Remote Work Won | Prime Reacts 

Yeah I think this is probably one of the strongest arguments against RTO initiatives. If the entire team is scattered, it doesn't make any sense. The rest of it gets murkier.

I'm working from home and have only 2 team calls a week. All working questions solved by team chat or 5mins 1v1 calls. And it's just great.

​@@kaerakh4267in that case you can set up a "team day" where everyone in your team comes into the office on the same fay each week

I didn't have that painful of a commute, but pre-pandemic half my teams were always in another city so all meetings were remote. Aside from mentorship as a junior (with a same location mentor, which wasn't always the case), being in the office always felt pretty pointless with the respect to work when almost all meetings were digital anyway.

I think its a company culture thing

Human interaction is not something to avoid.. and what about the other 5%?

you have forgoten about "have you seen ", standup beeing people standing in a circle and saying 1 by 1 what they are planning to do(visible on kanban), In 1,5 years I only had once a standup where when I said that I was stuck/idle ing that the group help me or gave me a task. I hade more luck writing my lead an email and getting a response/help half a day later.

@@-Jason-Lhuman interaction is not something to avoid, but it seems like you should be arguing against the 95/5 split rather than trying to justify the ROI on 5%. Because the business people sold on return-to-office aren’t buying into it for just 5%.

And then Social media handler comes with camera let me take your photo tomorrow is your birthday

And the bus always being late, or early but not staying until the scheduled time

I agree with your point, but I also want to point out mass transit in major cities is violent (see Washington, NYC, SF). Until actual safety is returned, remote work must be allowed.

Yea 1 hour each way, twice a day is 10 hours for a 5 day work week, so that's about 500 hours a year wasted on driving, and for me that was 12,000 miles of wear on my car and exhaust fumes, and around £3000 a year in petrol, and when I work from home I actually work longer hours because that time isn't wasted with commuting. Luckily my work judges people on their achievements rather than their location

Someone works in post pandemic London 😂😂 I feel ya

@@georgehelyar Aye 500ish hours, haha my maths is shocking…

If there's a meeting that actually adds value that couldn't be done remotely, that'd be the only time I'd be willing to have an office day. Spoilers: this only happens 4-5 times a year, which says a lot about worker bee meetings. For manager meetings, I can see why Elon forced them in office for Tesla years ago.

Facts!

@@SimGunther Let's start with the basics: 90% of IT meetings are utterly useless

Same, we've got 1 guy on the team local. No way in Hell I'd ever go back to commuting, especially in Dallas, I'd sooner take a 50% paycut lmao.

@@monolith-zl4qt which is why I mentioned 4 or 5 meetings a year are even remotely useful/valuable while the rest of those meetings could've been a group msg or email.

There is a difference between being blunt and being outright aggressive. That title made it clear what the guy’s intentions were.

@@captainfordo1 Just like there is a difference between a joke and a factually correct, objectively true statement.

tbh this blog post is stupidly written and more salty than useful or trying to get a point

@@Salamander002 It's a blog post using tongue-in-cheek humor with a big fat "hot take" label on it. It's really annoying when people will are so blatantly hypocritical in this matter - like when Prime will immediately write off an whole article before even reading it because it has the word "gaslight" in it vs when the article has 15 different prefaces and pre-explanations. You are either being obtuse on purpose or you're incredibly dense.

It's more about the communication style. When he asked about the chances that the word colonization shows up I knew exactly what he meant. A person's choice of language has a lot of heuristics packed in it.

yeah, this is a complete L he basically accused the article author of fabricating/using unreliable statistics without any proof, then banned a guy in chat that called him out on it and later got pwned by his own poll 🤡-agen

@@ruroruro Seriously, and him banning that guy makes me lose respect for him. Prime strikes me as a smart guy, but then he has some takes that are so opinionated, but misrepresent the topic, which leads me to believe that he's just lazy. In my opinion, that's worse than being dumb.

@@webdavis I lost a bit of respect for him as well due to this episode. I think he made the decision to ban that guy before even checking the link, he just scrolled through that page with references before banning to find an excuse for his decision and look less volatile and more mature to his audience.

