuting, the ability to move to more auspicious areas. There were of course also downsides, like social isolation.

I am a creature of habit, so working from home wasn’t that different for me, but without a commute and with the added bonus that I could do laundry during the day. At first I wouldn't necessarily say that I was less productive than when working in the office, but I was also not greatly more productive. 

However, as the pandemic raged on, I was starting to notice  differences.

The first thing I noticed was that I never accidentally overheard something anymore. As a principal engineer I typically oversee multiple projects and I am trying to keep the architecture of a large suite of systems and products optimal, coherent, and consistent. To do my job I need information. The pandemic didn’t impact the official information channels that I was plugged into: Documents, chats, and meetings flowed pretty much as before. But I did notice the sudden disappearance of unofficial information channels: Discussions overheard near my cubicle, people pulling me into a whiteboard discussion because I happened to walk by, chats during lunch, seeing people congregate over a screen and injecting myself into that situation to learn what is going on. A large part of my job comes down to tying things together, and no longer being in the office gave me fewer strands to work with.

The next difficulty I ran into was ramping up senior people. I experienced that problem from both sides, ramping up myself in a new job at a new company and helping other senior people ramp up after being hired. As a senior person your effectiveness depends on your in-depth knowledge of the technology stack and a deep network of people in the organization. As a new senior person you have neither, and it turns out it is really hard to build up the required knowledge of technology and people in a “working from home” situation.

The third problem I ran into is developing people. It turns out that learning what senior people do is best observed holistically and learned through osmosis. In a “working from home” situation your view of what your colleagues do is limited to the official information channels (documents, meetings, chats) and that is a very incomplete picture. Technical leadership requires a mature attitude towards everything that happens in the team and when working from home it is impossible to see what senior people do in a wide variety of settings where you might not be an official participant. Consequently I have had a number of difficult conversations with people about promotion because they honestly didn't know and didn’t see what the difference in performance was between them and their more senior colleagues.

A similar problem holds for dealing with underperformers. In many ways this is the same problem as discussed above; it turns out that even the written (official) expectations about job performance contain many open norms that are subject to interpretation. It turned out it is very hard to convey job expectations if you do not have examples walking around to observe and that the manager can point to.

These and other problems prompted many companies to mandate some form of hybrid working, often in the form of a requirement to be in the office at least three days a week, often with an additional requirement for teams to agree on what these days are.

Personally I think this is perfect, because it balances the advantages of working from home with the advantages of being in the office. Nevertheless lots of people hate it. I totally get that; if you got hired in, or moved to, a remote location that is not close to your company's offices and then the company requires you to come in again, that clearly sucks balls and there are no great solutions to that problem.

Positions on this topic seem to be solidifying, people are protesting and loudly complaining on social media, internal company emails on the subject are being leaked to the press, and companies are being vilified for requiring their staff to spend some or all of their working hours in the office. This is especially hard for people who spent the last years of college studying remotely, graduating remotely, and then starting their job remotely. They are obviously flabbergasted about having to report to an office because they have never done so and often they are also in the types of jobs or roles where working from home is about as effective as working in an office.

I on the other hand have no problem returning to the office because a) it is not a hardship (I live an easy 25 minute bike ride from the office) and b) I am gaining a lot from being in the office in terms of access to colleagues and information that I would otherwise not have access to. 

When my employer announced a return to the office, quite a few people asked me with a worried look if I was okay with that. Chill out everyone, I worked in an office for 32 years before the pandemic sent us all home. I think I will survive.

Working from home is amazing for some things and it is not quite so amazing for other things, so it makes sense to me that a hybrid model is the way to go. That definitely sucks for the people for whom returning to the office is very inconvenient but companies are not democracies and if working from home is super important to you, you will need to make that an important factor in choosing who to work for.

It is clear to me that working from home is here to stay. Some companies will decide to be fully remote and they then have the obligation to make that work for them, including dealing with the various problems that I outlined above. Other companies will choose to go (or stay) hybrid and they will experience both the advantages (in terms of easier organization of work) and disadvantages (access to talent, expensive real estate) of that. Some companies might even decide to have everyone in the office five days per week again because they like that or maybe because there are factors in their work that require it (such as job site security in defense contracting).

The exaggerated claims we heard at the start of the pandemic that said that nobody would ever be in an office again were definitely stupid when they were made and that will not come to pass. However the experience that was forced upon us made a lot of people realize that working from home can work and can be effective, and that will drive different modalities of work in the future. 

Looking ahead ten years from today, not everybody will be working from home (obviously), but not everybody will be back in the office either. Working from home is a new tool in the company's toolbox to optimize their workplace, real estate costs, team organization, and talent acquisition.

I am happy being hybrid, it makes sense for my job. I will miss the winters in Arizona though….