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I understand most of your point, but the end of your comment shows a real lack of interest in and understanding of what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.

All of that requires tremendous amounts of communication, and communication over Slack and even Zoom is very low bandwidth compared to communication in person.

Consider this: if your home had only a 56k dialup modem and your office had gigabit fiber, would you still prefer to work from home? Because that’s kind of what covid-remote had been like as a people manager in a larger org.

To make remote management work you need to not just “learn how to use Slack and Zoom,” you need to fundamentally redesign your entire org for extremely low social cohesion and low bandwidth communication. It can be done, as evidenced by many successful remote-only companies, but it’s not simple or easy, and it’s brutal to be a people manager in an org that was designed around office work and leading through the conversion to remote-only.

Funny my managers often wanted me to be more "flexible" to meet absolutely non-flexible deadlines.

I certainly won't mind if my manager has to adapt for once (and don't tell me they adapt to each of us and all situations and that's already taxing)

I'll happily turn the tables.

And so instead of the managers adapting, the engineers have to adapt to the 56k equivalent by being in the office?

Exactly. Leadership/management love to complain about how they want to be in office because it's better for them, but then couldn't care less when people work better at home.

Only terrible management fits this description. Good managers care very, very much about what’s best for their people, and are willing to sacrifice a lot to help them achieve.

You are right. Unfortunately in my experience the average manager averages closer to terrible than good, let alone great.

That’s a disingenuous interpretation and not what I said. Good managers work hard to try and help everyone on the team do their best work. Just keep in mind that the overall team optimum may not be the individual optimum for you. It’s basically impossible to create a work environment that is ideal for more than 3-5 people. The more people you add the more you need to balance everyone’s preferences.

But good management can and does create a work environment where everyone feels things are pretty good.

As for me, the biggest takeaway I have from COVID life is that open office designs have to go, and possibly that hybrid remote work has some answers for how to make that possible. Open office is fine for some kinds of work, but ruins deep work. I think most people who are having an epiphany about work from home either had a terrible commute and didn’t realize how much it stressed them out, or had never gotten to do deep work before and didn’t realize how valuable it was. Those are important things for all of us to learn.

I appreciate this insight

As an engineer who transitioned to p eople management pre-covid, then back to engineering during covid (after burning out HARD), I gained a ton of empathy for my managers.

It's really shocking just how complex and demoralizing mid-level management can be, especially-so in the remote world.

After seeing just how hard it can be to simply know what your team is doing on a given day (let alone to align them to some vague OKR passed from on-high)... Let's just say it's made me want to adopt some practices that make me easier to manage.

At the very least, I'm putting more effort into keeping my tickets & PRs up-to-date and easy to understand at a glance.

> what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.

And if WFH improves output and morale at the cost of more difficult management, isn't that absolutely worth it for managers? Their entire effort is dedicated to enabling contributors, if a policy does just that then they should push for it.

I do mechanical engineering, we design stuff for our manufacturing operators and our customer's operators. Whenever some amount of effort on my side may reduce the operator's burden over the life of the product, it's absolutely worth it. I'm not going to make a subpar design just to save myself an analysis, that's the job.

So if WFH requires more management effort, and results in better output for the team, it should be pushed by management. Managers shouldn't compromise their team's output and morale just to save themselves some remote meetings.

Your conclusion is trivializing management and missing the big picture.

1. Not all workers productivity goes up when working from home. During COVID about half my team of ~35 told me they hated working from home and felt their productivity had fallen significantly.

2. It’s often the case that things which are optimal for one team are not optimal for the organization as a whole.

Those two points don’t mean that moving to work from home is never the right decision, it can be the right decision and it can be worth the effort. But it’s just not as simple as most work from home champions like to imagine.

> During COVID about half my team of ~35 told me they hated working from home and felt their productivity had fallen significantly.

It’s pretty common for people to say what the boss wants to hear. It sounds like you like in person work. So I wouldn’t base too much important decision making on your straw poll.

Also, self reported productivity is a terrible measure unless you specifically want to measure feels.

For management decision, you should have some reliable basis that works to control for your biases.

> Consider this: if your home had only a 56k dialup modem and your office had gigabit fiber, would you still prefer to work from home?

Perhaps you underestimate how much I hate being outside of my home. If given a realistic choice, there is no situation where I would ever prefer or enjoy the office. Nothing is worth it, and most of it is an active detriment to my quality of life, especially the people. I'm not asking for everyone to be remote, unlike the many people who want to force everyone to be in-office, I just want the option for myself and others to be remote based on preference.

