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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.

Hot take: There's a whole way of communicating and handling team organization that grew up around 20th century business management culture, and it just doesn't work well with remote teams. Methods that do work well with remote teams, though, don't work well with traditional deeply hierarchical management structures. At best, they tend to make all those management layers somewhat superfluous.

This means getting people back into the office may be a matter of self-preservation for career managers, whether they realize it consciously or not.

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LOL, this might be one of the biggest truths I've ever read on HN. An expanded, micromanagement style of leadership just isn't necessary in a remote style office. Trust in your employees and a flatter structure, with fewer executives and more people who produce is ideal for a remote office business style. This is a direct contrast to the mantra of the 80's, 90's and 2000's logic of grind it out for as short a time as possible producing and move to middle management. It's been a detriment to our school system and many businesses. Lifetime crafters/creators/producers are looked down upon in our society, more often than not.

This is a depressingly accurate assessment of the last 30 years.

The only hope I hold is that people with shared creative interests will eventually prevail.

The pessimist in me also considers that the allowed monopolies will then buy up those creative successes.

As long as they are paying decent prices for those creative successes (so the creators can have a comfortable retirement with healthcare in the US), this is not the worst outcome.

But my wish is that the really creative, motivated people don't lose their motivation. F*ck You money is a great idea, but after a couple of years of coasting, spend some energy and funds to make something really cool happen.

Unfortunately, some people go through such a traumatic experience which happens to result in FU money that they burn out and stop creating. That's a great shame for us all.

I guess?

TBH, getting acquired by a big boring corporation in my early 30s, and having the startup into which I had poured countless late hours' worth of blood, sweat, and tears become a long and joyless coast into mediocrity, was possibly the greatest thing that ever happened to me both professionally and personally.

There was a brief period of anxiety over all the corporate bullshit, and the loss of edge, and all that good stuff. But, after about 6 months of that, a magical thing happened: I started leaving work at work. My demeanor became more placid. My sleep improved. I found hobbies.

I guess maybe, in some poetic sense, it's sad that I'm no longer driven to build exciting things. But, in a more mentally healthy (for me -- I'm certainly not going to begrudge someone else for continuing to be ambitious and driven) sense, that was benefitting a bunch of strangers more than it was benefitting me. I've done my time, and I'm now content to sit back and watch the young'uns take their turn to run themselves ragged chasing dreams around the office all week, and then watch my own young'uns run themselves ragged chasing each other around the yard all weekend.

That's really for you, and I mean no disrespect or judgement. But at some point in the future you'll have a need to "do something" again. Maybe after you've built a family and put them all into motion, you'll find a place where you want to do something again.

And for better or worse, your kids will be shaped by the environment you provide. If you have so much money that they need never worry, then it will actually be harder for them to find their own place and be motivated. Think back honestly... if nothing you did really mattered in terms of your financial success, would you have been motivated to do what you did? I probably would not.

Already my children are a mix of complacent and unconcerned of the financial future and also driven to create. They know they will never be poor or hungry. Will that limit the raw expression and energy they have? It did me. I could not fail if I tried. I knew I was capable of anything, and I demonstrated some degree of that in various ways. But I had nothing to lose.

Eventually everyone begins to ask what the point of anything is. And frankly, we are left with no answers and just some guesses or assumptions. We basically decide what life means. If it means nothing, then why bother with any of it? If it means something, then we should put energy into whatever that something is. Money makes most of it nicer, but it can be a distraction for those who have it and for those who seek it.

If we didn't have managers, all the planning, negotiating, syncing, communication & meetings stuff overflows into the engineers themselves, who might get grumpy at doing something they really typically do not enjoy, which is management work. If you remove the managers, your staff engineers quickly start becoming defacto managers.

PM work, management work and all of that is work, and someone has to do the work and if the managers / PMs don't do that work other people start taking up those jobs. That stuff doesn't go away with the magic wand of remote.

Yes there is an argument that those jobs make a bunch of extra work that may not of been necessary, but that also applies to engineers themselves. Every job role creates extra subjectively unnecessary work.

And I am saying this as someone who has been an engineer my entire career, I haven't been a manager.

If we remove and automate away as much red tape as possible, is the remainder really that bad we still need a dedicated manager over a hybrid? Will somebody of the team not feel the urge or the will to pick it up instead?

Do we still need a manager who has power over the developers and partially decides which jobs exist, giving them not only an incentive to create extra work, but have a trump card on anyone who would call out their BS?

Do we truly need all this manual syncing and negotiating? Or has part of the corporate machine become addicted to all this red tape so much, they believe it is not only a necessity, but an insult to the individuals participating if the red tape is removed in its entirety?

Frankly, as much as I despise management work, I have a hard time buying the argument it really would be as terrible as it is now once you get rid of that red tape. Hybrid roles don't have an incentive to inflate the amount of red tape: they can go back to doing the other side of their role instead, and have an incentive to remove any existing red tape if it becomes suffocating.

Manager as facilitator works awesome. Manager as controller sucks. One path gives the team power, the other gives the boss power.

Managing a highly self-motivated team of engineers is different than managing a team of undermotivated slackers.

For the former, a great manager will regularly ask, "What can I do to help you do your job well?" This person fights the political battles that need to be fought, takes bullets for the team, gets the team the resources they need, removes roadblocks, recruits, etc. The team already wants to work hard, wants to do their job well, and "manager-as-controller" is absolutely the wrong way to lead.

But when you're managing a team of undermotivated people doing more dreary work (which, honestly, might be most people and most jobs), a great manager will occasionally pick up a hammer and do some of the hard work themselves to boost morale. They'll find and remove the major pain-points of the day-to-day, improve training so the team is more productive, cheerlead a bit, try to improve compensation, make sure the team's major wins are visible to upper management so they can get the resources they need, etc.

