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Comment by dade_ | Hacker News Reader

I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry. They are absolutely fucked. Like Wile E Coyote running over a cliff, they are desperate to not look down. In December 2019, I asked some guys in wealth management, what’s a hot tip, and they were all about Commercial Real Estate, it never goes down! I laughed, but then wondered, what would make it go down? Anyway, that question is now answered.

I’ve been working with a company that have done studies on remote work, at the beginning 4% of employees wanted to work from the office 100% of the time. 6 months later it was 2%.

Problem #1, Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them.

Problem #2, people new to the workforce are most likely to want to come into the office some of the time as they are struggling to figure out the culture and finding help and mentoring. This is actually another failing of employers.

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> Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them.

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.

I personally find it much harder to onboard new people. It was easier to notice when someone is lost/struggling when you could see more body language.

Mentoring in a pair/XP style feels a bit harder over Zoom but the tools are getting better.

Planning meetings (or any type of open discussions) are much more grating to me with the Zoom lag and cross talk.

Heads down, ticket based work has less distractions though.

Maybe I just suck but I feel much more adept at in person interactions than remote interactions and its not about appearances.

Many companies function on thick layers of bullshit [1]. I liked your metaphor: when the tide goes out we see the shit below the water. Managers don't like when they lose face.

[1]: please read David Graeber, may he rest in peace.

> The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers.

1000x this. Much of the time, people in management were promoted there because they were complete shit at line / front of house / customer or client-facing work and someone up top didn't feel like firing them that day. After all, if you were good at line work, why would they promote you away from it?

It makes perfect sense that they'd be complete shit at managing teams, too -- remote or in-person.

Do any of my parent comments have any actual management experience?

Because while it‘s super easy to ramble about managers, they‘re essential to any company that‘s larger than a dozen people.

Management attracts scorn. I have to ignore it as people who don‘t see the importance have no clue what it takes to build a winning team and company.

And while I‘m still trying to learn how to manage a remote team and getting good feedback, I hate it. As in, I utterly, completely despise it and I‘m close to burnout and think about leaving the profession to just do engineering on my own.

Maybe I still haven‘t figured it out, but I feel like I have the choice between still trying to connect to humans and suffer from Zoom fatigue — or go all-in on async, having the feeling that I‘m chatting all day with a black box of meaningless, replaceable NLP models.

It‘s lonely, it‘s tiring and I‘m so looking back to connecting to real humans. If you have tips, I welcome them.

Try to get a non-work private life with non-virtual contacts. Or maybe move to Sweden - it's more common to seek family and friends in your company - with all strings attached…

I’m from Sweden and most of my friends are old or current coworkers except for my oldest that’s from my school or university days. Is this not common elsewhere? If it’s not I think I should consider myself lucky as I believe that is a big factor in how much I enjoy going to work. I’m somewhat split on remote or not. For me I enjoy work more at a office with my coworkers but having a commute around 30 minutes and not having the possibility of just eating whatever’s in the fridge or being able to split the responsibility of a sick child in smaller pieces than a full day makes the practicalities of remote work very nice.

I've been working/managing remote for 15-20 years. I agree with the posters, that the skills which make a manager successful can be executed remotely as well as in person.

Buy "High Output Management" by Andy Grove. Read it. I've read it cover to cover 6 times now and still find gold each time I review it.

It is hard to know everything about your situation from you post, but your more emphasized issue is you seem to be missing a 'real connection to real humans'. Yes, of course a manager needs to be connected to the team, and that empathy/earned respect is essential.... but it can be built using remote means as well as in person. You show respect through words and actions, those can be written as well as spoken. Maybe you personally put a lot of emphasis on the immediate feedback of face to face to feel that connection? Truth is, while that immediate feedback feels great and helps you tune your message, it isn't the foundation. The foundation is the thing you are getting the feedback on.

If the message is "Team, here is the goal for the week and why it matters", the foundation is that each person sees the goal and how their effort contributes to it. It is great when everyone high-fives around the room, but high-fives without the understanding are a false signal.

You are correct that managers are essential to building a winning team. You probably have a list of what roles/jobs/tasks a manager does to achieve this.

You could write down that list, and for each item write your current process for achieving it. You could then think about how you can map that process to a remote work framework.

