‘Return to the office’ rhetoric needs to end

https://thebluejester.medium.com/this-return-to-the-office-rhetoric-needs-to-end-f48580c78d05

by imhoguy • 4 years ago

228 311 4 years ago

thebluejester.medium.com

hollywood_court9• 4 years ago

My wife works for the state. Her team’s productivity soared during the 8 months they spent working from home.

Once they were forced back to the office, 6 of her peers quickly left.

She and one other person are the only ones who remain. Productivity fell greatly even before her peers left.

She only continues to work because she needs ~18 more months to be fully vested in their retirement system. Then she is leaving as well and she will probably just remain at home until she finds something she enjoys.

Her managers know that they are capable of being far more productive while at home, but they don’t seem to care.

Part of me believes it’s “cruelty is the point” but I’m also aware that the director of her state agency is a conservative who has been trying to “starve the beast” once he took over. He has found the most effective way to starve it as all of the young people are leaving to go to the private sector.

Once my wife leaves, the entire state will have exactly one employee to handle her workload.

Edit: The worst part is the fact that the other side of her hallway is nothing but empty offices because those people are allowed to work from home. However, she works under a different director and he refuses to allow it. So it’s quite literally one man ruining it for the rest of them.

eachro• 4 years ago

What is her team responsible for?

hollywood_court9• 4 years ago

They analyze field reports from other scientists. 100% of her work is done at her PC.

When she’s at the office she has to deal with her lower morale in addition to the random coworker stopping by to chat or her manager interrupting her in various ways.

During her WFH time, she alway completed her work by 10am each morning. Now she struggles to complete it by 5pm while being in the office.

The folks that left had many years to go until they were vested. Since she only has a short time remaining, she decided to stick it out.

Ensorceled4• 4 years ago

Please don't ask them to dox their wife.

Thlom2• 4 years ago

In my team most of us are back in the office now. Luckily we still have the option to work from home, so when that is more convenient I'll work from home, but most days I'll be at the office. Never really got the hang of working from home.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

“ Never really got the hang of working from home.”

And thats fine. Everyone should have the option of whichever way works for them. The only issue is that many of those who prefer on site want it imposed on everyone else.

intrasight7• 4 years ago

A friend of mine works for the state. She was told to return to the office. The office is in another city. She is having to buy a condo in that city in order to make that feasible.

hollywood_court9• 4 years ago

My wife commutes 45 mins each way. It’s awful because it’s so dangerous. Her office is in a dangerous area and the interstate she uses to commute is known for its deadly wrecks.

rhexs• 4 years ago

No one is owed a remote job. Unfortunately, if you work for the state, it is highly likely you don't have the skills and leverage to force the issue as most of the positions are just supporting some sort of bureaucracy and fundamentally have to exist because a lobbyist at one point got a law passed. State jobs, like it or not, are often effectively just political appointments.

Also keep in mind that you can't fire or terminate anyone, ever, in the state, so there's also a chance leadership feels this is the first time they can turnover roles that aren't doing much or meeting their goals. That's a very rare opportunity. If you think "rest-and-vest" is bad in tech, you ain't seen anything when it comes to government. Imagine jobs where no one has accomplished anything in a decade or more.

Of course you immediately jump to some sort of conspiracy though.

hollywood_court9• 4 years ago

You made quite a few assumptions there.

She’s a microbiologist. There aren’t any private sector jobs for her around this area unfortunately. It’s either the state or the university (also the state).

She applied and went through the interview process just like anyone else. There was no “political appointment.”

She isn’t allowed to work from home simply because one individual doesn’t like it. Her director refuses to allow it while the director in charge of the other side of the hallway does allow it.

It’s the result of one man imposing his will on others.

tomrod5• 4 years ago

it is highly likely you don't have the skills and leverage to force the issue as most of the positions are just supporting some sort of bureaucracy and fundamentally have to exist because a lobbyist at one point got a law passed. State jobs, like it or not, are often effectively just political appointments.

This tells me you haven't met or worked with very many people in state or federal jobs. I feel like this needs reasonable pushback.

SOME of the leadership positions are political appointments. The majority of employees are a highly skilled workforce supporting a specific mission of that particular state agency.

And "can't fire or terminate anyone, ever, in the state" is a bit off as well.

kranke1555• 4 years ago

The truth is a significant portion of managers, in my experience, are not particularly well suited to the task or are incompetent on some level. Usually their domain level knowledge of what is happening is lower than it should be, so they struggle with leading teams because they’re not as good at knowing what’s going on as they should be.

One way to mask that incompetence and lack of domain level knowledge, in my experience is to come by the workers and look over their shoulders and ask questions.

This is not a problem managers who are experts in what their workers are doing have. But those people in my experience are a minority. They are hired by high performing companies, everything in the middle and down get the cruft.

High performing managers don’t need this, because they know what’s going on even if everyone is at home. They can see who’s slow, who’s fast, who’s delivering what they need. And they know why and how to fix things very quickly.

Poor performing low domain level knowledge managers struggle with this, because they can’t “look over the shoulder”, and ask questions until they have some understand of what’s going on that allows them to (attempt to) fix things.

Thus low to mid performing managers do poorly at WFH while high performing managers are fine with it (in my experience). Having the “over the shoulder” view does indeed allow for lower performance managers to get a grip on a project so I understand why they want to keep it.

kemiller2002• 4 years ago

>This is not a problem managers who are experts in what their workers are doing have.

You're more or less right, but I don't think this is exactly the case. A good manager shouldn't need to be an expert in what their staff is doing. The manager should be there to help them let them do their jobs and stay out of the way. I always say the same thing around this, "If you have to constantly watch your employees either, why do they still work for you, or why are you the manager?"

PeterisP• 4 years ago

Managers play very different roles in different jobs. There are many jobs where your direct manager is a foreman who is doing pretty much the same job but is expected to be an expert in that job and has the responsibility of teaching the others how to do it and doing quality review/supervision to ensure that they're doing it properly.

maxsilver2• 4 years ago

A good manager shouldn't need to be an expert in what their staff is doing. The manager should be there to help them let them do their jobs and stay out of the way.

It's not an either/or, it should be both. A good manager must be at least good at anything their staff is doing and a good manager should be there to help them, let staff do their jobs, and stay out of the way.

If the manager isn't really good at (or an expert in) the role under them, then by definition they can't be a good manager, because they couldn't actually help their staff. But a manager shouldn't be doing their staff's job (they shouldn't be micromanaging), they should have trust in their staff to do good work, and only get involved when explicitly asked, or when something has gone too far off the rails.

---

It should be a "trust but verify" situation. You should trust your team to do work, and stay out of their way to let them do it, but also know enough of the specifics to be able to verify any of it and correct when necessary.

hammock• 4 years ago

deeptote• 4 years ago

The truth is a significant portion of managers, in my experience, are not particularly well suited to the task or are incompetent on some level.

Competent managers are few and far between, Steve Jobs said/did a lot of stupid crap but one cogent point he made was that the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers.

Loughla3• 4 years ago

I count myself as a good manager, and I believe my staff would agree, from what I can tell. I know I'm not perfect. I'm slow to act, I'm way too able to see both sides of every argument, and I want to make sure all of my ducks are in a row before I make noise across the institution based on what my team needs.

But, my secrets:

1. I didn't want to be the boss, I just absolutely HATE being told what to do. The only way to not be told what to do, then, is be in charge.

2. Be open and honest in everything. If you don't know what they're saying to you, say that out loud. If you can't get any traction for whatever the thing they need at the institution, tell them and troubleshoot what comes next. If you really, genuinely understand the individual's complaints, but know that it won't go anywhere, be up front about that, and the reasons for it if you are able.

3. Let the experts be experts, support them, believe them, but also ask questions and do your research so you can (a) call out their bullshit if necessary and (b) not sound and act like a complete moron. In other words, trust, but verify.

4. Do not ignore inter-personal conflict. It will only fester, it will never get better. Your job is to manage the people, including their relationships. Nobody says you have to be friends, but you better f**ing believe you have to work together.

5. Buy drinks if the office does an after-hours, and then leave so they can shit talk you if they want. Even if you're great, they'll shit talk something about you; it's human nature.

Again, I'm not perfect, but these things are 99% of successful managing. I see my job as insulating my staff from the bullshit that flows down from on-high, that way they can actually do the important work.

I loved WFH. My staff were happy, they were productive, and they were productive in FAR less time. But, alas, the executive team here is stuck in a 1950's factory mindset of 'presence is productivity'. It's infuriating.

lapcat2• 4 years ago

Steve Jobs said/did a lot of stupid crap but one cogent point he made was that the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers.

I wonder if he read Plato's Republic, because that's the same idea behind the philosopher kings.

mhss2• 4 years ago

the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager

There's some truth to it. In the sense that I think best managers are not seeking power or "being a leader" for the sake of it. However, there are also a lot of managers that did not want to be managers and are miserable because they'd rather be doing sw engineering and as a result they're shit at their management jobs. Many do not realize it until years into the role and some cannot let go of the 'status' of being the manager and are trapped in a job they do not like, mistakenly afraid of "stepping back" on their careers.

tablespoon2• 4 years ago

Competent managers are few and far between, Steve Jobs said/did a lot of stupid crap but one cogent point he made was that the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers.

It's worth noting that a lot of terrible and mediocre managers also "...never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers."

api• 4 years ago

That those who desire political influence or power are precisely the ones from whom it should be kept has been known and understood since at least Ancient Greece.

brnt• 4 years ago

Management without domain knowledge is there for other reasons. One of them probably includes speaking to the outside world: customers, people who certainly don't have domain knowledge. It's not strange that this kind of job may require as many FTEs as doing actual work. Maybe what is strange is calling it 'management', and implying a hierarchy.