​@@webdavisyeah, that ban pissed me off: "you told me to check the study before judging it based on nothing? Well you sir didn't personally check all the sources of this study I say based on nothing - begone!"

This is why RTO always happens with the CEO just imposing it, workers despise it and there's no solid evidence it's needed so they just force it on people and fire anybody who disagrees Prime's CEO material apparently

lmao amazing, yet sadly accurate summary.

Perfectly said.

I had the opposite experience. At one job, I had to be on call ALL day for several hours for pair programming. The job was WFH but super micromanagement. In office, I am left alone for the most part. But yea, the commute sucks still. Depends on your colleagues and management.

@@mecanuktutorials6476paired programming is such a waste

Just to clarify, introversion != social anxiety. I'm in the same boat but feel like many self-described introverts fall into this trap of avoiding everyone all to fast just because they always assume a layer of bs small talk to be conquered each time someone comes up to them IRL (cue social anxiety woes.) Two introverts ping-ponging ideas IRL and learning their nature of thought is a wonderful thing that can empower online discussions even further.

@@mecanuktutorials6476 That's a micromanagement problem not a remote problem though

I know this is a joke but I'm surprised about the number of upvotes

That is your fAmiLY!

Sometimes not even, my team and stakeholders are distributed across multiple countries. When I am going to the office I will be working remote anyway

@@IgnisAchilles ditto tbh

@@penname4764 why a joke? your colleagues are not your friends.

"You help their work a ton in ways that are maybe not possible" Take towards the end that kinda retorts one of my points here. I would say no to this in some ways and agree in others. The thing is that these people who ask me frequent questions, still do, but they do so in teams where I can stay in my current train of thought. If I am working on a piece of code and I have 2 hours planned to go through the module and write some test for it, then I have that time to myself. When the two hours are gone, I can pull up the questions people have and address them/help with their problems. The reality of remote work after 4 years as well is that often I check in on a question 30 minutes after someone asked, and they figured it out themselves anyway. Sometimes they haven't and I do help out still, but in my experience a lot of people asking for help irl just did so because it was convenient and I am bad at saying no to requests. Now that getting my attention isn't something they can force because I can turn off notifications, a lot of people have learned the value of self help. As far as the arguments for junior devs, imo this one is tough to address. I was never a junior dev in the remote work era, but I do work with some junior devs. We have spaces for junior devs to get help from mid to senior level workers and that works quite well in my experience and creates a lot of cross team conversations. We also just still have the ability to screen share, read docs together, and do trainings together. It might be harder for an ambitious junior dev, but there are solutions that don't involve going in office. Like ultimately, remote work has a lot of struggles that didn't really apply to in office, but the same is true in reverse. I don't believe that the problems of remote work can't be overcome. I do believe that the problems with in office work cannot be overcome. That is the hottest take I can have about this.

@@miscbits To add to the question as well, I make sure to enforce a "ask your questions in a public channel for the team" mentality so that if Im not available but someone else is they can answer quicker, but it also helps spread knowledge or reinforce it for things that might not crop up as often like more ovscure parts of the code base. The problem people always run into is trying to do the exact same thing as in person which was never functional (as you mentioned, constant distractions aare really bad for getting work done) instead of adapting to better models that work for all involved

What do you have to colloborate on with coworkers as someone who is not in the computer science field? Are they all software engineers with different skillsets? And did you specifically apply to a remote job and got it?

@@lukeskywalker7258 I work specifically as a data engineer so often times collaboration is looking at data, sharing notebooks, and talking about statistical significance. We also often specialize in one product or domain so we have to share information about products and programs that we aren’t necessarily super knowledgeable about. My job when I started was in person and it moved to wfh. They’ve tried to do a return to office + I’ve survived two rounds of layoffs. Nothing will stick even with fresh employees, they immediately have the expectation that they are going to be grandfathered into the wfh policy.

