Comment by fbggthro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fbggthro | Hacker News Reader

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This strawman about middle managers in the WFH conversation is exhausting and annoying. Do you really think middle managers are some evil scum-sucking lizards that actually enjoy things like hour long commutes and wearing uncomfortable clothes? They're people just like you are, and they enjoy sitting at home in their pajamas just as much as you do.

Maybe, just maybe the issue is that middle managers have actual, legitimate reasons that WFH isn't a universally good thing. Contrary to what you may think, not every worker in tech is a high-performing star that produces flawless code if you just leave them alone in their home office. A lot of employees are lazy and will take advantage of the reduced oversight to slack off, a lot of employees are people who need constant hands-on mentoring or direction, and a lot of employees are just simply more productive when there's someone to impress nearby.

So while I respect that you might be the perfect worker bee who does whatever work is assigned with no oversight or hand-holding required, most employees are not that, and in-person oversight/mentoring (and if in-person oversight can't happen, get ready for increase monitoring on your work laptop usage) legitimately is necessary.

Here here. I want the office, to help me focus, and to reduce friction when communicating and solving problems.

Most of my job is not coding. My job isn't assembly line work. It is solving problems in coordination with my peers, which yields small amounts of code and configuration.

If I had straight-ahead clear as day coding to do, and I was motivated -- then, yes, being at home in my own environment in the quiet would be great. But that's not my job, nor the job of many other people.

Working from home is not for everyone. I'm looking forward to returning.

I can relate to this a bit. Most here will quickly jump on the "Judge output and not effort" and dismiss the fact that judging output is very difficult, time consuming and often unfair.

If the task hasn't been done on time, it might be because the task underestimated the difficulty, or that the person had other tasks which interrupted this one. If the person tried their best and they are competent, the output doesn't matter so much since likely it would have taken an equal amount of time for anyone else to get it done. You can't ask people to do more than they are capable of.

When everyone is honest and trying their best there are no problems but its pretty hard to work out when they aren't.

I'm sympathetic to this position, but I do wonder: is it actually easier for underperforming employees to hide when they're remote? I feel like, anecdotally, they are pretty good at hiding in person too.

Maybe it makes them try harder to appear busy with real work when people are around to hover over their cubes, but I'm unconvinced that you can really wring blood from a stone.

Maybe around the edges the "personal touch" is enough to inspire (or frighten) an employee in a way that remote communication does not allow, but I've not seen many poor performers actually improve unless they were already personally motivated to do better themselves.

Sigh, sadly, as much as I would like to think otherwise, you do have a point. The universal part that is. WFH is definitely not for everyone. In our little group we do have one member, who has has started to abuse the situation. My immediate manager is not one to micromanage, but as our team has gotten bigger, we had to stop relying on trust. So we started to rely more on raw numbers. And it sucks, because this particular unit had a rather high level autonomy.

But... maybe that is the point.. there should be a way to get those who can do WFH to keep doing it.

You sound like a middle manager trying defend themselves.

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