I've experienced corporate cultures in a few places, and Americans do love their hierarchies! If that bothers you, you could consider a job in a place where this is less so.

marcinzm3• 4 years ago

In my experience talking to customers without having domain knowledge tends to not end with the best outcomes.

edit: Which is why you've got sales engineers, solutions engineers and so on at most competent companies that do external sales. Internally you've got product and project managers with technical backgrounds.

otabdeveloper42• 4 years ago

Truth is a significant portion of employees, in my experience, advocate for work from home because they want the chance to slack off.

P.S. Someone has to say this.

EncomLab• 4 years ago

In my experience, the only people who "look behind doors" are those who stand behind them. If you have time to determine who among your co-workers is slacking you either do not have enough work to fill your own job description or should be in HR.

marcinzm3• 4 years ago

And a significant portion of being in the office isn't actually doing work but pretending to since management often values that more than actually getting work done.

dleslie5• 4 years ago

As long as they deliver on schedules they commit to and are agreed to then it's not a problem to have down time.

Even when I worked in an office I would take long walks or leave early, because a rested and happy mind is a productive mind.

NAHWheatCracker• 4 years ago

I agree with you, but I'll also put in that some people want to slack off because of their managers' discourage them. That's my situation, at least.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

I can slack off just fine in the office.

Ensorceled4• 4 years ago

This is the problem with pretty much all of these articles.

Some employees ARE more productive. Some are just as a productive but are happier because they have no commute. Some are LESS productive because they need the team structure. Some are less productive because they can get away with goofing off.

All of these things are true and they might all be true within a single team.

ivan_gammel2• 4 years ago

That's a reasonable desire and should not be punishable. Did you know that in Germany it is not a criminal offense to escape from prison?

If someone can remain productive while having a good time during working hours, that's probably because they use that time to recharge and maintain their productivity. One of the biggest sins of managers is to try to over-optimize the team performance by having more control.

SkipperCat2• 4 years ago

Our world is set up with rules to stop the minority of people who can't be trusted to not abuse the system. If everyone could be trusted, we'd have no locks on doors.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 4 years ago

Full honesty: I slack off anyway, I'd just rather not have to commute to do it. If they had a problem with my output they'd have spoken to me or fired me by now.

CuriouslyC• 4 years ago

People are slacking the same amount at the office, they just have to work harder to hide it.

thefz• 4 years ago

Consider this:

- Some kind of work is measurable. It can be measured in person as well as from remote.

- With around 12 years of experience working in an office, I can guarantee you that 100% of the staff is not working 100% of the time. Maybe 60-70% ish. Why loom around in the office doing nothing when you can be at home and take care of yourself, your pets, your loved ones or cook a healthy meal, and so on?

- WFH is just taking back the time we devoted to work which is not work related such as commuting.

UnpossibleJim• 4 years ago

I just have to ask, did you guys (non exclusive) not work with slackers in the office, pre work from home? Maybe it was just the places I worked but there were plenty of people who didn't produce that were in the office all day long. And the people who produced are still producing while they work from home, at least in my experience. Some people are just going to look at cat videos all day, on their phone or on their computer. I just don't want to share an "open office floor space" with them while I'm being productive =/

tharne• 4 years ago

Truth is a significant portion of employees, in my experience, advocate for work from home because they want the chance to slack off.

You don't need to be WFH to slack off. People have been slacking off in offices since the office was invented.

granshaw• 4 years ago

Truth is most humans are only capable of 4 hours of deep work a day, even less if some of that was really mentally taxing work such as debugging or figuring out nasty trade offs involving multiple codebases, domains, and tools

P.S. Someone has to say this.

suoduandao23• 4 years ago

Yes, but when people slack off in the office, they generally do so by engaging someone else in conversation. So slacking off in the office is ruins two people's productivity as opposed to one. Making it harder to slack off feels virtuous, but it's like criminalizing drugs to combat organized crime.

AlwaysRock2• 4 years ago

When you say slack off you mean what? I deliver at the same level as I have when working in an office. I also get to do house hold chores, exercise, and spend time with my dog during the day.

Taking regular short breaks during the day to do these things takes about as much time as taking regular short break in the office to go get a snack or take a lap around the building or going to lunch.

"Slacking off" is anything other than being tied to the computer for 8 hours a day?

kranke1555• 4 years ago

That’s true but I think the current working hours are not for everyone. Basically I don’t consider taking breaks to be slacking off.

We’ve evolved into brain work, not hand labour, and we’ve kept the same hours. My impression is that at the end of a week at the office in london I was beyond exhausted, and I could just barely recover before coming back Monday.

Now I work shorter hours, yes, and some might consider it slacking off (if they could watch it over a webcam). But I eat much better, feel much better, and don’t feel the need to get trashed over the weekend to recover.

Even in the office I would often take breaks to breathe again because I often felt the environment was a pressure cooker, I would go to the bathroom, go to the shop, find some excuse to eat. In my industry (advertising) overwork and burnout is incredibly common unfortunately.

So I personally don’t see it as slacking off. I know a lot of IT folk who don’t work as hard as most people in my industry and they get paid much better.

echlebek• 4 years ago

People already have plenty of chances to slack off at offices. This is a complete non-argument.

wbsss4412• 4 years ago

I half agree, though I’ve seen plenty of people on Facebook/YouTube/shopping sites at every office I’ve worked in while on the clock, not to mention just goofing off with coworkers talking about whatever subject.

When I’m at home I find it much easier to create a distraction free environment without the noise and uneasiness of someone looking over my shoulder.

registeredcorn• 4 years ago

I would argue that not all managers necessarily need to be experts at whatever it is I do all day, as long as they can get me what it is that I need to do my job effectively.

I do find it incredibly frustrating when I need to explain repeatedly what it is that I do, or when I tell them what I need and they don't make it happen. Or, try to sidestep it by repeatedly asking for "just one more meeting" on the topic.

The worst is when I raise a concern, they raise a counter, and I have a series of counter-counter points to support my concern, but it is still ultimately dropped because they "don't agree". This predictably leads to issues months later, which leads into the very same people asking, "Why didn't anyone bring this up?" where I can then either mention it and humiliate them, or pretend that it never happened and make myself look like a fool.

Basically, the way I see a good manager is someone who doesn't necessarily need to know the in's and out's of how my job works, but is able to trust my assessments and support my requests, when it comes to getting things done. A manager who is an expert in that subject might be able to draw the same conclusion, but if that trust and support are fulfilled, their level of personal expertise on the subject is largely irrelevant from my perspective. As long as they can fight to get that thing supported, and don't do so in a way that undermines or ignores professional assessment, I don't care what they do or do not know about the topic.

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

Rings true to me. The OS group I was in at Convergent Technologies didn't have a group leader, a director nor a VP-level software manager for 4 years, and we did fine. We turned out multiple important releases fully supporting hardware and innovating software.

But we were all very senior people in the group

mhss2• 4 years ago

One way to mask that incompetence and lack of domain level knowledge, in my experience is to come by the workers and look over their shoulders and ask questions.

Nothing wrong with asking questions. I'll take a manager that asks questions 100x over a paper pusher that is not curious about what I do and makes dumb decisions due to lack of information. The difference is more nuanced. How you ask and what you ask is what makes a difference. As a manager with a long dev career before, I know better than asking random questions at random times without context. I need to provide context about why I am asking and what I'm hoping to achieve and why sometimes educating me is good for everyone in the team. You also not need to ask "over the shoulder" when you have source control, tickets, design docs and presumably other artifacts to track progress of what's being done.

Domain knowledge is a big advantage, but if you're a good manager eventually you'll find yourself leading teams in domains you had not worked on before. Unless you're talking about the domain here being "sw engineering", it is almost inevitable you end up leading teams in an area where you're not the expert. It requires a more skilled manager to be successful at leading a team where you cannot rely on your domain expertise.

ivan_gammel2• 4 years ago

Operational awareness <> domain knowledge <> professional expertise <> leadership skills.

Operational awareness can be low if you have a lot of trust in your team. You only need some control checkpoints, at which you can interfere if something goes wrong, but the team can deliver autonomously the rest of the time. In fact, very high OA can be a sign of micromanagement or of a too high cognitive load on the manager.

Domain knowledge can be low if you have domain experts in the team and/or good documentation, so you could delegate sharing and accumulating the knowledge.

Professional expertise can be low if you have senior people in the team and you gained authority by other means, so team can trust your decisions.

The only skill that a good manager must demonstrate is the leadership, which I define as a collection skills to organize collaboration, build trust, optimize processes, enable, motivate and grow people. That skill is indeed often missing, especially in startups, where promotions to management positions often happen based on ownership, not on leadership.

marcinzm3• 4 years ago

That skill is indeed often missing, especially in startups, where promotions to management positions often happen based on ownership, not on leadership.

In my experience many startup founders also get defensive if someone else shows more leadership than they do. And since often startup founders aren't great leaders that's not a high bar.

omginternets• 4 years ago

From what I've seen, managers can also ask for updates via Slack to great effect. Moreover, that conversation/status-report can take place asynchronously, which avoids distraction.

So I have a hard time believing this is the main motivating factor behind the push to return to the office.

heliodor2• 4 years ago

On top of that, many industries and politicians are pushing for society to return to the office because of the ecenomic negatives of not doing so. Think of all the commercial real estate sitting empty, think of all the dress clothes and makeup that is not being sold, etc. Lots of industries are very interested in workers going back to the office and lobbying their politicians to push for it.