> it’s brutal to be a people manager in an org that was designed around office work and leading through the conversion to remote-only.

It's brutal to be an introvert/misanthrope forced to sit in a chair 8h a day, and the point is that it's not necessary. Let people who want to be in-office do so, and let the rest stay home. I still haven't heard a convincing or legitimate reason why things should be otherwise except for people who are stuck in the 1940s office mindset.

But you have that option. Remote work is available and plentiful, now more than ever. So work remote if that’s what you need. It sounds like that should be non-negotiable requirement number 1 for any job you consider.

All I was pointing out in my original comment is office work is not a conspiracy by management to torture you: it’s by far the best work environment for many people and many kinds of jobs. If you could understand that - while also understanding yourself and that it’s not a fit for you - you might be able to let some of that anger go and find a more comfortable fit on a team.

> It sounds like that should be non-negotiable requirement number 1 for any job you consider.

You're right. Thankfully I'm finally in a position where I can do that moving forward. Before my current point in life, I was more in a position where I had to take what I could get, which is where the lack of flexibility became very frustrating. Just like we let engineers listen to music and wear hoodies, I think it's reasonable to let engineers work from home or the office as desired.

> office work is not a conspiracy by management to torture you: it’s by far the best work environment for many people and many kinds of jobs. If you could understand that - while also understanding yourself and that it’s not a fit for you - you might be able to let some of that anger go and find a more comfortable fit on a team.

You're right about this as well. It's not a conspiracy to torture, and office work is best for some people. But again, I think people underestimate how much people want to have the option of working remote, and overestimate how important in-office presence is for a huge majority of cases.

> and keeping morale high.

My morale has never been lower than when they moved us into an open office where I had to hear everyone jabbering away (plus it was in another state which more than doubled my commute).

> I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face

It's a reasonable way to feel, but I don't think the majority of people are like this. People who feel this way should definitely seek remote work.

Hate is a strong word, but if you phrased it as "would prefer not having to be near people, listen to people while trying to focus, or be forced into unwanted face-to-face social interactions" the percentage would be fairly high, especially among developers.

That’s not really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people who prefer office vs. not.

Its exactly what is being talked about. All of those things are things inherent to the office experience that go away when working remotely.

Those are only the negative experiences. Many people do not like those things. But there are positive aspects to being in the office that you misleadingly did not list.

The more extroverted among us get emotionally charged by parties and social interaction.

The more introverted among us get emotionally drained by parties and social interactions.

For the introverts, the draining effect is much less pronounced if the party is among a tight-knit group where being conscious of social norms is not needed.

After a large gathering of people I am not emotionally close to, I need a couple hours alone, without human contact just to decompress.

Based on your description I'm an introvert, but I still need WFH in my life for the social stuff and structure. I guess it's a continuum. I'd go crazy without at least 2 days a week in office.

Just because someone is introverted doesn't mean they "hate interacting with coworkers face-to-face", though.

Majority I would say is anecdotal. People have other lives and priorities. I would rather see my family 40 hours and work.

> Maybe you're an exception, and it would be great if you are. But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager. I think in 2021 it's fair to raise the bar and expect managers/leaders to learn basic online communication to the level that teenagers were doing like 10-20 years ago, rather than shackle everyone to the office and commutes because leaders can't learn how to use slack/zoom

With all due respect, I‘ve been chatting on IRC since the birth of Undernet, but some people I thought I had meaningful connections with I should have better not have met IRL. These days I prefer to make my connections in meatspace.

I introduced Slack to our company and am fully able to use Zoom, but there‘s a difference between four Zoom calls a week and four a day (yes, you do need to manage up and to the sides as well).

You might hate your manager, but so far companies don‘t work without leadership and coordination either.

I hope we can find something better going forward together.

I don't feel the WFH pros/cons align perfectly with engineer/managers either. I know many managers who are very comfortable with managing a geo-distributed remote team. Mine in particular is quite good at it.

I sometimes wonder if software developers who share these sentiments are often disappointed by the way things work in the industry because they expected to be coding/interacting with machines and toys the whole working time but in reality there is a lot more to building software that solves business problems than just coding.

I can only speak from personal experience, but yes, it was pretty crushing. I knew interacting with people would be required, but I did not foresee the full on panic attacks in the bathroom, trying to calm down so I wouldn't just run out the front door and never come back.

Ditto. I haven't had the same intensity, but I always take office lunch in isolation somewhere, take a lot of bathroom breaks where I'm just sitting on the toilet, etc, just to get some solitude. It's a real drag having to interact with people

> But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager.

