Remote Culture War Has Begun, Executives Pumping Out "Back to Work" Propaganda

for me this is the trickiest part. A lot of people and companies are looking at hybrid as a sort of compromise but the brutal reality is that hybrid may be hellishly bad and lead to far worse outcomes than all on-premise or all-remote. I feel like there is a high risk of a lot of dumpster fire disasters and not sure which way it'll go in the end.

Agree with your comment in general. On this point, I wonder if this is only true whilst power remains in the supply side of the labour market. When the next recession hits, maybe we'll see a migration of workers to where the main employers are.

I do wonder if remote working suits the workers a lot more than the employers.

If a manager is struggling with a remote team, that’s usually a sign that they’re generally incompetent as a manager. There may be a few cases of good overall managers that struggle with remote. But they’re few and far between.

The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. It’s not a lack of training. Remote management is pretty much nothing more than basic management 101. Mediocre operators prefer in-office because it’s easier to kludge something that gives off the appearance of actual management.

When a team transitions to full remote, it’s like the tide going out and finding out who’s swimming naked. If companies were sensible, they’d embrace full remote because it quickly reveals where the weak points in the org chart are. And rather than capitulating to demands, any middle manager lobbying for a return to the office is probably a good candidate to trim the fat.

It starts from hiring people that inspire trust, and then...trusting them. Get them their assignments, mentor/coach them when and where needed, but otherwise let them do the work. Let them shine on their own.

Metrics are largely measurable anywhere, if you picked the right ones.

Build esprit d'corps. The rest starts to fall into place naturally after...

Pretty sure there was no correlation in the firm's demise (Yahoo was already underwater), but not sure it did help either.

I wonder if a good hybrid approach would be that managers with reports having less than a year or two tenure, along with those new reports, go in to the office every day. At the end of that time the worker can work remotely. When the manager no longer has new reports, that manager can work remotely.

You're right.

Idea: I live out west, where there's not enough housing. I was walking by a now completely shuttered cluster of office buildings near me the other day and wondered two things. First, "wow, commercial real estate people must be sweating" and second, "why don't we rezone this all this stuff and turn it into apartments?"

I'm not going to "mentor" an object on my computer screen as if it were a human being who showed up to be my teammate.

Remote work, while granted is hyper productive, I've never felt so disconnected from my teammates. There are people I used to have contact with daily that I haven't even slacked with in months. A chat/Zoom window is a much higher barrier to conversation than meeting for lunch, coffee, hallway paths crossing, waiting for the bus etc. I'm completely out of touch with what they're working on, aside from little blurbs in stand-ups. We have all become little siloes. I miss whiteboard conversations.

And that's to say nothing about the personal connections that have suffered. As adults, the place where you spend the most time with non-friends is the workplace, so that's the best bet at making new friends (in the same way school is for adolescence).

The funny thing is, when I was in the office, I felt most productive when I was given long stretches of time to just do focused work. But productivity is not the end goal of a career. It's collaboration and team achievement.

I have a feeling that the powers that be that are beating the back to work drum recognize some of these aspects. Obviously they see the productivity metrics, but they see the amount disconnect as well.

Eh, dunno.

A) It's not the complex concepts that benefit from physical proximity to other members of our species, in my experience; it's the subtleties, the little tricks, hacks, and bits of hidden knowledge that are really amenable to someone shuffling over to your desk, grabbing your keyboard, and going "here look at this weird way of doing it" in 20 seconds of physical interaction. Junior people can learn complex things remotely, but maybe physical proximity can give them those little details better. Which leads me to

> [...] at least 2-3 times per week.

B) So let'em come in twice a week and work from home the other 3. What's the problem? One of my siblings hires junior people at their firm and this is the way they've been operating since before the pandemic. The kids get trained up real nice and are happier in their work not having to commute 3x/wk.

Programmers don't have the best hygiene in my experience and not having a sweaty meatbag in the chair next to me while we share concepts is justification enough.

Perhaps if your work isn't all on a computer you can't get around this, but at least for programming I firmly believe in remote work.

Publishing hot takes devoid of substance and lacking intellectual merit reflects poorly on the institution and the editors who made the call to do so, regardless of what position they advocate.