BlargMcLarg• 4 years ago

Ironic considering car usage makes up a huge portion of emissions, and this would be the easiest way to cut it with very little negative impact to mental health.

csdvrx• 4 years ago

Think of all the commercial real estate sitting empty

Then turn all of it into housing! If you argue it won't be suitable because of a lack of sufficient windows per room etc, I guarantee you that at a low enough price, it will find a buyer or a renter.

I love working in an office, but having 2 physical spaces, each empty for about half of the time (office at night, home in the daytime) strikes me as stupid.

Let's be honest: there is no genuine physical limitation. We've just decided to be wasteful with our land use to milk more money out of it, and to force the hand of people who might object to that with laws like single family zoning.

NikolaNovak2• 4 years ago

You kinda lose me by repeatedly mixing up "asking questions" with bad management. I now believe the opposite.

In my 3rd year of computer science degree, I took a management course on a lark. Scariest sentence I heard at the time was "a good manager need not be subject matter expert". And first decade of my career I believed that was a horrible idea.

Now I don't. A team lead needs to be domain expert. I want a manager to be good at management - risk analysis, planning, stakeholder communication, etc - and willing to ask questions, seek input and learn. I don't need my manager to know how to create new indexes in db2 or troubleshoot Weblogic or set up integration broker. I need them to ask questions, interact with and listen to the team, keep us informed, fix as much politics crap as possible, ensure we are well integrated with other teams and projects, etc.

(note that this is orthogonal from office vs wfh. You can ask questions and engage team remotely easily enough if you choose to, and you can do it tactfully and productively if you try).

yunohn• 4 years ago

I want a manager to be good at management - risk analysis, planning, stakeholder communication, etc - and willing to ask questions, seek input and learn.

Yeah… OP wasn’t talking about questions like those. The managers being discussed are ones that rely on those questions, and don’t build up knowledge, to do /all/ of their job.

Also, I’ve yet to meet a manager who was actually good at “risk analysis & planning”. I guess most of them are good at communicating, that’s usually how they got the job in the first place.

mox1• 4 years ago

Just so you know, a non-zero portion of F500 doesn't really believe in or have a "Team Lead" role. Its Managers and Individual Contributors, no overlap. I would argue that (in general) a first line manager should be a Team Lead. Otherwise you now have 2 managers (a work product manager and a HR / performance manager).

My (F500 size, but private, Fintech / banking / insurance company) company has 2 "tracks". Individual Contributor (labeled P1-5) and Manager (labeled M1-5). HR does not have any room or space for a "Senior Engineer who is also a Manager." I am currently a P5, If I wanted to move over to management, I would have to take a large pay cut (down to a M2, maybe M3). To keep an equivalent pay and move into a M4 role, I would have to be a manager of managers (aka director or 2nd VP I suppose).

This company desperately needs a Tech Lead type role, but there is no space within their HR playbook.

I suspect at a lot of older companies (outside of FAANG), you will find a similar breakdown or "wall" between ICs and Managers.

donatj2• 4 years ago

The best managers I've had in my near twenty years of software development have been so-so developers but amazing at keeping other people off our backs, saying no, and limiting scope.

marcosdumay5• 4 years ago

Well, "expert" in "a good manager need not be subject matter expert" carries way too much weight.

A good manager doesn't need to be an expert on the matter, but he needs to understand it. Otherwise, he can not do risk analysis, planning, or stakeholder communication.

adamsmith143• 4 years ago

This does make sense and I've seen the opposite happen all the time. The most competent engineers ended up getting promoted into Management and flounder.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around

MBWA is an actual management style taught in business school, and before the pandemic, was considered highly effective.

noasaservice3• 4 years ago

I find that many managers follow the school of thought as "Being abusive gets people to work because they inherently do not want to work".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kczJJXk-dw

The above YT video is about the Checkers/Rally's CEO masquerading as a worker and being yelled at and watching abuse by a shift supervisor to workers. The Shift supervisor then makes the above justification, that workers wouldn't do anything if they weren't abused.

Naturally, this video has instant karma happen. But in the real world, you put up with it, you get fired, or you leave. The saying "Go to work because you believe in the company, but leave because of the manager." is precisely because of this abusive school of thought.

And this applies in tech as much as it doesn't. In tech, this is how you get return-to-work, massive spyware on devices (sometimes even your own devices if the company refuses to provide equipment), and other abhorrent and illegal-in-not-USA policies.

Quite honestly, in more professional positions, being told the strategic plan is more than enough for us to realize what needs done, how to do it, and execute it. Then again, I also argue for more democratic workplaces, rather than the top-down authoritarian method.

kkfx2• 4 years ago

Issues at a certain scale are well beyond reactionary and incompetent beancounters: just imaging a mass exodus from cities to nice place in nature:

- for remote workers: connectivity issues, home issues (secondary homes with bad heating since they was designed to be used only in summer, badly equipped, ...), mobility issues "hey roads here are damn small for the new-present amount of people!", "holy crap! Where I can get pizza at 4am here?";

- for workers around city offices: well, they simply need another job...

- for food delivery: they need to design a new logistic network, something that can't happen fast nor easily

- property values change who will benefit some much but also ruins others.

Oh, let me say: I'm a remote worker who flee a big city years ago and very happy of my choice. Back than some many have told me I'll lost many opportunities (true, to a certain extent, in person meetings/conference put different people with something in common together, something absent in a remote scenario) and I'll face so many issue that I'll not last more than few months... Now they regret to have not done the same back then. And that's not really positive in general: simply too many are not ready for a significant "life change" and in a society in deep crisis for many reasons adding another one is not that good. It can be if done well, with a bit of organization and planning, something I still not see.

I see partisans of both sides stating all the good of their side, ignoring the issues or their side, ferociously classify "opponents" as the worst crazy cancer of the humanity etc. Something sometimes nice to see with a bag of popcorn but not really positive for the society.

valand• 4 years ago

As someone who watched a company grow from 15 to 400 people in a rushed time, I found that distinguishing good manager from the bad ones is easy. Good manager cares and bad manager don't.

Bad manager asks questions, but then discard the part that is not important to them, even though the team needs the manager to understand it.

Good manager asks questions and understand (at least try to) if this is important for the team, for the project, and for the company. When they ask about deadlines and estimate, they ask why, and they try to deduct, and they remember. Good manager that works in the business selling technical product attempt to understand the technical part of the product instead of blindly "delegating" it and demanding things done.

Good manager tries to improve all aspect in the team. The process efficiency. The communication blockers.

I've seen first hand a manager, having no technical background, getting capable of reading C++ code over time to help the struggling team, and yet does not realize to have been so technical. Kind of having an impostor syndrome. Because they care so much.

I've also seen first hand a manager that only cares about deadlines and presenting good stuff upwards. They don't care about details unless asked by their superior. And once asked for details, they act like messenger owls and echo servers.

wikitopian3• 4 years ago

A vast subset of our economy depends on parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work.

If you think they and the government institutions and their politicians who rely on their tax revenues are going to politely shut up, you're mistaken.

UncleEntity• 4 years ago

A vast subset of our economy depends on parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work.

You mean people who work in the coffee shop down the block so you can get your $7 latte on the way to the office?

Quite the interesting definition of ‘parasitically’ if you do.

mellavora• 4 years ago

Maybe they mean the people who own a coffee shop which charges $7 per latte.

intrasight7• 4 years ago

I had interpreted "parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work" to referring to those corporate managers. But certainly one could expand this to include all those who provide products and services in our economy. In fact, one could expand it to include the entire human race which is a parasite on this plant.

series11• 4 years ago

Probably more along the lines of personal vehicle ownership and a fast fashion wardrobe only needed for the office.

bart_spoon• 4 years ago

Probably refers more to corporate real estate interests. Just because people stop commuting to work doesn’t mean they will stop eating out. Maybe they won’t be located in the same places, but there will still be demand for food, coffee, etc. What doesn’t persist is the demand for giant corporate offices, and so there are some people who would be stuck holding some massive bags if the office real estate demand becomes permanently reduced.

maxfurman• 4 years ago

I mean...yes? That's just supply and demand. People in the office need places to eat lunch, maybe some stores where they can run some errands before heading home, etc. etc. and if there are enough people there will be enough demand for several businesses to service these needs.

Obviously the last few years have thrown everything out of whack but a bustling urban core is a beautiful thing.

BoxOfRain• 4 years ago

Obviously the last few years have thrown everything out of whack but a bustling urban core is a beautiful thing.

For some, I really don't like urban life and the more bustling and hive-like the more I don't like it. I'm determined never to set foot in an office again, particularly an urban one because I simply don't like the urban environment. I hope that there's enough people like me to make sure a full return to the office never happens.

wikitopian3• 4 years ago

I think coding on my enclosed porch in a cozy country farmhouse surrounded by nature is a beautiful thing. In comfy pajamas, all day long.

Will you subsidize my aesthetic preference or does it only work one way?

noasaservice3• 4 years ago

A vast subset of our economy depends on parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work.

    1. Building rents
    2. Transportation
    3. Parking
    4. Eating out/beverages

Building rents are the craziest. The company I worked for doubled their area in December just before the pandemic, for more people to be packed in. The job was inherently easy to make remote, but they hated remote. When remote happened, they were holding a multi-million dollar bill on rents gone to nothing.

Companies that realize they can get 1/10 or less the area, and still have co-working areas and a few offices can save enormous amounts of money and be more *agile* than the in-person companies can be. But having companies reduce their rentals down 90% scare the landlords.