> I agree with the posters, that the skills which make a manager successful can be executed remotely as well as in person.

I agree as well and just for the record, I wouldn't say I'm ineffective. We 10x'ed our revenue and tripled the team during the pandemic. I'm getting top notch reviews from my peers and I've got a kick-ass team around me that I really like.

It's just that my job itself went from an onsite one that I loved to a remote one which I absolutely hate, and I'm at loss about what to do with that or what I'm doing wrong.

I'll definitely check out your book suggestion though.

The scorn you read here is not against all management, but against the notion of "we can't manage remote employees effectively". Your results above show that it can be done even when you hate it, which most of us assumed was the case all along and we've been suffering the "back to work" talk track needlessly.

Yes, and my apologies. Your comment made it sound like you were new at this. But I think I found your profile on LI. If so, you are clearly highly experienced, and what you have done is pretty impressive. I'm not surprised that you get top reviews.

Also impressive that you have the professionalism to continue this despite your low mood.

Wish I could help more with the 'what you are doing wrong' bit. I wouldn't use those words, you probably aren't doing anything wrong. It sounds like you just miss being in the same room as your team. I get that, the human contact is real, and on-line is a thin and stale version of it.

You can be an effective leader either way, but yeah, emotionally there isn't a substitute for getting everyone in the same room.

>Remote management is pretty much nothing more than basic management 101.

this seems to be saying that remote management is easier than normal management without the ability to observe people during the course the day.

maybe this seems counterintuitive to me because I don't really know much about management; perhaps you can expand?

I'm not the original poster, but I agree with the sentiment and can explain how it's not easier:

Take any number of "fundamentals" of management: having regular 1-1s, regular reviews, having planning meetings with the team, long term goal setting, operations reviews, etc, etc (yes, management is a lot of meetings).

If an office setting, you can feel like you're doing these on an ad hoc basis, and maybe you or others can do successfully this in an ad hoc way (although if this is the general way of doing things, and your org is large enough, I would guarantee there is a manager that isn't doing this well). But this way of managing completely falls on its face when people start going remote. If you aren't regularly scheduling this stuff then it's just not happening, or people are getting left out.

So I would say that remote management isn't easier, but it makes it very apparent who is doing the management basics, and who is not.

I'm likely biased in that I've run a nearly 100% remote team for almost a decade. I don't find it difficult (most of the time; some days trying to manage multiple geos when multiple escalations are in play can be trying, but having excellent, competent staff helps) but I do think it requires mindset and approach that is different from folks who operate from a "I need to see them in a desk" mentality.

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...

this is the most resonatingly true thing i've read lately

Problem #3 Many managers really contribute nothing. WFH is exposing that

That's only true if your team is miraculously self-sufficient. Also, good managers don't need offices.

I'm curious about the vocal disdain for 'managers' here at HN. I know it's just a subset of folks voicing these opinions but I'm intrigued by the level of vitriol and consistency of the message.

I've been filing taxes since 1988 and I've only had one or two managers that I would say are truly incompetent. I would say most of my managers have rusty but relevant technical skills, have been open to my input, are generally willing to negotiate through disagreements and, my favorite, leave me alone. I've had a handful of legendary managers, a word I am tempted to put in quotes because they inspired me, helped me grow, and left me in a much better state than they found me.

Having managed multiple teams myself, it can be a fuckin' slog. There have always been one or two extremely high maintenance people on the team, conflicts to resolve, bullshit HR stuff to take care of, commitments to defend, bullshit to block, misses to explain and some amount of time tending to vestigial organizational dependencies that somehow are impossible to shake. And that's without immigration to deal with...that's an entire mess of its own.

That is all in addition to actually developing some type of relationship with each member of the team. Trying to get a feel for their communication style, pull(!) out from them some idea of what they see on the horizon, continuously observe their interaction with the team and overall performance at their job. Look for recommendations to help them improve in areas that need it and then run that through what you've learned about them in order to deliver it in a way in which they will be receptive. Mine progress for evidence of efforts from the underrecognized and let them know they are seen. Plan for promos when the time is right, begin evangelizing your employee early on, work on promo package with them, mine your network for support as you educate your employee on what is needed to get it done.

