Office NIMBYs

The remote work scam and the joy a great workplace can bring.

At a talk a few weeks ago, I made a passing comment that I think remote work is a scam. This ruffled a few feathers and so I thought it was worth clarifying why it is.

The last few years represented a huge industry-wide experiment on the impact of remote work on everything. Now that the dust has settled a bit we can look at the good and the bad.

The good is articulated in extensive detail across the internet, so I won’t go into too much depth on it. The bad does not get equal attention. An area that is particularly overlooked is how juniors and newcomers (to their job, or to the industry) grow and develop, and all the studies I’ve seen say that remote work is a disaster for this.

Source: New York Times

This study¹ proves something that’s obvious to everyone. Of course proximity matters.

Programming is best taught,² and best learned, like any other apprenticeship: the apprentice learns through the mentorship from, and close observation of, someone much more experienced than them in the craft. This has worked for a good chunk of human history, and it’s great model for learning to code. Nobody argues that, by the way - nobody’s saying that you can finish a university degree or coding bootcamp and have nothing left to learn. No, we all agree that some sort of further learning is required even after new programmers get their “credentials”.

This model falls apart as soon as you work remotely. This is for 3 reasons which also aren’t surprising:

1. Most people aren’t good at teaching things via Zoom

2. Most people aren’t good at learning via Zoom

3. Most companies aren’t set up for learning via Zoom

Only in the rare case that all 3 line up can a trainee learn remotely from a mentor as quickly and effectively as they would in person. That’s the rare exception that proves the rule. It turns out that it’s really hard to learn to code alone, at home, in bed.

For most people and most companies, you can’t look at the studies and come to any reasonable conclusion except that office jobs are better than remote jobs for starting one’s career. But most people in the industry really don’t want to acknowledge this. Why? Presumably because if you like working from home, it’s not in your interests to acknowledge that it’s not good for others (or even for you).

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This reminds me of the debate about “NIMBY”s and housing policy in many countries. In short: NIMBYs want more affordable housing to be built, but not anywhere close to them (lest undesirable people move into their neighborhood). If the choice is between their street staying nice and more cheap housing being built, the street’s staying nice. Opponents of NIMBYs say this stance is hypocritical - they claim to want cheaper housing, as long as it’s “not in my backyard”.

Similarly, I think there’s a lot of people who say they want more to be done to support juniors in the software industry³, but if the choice is between better training and working remotely… those juniors are going to be learning to code at home, alone, in bed.

Often this is well-meaning, but it is hypocrisy and it should be called out. Now, if a remote work advocate was to say “I know how to do my job, I want to work from home, and I don’t care if it’s bad for the next generation”, then I wouldn’t agree, but at least I would respect their point of view. You’re doing what’s best for you - fair enough.

But if you are well-meaning and you claim to really care about mentoring juniors, that’s commendable, but you should walk the walk by actually mentoring them in real life. Unfortunately most of the discourse I see tries to argue that juniors should get more support and they should get remote work. Everyone deep down knows this doesn’t work.

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Aside from the learning benefits, there is an even deeper loss taking place here. A great office culture - where you work together with good people on useful things - can bring true joy and meaning to the lives of everyone that’s part of it. For a long time, the workplace was a place where adults made real substantial social connections, like friendships and sometimes even life partners.

I’ve met so many of my best friends through working side by side with them.

To rob the next generation of that is a tragedy. To tell them it’s in their interests is a scam.

I sometimes think about the fact that you will spend more time at work than you will with your family during your working life, so it’s really really important to have a great team around you. Remote work proponents will argue that these days you can spend all your time with your family, because you’re at home. But does this look like quality family time (or quality work being done)?

Doesn’t look good to me.

Here’s to doing real work in real life.

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I’ll be exploring this topic more in future posts, so if you’re interested please subscribe:

1. Here is the original paper that the NYT summarises.

2. This post is about programming because it’s what I know best, but I am pretty sure it can be extrapolated to a lot of knowledge work.

3. A longer post on this here.