Transportation exerts a LARGE cost on workers. We're not paid for this lost time. And even at 30m drive, represents 5h a week lost to nothing. Well, not nothing. Gas prices are expensive, as is vehicle maintenance. So we're *paying* for the right to get paid at our jobs. And if your work is easily-remotable, then this shows a cost (at 30m/oneway) 5h + $.56/mi that you're wasting.

Parking is usually a perk. But regardless who its coming out of, still represents a significant cost for dozens or hundreds of vehicles to be stored somewhere. In big cities, that's upwards of $50/day. In my smaller city, the company was paying $300/yr in a terrible condition 4 story parking garage. Didn't even have guaranteed spots either. That was just "permit" to get in. Again, someone's paying it, and it's not cheap. But it is needless.

Food/beverage costs are also much higher, due to not being within vicinity of your kitchen. If I wanted coffee prior, it was going down to the coffee shop and getting one. However, I had the equipment and matewrials to make them at home, but being in an office prevents me from that. Same with food... although I could take my own lunch.

Now, instead of costing $15/lunch, it's costing me like $3/lunch. I brew my own coffee. I eat leftovers or make food I want to eat during lunch. I can also do things like make (chicken, beef, duck, turkey) stock on the stove while working. I can also now do more complex recipes that take time (like Pho) with only being present in the kitchen... There's no way I could leave the stove on going to a workplace. For those of you that says I'm stealing time doing long cooking - I'm not. Being present is just to make sure that a fire or other bad doesn't happen.

And I'm only looking at monetary costs. We also have a magnitude of environmental costs I never discussed. And that also percolates down to health benefits of less pollution and less injuries on the road. There's dozens of 1st and 2nd derivative effects.

But in the end, it's a bunch of technophobes that believe workers MUST be 'supervised' in an active panopticon manner so they work. (And as a corollary, that's also why open offices and hot desks are a thing. Same reason)

xchip• 4 years ago

Not even the managers want to go back :D

oldnetguy5• 4 years ago

We have people working remotely and they are supposed to be available and online and I find that many are not available.

We have even had emergencies where we reached out to people only to not get a response.

There are people actually working from home and they are people "working" from home.

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

Then you should be paying money for people to be "on call" not "available and online". An error in planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

oldnetguy5• 4 years ago

If an emergency happens on a system you are responsible for in the middle of the work day then it is expected that you fix the system you are responsible for.

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

This has been my experience.

I only have a small team under me and they have good work ethic, but I reach out to other staff and it’s a ghost town.

It’s a Wednesday at 1100, and I can’t get anyone from accounting, finance, HR, or marketing…

The truth is there was some truth to it when Musk very publicly said “you can pretend to work somewhere else”. That’s true on some cases, and it makes me more certain that when I see WFH brought up, one side of that “debate” refuses to ever admit it.

jeromegv• 4 years ago

The issue is not WFH. The issue is that you work with incompetant people. Even if those people were sitting in a chair at the office, they are likely procrastinating all day, talking to everyone, not doing anything done. Sure they are harder to reach with WFH, but the reality is that they were very bad employees in the first place.

If someone can't be reached on a day they are supposed to be working, well their manager should be addressing the issue and ask them what the fuck they were doing at that time. WFH or not, those are bad employees.

vouaobrasil2• 4 years ago

Exactly the same as in the office....the problem here is not being away from the office. It's management treating people like children and not setting up a proper reward system to show workers that what they produce has value.

Ma8ee• 4 years ago

Uhm? I thought my salary was my reward for doing my job. Am I supposed to expect something else than that?

And in my world, it seems rather childish to only do what you should if you are promised a treat afterwards. (And I certainly expect more of my own children.)

dleslie5• 4 years ago

If they're clocking hours or missing scheduled meetings that's a problem, if they're paid salary and aren't on call or needed in a meeting then their lack of availability is fair.

Closi• 4 years ago

Not really - it's job dependent, but if someone on our team needs support or help during working hours I expect to be able to contact another team member to get them to help.

prmoustache• 4 years ago

I've seen the same with people at the office disappearing for a long time. I even found out once we had a coworker taking naps in the toilets seat and one that got fired after years of setting up fake meetings while he was playing golf or running errands.

You can't be on everyone's back all the time anyway and this do not really happen in a well managed company where everyone has a real purpose, goals and has to report on the job done.

mring336212• 4 years ago

Burnout happens.

heliodor2• 4 years ago

Just like at the office, you have to make sure people are actually working. Either way, it's on you.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

There needs to be a minimum set of expectations set. Working from home doesnt mean one shouldn't be available. I think the issue at hand is that either those people dont understand that you must be available just like in an office - or better - or they do but are taking the piss. I’d make clear what is expected of them and if they dont meet the requirements well… thats just poor performance on their part and you can find better people. I am all pro wfh and better rights but it goes both ways. Companies are not charities.

celdon252• 4 years ago

If your company doesn’t fix that, the market probably will. I’ve been through that drill.

mikece• 4 years ago

A stark truth about working from home is that the useless layers of middle management are exposed as not being needed. When everyone is both on and active on Slack/Teams/etc then high level decision makers can interact with low-level leads and front-line managers who are actually getting things done and shape strategic direction more easily -- and the lower lever folks can access leadership more easily and quickly when problems arise. No running it through seven layers of management, no weeks of delays to have meeting to plan meetings to think about having a meeting to discuss the issue: just get straight to the point with the people who matter. If I was a useless middle manager I would want an immediate return to the office as well.

jevgeni5• 4 years ago

Sounds like the top can't stick to its own designs.

intrasight7• 4 years ago

then high level decision makers can interact with low-level leads

Not my experience at all. There is no "slack" or anything comparable. There is no communications that skip levels. Why would a manager allow that? They would lose their power.

gsibble2• 4 years ago

I believe this is the primary reason for pushing people back to work. All those middle managers are shown to be useless idiots, as they usually are, when people work from home. They're trying to save their skins and justify their existence.

jevgeni5• 4 years ago

Yet another snarky take by a techie blaming all on "management layers"... Sometimes I come to HN just for that sweet myopia.

ElCheapo• 4 years ago

Option A: return to office

Option A-bis: return to another kind of office

Option B: work from home

Option C: hybrid

Question: what is the goal of the employer? how do the options contribute to the goal?

"Return to the Office" is not a rethoric, there are certain metrics that are boosted by having people in the same buildings, and other that are boosted by having people work naked in their bedroom.

I'd say this " 'Return to the Office Rhetoric needs to end' Rethoric needs to end"

jevgeni5• 4 years ago

It's essentially a question of focused vs. collaborative work multiplied by commute times. Figure out how to provide both focused and collaborative models, optimize for commute times and you're set.

jrochkind13• 4 years ago

Those who cannot manage their time correctly and have to work past five to get things done and those who feel corporate pressure to work past five because others are doing it.

Doesn't it depend on how much work you have to do? Whatever amount of work you can get done while managing your time correctly and working 9-5, isn't there some larger amount of work that your employer could expect/demand of you?

Yes, the amount of work you can get done while managing your time correctly between 9 and 5 is different for different people (also different for the same person different weeks, for sure). But this is why I've had trouble understanding "oh, it doesn't matter how many hours I work as long as I get my work done, the work they expect of me." What is the "work they expect of me"? For me, putting in (roughly, on average) the time my employer expects me to work is the work they expect of me, it's what allows me to push back if they try to assign more work than fits in, if they try to just keep adding more "priorities". I can, agile-style, work on whatever you say are your top priorities, for the X hours a week you expect me to work -- what I get done in that time is what I get done, it is unreasonable of you to expect more. This only works if I'm really working that time though, my end of things.

This seems relevant to me because, from the worker's perspective, it is one of the the things people suggest as advantages to working from home, in these forums -- hey, I can work half days every day, as long as I "get my work done". (There is even someone in this thread suggesting someone could "get their work done" working an hour every day. Presumably if their bosses knew that they would assign more work, and be right to do so?).

youerbt2• 4 years ago

But there is always some expected body of work. If you don't pull your weight, despite working 9 to 5, you might get fired.

I'm one of those "half days" people, and it's not about doing less. It's about realization, that you are productive for less than 8h daily and that difference + commute time is simply wasted. Even if you plug some optimistic numbers, like 6h of productive work vs 8h office + 1h commute, its 30% of time spend on "work" just lost. Daily.

jrochkind13• 4 years ago

If your employer knew you were only working half-days, do you think they would be unjustified in adding to your workload? Does this work situation require keeping it secret from your employer how much you are working?

How do they determine what is the "expected body of work"? What keeps them from making it too high to actually get done in 8 hours? If it's not knowing that it would take you more than 8 hours to complete, if you expect how much time you actually take is private information and can be less than 8 hours and it's none of their business.

paxys2• 4 years ago

What needs to end is the "hybrid work" rhetoric.

There is no such thing as hybrid. Either I live in proximity to the office or not. Either I buy a car/figure out public transit or not. Either I set up a home office and buy WFH equipment or not. If I am forced to go into the office for >0 days a week then I have an office job, period.

"Oh but you can work a day or two from home!" Pretty much every tech employee was already doing this well before the pandemic, and "hybrid" wasn't touted as some big perk then.

danaris3• 4 years ago

Pretty much every tech employee was already doing this well before the pandemic

Your experiences are not universal.

This is definitely not true of most "tech employees" I have known personally or heard from—at least if your "day or two" is intended to mean "day or two a week" or even "day or two a month".