@@lukeskywalker7258 I work as a data engineer, so a lot of the collaboration is working with people who have domain knowledge of their specific products. I work at a company that has lots of different products and we work with thousands of stores across the world, so no one data person at the company knows everything about the company. We basically need to constantly be working together to make sure all of our models line up and that we can be in a state to share information around easily. It is true that a lot of us have specialized skills because of the domains we are in, but I wouldn't say that there is anything specific that one of us could do that anyone else can't. It's just a scale and volume thing. Like even if I wanted to understand every aspect of the business all by myself, it would be somewhat futile. I also was in person when I started this job 5 years ago, and then it became a remote job later on after the pandemic. The lease on the building we were in ended basically a year after we went remote and the company just decided to rent a floor on a smaller building and do the hotel desk thing, so we can come in if we need to. We do sometimes for events or for war room meetings, but its super rare for me personally. I think the company would like the do a RTO if they could, but at this point we have employees all across the country and we don't have a large enough office to accommodate everyone anymore. We have new employees as well who feel "grandfathered" into the wfh situation as well and also basically just assume that it will continue even though many of the people who were here when wfh started have rotated out. Its safe to say for us at least that it just has too much momentum to stop. Truth be told the distinction between hybrid and remote is a little vague and Primeagen seems to talk as if hybrid is proof that in person is still important, but the article author talks about hybrid as if its just as good as full remote. I am here to say that the way my company does it is the absolute best. In office work is always 100% optional and our office gets enough visitors every day to justify it (for now at least). The company pays a fraction in rent that they used to, and workers feel like the office is a resource rather than a prison. When I go into the office it is my own free will and I feel I get a lot out of it. If I were being forced to go in, I would probably run into a lot of the same issues I had before going full remote.

at which timestamp did this happen? I heard it, but I wasn't in the room when it happened.

@@y00t00b3r 9:13

that guy was kinda on point if he got banned for maybe not doing his research why did prime just skim through it without opening a single link and confirming himself.

@@y00t00b3r 7:47

he does do that sometime. cant you like disagree and move on. oh well.

That’s an interesting perspective. Our most junior hire has been….. interesting. But not on the hard skills. It’s the soft skills of communication and professionalism that have been a lot harder to teach remotely versus in-person.

You’re just probably the right junior to mentor ;) And imho this is a great point / I’m sure good people will strive and weak people will concentrate in “in office” shops…

Did you work in person before you worked from home? I love working from home, but my personal experience is that new graduates who have never worked in an office are more likely to slack off in their first job when working from home. Also depends a lot on the person of course. Really the main thing is having a work ethic and wanting to contribute and learn. One guy in my team was working 40 hours as a chef while doing his degree remotely so we hired him entirely based on his work ethic before he graduated, and he did his final year of university while working full time for us, and he's been a great hire.

@@violettefemme21 I can see that being an issue. Especially considering the kind of nerdy introvert people who are usually interested in the field. I wrongly assumed that that wasn't much of an issue due to how we don't really have that kind of behaviours at work. It's a good point to bring up. Engaging people to interact online differs from in-person.

@@georgehelyarslack off in terms of deliverables or effort? Because even if a person slacks off time to time, if they get their work done on time, is it that much of an issue?

Is the second pretty much the majority of companies that need software engineers?

@@lukeskywalker7258 don't have the stats, but it definitely depends on your direct management. Sometimes top management will recommend "return to office" but won't enforce it, and your direct manager may not even care, as long as you do your job. If, however, corporate decide to enforce your office presence by tracking card swipes, and make it a key performance indicator on which top management bonuses rely, then too bad, you get mandatory office presence.

The truth is managers are the ones bitching about this, they're quacking in their boots knowing they can't justify their job if there is no one to consistently pester

​@@mortvald The weird thing is that I've seen managers do their job extremely well while remote. Since you can't pester people immediately because they can choose to ignore you until they're free, remote inadvertently makes you consider meetings, mails, and communication in a more calculated manner.

I like this take - I too am not interested in going to the office, simply because the perks do not interest me. I still go, once a week, because of socialization, but only because my team mates requested it.

The salt in these comments is amazing.