If the benefits outweighed the cost, companies would have already offshored well before the pandemic. It’s not like WFH changes that calculus. If a BigCo would rather pay a programmer in Bangalore over one in Boise, than they almost certainly would also prefer him to one in Mountain View too.

Time zones I think will be the biggest advantage to hire within the western hemisphere, nobody likes the PST <-> IST timezone meeting gap, there aren't many to hire in latin america and they speak English well and communicate well. If latin america had a large base of engineers to hire in the first place, I think many places would choose there just on a timezone and english communication skills basis.

But you see big compensation gaps even between NYC / SFO / SEA and the rest of the USA, so you could very well see a drop from that.

Inevitably what I see is that some company tries to outsource some function, to save some money, or just because they don't want to deal with it themselves, and then the experience is so bumpy and acrimonious that they bring it back in house after eighteen months or two years.

Perhaps the problem with offshoring is not just the fact that the people are working remote. What about (very) different timezones, different working culture, different culture of communication etc.?

Remote first may be painful in the short term. But in the long term it’s much healthier as it forces the org to rationalize structured lines of communication.

After the 2008 financial crisis, there was talk about breaking apart "too big to fail" banks and reigning in their financial shenanigans and the world was forever changed. Nothing really changed except the banks got bigger and now housing market is the hottest it has ever been.

After the Trump election, there was talk about end of democracy, financial collapse, end of globalization, etc and the world was forever changed. Nothing really changed except the state gained more power, the wealthy got wealthier.

Every few years there is a crisis that is going to change the world forever. After a few months/years, people forget and move on, til the next crisis that is going to end/change the world.

You'll realize this eventually. It's why news really should be taken with moderation. Too much news and it become poisonous and unhealthy for your well being.

Everyone eventually learns that "life goes on". In a few years, covid will seem like ancient history and most people will have moved on to other things.

Life went on after the far deadlier 1918 pandemic. Life went on after ww2. Life went on after 9/11. You'll be alright.

You had me until the end. Nicely done.

We all know the ping-pong table is there for the same reason as the couch in front of the break room TV, or the cheese on the mousetrap.

I couldn't disagree more strongly with the author of the linked article. I'd almost call it pro-remote-work propaganda.

But, I say that as a software developer who is extroverted (at least relative to the profession as a whole), and is in my early 30s. Working from home can be super isolating and depressing, and I would rather leave a lucrative career than start another remote job (I already quit my previous remote job, currently living off savings rather than work remotely).

I know some people who like working remotely. But I also have friends who hate it as I do, and are super eager to return to the office (some already have, at least on a part-time/hybrid basis. The two biggest factors are see are introversion vs extroversion, and whether they live with other people. My extroverted friend whose wife works at an in person job, and is thus alone all day, hates it. Another friend who lives by herself hates it. A third whose social life centered on work hated it, and wound up moving in with her parents despite being in her 30s just to have some other people around.

Productivity-wise, I agree with the studies I've seen showing more time, but no more results. I think of my friend who is not confident in his job security and is working at least 50% more hours than in his pre-pandemic in-person job; I've told him several times his colleagues probably don't realize how many hours he is putting in or how effective he is, because he only interacts with about three people and it's all remote. In the first couple months of his job, before his workload went sky-high, he complained that some of his colleagues were completely burnt out and unproductive; now it's no mystery why some of his colleagues are like that.

Another reason I think it's introvert vs extrovert is my conversations with recruiters. I'm that odd software developers who enjoys talking with recruiters, at least the ones who take the time to get to know you. Almost if not 100% of the recruiters I talk with miss being in person. Most of them are young. And guess what, recruiting is a highly extroverted profession.

My prediction for the software industry is there are going to be a lot of people switching jobs over the next year or two, as the people who want to be in the office but are stuck at remote gigs leave, and similarly the people who want to be remote but are stuck at in office gigs leave. Some people will probably prefer hybrid too, but most of the people I know have strong opinions on the topic, and I wouldn't be surprised if hybrid mostly falls by the wayside once uncertainty around covid protocols subsides.