Nothing I have to say on this topic is new and, therefore, probably not that interesting. But I have thought, read and listened a lot about it and so it’s been dominating a portion of my brain for a while now.

I’ve always struggled with the traditional office environment. Harsh lights that gave me headaches. A hum of noise around distracting me so much I often had to have headphones in listening to music, usually louder than my cubicle mates would appreciate in my younger years. People stopping by my or neighboring desks to ask questions that could have been sent in DMs and looked at during natural pauses in flow.

I’ve thought a lot about the concept of flow, that sort of zen like state often spoken of in reverence that developers get into. While it is a thing and often directly correlates to developer productivity level there’s also the cynical part of me that looks at it from the outside. How so often developers are given an air of mystique – going into flow, solving great problems, whiteboards full of cryptic notes and diagrams. Again all of it does have a core of truth in it but I often think how much we play into it for our own benefit. Or how it’s not that different from anyone else just having deep focus on a problem. But I digress.

Going back to productivity and the core of what I set out to talk about I think companies and leadership have it wrong right now. As I write this we’re deep into the “return to office” (RTO) movement in that most large companies are pushing to limit if not do away with remote and even hybrid work to a great degree. One of the things I often came back to in meetings when we seemed to be spiraling without arriving at a solution was the simple question of “what are we actually trying to solve?”

With RTO it seems to be two things – control and productivity. Control in the workplace has always been a battlefield where the front line moves back and forth between employees and companies. When there’s more need than workers we get more mobility, benefits, and pay. When there’s not, we have to make compromises and sacrifices to support ourselves or our families. But productivity I think is the more interesting one. It directly relates to something that employers focus on – return on investment (ROI). If I’m more productive for the same salary, they get more. So often their goal is to make us more productive which they feel RTO does. But the data I’ve seen implies different and we saw this in the unwilling experiment we were all enrolled into during the pandemic.

When the pandemic started I had already been working remotely for about six months and working hybrid before that for years. Having all of my colleagues join me remotely was even better for me. I’ve often struggled with when to interject in conversations which means I really struggle during meetings over a certain size. But with all of us in Zoom (or Teams or whatever) your ability to read body language and the room was limited, so we all sort of naturally fell into the tools built in like the hand raising feature. So if I had something to say I could use that and it felt much more natural and comfortable for me. 

After people started to initially go back into the office I struggled again. Partly because of that – people wouldn’t look for the hand notification as naturally anymore instead focusing on the people in the room – but also because as with most companies I worked on distributed teams. Even if we were all in the office there were multiple offices – NYC, Boston, India, etc. So now you not only had side conversations going on in a room but multiple ones and they couldn’t see each other.

During the pandemic we also utilized DMs, emails and other asynchronous forms of communication because you couldn’t lean over a cubicle wall or walk to someone’s desk. And because we were all in the same boat we grew comfortable with focusing on tasks and then checking them during natural breaks in focus (or flow). Once people started going back into the office that changed back as well with more desire for immediate responses.

One of the things I noticed most is that during the pandemic the teams I was on were very high performance. Our productivity was much higher before some of us returned to the office. Communication and rapport were also better before RTO. I had an interesting dichotomy as I worked on two teams. One that was distributed and hybrid and one that was almost fully remote. The fully remote team continued on being very productive and cohesive – even though many of us were (like myself) not 100% assigned to the team. The hybrid team tended to coalesce around office locations.

I noticed this most with two of the more junior developers on the team. During the pandemic when everyone was remote both got guidance and mentorship about equally. After we went back to the office because of the distribution of the team, one was in our main office with both tech leads and another senior developer while the other was on their own even when in the office. I don’t think you need many chances to guess who tended to get more mentorship after RTO.

And that sort of gets to my point. Remote work always felt more democratic and productive to me. We’re all on the same level so we all have the same voice and attention, not just who is in front of tech leads, management, etc. So mentorship and promotions at least feel more fair. Bonds are made not by proximity but by rapport and respect. Finally you’re able to have more control over your focus so you can do more deep work.

If you were observing me in the office versus remote it may look like I was more productive in the office, but there’s an illusion there. I wouldn’t argue that if you compared time directly in front of the computer I was probably doing that more in the office. And it was because of being in the office, but not because people were watching me. It was because I couldn’t control interruptions, would get pulled out of flow, and then have to get back into it. The same problems I could solve in 1-2 hours at home where I could just be heads down would take me 3x (or longer) in the office. Unless I sequestered myself in one of our “phone booths” or jammed my headphones in and ignored everyone who didn’t directly tap me on the shoulder or sit on my desk – but at that point what is the value of going into the office anyways?

I get the arguments against it. Managers are able to see us more in the office. But they weren’t during the pandemic and most of the data I’ve seen says that was some of the most productive times for companies. Maybe that’s skewed a bit because we literally couldn’t leave our houses, but even as things started to open up the data I’ve seen seemed to hold. It seemed to do wonders for retention too because, surprisingly, when you treat people like adults and look at their results and not whether they’re sitting at a desk in some office somewhere for a requisite number of hours they feel more valued and trusted. Which makes them want to stay and, ironically, work to keep that trust. They value the natural joy of actually building and accomplishing things, of having purpose.

I also get that for junior developers it’s harder to be mentored virtually than in person. It helps to sit next to someone rather than sharing a screen on Zoom. But now there’s a huge push towards AI and pair programming (or vibe coding or whatever the next buzzword will be) which is basically exactly the same thing as virtual mentoring.

So again I go back to – what are we really trying to solve? As humans, with our one wild and precious life, what do we really want from our work which will take up so much of our lives during some of the best years? Why can’t we have a little more trust, empathy, and kindness for and in each other? Or are we all just doomed to being “resources” that capitalism can extract as much productivity from before they have no more use for us and toss us aside? 

I know the type of company I would build if I had the wealth, ambition, and skills to. But maybe that’s just me.