Yeah, believe primeagen instead - he always right

@@guguludugulu Yeah. You better believe him, or he got that banhammer ready.

He clearly doesnt even understand statistics. Small sample sizes can be extremely accurate when chosen carefully. You know, like statisticians do, which prime is not one

it's the second comment that got him banned

This video only has 1k likes, but has 200+ dislikes... that's a pretty bad ratio, and I'm pretty sure it's because of him being very hypocritical with his not reading the studies/sources as he got mad at someone else he told to read the studies/sources.

One day, someone will actually look through the sources, but until then, we can all yell at each other

​@@tbunreallYou really think they chose carefully for that statistic lmfao

"how do i discuss things? the same way you do: i send them a message on slack or set up a video call because they're on the other side of the country. the only difference is i do this 30 minutes after waking up and you do it after spending your entire morning sitting in traffic." remote is such a natural arrangement if you have people working across time zones. i'm so much more willing to be flexible with my time (read: get on a 10pm meeting with the korean team) if i don't already have eight hours of my day hard booked for work. so many californians will never get this because they're used to the world revolving around their workday. i swear to god all it would take to sell CEOs on the merits of remote work is to make them work from a branch office for like a single month.

And lol the guy who owns one or two properties is not the one affected by this. All your comments about "oh it's a complicated business" as if there were a bunch of mom and pop shop real estate companies being run into the ground by remote work are incredibly out of touch. These are massive conglomerates. They'll be fine, unfortunately for all of us. Meanwhile, most of our generation can't afford homes largely because these people are eating up all the properties. Saying "oh it's inexperience", "these people are fools" or whatever is just you feeling personally attacked by something that has nothing to do with you. I mean hell, this stuff is difficult for the average person largely _because_ it's hard to compete against these large holdings. You're literally fighting against your own interest.

@@isodoubIetits nice when you go to the comment section and see someone wrote the exact comment you wanted to leave.

@@Rohinthas between this and banning that one guy this video was such an L

Part of a healthy work environment is the monthly sparring with your manager and HR.

by not going into the office you are decreasing work place sexual harrasment and jeopardizing HR jobs. HR has families too! dont you care about their children.

@@pluto8404 By children you mean cats and dildos because lets be honest, who are the ones working in HR these days?

@@pluto8404 I'm looking for work so I better retract my previous comment but I'm not going to.

I was prepared to argue with this sentence for the first 5 words, but the rest actually give's a balanced chi so... can't argue with solid logic.

Sounds like you work with ass holes.

you article was a little salty... but then again, the site is called HOT TAKES! your deliverable has passed all checks and reviews.

It was pretty scathing, but I think most people disagreed with Primeagen in the end.

Not everyone has to agree with each other, it's the internet@@NostraDavid2

How dare you include statistics and citations that a streamer has no time to click and read through? Also disappointed you didn't say wage slavery or better yet, colonialism, like prime was hoping for.

He claims things like body language are very important... :) (not joking, real primeagen take from a recent video)

yeah prime's take on in office is god awful. ridiculous considering he's currently doing remote work, spending time with his family, and doing his side hustle of youtube without dealing with commute. He would be far too gone with the extra commute and dealing with in office politic nonsense if he did go back to in office. What a tool@@Pico141

It's always this sort of loose nonsense about "collaboration" that they can't back up with anything solid, which is why it's wild that he's desperately denying actual research and statistics in order to back it up

@@CrispBaker The actual research also isn't sold on it only being good though, people get way to worked up over this stuff. There has been several studies showing negative affects on productivity when tasks aren't all sunshine and lollipops and there isn't a complete view whether it harms creativity or not. These conversations are always so draining because people are coming in with bias with their own sources they hold near and dear.

@@zombieguy There was a study quoted in this very video that made it clear there was no benefit to RTO, which Prime blew off because it wasn't saying what he wanted it to say. Forcing people to commute, or even move across the country, is obnoxious enough that you need a clear reason for it. People hate and resent being forced into the office. "Managers are insecure" isn't enough of one, and neither is vague nonsense about "collaboration"

As someone who is just getting into this field, how do you "team" them? Is this just like an email or zoom invite? It's wierd that you guys are just collaborating all online anyways even in office. Some of the mentions I have seen are collaborations happen with meetings and stand up meetings throughout the day so does that not happen everywhere?