Maybe it's true in Silicon Valley, but please try to remember that Silicon Valley does not employ even close to all the "tech employees" in the country (let alone the world).

z9znz• 4 years ago

Every situation is different, but for sure there are a group of people like me who have decided that we will only consider jobs where the work is fully remote. Once in a great while an on-site event or meeting is ok, but a "hybrid" of some days in and some days remote each week is not acceptible to me. This is not just because I prefer working at home (or very much dislike working in a typical office), but also because I like to be free to work from anywhere.

It's funny too when people use the argument about how much better collaboration is in the office. Except for certain stages of product development, collaboration is rarely needed because planning and designing is usually straightforward or the work is just routine.

Most jobs ultimately suck, so I don't have much FOMO when I tell a recruiter that I am not interested in any opportunity which requires specific on-site time.

amhokies2• 4 years ago

My mother-in-law works an office job and is easily able to do her job from home with no impact on productivity. She also has had a heart transplant so is immunocompromised. Recently her bosses have started pushing her to come back 100% to work even though she has a note from a doctor saying she shouldn't be going into the office.

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

I'm only guessing where you are, but just try that shit in Europe (over-ruling a doctor, that is).

I stand to be corrected.

amhokies2• 4 years ago

I’m sure you correctly guessed that I’m American

streblo3• 4 years ago

Let's be real - a lot of tech companies over-hired from late 2020 to early 2022. Many need to cut staff now that the capital markets have dried up. The easiest way to do that without an actual layoff is to reneg on the promise of being able to work from home. A lot of people will just deal with it, but a small amount won't, and will quit. This is the easiest way to go if you're the executive team, since a lot of this 'soft layoff' will happen voluntarily and will save a lot of the expenses (not to mention the negative signals sent to the market) that come with a real layoff.

Invictus0• 4 years ago

Who do you think leaves when promises are reneged on? The best people.

SamuelAdams• 4 years ago

Yes, but the best people typically know their worth and leave in 2-3 years anyways, downsize or not. What’s important during a layoff is keeping the company running. How deep can you cut without affecting day-to-day operations?

You don’t need 10x experts to keep legacy systems running for 6 months. Good people leaving is a calculate risk that managers probably considered.

streblo3• 4 years ago

Not sure I agree. My anecdotal first hand experience is that it's irrespective of talent or work ethic.

ornornor2• 4 years ago

It’s never about the quality of people. Past a certain size, it’s all about politics and appearances, actual performance or quality doesn’t matter. This kind of abuse self selects for docile, “flexible” employees who won’t rock the boat, won’t complain about unpaid overtime, and will take the abuse without causing too much trouble. And that’s a perfect strategy because only this kind of people stay at that kind of companies in the long run.

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

They should just make the CEO stay at the office and not travel if the rest of the workers can't work from home.

unity10015• 4 years ago

Let's face it: The economic, time and energy cost of the commute is WAY too much for the return to office to be justified.

Average one-way commute in the US is ~30 minutes. An hour lost every day. 20 hours every month. Literally we are losing ONE DAY at the road every month. 12 days every year.

And its much worse than it looks: When you commute, you don't only incur a time cost. You spend cognitive energy - you have to navigate transportation, cars, people, you have to avoid hitting another car or getting hit by a car, catch the tram at a certain time, do various things just to be able to get to the office.

All of these have a cognitive cost. They burn energy and especially cost concentration.

Then you have to enter the office, say hi to peopl around, settle in your desk, and start getting into the work mindset... only to be interrupted by the stand-up or whatever other practice your place has. Or maybe you will just wander around and not do much until that stand-up or meeting.

ALL of these cost immensely for both people and organizations. Economic cost. Energy cost. Burnout cost.

...

Compare this to the situation when working from home:

You get up. Get something to eat and a cup of coffee. You sit in front of the computer. You are ready to work without all that cognitive and time cost.

ahoho3• 4 years ago

Commuting is not so bad when public transportation is good and/or you live close to the office.

I used to live a fifteen minute walk from my previous job. It was something I relished, and on days with poor weather, I just worked remotely. Now I take a subway and I can read for 20 minutes.

I wonder if employers might start setting up smaller, “hybrid-first” offices in less expensive, more residential areas (eg, in the outer boroughs in Manhattan). I enjoy working from an office, but if no one comes in, the appeal is diminished.

unity10015• 4 years ago

Commuting is not so bad when public transportation is good and/or you live close to the office.

Nope. Consider the BEST case:

You live NEXT DOOR to your office. You get up in the morning. You quickly grab a bite. Then prepare for ~10 minutes for going to the office. Getting out of your house, going into the next building, settling down etc all take another 10-15 minutes. And that's for people who prepare in the morning fast, walk fast, settle down fast.

So its still ~1 hour lost every day.

Now I take a subway and I can read for 20 minutes.

Would you sit and read for 20 minutes if you didnt have to commute? That sounds more like pulling something good out of an undesirable situation through discipline and personal talent than any benefit. Not to mention that if you actually sat and read in your own house, that 20 minutes of reading would also be totally different than reading in the subway.

kodah• 4 years ago

"Hybrid first" really needs to be far away from major cities. I live in San Jose; not a single new tech business should be opened here given the cost of homes and rent as well as the slim options.

My last company naively went "hybrid-first" and a lot of people who weren't married to other high income earners left because they're getting financially squeezed in these metropolises.

dunefox• 4 years ago

Commuting is not so bad when public transportation is good and/or you live close to the office.

You mean iff you can afford to live that close to your work that you can just walk in 15-20 minutes? Yeah, then it might not be bad. I still lose almost 3 hours per commute twice a week because I can only afford to live 60 km away from the capital in which I work.

g9yuayon• 4 years ago

The challenge of "living close to the office" is that people change jobs every few years, especially in the bay area. Unfortunately we don't change our addresses as often.

lbeltrame3• 4 years ago

It depends on the person. For me the commute was the "moat" I built to detach my mind completely from work related matters until the next day.

Personal experience matters a lot, too. I did WFH for two years in 2009-2011 and it was mostly fine. Now, although not optimal by any means, I endure my 1h 15 min commute daily. After being locked down in my house for more than 70 days in 2020 while having a very stressful work experience I could not escape from, I don't want to WFH ever again.

Others may have different experience and goals.

unity10015• 4 years ago

For me the commute was the "moat" I built to detach my mind completely from work related matters until the next day

You seem to have made a positive outcome happen out of a negative situation. If there wasn't the commute, you would have built that moat through different ways without losing time every day. And the cognitive cost.

AlwaysRock2• 4 years ago

Yeah I build that moat now by reading a book before work and exercising right after work. A lot better than the horrid commute I used to have.

GenerocUsername3• 4 years ago

Me, I just run the bathtub at high heat and full volume for an hour to steam up my bathroom. Sure it costs a few dollars and wastes tons of resources, but I need that rushing waterfall ambiance to unwind...

This is of course a joke. My point being that wasting resources to clear your mind sounds crazy when it hasn't been normalized for decades.

Find another way to build that moat.

timthorn• 4 years ago

I relish the commute as the gap between personal life and work life. It allows me time to decompress and means I'm rarely thinking about the office when I get home.

milkytron• 4 years ago

The commute can optionally be replaced by other activities with a bit of diligence. Personally, I'll go for a run mid day. I know others that will go for a walk in the morning and after work. Others will perform some other task to decompress.

It's all about what's knowing what's best for you. If you need to get in the car and sit in traffic to decompress, you still have that option if you WFH. But just like commuting takes energy, so does getting up and decompressing in a way that is beneficial for yourself.

marcosdumay5• 4 years ago

When you end your work, get out of your home, walk for 10 minutes (settle on a route that is nice to walk), get back and start your personal hours.

ballenf• 4 years ago

Commute time is just one of many very large inefficiencies in modern work life. I spend much more time each day in useless meetings, filling out useless forms, digging through HR docs pages trying to find convoluted policies so I can get reimbursed for some obvious work-related expense.

The challenge to getting more remote is that commuting is NOT the most wasteful aspect of most companies (even if companies bore the full cost of it).

yamtaddle5• 4 years ago

Or maybe you will just wander around and not do much until that stand-up or meeting.

Pre-standup is for running git-log to try to remember WTF you did yesterday so you can say it in the meeting.

uhtred• 4 years ago

At this point the return to office articles are just click/flame bait. The boston globe publishes one probably once a month and of course it leads to hundreds of furious comments like "I will quit before I go back! Never going back!".

TheRealDunkirk• 4 years ago

In my view, none of the "return to office" rhetoric has anything to do with actually doing the jobs. It's a problem with new hires. Without at least meeting someone face to face, and talking to them from time to time, there's no context for any of your other interactions. There's no chance to build any camaraderie or rapport. That's fine for one-off calls with IT support, but it's not for a team of people centered on doing a particular thing. I'm one of the more introverted people around, but even I see the need for at least some in-person interaction. Our group has hemorrhaged people over the past 2 years (and the software I write has greatly helped to at least partially make up for this), but it's not a situation that can last forever.

falcolas7• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: my team has onboarded two new hires, and it’s gone well. Mostly because they are not depending on work for their social life, so normal daily interactions via video calls has been sufficient for them to integrate.

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

Mostly because they are not depending on work for their social life

I've heard this a lot. It seems a point of contention. I don't see how people don't depend on work for some level of social interaction. How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with? How can someone want to sit at a computer banging out useless shit for faceless corporations and not have the conciliation of suffering through it with people you know and like?

At my last pre-covid job, once covid hit, my team of 10 or so would do voluntary virtual happy hour (VHH) and we would, for several months, be on zoom for hours and hours after work on Thursdays, drinking, playing music over Zoom, Among Us, and so on. And work was about 10x more enjoyable than whatever it is I do now, in large part due to that comradarie.

