Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion:<p>* Remote work is much better if you know what you&#x27;re building and &quot;just&quot; need to execute.<p>* In-person is much better if you don&#x27;t know what you need to build, are trying to &quot;figure it out as you go along&quot;, and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.<p>Obvious, right? But I think what I&#x27;ve realize is the dimension of &quot;we know what we need to do&quot; is actually pretty much orthogonal to the product, size of the company, tenure of the employees, etc. I&#x27;ve been in early stage startups with no PMF that nonetheless have strong product-centric leadership who can set down an unambiguous vision for what they believe needs to be done. And I&#x27;ve been in startups that have PMF yet have no vision, and everyone is standing around in their remote offices twiddling their thumbs on &quot;what to build next&quot;.<p>For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2. I worked at Meta remotely for a year. My instructions when I joined were something like &quot;Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute&quot;. WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.<p>TL;DR I think remote work is well set up for companies with leadership that resembles a benevolent dictatorship. I think if you are all-remote and your leadership is effectively &quot;managerial&quot; in nature, NGMI.