But critically, this second type of manager ALSO needs to be able to crack the whip once in a while to make it clear that being deadweight won't be tolerated, and complaining won't be rewarded. When the work is somewhat painful, you really want to foster a kind of contagious, optimistic busy-bee state where everyone is eager to do their part and help one another, and you'll have to put on your "manager-as-controller" hat once in a while to get there.

>you really want to foster a kind of contagious, optimistic busy-bee state

Is that really how american workplaces look? Sounds incredibly dystopian.

Yes, it is how american workplaces look. It's a bit dystopian in a sense.

Working in a faster-paced environment probably isn't the hellscape you're imagining: most foreigners I've worked with like it. Some don't. It is different, though - in England the slower pace of everything irritated me.

> all the planning, negotiating, syncing, communication & meetings stuff overflows into the engineers themselves

That is traditionally done by managers, but it doesn't actually need to be handled someone who is anyone's boss in particular. It's handleable, often with less overall effort, by people who are at the same level as every other team member on the org chart. The whole boss/report dynamic tends to inhibit clear communication, because circumspect people tend to to communicate less-than-candidly with those who hold the power to advance or inhibit their career progress.

My company promotes themselves as a “flat connected organization” yet our CEO has adamantly stated that work from home will not be possible as long as he is CEO. This is despite the company doing better than ever. He leans on a belief that some ephemeral energy and cultural value is being sapped away from working remotely and that we are “running on fumes” through COVID. I don’t believe any of it, and the company has continued making management changes and major acquisitions throughout the pandemic, fundamentally altering any concept of a pre-existing work Nirvana.

Our regional president also is anti WFH. He claims that WFH would eliminate quality mentorship that he experienced and the ad hoc conservations over lunch that lead to friendships and new business opportunities. This is a better angle, but it’s also not something that happens for everyone, everyday, or can be used to justify 5 days in the office.

This is key. These aren’t bad ideas. Face time is important, non work proximity is important (ie lunch). None of this requires 5 day a week presence.

I’m so tired of this “ad hoc water cooler chat” suddenly being elevated as the most important part of office work. It’s never in the past been valued by these execs, and on the contrary sometimes punished (hey, quit socializing and get back to work!). But, now, all of a sudden when these execs are scrambling to find some reason to return to the office, they trot out “serendipitous hallway conversations” as the great holy reason for the office’s existence. Sorry, but I call bullshit.

When you can't point to something quantifiable, I guess you point to something like "water cooler chat!"

My feeling is the same: while random interactions are important, they aren't exclusive to an office setting. Weird logic. It's been surprising to me how much ink has been spilled about this, and how few solutions have been offered.

Exactly this. I've had as many "serendipitous hallway conversations" in the last year as I had in the years before - just this time, they happened on IM, on videocalls, and in code review comments.

A small group of co-workers willing to sometimes go off a tangent in a conversation is all it takes. Doesn't have to be face to face, much less in a hallway or in front of a water cooler.

This. You know what happened the first week I was back at the office? Non-work chit chat taking up hours of time.

If it's really valuable information, write it down so even more people can be exposed to it! It's like that saying about meetings: "this could have been an email."

> running on fumes

I think management people are likely running on fumes … it's like the inverse of what introverts feel when they have to be in-office 5 days a week I suspect.

I'd add that the second take is also kind of outmoded, in that it assumes that mentorship, friendship, business opportunities must flow through your company. I've actually found more of this during the pandemic, and apart from my company …

True, serendipity (e.g. water cooler conversation) is harder in remote environments, but not unsolvable …

It's not (mainly) about introverts vs extroverts, it's about high status vs low status.

I guess not having your ass kissed daily must feel like "running on fumes".

Fair. My comment did imply that managers / those who feel "drained" by remote working are extroverts, which may be untrue.

On that: I think extroverts can tend to derive value from external factors, which may make them more hungry for praise (especially public).

(Edited because earlier version was murky)

I'm sure the vast majority of managers are extroverts, and introverted managers would be more ok with remote-work.

The upper management folks also have big, comfy, quiet offices with floor-to-ceiling windows, and an assistant right outside the door to bark orders to.

The people working in cubicle-hell or open-office purgatory generally aren't the ones clamoring to get back inside the building. If offices were redesigned to give more rooms with doors to the people who want them so they can do some quiet focused work, even if it's not an assigned space, I think you'd see much more eagerness to return.

> an assistant right outside the door to bark orders to.

And that same assistant will screen time with the boss, something us plebs don't get.

> This is a better angle, but it’s also not something that happens for everyone, everyday, or can be used to justify 5 days in the office.

It's not, really.

To think of it another way: what would happen if your mentors left for better jobs, got hit by a bus or even just retired? People need to be documenting things so that knowledge isn't lost and can be passed on to many more people. If it's really that valuable, just think of how much more of an impact it will have when it doesn't have to be passed on one-to-one.

Typical management structures seem to be focused on minimizing down-side risks rather than expanding upside returns.

If you have 10 employees, 5 are much happier and productive at home, 4 are the same, and 1 is completely taking advantage of it, old school companies seem to focus on that 1 person, rather than the 5 that are happier and more productive. They'd rather have nobody able to take advantage of the system than to terminate the 1 employee that's taking advantage of things.

The communication skills and preferences that are best for remote teams are different than those for in-office teams. Until you can retrain your staff or transition to different staff, a manager might be better off asking people to come back to the office.

> Until you can retrain your staff or transition to different staff, a manager might be better off asking people to come back to the office.

Meanwhile, those who already have remote work skills won't stick around to have their time wasted by being forced to work in an office.

I suppose a manager might be able to handle that by forming different teams with varying policies.

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