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The pandemic is never going to "end" so why oscillate between exclusively on-site and exclusively WFH?

and why, as an manager, take on that kind of liability unless you absolutely need people to be on-site?

Reminds me of an anecdote where a guy was working at a UPS near 9/11 ground zero and the manager tried to stop them from leaving work.

Is it just the Will to Power? or am I missing some convincing opinion pieces in The Economist or FT? I'm so genuinely curious about why a manager would be compelled to insist on on-site.

Cynically, I know it's easier to switch jobs if both are WFH... Would hate to think that Big Tech companies conspire to jointly enforce on-site (as an addendum to that infamous no-poaching agreement).

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A lot of companies have a huge investment in commercial real estate and likely don't want to see those values drop. But I'm with you--this makes no sense to keep oscillating between "yay! cases are dropping, the pandemic is over!" and "uh oh, everyone WFH for now".

IMHO companies where possible should scale back to the bare minimum on site and build a strong remote-first culture. Sell offices and move to smaller locations if it makes sense to reduce that footprint. This doesn't mean no one can work on site, or that no one can work remote.

Indian IT companies famously use all sorts of arrangements to claim large chunks of premium land in big cities. A large portion of their profits are banked in land and commercial real estate yielding them tax benefits and holidays for "infrastructure investments."

It might be as simple as they don’t know if you are working or not when your butt isn’t in your seat. Or, to put it another way, lack of trust.

We've had two years now--that's plenty of time for management and HR to figure out how to measure and validate remote work is getting done. If a tech company still needs a manager to see a physical person in a seat then the company has far, far bigger problems.

If they can't tell if you are working or not without physically watching you come into an office and sit at the desk for 40 hours every week, then WTF is your actual job? It certainly can't be something consequential that the business actually needs to have done. If it were, they would quickly notice if you aren't doing it.

(Edit: As a concrete example, I once worked on an all distributed team where it was abundantly obvious to the whole team that a new hire was goofing off. If they were simply having issues meeting productivity expectations, that would have been one thing, the kind of thing we could hopefully resolve with closer mentoring. But they were also really difficult to get a hold of during the day, and frequently made lame excuses - or obvious lies - for why they couldn't be available for meetings on short notice. Things like that.)

I think there are plenty of jobs that would be overlooked or mistrusted (by bad managers) if people can't see you physically sitting there 40 hours every week and some might even be questioned then.

When I was doing IT Support for employees of this one company I certainly got questioned why they pay me and what I do all day when everything worked. They would certainly notice very quickly when I wasn't doing it and they did notice quickly that things where not working anymore when I left and wasn't keeping these things running anymore. This was when I was going into the office every day and I think this would be even worse if I was doing this from Home.

No one had a clue about what I do all day. The same way that I have no clue who does payroll at my current employer or what they do all day, but I would very quickly notice if they decided to slack off.

The problem is that there wasn't really any way to track my performance or any way for me to show that I did actually work. The systems for that just where not there. So the only way my manager evaluated me was by me clocking in and clocking out every day at the front desk.

So you guys don’t even have basic issue and task trackers? Even Office 365 plans have Planner, a basic shared to do list. This is strange. Even without project tracking software, all you’d need is a weekly standup meeting for status.

No, we didn't have any of that. There was a reason why I left this place. IT was not seen as anything that deserves more respect than the dirt on their shoes.

Even if I had introduced a standup meeting or status meeting, I don't think I could have gotten my manager to participate in that. What exactly would that have done? If you work under a shit manager none of what you suggest would have helped.

If they can't tell if you are working or not without physically watching you come into an office and sit at the desk for 40 hours every week, then WTF is your actual job?

More like wtf is their actual job

There are companies in India that took your mobile phone before entering office. This was before pandemic. They had no trust in their employees. Because of pandemic they had no option but to trust their employees or else they were all gonna go in the ground. Their hand was forced by pandemic to trust their employees and it worked really well.

We would have forever worked in those awful open office plans if this mass scale experiment had not happen. Now the cat is out of the bag and everyone knows wfh works.

>Cynically, I know it's easier to switch jobs if both are WFH...