Then you have the periodic dumpster fires that 99% of the time are entirely avoidable. Intra and inter-team fights, liars and cowboys breaking shit, last minute disclosures of untenable delivery gaps, HR-issues, extra curricular issues, etc.

It's not a particularly easy job and I would say that the combination of technical and interpersonal skills that would be required to meet expectations I see voiced here and elsewhere are in extremely limited supply. I know I have and will continue to fall short of that standard many times.

Dunno, maybe I've just been lucky.

You’ve said it yourself that your favorite behavior of managers is to leave you alone. But what’s their use then? If apart from having autonomy you only have negative experiences with management your idea of them ranges from useless to harmful.

I haven’t seen what they do in the background and am working for not so long but so far managers have not really impressed me.

The best managers I've worked with unblock ICs, and defend from company-wide politics. Maybe set direction at a team level. Ordering smart, creative people around just obliterates 99% of their value.

Managers are also like movie directors. I’ve been on projects where smart people can focus on the wrong parts of a project. Sometimes it takes one person to orchestrate the band, hone in one what is the true impactful work. Shepard the sheep through to the finish line, especially if they are headed in an ambiguous direction.

Now, what’s all that got to do with having butts in a seat that you can physically see? Jack shit really.

I think what you are talking about with the former and technical leads and product owners, not typical people managers. There is overlap, as it gets fuzzy, but most managers I've experienced have terrible technical insights and are instead an active blocker to great results.

I think it depends on what you want. I don't spend a lot of time dealing with my manager. He leaves me alone. But he also deals with all the stuff coming down from above so my job is just coding. To me that is a win as I don't want to have to deal with anything on his schedule.

> favorite behavior of managers is to leave you alone. But what’s their use then?

To allow you to be left alone to be happy and productive.

With an ineffective manager, you'll be bombarded with all the interruptions and BS from the layers above and every side. With a great manager you won't be bothered by any of this, leaving you to be happy and productive.

In my humble opinion I think it might be easier than that: people don’t like to be managed, and people don’t like to have supervisors. It feels more like a personality issue than an actual work problem.

"they inspired me, helped me grow, and left me in a much better state than they found me.

And that is pretty much what the gig should be.

The vast majority of HN commenters are young and have never been managers themselves, so don't have much appreciation for what the role really entails or its difficulties. Also, tech seems to have a higher percentage of bad managers than some other industries I've worked around, possibly because a lot of tech workers don't actually want to be managers but get forced into the role either by promotion or pursuit of money/power.

I'm assuming that by "managers" we mean project managers here... These are a few things which come to mind which managers are involved with, which developers are often protected from: 1. Financial decisions 2. Client relationship management 3. Proposal writing 4. Progress reporting 5. Managing changes in scope/schedule 5. Delivery Forecasting 6. Accountability for delivery

It depends on what you think management should be like.

In practice, I mostly speak to my boss once every week or two weeks (if even that, I have gone two months without it while remote in a past role). They exist as someone who stops by once in a while and otherwise does not exist. This has been the case for both my current job and my last job. I can't imagine that either had any clear view of what I did day to day.

For me, that works. But I have known a lot of co-workers who have an issue with that as to them that impacts their advancement in the organization and they feel unrecognized as their manager couldn't tell someone else what they did that week.

I think many want an engaged super champion manager they work closely with.

You describe the workload of a conscientious manager well. The problem is that the work is largely not necessary. The team would do just fine without you, handling the same problems closer to the source and interacting with the rest of the company directly or through a non-managerial coordinator. All the effort a manager must undertake just to maintain some familiarity with the situation on the ground is an unfortunate waste as it will never be perfect and always will introduce additional steps and noise and need for corrections into the communication chain, or worse, just lead to misrepresentation and flawed personnel calls.

It can indeed be amazing to work with an inspiring and challenging person but that does not need to be a manager. Any inspiring manager could probably have been an even greater coworker.

Hopefully that makes some sense, and yes, I am criticizing myself as well in this comment.

I've had good managers and bad managers. The damage done by the bad managers was far bigger than the help I got from the good managers; in the worst case the manager lied and forced me out and there was nothing I could do. It's a position where there seems to be very little accountability for doing it poorly and no way of dealing with those who do - see Bezos' famous "You should quit."

