Great read. Another nuance that people miss successful remote companies create lots of opportunities for people to meet in person.
For example, at PostHog we pay for:
- On-person onboarding for new team members
- One or two small team offsites each year
- Co-working and socializing
- One all-company offsite per year
This approach might not scale to larger companies (we're ~35 people and growing atm), but right now we spend less on all of this than we would the equivalent office space in San Fran, and get all benefits you mention RE: hiring etc.
Outstanding write-up. Completely agree that this debate is far more complicated than many would have you believe.
On a separate note, I do wonder about the motives of some of these companies reinstating working-from-office policies. Part of me wonders if it's a covert tactic to induce unofficial voluntary redundancies. The moment a company compels everyone to return to the office there will likely be some engineers who will immediately leave. If the company is looking to make cuts, these folks leaving make the lives of the organisations much easier.
I have no evidence to back this idea up; it's just a hypothesis.
Great read. Another nuance that people miss successful remote companies create lots of opportunities for people to meet in person.
For example, at PostHog we pay for:
- On-person onboarding for new team members
- One or two small team offsites each year
- Co-working and socializing
- One all-company offsite per year
This approach might not scale to larger companies (we're ~35 people and growing atm), but right now we spend less on all of this than we would the equivalent office space in San Fran, and get all benefits you mention RE: hiring etc.
I think that what you described is one of the optimal solutions that gives much of the best of both worlds.
Outstanding write-up. Completely agree that this debate is far more complicated than many would have you believe.
On a separate note, I do wonder about the motives of some of these companies reinstating working-from-office policies. Part of me wonders if it's a covert tactic to induce unofficial voluntary redundancies. The moment a company compels everyone to return to the office there will likely be some engineers who will immediately leave. If the company is looking to make cuts, these folks leaving make the lives of the organisations much easier.
I have no evidence to back this idea up; it's just a hypothesis.