Even before that, part of the success of my job was through socialization. I don't mean climbing the ladder or kissing ass. I mean getting to know people on different teams through running into them, working in the same area, and spontaneously chatting about their work and how our teams affect each other. That kind of communication and collaboration is much more difficult to scaffold on Slack.

I know that a lot of movement into IT and within IT was through this kind of spontaneous meeting of people when walking through the halls or running into each other at the coffee shop. Work was a community of diverse roles and individuals, a microcosm of society where people could see how others work and be part of something bigger than our team. It sounds cliche, but that's how it felt.

Now, we have #team-chat and #diversity-and-inclusion and @manager.

TLDR: Social interaction at work is healthy; social interaction at work helps people enjoy work, learn about other roles and have job flexibility and helps them do their own job better; The thing you spend 1/3 of your life doing should have a human component.

hbn• 4 years ago

Yeah covid hit in my last semester of my university degree, so I graduated (sans ceremony) and found a job remotely. I was able to get up to speed perhaps a bit faster than some recent graduates because I had done a year-long internship at a company with similar technologies to what we're using at this new job, but I still didn't really feel like I knew anyone until they started doing a hybrid work setup (1 week per month with your team in the office) and I met people face-to-face.

Being a new hire and you're just sitting in your room/home office with Teams open on a laptop and trying to just hop into work is difficult. You're gonna have a lot of questions, and instead of leaning over to the person sitting next to you, where they can point to your monitor and it'll take 5 seconds now becomes finding someone to message and typing out your question to them, and if they can't answer it over text then you start a call and go through the "can you see my screen" rigamarole where they can now help you but they can't point or use your keyboard. And if you're having a lot of questions, it's daunting to ask a person you just met if you can repeatedly pull them into calls. I've noticed it happening several times with new hires where they'll just be sitting around struggling with a task they're given and not asking for help because they don't want to pull people away from their work.

greedo2• 4 years ago

This is an onboarding/training issue, not a WFH issue.

In office, this would be highly disruptive to whoever was sitting next to you, unless they were tasked to being your mentor. I used to work next to some coworkers who were very intimidating and used every question I had as an opportunity to "demonstrate" their superior intelligence or experience. Luckily, I was assigned both someone to onboard me to the company and to my role. This person was trained, had been with the company a long time, and was well suited to introducing new hires to a large corporation. This could have easily been done remotely.

silksowed• 4 years ago

my timeline is exactly like yours and i only got up to speed because of my manager/mentor. if he left me to my own devices i would do very little even today. manager's need to change their approach, simple as. if they can't adapt than it really just hurts them to have under-performers underneath them.

twh2702• 4 years ago

My experience has been that if your org doesn't intentionally do something to build rapport and relationships among remote staff, it's probably not going to happen, and consequently interaction will feel mostly transactional and clinical.

osigurdson3• 4 years ago

I was able to develop a great working rapport with a person who I'd never met personally and only ever discussed things via email. This model is also common in open source projects and seems to work fine. In person camaraderie and rapport do not appear to be essential.

Valakas_• 4 years ago

As a previous new hire who got into a new job during full blown Covid, I had no problem whatsoever building a good relationship with my colleagues. Regular routines were setup, the team communicated frequently. Frequent calls. Eventually mMemes started to be shared, and we built a good work/personal friendship exclusively online.

I didn't miss face-to-face in the slightest, nor did i feel like i didn't belong, or that I was lacking support. We have plenty of online trainings as well.

Face to face being needed for new hires is another myth that needs to go.

iosystem• 4 years ago

In academia we've lost multiple great programmers to the private sector because of the "Return to the Office" nonsense and even when the rule requires being at the office ~40% of the work week. The replacements being low paid foreigners on work permits and they're needing to be taught but we no longer have enough experienced programmers for the task. My impression is productivity lost isn't valuable enough unlike the political reason of why people need to drive into work everyday.

cmrdporcupine2• 4 years ago

I'll Return To Office when local employers learn how to compete with remote employers.

I've said it before, I don't like working from home. But I dislike working for underpaying petty feudal overlords with garbage tech stacks and mediocre management even more.

I know what my local market is like, and there's plenty of remote companies happy to outcompete them. So that's what I'll do.

That said:

Apparently showing that you can continue to deliver at a high standard, remotely, for two years is not an indicator that you will be able to work like that always.

In reality, I know that Google's own metrics showed marked decline in productivity during that period. I witnessed it first hand and saw all sorts of deadlines slip and things get cancelled.

Whether that was due to WFH or people dealing also with having kids and spouses at home -- and the fact that the whole world was seemingly falling apart around them -- I don't know. I know I didn't cope well with it.

But also, I think those kinds of Big Companies proved themselves absolutely woefully incompetent in adapting. They didn't handle it well. At least my team didn't.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

If you're working at Google - other local companies probably don't make enough money to pay you to be competitive...

cmrdporcupine2• 4 years ago

I do not work at Google anymore.

kiawe_fire2• 4 years ago

It’s unfortunate, but there is a strong link between company culture and their remote work offerings.

At this point, companies that are “office first” tend to be of the poorly managed, tech-debt riddled, low trust variety, while remote first companies tend not to be, but also tend to have an actively hostile culture towards in-person work.

I believe there is a slowly growing cohort of people who do their best work when regular or semi-regular, in-person collaboration is involved. In time, I think well-managed organizations with proper tech practices will emerge that recognize this, and will attract the right people for it.

Until then, and for as long as each side in this straw man debate views the other as a mutually exclusive, almost existential threat, then this “rhetoric” from both sides most certainly won’t end and we will all continue to be subject to articles filled with lists of value judgements and personal projection on “the one true way everyone must work”.

Der_Einzige• 4 years ago

Well, places like Oracle are friendly to remote and have no "back to the office requirement"

While places like apple or Amazon are trying to get everyone back.

Seems to fly in the face of your analogy.

TexanFeller• 4 years ago

The thing that worries me is that WFH could bring back offshoring in a big way. WFH may come to be Work from Hyderabad. Lots of brilliant minds in other parts of the world.

dam_broke_it• 4 years ago

All the "lowish" positions were offshored DECADES ago.

Companies still trying to do this REAP what they sow.... (easily google the results of this MISadventures)

papandada3• 4 years ago

Met brilliant minds no doubt. But between working on Indian Standard Time vs N. American time zones (for me) and the average Indian company exploiting their employees at multiple clients and with an impressive layer of account manager invincibility against individual accountabilities, I'm not feeling too threatened... yet.

greedo2• 4 years ago

Yup. My company employees a lot of people from overseas, as well as uses consultants from India. It works generally. There are friction points but WFH has actually made some of it easier since everyone is treated the same. The TZ difference is the biggest obstacle, but that can be worked around.

A friend has a completely virtual company and has multiple employees from Czechia and Hungary. Much cheaper than US employees, but again, there's some added friction. Just need to decentralize and delegate to be most effective.

Now that sounds easy, and for some small companies and small business units, sure. But for a big corporation?

trabant00• 4 years ago

I've been working remotely for 4 years and will likely never go back to the office if I can help it. That being said let me be the devil's advocate and say that if I owned a large company I would likely fight against remote work.

While a minority of workers thrive remotely and they have the results to show for it, this is clearly not the case in general. Lots of people can't focus from home and lots still simply take advantage to slack as much as possible. These things are from the horse's mouth.

In person social pressure pushes people to work more. It's too hard and too expensive to measure performance per person, I mean we have regular threads about that. And even if you could measure you can not act because you can't fire most people and neither can you discriminate who is allowed remote and who isn't.

Overall I think it is more honest to frame this as a conflict of interest (in a lot of cases) between employer and employee, and not as right vs wrong.

osigurdson3• 4 years ago

I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later. Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being temperature controlled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself. The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.

SkipperCat2• 4 years ago

I can't say there's anything wrong with what the author states. It all rings true. But when I read these articles I constantly detect a theme of "one size fits all" or "this works for me". For some companies, remote works fine, for some, its a partial failure (or even worse).

If you have teams that are mature, and have solid interpersonal relationships, remote can be a boon to productivity. But, you need to have defined workflows and protocols for getting things done. If you don't have that, being remote exacerbates the problem of bringing things to completion. I'd also say that if you're a manager and your team can't get stuff done remotely, you are failing as a manager.

Conversely, if you have younger (not in age but company tenure) teams, you may need that in-person time to build the relationships and workflows. There's nothing wrong with that, and as a manager you should codify them ASAP so they can be taught and learned by new hires.

When it comes to remote work YMMV. I'd actually like to see someone do an in-depth study of this and quantify the performance of many companies that WFH/Hybrid/Office and find out what the actual performance numbers are. I'd then like to see some research into best practices about how to create teams that thrive WFH and also what makes them fail at WFH.

It's a new world folks, it's probably going to take some time to suss this all out. And until that happens, I'm going to enjoy the 2 days per week I work from home.

digitalsushi• 4 years ago

Last week I went into the office for the second time since February 2020, and I said one of the things on bad-mock list: "You cant whiteboard over zoom" as a cohort and I scribbled gleefully over the four 6x10 foot whiteboards facing inwards for three hours straight.