Me too, but I think perhaps that you and I are several standard deviations above the median in terms of reading comprehension and ability to write clearly.

Not everyone is capable of this, as I learned when I tried to run a whole-ass engineering org like I previously ran more informal teams on irc.

Most people are bad at reading comprehension. It's why they tell people to repeat and rephrase their points when communicating, to give their readers a second chance at getting it.

There is also the aspect of being on the record in corporate chat. There is way more on the line when everything is recorded than informal in person talking. People also 'have to be there' with their jobs, doing something they necessarily do not enjoy. On IRC in the 90s when everyone was anonymous and nothing was on the line, you had the social freedom to be more open, and the people who wanted to be there didn't have to be paid to be there.

Yet another good reason why corporate chat message TTLs should be no more than 7-14 days.

(Another is that the default of "forever" in things like Slack and Mattermost means that a compromise of a single user account gets to see every DM (including sensitive stuff DMed like passwords or PII) ever sent or received by that user. It's insane. It's also able to be subpoenaed. Expire your messages!)

People get really annoyed that they cannot find answers to previous questions, and if you have q&a website to get around that, your just moving the chat goalposts around. Not to mention its a higher friction process, so people go ask questions anyway on the company slack.

Also screenshots are a thing and easy to do in secret impulsively, recording stuff when your talking in person has a much higher threshold, and far less people are typically listening.

Also once you get to a certain size, there are legislative retention requirements and legal holds.

Perhaps, but how is this different from any other soft-skill? A manager with poor reading comprehension who can't do their job unless they require every single person they manage to be physically available seems to be just as ill-suited for their job as an engineer who is incapable of working on a team, or data scientist unable to present their results in a comprehensible way to stake-holders.

Seems to me that remote-work has been a bit of a reckoning for managers, in the sense that our societal work environments have been tailored in a way that unnecessarily hampers employee well-being and productivity, all to cover up the fact that many managers are lacking in some soft-skills that are critical to actual management.

Couldn't have said it better myself. The shore went out during the pandemic and we saw how many managers and leaders have been swimming without swimsuits. And unsurprisingly, you see a lot of them making excuses rather than finding ways to evolve and grow the way individual contributors have had to do this whole time: adapting to cubicle life, adapting to desks instead of cubicles, adapting to shared workspace, adapting to flexible workspace where you don't even have your own assigned workstation. Meanwhile Mr. Manager in his corner office loses it if he has to make a zoom call

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Hiring, especially at larger scale, is a matter of constant, neverending multidimensional compromises.

I would humbly agree, and you make good points. I never thought about why repeating points is so important. I have often wished to some extent that the bar for communication were higher, but I guess that's something most workplaces would rather just plow through than try to really improve.

Hiring is hard enough without chopping off 50 or 80% of otherwise-qualified applicants because they have gone their whole life without reading things very carefully.

You really think your peers are going to appreciate your attitude?

Don't take this the wrong way but I think you need to think about Therapy.

It’s not clear what exactly you’re referring to by “attitude” or how you think “Therapy” will affect it.

On the other hand, I can easily see how the sort of non-constructive verbal lashing-out demonstrated in your comment could be a problem in the workplace, and a behavior that one can learn to avoid through Therapy.

"I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face, I hate sitting in office chairs and desks, and I hate commuting."

That is asking for your employer to say well none of your coworkers want to work with you "total break down in trust" bye bye

Which was my point the person does need to understand that he has to work with other people other wise they will be fired.

But he’s not saying he doesn’t like working with people in general, or even that he doesn’t like the people he currently works with. Only that the previously enforced method of interaction isn’t his cup of tea. And for all you know his co-workers feel the same.

Thanks, that's right. I actually am grateful to have a team that I like a lot at the moment; I just prefer working fully remotely and my coworkers happen to feel the same way, in this case.

He plays the game in office. But it’s exhausting and pointless. The only benefit I see of being in office is not having to compete with others around the world for jobs.

Concise and correct. The latter is probably one of the few benefits I've seen to being in-office, but even then I think it depends on your country. I don't think it's easy for foreigners to get an American remote job, for example.

Maybe you missed the parts where I mentioned acting/miming. I'm not so oblivious as to be a grouch at work lol. That's y whole point: I _have_ to exert effort to be friendly and likable and get along with my coworkers. It takes effort because it's not something I enjoy or want, but is essentially necessitated by any job. I don't like working or coding that much either, but I still put in the effort to do a good job because that's what working is: work. It would just be easier for me and people like me if I could take out the unnecessary stuff like being in an office, just like employers generally pay for air conditioning so you don't have to try working through heat stroke during hot summers.