Somehow I had not considered this, but it seems like the dominant factor.

Depending on your workload, you might even be able to try a couple on for size before you quit. If you quit.

Personal anecdote: When I moved from an office job to a WFH job, there was this absurd period when I had to do a series of interviews with the remote company. It was like 8 different interviews on 8 different days, and they were all video calls. So, I had to figure out 8 different excuses to be gone for two hours to commute home, do an interview, and come back to work, all within a couple weeks: dentist appointment, doctor's appointment, optometry appointment, picking a friend up from the airport, followup appointments, etc.

I'm pretty sure that's a huge tipoff to HR.

We used to call them "going to the eye doctor" to our colleagues. "Yeah, I have a follow-up eye exam tomorrow." "They gave me a much stronger prescription (salary). You should go get your eyes checked!”

Side note: If anyone is working for me and is/wants to be interviewing, I welcome them to talk about it and/or to just to book a conference room and take the interview from there. Taking 2 hours and hassle is worse than taking 1 hour and feeling like we’re all adults.

lol. Has any employee actually taken you up on that? I would never do this in a million years personally.

I've been on both sides of it several times. I've counseled several employees on what I thought of their external prospects (generally and for specific job listings) and sometimes that ends up with, "Yeah, I think you oughta go for that one." Other times, it ends up with "Here's what I see for you here; here's what I see there; you have to decide."

On the other end, I've told four different bosses that I was either considering looking or actively looking, and why. Sometimes that ends up in me changing jobs; sometimes it doesn't because we can address what isn't working for me or reach a middle ground that works.

I think people assume far too much ill intent on the part of managers. To me, I want you working for me because you want to be doing the work we're doing and are happy with the pay we're paying. If you're not happy, you're not going to do your best work, you're not going to grow as much as you are capable of, and selfishly, the company is not going to get the best output from you. I don't need everyone to be ecstatic and grinding away with perfect devotion, but I generally want people to be happy (for them, for me, and for the company).

From that, you'll correctly guess that I've 100% had employees reserve conference rooms to take interviews. It's no problem in my book. (Other employees: the first I knew they were looking was when they handed me a resignation letter. That's also perfectly OK; your business is your business.)

> I think people assume far too much ill intent on the part of managers.

Not ill intent, just basic human fallibility. I would be worried that my manager takes it personally, and has difficulty trusting me going forward. So I would be hesitant to do something that I fully expect to be severely career-limiting should I decide not to pursue this other opportunity.

It's not entirely dissimilar from how most people aren't comfortable being in an open relationship. Wanting one's partner to be monogamous generally isn't about carrying ill intent toward them. It's more likely to be about everyday human insecurity.

I don’t suspect I’ll intent. But once you’re not playing to the illusion of any sort of long term, other people won’t invest in you as much (peers and managers). Some jobs tolerate this day to day transactional nature well, others not so much.

You’re probably a 10% manager.

This is not the norm. A petty person might hear of an employee interviewing and do any number of things. It would be what an old boss called a “career limiting move.”

I’m glad managers like you exist.

I would. If I'm interviewing I'm anyway going to leave soon, even a vindicative manager couldn't do much. - and chances are people don't care that much about their employer.

Same for my directs, I even helped them to find new gigs.

I care more about the relationship with a fellow IC than keeping them in a company where they're not happy.

Who knows, they may refer me for my next gig.

I'm not getting a bonus if I retain people (or punished if they leave), anyway.

>Side note: If anyone is working for me and is/wants to be interviewing, I welcome them to talk about it and/or to just to book a conference room and take the interview from there. Taking 2 hours and hassle is worse than taking 1 hour and feeling like we’re all adults.

I've put for similar options, I even offer to be their reference. True, we should be all adults, anything else is stressful for all involved.

As a hiring manager for a remote team myself, whatever company scheduled your interviews that way was very unfair to you to make you take that risk 8 times.

We do have a similar numbers of total conversations in our hiring process, but they're grouped into a smaller number of chunks/days; only some of those are an hour with 2-4 of them between 15 and 45 minutes; and we span many time zones and biorhythms on several continents so we can accommodate candidates who prefer to interview when they're at home.