This isn't a complaint, it's a question - what are people using for remote whiteboarding? I won't say what my os/meeting software so as to keep any responses somewhat general. Thanks, though, I know people must be doing something better than what I have run into.

balderdash• 4 years ago

A handful of observations:

1) the dispersion of outcomes is quite large, I know people at fully virtual startups that are having great success, I also know that some of the governmental organizations I’ve interacted with have literally accomplished nothing in the two years since they’ve “gone remote”

2)I’d posit that a team’s ability to work remotely is a function of 1) experience (few junior employees that are learning on the job), 2) caliber of employee (white shoe lawyers vs say the accounts payable department)

3) while I had a positive experience with remote work during the pandemic, if I were senior leadership I’d have real concerns around long term implications for employee development, company culture, and productivity

mring336212• 4 years ago

My brother-in-law works for the state of IL. When COVID hit, his department went 'remote'. According to him, while 'remote', anyone without a computer did not have to do anything, but was still paid. Suddenly, lots of people "didn't have a computer".

t43562• 4 years ago

I think the obvious bullshit in this is in companies which outsource overseas. Somehow it's fine to work remotely with people in India or China but it's not ok to work with someone in your own timezone....

intrasight7• 4 years ago

The article doesn't touch on what I believe to be a bigger issue with RTO - the huge carbon footprint of human travel for work. If there were a "carbon credit" for WFH, I think many more companies would embrace it. But that would mean first creating carbon penalties, which society is unwilling or unable to do.

lotsofpulp3• 4 years ago

Unnecessary complications just add avenues for corruption. See recent thread about business buying and selling carbon credits that do not result in reduction of fossil fuel usage.

A simple tax on fossil fuel would address the issue with little to no avenues for corruption.

intrasight7• 4 years ago

Which is what I meant by "first creating carbon penalties"

Once you globally tax it, you can globally trade it without so much gaming of system.

makz• 4 years ago

At my office the rhetoric is: we have green technologies, working here is more energy-efficient than working at home, even when including the commutes.

intrasight7• 4 years ago

I assume you are serious.

gsibble2• 4 years ago

Thankfully I already work so remote I'm literally on the other side of the country so I can't be called into the office.

I've always favored working from home as someone who codes 90%+ of the day. Getting and saying in flow/focus mode is extremely important. A single distraction can waste an hour of time, which adds up significantly when it happens multiple times a day across many days a week across many weeks a year.

Some companies I worked for before the pandemic recognized my productivity soared when I worked from home and let me work there for weeks at a time, while others kept me handcuffed to my desk.

I've had the fortunate experience to work for two remote-first / no-office companies now and have only become more productive and collaborative. I don't buy the "we need to return to the office" BS one bit. Just managers who don't trust their employees trying to justify their bloated salaries.

That being said, I have looked into getting a private office for myself somewhere outside the house since without it, I rarely ever leave the house and both me and the wife work from home. We both want some separation so we have a nice reunion at the end of the day to look forward to.

tomrod5• 4 years ago

My concern is outsourcing. Despite many companies being burned by outsourcing quality gaps the last few cycles, I am starting to hear "If your job can be done from Moscow, Idaho it can be done from <pick your favorite outsourcing target>."

Nasrudith• 4 years ago

That has always been a fear-mongering fallacy. The proper response to any threats of outsourcing is to call the bluff. "So why aren't you doing so already?" There is no need or use in threats if there is already a superior for costs alternative.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

Without remote work options tech is simply not a family friendly career. If you want more in life than the “opportunity to work in a fast paced environment”, rent a lousy miniature home or live with housemates then tech is not the right choice. Sure there are those who get paid a nifty compensation in return for their freedom, but thats not sustainable. Remote work on the other hand allows for proper personal growth. The higher the reward the better the motivation the more productive you are. A win win situation.

3pt141592• 4 years ago

I've gone back and forth from being in management and just a straight up IC. As an IC, I love "work wherever you want and we also have an office and we trust you." But that said:

People that judge managers that want a return to the office as "incompetent" in my opinion misunderstand competence. Competence isn't a spectrum. It's a function that depends on inputs and is matched to some selection of innate traits and acquired skills.

As a manager, if I'm supposed to be managing remote, I absolutely need frequent one-on-ones. I have ADHD that I can't take meds for, and the inattentivety is real. Not to be confused with a lack of conscientiousness, I am much better at managing people in person because I can pick up on social cues in a way that remote just can't. And yes, many workers don't go straight to management when they're stuck. They quietly twiddle their thumbs, and if you dear reader are being honest with yourself, you know this is true at least for a sizeable portion of the workforce.

So my advice here if you're a manager: Daily one-on-ones in the morning with defined goals and blockers. For the most dedicated, weekly is fine. Don't force in office if you don't need it for real work to be done. But make work success clear.

If you're an employee getting pressured to come in: Ask your manager for a daily one-on-one for two weeks to see if they get the sense that things improve first. They can always say "no" and you can always leave.

papandada3• 4 years ago

Just a random comment to say that untreated ADHD with high conscientiousness is a certain kind of suffering.

3pt141592• 4 years ago

It can be, yeah. Timers and todo lists help. Same thing with setting boundaries with people and understanding your needs to help others effectively.

Edit: Also, I feel like my ADHD is at least partially treated by the above and I don't dislike it overall. I like who I am now that I know how to help people better. I also found the power of prayer in the past couple years, and that helps too.

Eridrus• 4 years ago

I barely come in to the office any more, and this has been fine for me, I know all the senior folks in my org, I have a big meaty project that I am driving that has appropriate staffing, and it's largely not from the city I live in, so I don't really benefit a lot from showing up to the office anyway.

But I also haven't interacted with new folks my org has hired in my city unless I have directly worked with them, which isn't really a problem for me, but I have more experience with our technology/systems/processes that new hires would benefit from, and I am not interacting with them enough to share it.

Anyway, my eyes started glazing over when this post said there was no evidence, since all the big companies have done studies on the effect of the covid shock & WFH. Microsoft published theirs and found that it wasn't totally cost-less, even if primary productivity metrics were not impacted: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-eff...

You can argue that the evidence is being misinterpreted, that companies are trying to have their cake (increased task-specific productivity when WFH) and eat it (increased innovation) too, but to say there is no evidence is to not engage with it at all.

In general, I find it unsurprising that someone from an SRE background at a relatively small company is bullish on WFH, the job is largely not innovation focused and is probably one of the parts that is least impacted by the downsides of WFH.

I think we've all experienced too big a shock for things to go back to how they were before, but pretending there are no downsides is just dogma.

andrewla2• 4 years ago

There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education.

This dream was killed by COVID, and likely it'll be another generation before it is even considered seriously again.

The epitaph is not yet written for remote work and work-from-home, but I think we need to wait a couple of years before we can consider a success or a failure. There are troubling signs of its failure that I see at the larger tech companies; their culture has been ripped apart and reassembled into a Frankenstein imitation of its previous state. For better, for worse, who can tell, but subjectively, the change mostly seems for the worse.

Management is completely unable to adapt and has moved even further in the direction of only pursuing work that can be accurately scheduled and whose execution is therefore trivial if laborious, and the only people who can get anything novel done are those that can execute while simultaneously snowballing their management with fairy tales about work estimates and milestones.

We'll have to keep an eye out in ten years for the companies that emerge out of the fertile ground left by the workers at these companies that find they have built up a repertoire of skills that they are no longer allowed to use.

ghaff• 4 years ago

There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education.

Realistically the dream was always that large hall, largely broadcast, lectures could be replaced with video of world-class lecturers. And while there are obstacles--most schools don't want to replace half their course content with videos--it's eminently doable. The key point though is that the other half of the content and in-person assistance can't be replaced in the same manner nor can courses requiring equipment, hand-on work, etc.

yamtaddle5• 4 years ago

There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education.
This dream was killed by COVID, and likely it'll be another generation before it is even considered seriously again.

I think the future is that rich countries are gonna Baumol's Cost Disease their way out of being able to pay in-person teachers. I think we're trending that way already, in fact, and Covid wage-hikes in much of the rest of the economy, plus the most recent anti-educator (don't think that's what it is? Ask some teachers how they've perceived and experienced it) political movements (anti-anti-Covid-measure movements, shitty, ambiguous anti-LGBTQ and anti-teaching-about-slavery legislation) have pushed us right to the edge of that cliff.

For the US, at least, I expect:

1) We'll see falling teacher quality over the next few years, due to declining relative wages and deteriorating work conditions. We won't spend enough to reverse this trend—we already need an ~20% wage hike just to stop the bleeding, let alone reverse damage already done, I'd guess.

2) Rich people will continue to use tutors or private schools and get excellent small-class-size in-person education for their kids. Mid-priced private schools may become more common as this expands down-market to cater to people who can't afford $45k+/yr, but can afford maybe $15k or $20k per year, and are now motivated, by declining quality even in "good" public school districts, to pay it.

3) There will likely be some remote learning experiments to try to counter #1. I expect we're going to see the phrase "online charter school" a lot more in the coming couple decades. But the education will still be worse than what we had before, and way worse than what the folks in #2 are getting—though, maybe, better than the hollowed-out in-person schools.

4) We may start to aggressively import teachers from poor countries to try to cover the gap. This may even work—I think it's got a better chance than other options, at least. If it's not a Federal initiative, it'll likely mostly happen mainly in blue states and exacerbate the education gap between "blue" and "red".

IOW I do expect we will see fairly extensive online education experiments in the near future—but not for the reasons one might hope.

andrewla2• 4 years ago

Putting aside the general trends you've identifier, in the spirit of my previous comment, #3 -- "online charter school", I think this is definitely, 100%, absolutely, absotively, definitely, 100% dead. Just not happening -- the COVID remote school experiment was a failure on every axis other than public health, and everyone from parents to children to teachers to administrators acknowledges this.

paxys2• 4 years ago

There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education.

I don't think any actual parent shared this "dream". People don't realize that the school system is primarily a daycare. Education is a secondary concern for most.

helen___keller2• 4 years ago

I was already on a distributed team when the pandemic hit. I think it ended up that way by combination of being a high-trust environment and being a low-corporate-overhead environment (ie still a startup, albeit a late stage one).

