Where do you work?

Last week I was on vacation in Kyoto, Japan, and we happened to have one meeting where 4 of us dialed in from all around the world. From west to east: Bellevue, WA + Kiev, Ukraine + Beijing, China + Kyoto, Japan.

This made me reflect on my own career journey about “where do you work?”

Stone Age: Single office collaboration with occasional conference phone calls

I started my professional career at Microsoft in 2003. Back then I worked in Redmond, WA, and my wife worked in Pittsburgh, PA.  Everyone needs to be in office every workday, so we commuted between Seattle and Pittsburgh for 3 years.

• First we tried the plan where I visited her over one weekend, and 2 weeks later she visited me for a weekend.

  • This way, each of us traveled once every month, and we got to spend one weekend together every 2 weeks.

  • This lasted for a few months; travel fatigue kicked in quickly, especially for my wife.

• So my wife reduced her travel frequency, and I picked up.

  • We still got to spend one weekend together every 2 weeks.

  • But only being able to spend <48 hours together every 2 weeks was still a challenge.

• I made a back-then-outrageous request to my team: Can I work remotely from Pittsburgh for one week every month?

  • My management discussed it, and graciously said yes. This was extremely rare back then.

  • I worked extra hours every time to make sure no one feels my physical absence. Calling into meetings back then wasn’t actually easy; lots of accommodations needed to just allow me to work remotely.

  • The side benefit, my productivity was over the roof.

  • This lasted for about a year.

• I made an even-more-outrageous request to my team: Any chance I can work 2 weeks in a row from Pittsburgh every month?

  • My management team discussed it again, and graciously said yes again.

  • Life got much better than before, but was still hard. We were paying double rent (with my Bellevue, WA apartment being empty 50% of time). We started thinking of buying, and now faced the tough question of “do we also double buy?”

Bronze Age: Distributed in-office collaboration with limited video conference

Lucky for us, Google decided to open a Pittsburgh office in 2006, and I joined Google Pittsburgh early on. This solved my personal life challenges, but work wise, we needed to figure out how to collaborate across 3 time zones.

To collaborate with our colleagues in Mountain View, we ordered special video conference equipment, a small device that cost $3K apiece. This allowed both sides to call each other easily, and have a video chat any time. As much as we tried, the usage didn’t last long.

• We first tried to keep video always on, but muted. So both offices would know whether our teammates were present in the other office, and unmute to start a conversation.

  • The downside was, it was awkward to feel being watched when working.

• So we stopped the video from being always on. Then we no longer knew whether the other side had people in the office. Even though we could ping over chat to ask whether in the office, that extra friction made people reluctant to initiate a call.

Video conferences were certainly better than voice calls only, but they couldn’t replace the convenience of turning the chair and asking “hey I have a question”.

Business norm then was still: if you can be in-person, be in-person. Video conferences are a last resort. Even on video conference, normally one room was dominant, and people dialing from remote needed extra effort to have a speaking chance.

Iron Age: Video conference as de-facto norm

Then COVID hit in 2020. Suddenly everyone was working from home, and video conference became the only option. Zoom boomed.

Each person having their own screen made meeting “fairness” easy. Anyone can raise their hand in the app, and everyone can see whose hands were raised. Someone will call the remaining hands-up to speak. This dynamic change was so drastically better that Meta even after enforcing return-to-office policy still mandated calibration meetings to be one-person-per-screen.

The downside of video conferences as a de-facto norm is the loss of personal relationship in business settings. Things became more transactional. Some people felt disconnected from their teams, especially those who joined during covid and had never met the rest of their team in person.

As a result, 2023 saw a tide wave of industry wide return-to-office policies. Many (mostly large) companies preferred employees to be in office, and started tracking and enforcement of such policies.

Modern Era: Hybrid with the right balance

Looking back the past 20 years from my own journey, it’s amazing how much things have changed and in some aspects improved.

Looking forward I think it’s clear that a hybrid of in-person and video conference is the future.

• In-person brings strong relationships, team bonding and cohesiveness, and more efficient collaboration.

• Video conferences bring flexibility for personal needs.

The art is how to balance the two.

While most people agree the video-conference-only approach during covid time was not ideal and some correction is needed, I personally think the current industry wide return-to-office is also overcorrecting, and employee resentment is gradually building up. I foresee some further adjustments by the large companies to identify a good balance.

For startups though, the answer is a lot easier (simply because there are less people to coordinate). Prefer to meet in person when you can, and leverage video conferences when you can’t.

That’s me dialing in from a Kyoto hotel lobby at midnight.