That said, over my pre-pandemic career I think I've undergone interviews from small conference rooms or "phone booths" at workplaces before, with any bookings labeled as something like "personal call", or at cafes or quiet outdoor spaces near workplaces; most of my office jobs have allowed a certain amount of WFH too even if not a majority of my time.

That bs seemed more common in the early days of remote.

Now I (and most I’ve talked to in my network) ask the recruiter up front about the interview process.

This BS is a non starter.

I had to do a presentation to a huge group on why I’d be a good fit followed by 3 hours of group interviews. This was after a tech screen and a fairly intense live coding tech interview.

I’d never do that again unless it’s for my “dream” job. I got that job but it was nothing special.

I then had to sit in on these as senior eng I had to be part of the hiring committee. Such a time sink for all involved.

The pandemic is never going to end? Bold assumption, COVID may always exist but it will become endemic as have many other pandemics such as the Spanish Flu.

Despite many people's wishes, yes the world will eventually go back to normal. To suggest otherwise is very myopic. If you take the pandemic having an end for granted, then yes some companies that wish to return on site will do so before others

On the managerial front (and PMs, to a lesser extent), I think the perma-demic calls for a different kind of work. Most devs love to be heads-down alone and cranking. Managers, not so much.

- Communications are different. I think we're all trying to figure out the "right" protocols[1] for video meetings, as an example. That kind of thing hits managers especially hard. Managers (and PMs) are there not to wrangle code, but to wrangle meetings so the devs can be more productive!

- Control changed. Micromanagement in any form (except via malware stalking) just got a lot harder. Even the softer "managing by walking around" doesn't work now. Delegation is more important than ever. And most managers were promoted into position because they did things well, not because they loosely lead things into happening. So it takes some manager (re-?)training.

- Leading vs Managing is a more important divide than before. When people are left to themselves more, they'll find ways to solve their own problems. Partly because people have to solve more of their own problems and partly because managers haven't caught up to how to manage in a perma-demic, that means workers are more likely to self-organize.[2]

- With the lack of human physical contact, we have to focus more on how to measure productivity than on the way it was perceived in the past. This is likely to shock many people, managers or not, who focused more on social aspects. Lots of "soft" measures like "happiness" or "asshole-free-ness" change when the social conditions change. We still don't want to work with assholes, but what that means is shifting.

- Other

- Profit?

Manager Hint: delegate until it hurts. Hurts you and the person you delegated to. Set up checkpoints. And be available to help. Especially with firefighting and scutwork. That helps your team grow and act independently. Even if we ever get back to the office, that habit will pay off.

[1] Pro- or anti-occupy, politically, they addressed comms problems with large open-air meetings meant to include everyone. We need to think along those lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement_hand_signals

[2] Yes, "organize" was an intentional pun. Unionization in lots of fields, lots of shops is on the rise. And a shocking number of strikes goes unreported in the mainstream media (I can't find my original source, so Bloomberg will do). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-10-20/the-re...

many managers don't know how to do remote. and even experienced people get blindsided by it sometimes.

but change and learning are inherent to this field of work, so there must be something else.

for large companies, it's real estate. nobody wants to sell a huge corporate campus at a loss.

The number of deaths is so low it's hard to call it a pandemic.

But by all means, if we can convince companies to go remote with this bs, go ahead.

At the same time, I'm tired of restrictions to my personal freedoms to save literally 5 people (living in nazi Europe, restrictions are bad here, unlike USA / UK / northern europe)

>why, as an manager, take on that kind of liability

lolwhut? No one is liable if you die from covid at work.

The pandemic will (by definition) end when SARS-CoV2 becomes endemic, which seems like the overwhelmingly most likely trajectory that we're on.

We're not quite there yet, but I'm encouraged rather than discouraged by the totality of what I see and think we’re way past the halfway point in the time dimension of the pandemic phase of the virus, that we’re headed for a future where SARS-CoV2 is about as disruptive to society as H1N1 influenza, and that, except for a lot more tech WFH, that February 2023 will look a lot more like February 2020 than Feb 2021 or Feb 2022.

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