It was the most reasonable place I ever worked. I wasn’t given timelines, but I was the one proposing them, and everyone understood that timelines shifted due to unknowns. They paid my health insurance premiums and copays so I didn’t need to think about or worry about any of that crap. every meeting had a remote call link and nobody asked why you weren’t there in person. The management treated employees like adults.

For a twenty something who only ever had butts-in-seats type office jobs, it was pretty revolutionary to me.

helen___keller2• 4 years ago

Ironically, when everything went remote in 2020, it took away a lot of the culture I valued (imagine being at a place full of cool people who arent there because they are forced to come in but because they want to be there). That plus an acquisition and an opportunity to double my pay ultimately led to me leaving.

I wonder how the culture has recovered now in 2022.

gttalbot• 4 years ago

The office model that the likes of Google et. al. have is also a means of doing age discrimination on the sly. These offices are in places that it's vastly difficult for cost and other reasons to have a family, so folks that get to that stage in their lives end up leaving or finding some way to do distance based arbitrage. Remote work short circuits that so of course they don't like it.

suoduandao23• 4 years ago

eh, my office has strong wfh policy and lots of young families, but I can still tell who's young and single - it's the ones volunteering for overtime whenever the call goes out. And that's really what I as a manager care about, not whether someone's entertaining their kids while the code compiles. Maybe it's different at google, but there are plenty of accidental reasons an org would age discriminate as well.

schnevets• 4 years ago

I am curious how the leanest of "cutting-edge" startups will adapt to these new employee expectations. In the short-term, designing a company as "remote first" is a huge boon, but I could foresee a bounce-back to close collaboration in the coming years.

Innovation is rarely harvested in a vacuum; the best ideas emerge when experts hang out "at the water cooler". I think the volatility of the past two years has reduced the demand for innovation, as no one knows what the "new normal" is actually going to look like. Once this stabilizes, I can foresee passionate, lean teams that work in close proximity outperforming pre-2020 firms.

Or maybe my contrarian views are unfounded and the "Garage Startup" has truly been killed by the "Discord Startup"

throwHMaway• 4 years ago

H&M is Stockholm is putting this in place as we speak.

After 2 years of successfully having teams cooperate across countries, continents, time zones, the leadership team is forcing everyone back to the office full-time.

If anyone is looking to recruit, feel free to poach at H&M

lampshades2• 4 years ago

This is something I think about a lot now that I’m working remote and have decided to move to a remote (near family) location to complete the transformation.

I keep wondering what will happen if I move and then my company starts the RTO talk. Well, sure, there are more remote companies, but what if they jump on board with RTO?

I’m going along with the assumption that I’m remote forever, but it gives me anxiety having to make life decisions on shaky foundations.

disgruntledphd22• 4 years ago

Yeah, we ended up buying a house in Dublin rather than moving to a surf town for exactly this reason. That being said, I'm in a job search right now and almost every company I talk to is remote first, so maybe it wouldn't have been an issue.

lampshades2• 4 years ago

Do you plan to stay in Dublin or are you still contemplating moving to a surf town?

nprateem• 4 years ago

I think hybrid is best for new teams. People need time to bond and actually trust each other. People are wired to be friendly with people they are physically close to and spend lots of time around. I think it'd take far longer to do this remotely and would lose spontaneity, camaraderie, etc. I think initially 3-days a week in-office would help during these forming & norming stages, perhaps for the first 6-8 weeks or so. Once teams have formed and normed, they could go remote and I think be quite effective if there's a good dynamic.

Also, for team meetings I think it's easier to get peoples' attention in the office. Large video calls just don't work well IME. They're so unengaging, so it's more difficult for leaders to be inspiring and charismatic on video calls.

crhulls• 4 years ago

This article, like many on this topic, speak as if there is an absolute truth. Like agile vs waterfall vs "cool framework of the day TM," you will always be able to find successes and failures for each methodology. Each company is unique. There is no right or wrong. There is no evil conspiracy theory.

While markets are far from perfect, this does seem to be a problem capitalism can and will solve. Companies need to attract talent - engineers will vote with their feet if this is important to them. And, companies need to perform - if WFH truly doesn't work it will become apparent very soon (or conversely, if it works far better than in-office, the next crop of world class companies will all be remote).

One thing that is relatively undisputed common knowledge is that company culture and norms become ever more critical as a team scales. The startups and companies that navigate this the best will likely be highly intentional about whatever path they take, and both new and existing employees will be naturally repelled/attracted based on how much this suits them.

This should be a good thing. You, as an employee, get to pick whichever one you want. Just ask questions so you know what you are getting into.

jspash• 4 years ago

Off-topic, but as I was reading the article I kept double-clicking the page thinking I had accidentally selected the entire page. On osx the default settings for showing selected text is black on a blue background.

McDyver• 4 years ago

It's interesting that this is happening mainly with Big Names.

At the Big Name Im'm working for, this is also being mandated, at the advise of PwC. 4000 people back to the office full-time.

I wonder if others are also being influenced by consulting companies.

tayistay• 4 years ago

Climate change is an “existential threat”, but hey let’s all get back in our cars and commute each work day when we don’t have to!

ladyattis• 4 years ago

It seems like the return to the office call is really about multiple issues. First, there's the sunk cost fallacy that some companies have with regard to their office leases or buildings which keeps them trapped in the idea that they must have said offices or buildings or they're not a real company (as if the cost of existing as a firm should incur a dead weight such as unused or underutilized office space). Second, there's some companies that are perpetually in the panopticon mindset. They think if they measure, spy, and constantly monitor their employees then those employees won't slack off. The problem is that often the process adds more dead time than it removes. So many meetings, so many reports or email summaries to write. So much paperwork that is fundamentally unnecessary to the process. Third, there's just some people in charge that don't want to acknowledge that everyone is a little different in significant ways. Some folks thrive on just being given their duties and producing output that helps the process with little interaction with other employees. Some really need that watercooler talk time to get going for the day. And some just are a mix. In any case, this is something that all companies will have to face in the future since it can't be just all or nothing. The old ways aren't going to work for you and the new ways are yet to be understood. Ultimately, I'm going to say that work from home is going to be a permanent aspect of work and attempts to stifle it rather than figuring out how to integrate it is just delaying the inevitable.

badcppdev2• 4 years ago

Gee I miss just how much of the office day is “wasted” for me by people who walk up to your desk to say hey and how’s it going and start a conversation that lasts 45 minutes.

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

Meh, at this point I'm not even interested in arguing anymore the various points of why this should or should not happen. I simply won't work for companies that require physical presence in the office. If they're able to recruit people who are willing to do that, great. If not, well, not my problem. There's no shortage of companies thrilled to hire experienced talented remote workers. Maybe if we fall into an economic depression, that will change, but more likely businesses will see physical offices as a no longer affordable luxury indulgence for the middle management class.

kkfx2• 4 years ago

Hum, some parts are obviously reasonable: there are a certain amount of reactionary people in all modern society (like probably in any society) and for relevant cohorts they mostly concentrate in management.

BUT some parts are obviously crazy IMVHO: hybrid work is a no go:

- for a company it means still having office costs, BUT for an up-front unknown number of workers witch inevitably means less used but fully paid offices, plus extra costs for extra gears because not everything can be moved back&forth;

- for a worker means being tied to a geographical location, typically a city, where typically density do not allow amazing gardens and individual homes, plus the need to move gears back&forth

- for both means creating issues between cohorts of workers who do not "meet" much each others, a "pro-office cohort" who tend to work as a team ignoring those from remote and a remote one who tend to be quicker and chatty ignoring the in-office one.

What I do not read, nor I do not found in wide public debates are other and IMO much more important and uncomfortable issues that NEED to be discussed carefully:

- WFH must not means "smart working" in the sense "get this craptop and craphone and work the f* you like" but rent a room to your company/from the worker with proper services and safety (for instance locked door to avoid judge-cat or couples having sex during a work meeting, to cite famous recent episodes), so it must be a SERIOUS choice for BOTH party involved: the worker MUST provide a home office, the company must pay it's use;

- WFH have bug "market" issues: skilled workers normally haven't much of them, but the total fraction of eligible remote workers in majority have them; if you live in a cheap country you can earn less and still having a good life. Witch means on one side a legal/fiscal nightmare with companies trying to hire people from third world countries, some workers from the west migrating "just a bit south" and an overall fall in quality of anything we already seen here and there, for workers a salary war with all the premise to be a modern slavery war;

- for society WFH for all eligible ON SCALE means a little big revolution that depopulate cities, pushing non-eligible workers like downtown bar/restaurants, cleaning services etc, no one know where. Witch means BEFORE starting a stampede like covid-era flee with so many facing "unexpected" (obvious) issues like "holy crap my mountain home ADSL is reeeeealy slow!!!!" and beyond a plan to figure out how things will change need at least a public debate and analysis;

- property values change are also an important issue: people who own homes/flats in towns will suffer and some will be in trouble creating another potential societal issues with few sharks that try another estate bubble.

SergeAx• 4 years ago

This is slowly transforming from tiresome to nauseating. Yes, the rhetoric needs to end, but not that rhetoric. People should stop whining about how they don't want to return to office, and just find jobs where it is not mandatory. There are thousands of these jobs, and there's nothing wrong with them. Let market figure that out. Or, if you are really interested in FAANG-level salaries - you should play by their rules.

And please stop making up stories about how bad managers are to blame. Just don't work with bad managers.

‘Return to the office’ rhetoric needs to end

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