For my part, I’ve worked with people who sincerely claim to have never had a good manager like the one you describe, informing their opinion that management borders on expensive futility.

I think both experiences are valid. I think good managers are in as short supply as good engineers are, and good people generally. Both hiring markets tend to be markets for lemons. Hyper growth startups that need to fill headcount can’t afford to be choosy, and within companies like this the Pareto principle applies. Unfortunately many people have decades+ of experience with the 80% and have never witnessed the 20%.

Most managers are selected from the "people who want to be managers" pool, not the "people who would be good managers" pool.

I have about the same length of a career, and the majority of managers I have had have been poor. Except for one, the best managers just left me alone. The worst are the ones that try to help and be involved and caused great people to leave, screwed up projects, and caused a great deal of damage to organizations.

However, on the opposite side, technical leaders are awesome. Most of mine have been great. They are team captains, leading through inspiration and excitement and performance. I love leaders.

The push back to the office is at least 50% driven by managers that are freaking out because their uselessness has been revealed. Many orgs and people I know of have been performing better during the pandemic - now it is tough to correlate to overall remote performance, since the situation is different. In normal remote work, you can interact with other people easier, can visit your team on fun trips, and generally be more social, which has the downside that you aren't as focused on your work, either. Also, you don't have your kids at home, which is huge.

But if I were running a company, I'd take notice at the fact that many managers can be cut, and that a good chunk of management is merely gaining and holding on to power via social manipulation.

I've done management and leadership throughout my career, although predominantly I've been an IC, and I see managers taking credit for the good things that happen and believing they are responsible for them, and the opposite for the bad things. When in reality, many bad things are the managers fault, and rarely do they have much responsibility for the good things.

I have a very dim view of management in general, although there are the rare really good ones, but they are almost always the "get out of the way" kinda.

I'm sure there are cases where that is true, but doubt (hope?) it is not the norm. Perhaps instead of assuming they have zero value, maybe you don't have visibility of their value and contribution?

I remember the time when Marissa Mayer became Yahoo's CEO and canceled WFH saying that it was ineffective.

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

That was not a ban on WFH, but a disguised layoff.

Meanwhile she had the privilege of having a private office where she had a nursery installed for her newborn child. Doubly toxic, both to every remote worker and to every parent who has to take care of their children without being able to install a creche in their own office.

It does take some time for a new employee to figure out how to visibly contribute. Whereas more established ones have gained trust and confidence, so that they are considered fully engaged even when remote.

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.

> I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry.

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?"

There's a former office building near me that has been converted into an apartment hotel, so it's certainly possible if the zoning etc can be sorted out.

FYI: There are multiple asset types categorized under CRE. Offices are just one of those types.

I hadn't even thought of that - but I do have several friends whose offices are downsizing due to WFH policies, so I wouldn't be surprised. Surely you could just repurpose some of the buildings into residential real estate though?

Repurpose commercial real estate into residential, leaving ground floor retail intact. Housing shortage eliminated.

But who wants to live in an office block. We have done some of this in the UK and in general it hasn't gone well.

I'm down to bang out JIRA tickets from the comfort of my home in exchange for money. But that's as far as it goes. The skeuomorphism of "team" and the skeuomorphism of "culture" are vile.

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.

That just shows a lack of understanding on your part. There is a human being on the other side with the same feelings and subjective experiences as in person.

You may argue that team and culture is reinforced by doing activities that intrinsically require you to be in person (e.g. board game, sports etc.)

But I don’t quite follow why you absolutely need to be in person to find mentoring someone worthwhile.

No, it is a mistaken assumption on the part of remote partisans that humanity carries over through the internet. It doesn’t.

You’re that object to the other humans on your team, so perhaps that is not the best thought out strategy

I know, that’s why it’s very important to avoid any team that indulges remote workers.

Per 1 and 2: my brother got his first internship at a miserable finance firm in June 2020. All meetings were camera off. No introductions, welcomes, or onboarding whatsoever, just faceless screennames handing out assignments. Needless to say he's looking for a new job.

What I am seeing is managers, corporate side, HR and finance side people love cameras on. They are mostly dressed up and in their houses with cameras on. IT, Development, Engineering are cameras off. I prefer cameras off. On the one hand I could see it being kind of isolating and you aren't building those social connection, on the other, is that the place of work?