@@lukeskywalker7258 teams message. Similar to a slack or discord message.

@@lukeskywalker7258 means I message them on teams. Similar to discord or slack.

@@lukeskywalker7258 “teams” meaning send a message on Microsoft Teams.

The other thing not discussed, co-working spaces. Going to AN office rather than THE office is actually really nice. I was wfh before Covid, after a few years you can really see a decline. Going to an office with other people who are doing stuff but not stuff with me, is like a perfect environment.

It is.

One of the things I’m most happy about is that I was able to change my mind on this 180 (I didn’t think remote could work before the pandemic xD )

Most of his controversial takes are just him justifying his own bias and ignoring statistics because he's done A/B testing (which obviously makes you a master at understanding studies). It's one thing to be skeptical of a stat, check the method it was found through, and try to reproduce it to decide if it's BS or not and it's another to hand-wave it off as too small a sample size after just reading the title of the study and its abstract. Yeesh

@@JJarosze9595 It's weird how he's so incredibly desperate on this subject, trying to say "actually research and statistics don't work and don't matter" because it doesn't back up his biases

@@JJarosze9595 Yeah and you know trying to dismiss a sample of 600 as small is pretty silly. It could be that the sample is not representative, sure. There could be problems in how it was picked, there could be correlations making the usual statistical tools over-optimistic, maybe. But assess that first before declaring that 600 is small.

@@JJarosze9595 or like, he's just a regular human doing what he likes to do and doesn't really need to be accountable to weird standards like that because he's not a robot. Personally, I'd rather him have a personality than just be en emotionless stat machine.

especially since its disadvantages mainly impact employers, management, and real estate investors. even if remote work were statistically less productive, as a worker, i only care about being productive to the extent that it gets me things in return. if whatever productivity boost i get from returning to office doesn't translate to enough of a salary increase to offset the costs and time commitment associated with commuting, then it's not something i'm ever going to support.

A company cares about what helps the company. Even if their commercials say that they're trying to make the world a better place.

yeah companies would literally turn you into soylent green if it made them money. you are nothing but a little pawn. @@brinckau

​@@brinckauso do they readily offer remote or hybrid to juniors?

@@brinckau The funny thing is that it does indeed helps the company too with unecessary expenses, but it needs a plan, and skilled management, so you start to get what's the problem here... :p

@@lukeskywalker7258 Probably not.

The classic "rules for thee, but not for me!". What a fucking dodo.

well said. people often forget the opposite side

Have you been able to get hybrid or remote because of this?

Yeah that's why "collaboration" is a load of BS, that's what they used when they were talking about open-plan offices where you have to wear headphones or you can't work for all the distraction "Collaboration" to guys like Prime is when they go to some rando's computer and loudly annoy everybody in the room, everybody despises that guy

golden handcuffs

Was it easy to land remote work before? What was your resume like as someone who is just about to enter this field. It seems there is too much competition and many say don't even expect remote.

@@lukeskywalker7258 It was and still is about knowing what industries see value in remote work and which don't. Network and have a reputation for being a problem solver and someone to have around. Realize that remote is a tradeoff. No FAANG, no status jobs, no stock options. Mostly hard cash and lots of it. In exchange you get flexible working conditions and far more time in your day and the ability to live almost anywhere you want. My first few resume items weren't W2 jobs. I am a competent salesman and know how to market myself. I went FTE after my first few independent gigs because I was tired of working 18-20 hour days chasing jobs to keep food on the table. Afterwards I dropped those and started listing only FTE job lines. The way to be successful at anything is to do the things no one else wants to do. And my resume reflects that. I still work long hours but I also have other side gigs that I couldn't have if I were obligated to sit in an office and burn 2-3 hours a day in traffic. If you have hustle and are self-motivated, remote is for you. If you're looking for a vacation with the occasional zoom call, look elsewhere.

makes sense. i love my remote work too. even with a shorter commute, it makes a huge difference. i've found that i can mitigate weight gain by doing some exercises when i'm pacing around anyway

Chance of remote work like that for a new CS grad?

