You Drove to the Office to Sit in Zoom

Every week someone on LinkedIn explains why remote work kills productivity and culture, and the office is the only path to greatness. Meanwhile half of their own team sits in a meeting room with headphones on, talking to people in other cities. You commute to the office to sit in Zoom. Peak management.

TL;DR

work format != productivity. Office presence is just easier to see than engineering output, so people who can't measure the second one measure the first.

p.s. you can skip the post, the rest is just more detail

Presence isn't a metric

I don't buy PMs who say productivity is higher in the office. What's higher in the office is visibility. When you can't measure what a team shipped, you measure who sat at their desk from 9 to 6, because that part is easy to count.

Open space makes it worse. You see bodies in seats and it looks like work is happening. But sitting in a room has nothing to do with a solved problem, especially when the problem is a race condition in a distributed system and every interruption costs you twenty minutes of rebuilding context in your head.

Then there's the commute. An hour or two a day, gone, so you can open the same laptop in a different chair and join the same call.

Hayot Birja

I work at Hayot Birja: an exchange, low latency, you can't lose messages and you can't improvise with consistency. Fully remote, minimal bureaucracy, nobody counts hours. So much for "serious systems need an office."

I've also worked places without remote. Not naming them and not trashing them, good teams exist in both formats. My problem isn't with companies that have offices, it's with people who think the office is the reason things work.

Open-space fans

A special category. The ones posting weekly about the magic of random coffee-machine encounters while spending half their own day in Zoom with people from another office. The company pays rent so everyone can gather in one place and stare at different screens.

If you genuinely need random coffee-machine encounters, that's a quarterly offsite, not a five-day week.

Where the office does win

Onboarding juniors. First weeks on a new team. The kind of half-formed question you'd never type into Slack but would ask out loud to the person sitting next to you. That's real and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

It's also fixable with a couple of days together when they're actually needed, not a permanent five-day mandate for everyone, including people who've been shipping alone for three years.

Only my field

I'm not claiming a universal truth, there are jobs where physical presence is the job. But in engineering most of the work is concentration: reading someone else's code, writing your own, holding a system in your head. Where the chair stands doesn't change any of that.

What changes it is whether your management can measure results at all. The ones who can't will always pick attendance.