If you're just a name on the screen, you're easy to replace. Half-competent programmers are a dime a dozen in India, Eastern Europe, and South America. And they know how to use Zoom too!

I work in software engineering, and it's frankly annoying to deal with the always camera off people in zoom meetings. Usually it's well correlated with bad audio too and you have to strain to understand them. I don't want to make an argument about it because they are usually rare, but if any of my 1:1 teammates was always video off then I would bring it up to them.

Get a good A/V setup people, you have the technical ability and it's one of your main job interfaces. At the very least use a wired headphone setup and microphone so we don't play walkie talkie games as echo cancellation mutes one of us dynamically and your bluetooth headset adds 100ms random delays and a lower bit rate of audio. Also do ethernet to remove the delays and packet drops from wifi.

I ask for camera-on whenever there are less than 5 persons in a call.

The fact of the matter is that most people (myself included) are able to read visual cues from others and adapt their message accordingly. Actual communication (which entails understanding) is just easier this way.

Frankly, I don't even understand the discussion about cameras. In the meetings I'm at, 80% of the time someone is either presenting slides, some document that is being discussed, some plots/figures, or code. Even when that's not the case, nobody ever complained about the general cameras-off culture of the outfit, and I don't see any reason either.

At least for me, I like that. I don’t want some stupid HR culture speech. I want to get to work.

Another finding, companies are struggling to attract talent and when they do hire, a substantial number of new hires aren’t even staying for 90 days. Easy for them to find a new remote job.

>All meetings were camera off

Some managers where I work tried to pressure people to have their cameras on. It was later implied this was based on personal assumptions about what the "big boss" preferred.

But then some people ignored it, and someone else said "wait, they can't make us, if they push it the union will back us up".

yeah google and apple also spent massive budgets on commercial real estate holdings. billions. that’s why they’re trying to prevent wfh

I think Google and Apple are smart enough to see past sunk cost fallacies.

Really?

I wonder how long Stadia will be around

Well Apple engineering involves (for some divisions) access to exorbitantly expensive capitalized equipment.

WFH for folks in engineering labs with millions of dollars of shared instruments doesn't make sense.

That was the fundamental reality inside Apple engineering that I lived, anyway: the millions of dollars of instruments for digital design and test can't be repurchased per engineer.

That makes sense, but I have a hunch that the majority of people that work at Apple (at least in the US, and not say the actual manufacturing plants [thats probably outsourced to many companies in asia]) don't need to work with expensive hardware for their day to day work.

The reality of the situation, globally, is that the commercial real estate market was showing signs of rolling over prior to the pandemic (as well as many other markets), and the bailoutistan operations since sept 2019 repo market intervention continue to enable a lot of the paper of CRE that has/is used as collateral (and rehypothicated many times over) to put alot of entities exposed to it on life support…

However it does nothing for cashflows in the CRE that no longer exist, which is why the situation will continue to get worse with out continuously increasing the interventions in markets, and the forces that influence behavior in those markets (i.e NYT posts shilling someones cornered book to try and get peoples behaviors/preferences to change).

Arguably, there has been a long shift to remote work going on since the 90's. Anecdote: My dad has been working from home not too long after P&G sold his division to HP and then to BT, and I have been for 5 years prior to march 2020 (and continue to do so today).

It's like the 2020 trope of the construction worker saying that work-from-home won't work because how can they work from home?

Of course in every company there will be a subset of people who cannot do their job from home. Nobody is saying that every job can be done remotely. So it doesn't help to roll out the exceptions and say that nobody can work from home.

yeah except for the tens of thousands of software engineers they employee that have worked from home this entire year. iphone app devs don’t need expensive hardware

i don't know current counts but tens of thousands of software engineers sounds (maybe 100x ?) too many.

there are huge numbers of hourly employees across the stores, though i don't know where they break down numbers of employees by type.

you think theres less than 1k SWE's ??

I know for a fact that Google Maps alone has over 1k SWE's. Chrome and android have several thousands, same with YouTube. Uber and snapchat and airbnb have thousands of SWEs.

Apple has dozens of products that are comparable to the ones listed. So either each of their SWE's is worth 100x other companies or my estimate is correct.

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