All my juniors grew up like me - playing online games and hanging out discord. It's not hard to mentor them remotely at all.

My juniors, all of which are remotes whom I've never met, are doing awesome.

How many meetings are in a day?

@@lukeskywalker7258 In worst case it is a 45 minute meeting.

yeah Im here rn and its so strange that you'll have boutique shops and cafes randomly on the 5f and 6f -for examples.

that's terrible. i expect the setup to be good in the office. but i prefer WFH even if my setup is a bit worse

What's your setup?

Balancing cohesion with flexibility should be the primary concern imho

Are the companies usually strict when they offer only x amount of days a week remote and expect you to come into office the other days?

@@lukeskywalker7258 I have no idea. Haven't seen an office since 2018

That seems so pointless. Where I am, my department is fully remote since we are all over the country. Other departments out of my office are basically remote but go in once or twice a month… because 90% of their department will be there.

@@violettefemme21 I'd say worse than pointless. The person doesn't plan to stay by the end of this year. This is what you see at some larger enterprises that want to adopt a policy. Instead of figuring out how to tailor a policy for teams with different attributes they just have one blanket policy across the org because that's much simpler.

that's pretty stupid. it also sounds like they didn't have a say in how hybrid they want to work

So what is the policy on the other members since they are spread out? They have other office located in those paces and they are also forced to go there 3 days week?

@@lukeskywalker7258Yes, from my understanding it is something like that.

Honestly, I don't agree. I'm working from home for 4 years already, last two of those exclusively. I'm fine working from home and I prefer it to office work, but I'd like to be able to go to office sometimes, it can be fun. This vid's BS though, prime really dropped the ball here.

Yep.

Ok but what fool actually believes in statistics or scientific evidence, huh? Pshh. Wage slavery is good, actually. So is owning investment property and other legal forms of rent-seeking behavior.

give out middle manager handshakes

get away with sexual harassing your co-workers in a public setting.

muh collaboration

Have you ever thought about this comment, or did you just vomit it out?

Are all the members that you communicate with in the group also back end focus so basically same skillsets and working on individual stuff? And we're you hired based on being in office and the company later decided to go fully remote? Is that typical of many companies? If the company hired an intern they would likely just join you guys and you would give them tasks remote?

so do you disagree?

Also banning a guy who told him to check the study because "he didn't check the sources". And he thinks he didn't based on what, exactly? A hunch?

P-P-P-P-P-PIIIIIZA PARTY!!! xD

He's a corporate shill, its pretty obvious

i like to think that most people understand the differences, and choose the advantages they prefer

I've worked fully in-office and fully remote and communication has always been much better through Slack than in person in an office.

@@xybersurfer I very much agree.

But in this field is there a lot of opportunity for remote first work? I am hearing it's only possible for those with years of experience. Even if you do remote likely you would still be having those daily meetings and meetings throughout the day like on zoom correct?

@@lukeskywalker7258 I still get contacted by recruiters looking for remote workers, but yes I have about 10 years of experience. That might be affecting who is willing to hire me remote. We still have our daily meetings on Google Meet (we just moved from Zoom recently) but luckily I was able to get our daily standup moved to only twice a week on video since we all recognized that it was basically just a status update.

No. One more of those and you get banned, too.

@@snowballeffect7812 someone has burned out from debugging I guess

You do see how being fully remote makes that easier though right? You can live anywhere and go to any coworking location that you like, on your own rythm, without being forced to live i nthe most expensive cities usually

​@@TurtleKwittyso are most hybrid generally 3 days office and 2 days remote? Not the inverse?

@@lukeskywalker7258 no idea, I'm happily fully remote with a global team. I'd imagine it varies what people consider hybrid?

How long are meetings and how many generally would you say you have in office or remote? Are the meetings pretty much with your coworkers?