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Adding 2 hours of unpaid commute doesn't do anything but increase burnout. Nor would it prevent slackers from slacking.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I have to go into the office occasionally to get my work done. The energy required for commuting is non trivial. I’m not sure why nobody is talking about that.

I can parlay that energy into the product I’m building on the days I don’t commute and I feel like I achieve more.

Certainly the remote first culture will require more from managers so I get where the push to return is coming from, but that’s something we can deal with together as teams.

Because for some people it really does. We have one such example in our team that unless he has people watching over his shoulder, he seems to have spent lockdown twiddling his thumbs

If it was up to me, I wouldn't keep him employed.

Managers shouldn't be babysitters.

Pro: It's difficult to fire people in the UK

Con: It's difficult to fire people in the UK

As a manager I have access to restricted table our HR keeps for the correct procedures around firing people in all the jurisdictions we operate in.

Short version: it's not difficult to fire anyone, all that changes across countries is how much it costs.

It takes away a lot of things a slacker could do (like run errands, do hobbies) instead of work. And makes it more obvious when you’re not working

Unless you impose intrusive restrictions or surveillance on internet browsing, it doesn't really do enough to combat slack, and just antagonizes slackers further.

If they are delivering, who cares if they run errands or do hobbies? Look at their work and if they don’t meet the bar, let them go. This whole attendance equals work thing is more often than not coming from insecure/micro managers.

I was responding to my parent/gp comment about slackers WFH. I think by definition we can say "slackers" are people who aren't delivering at an adequate level - or at least that's how I interpreted it.

I am not sure how much you have been in leadership positions or dealt with hiring in tech, but things aren't as simple as letting people go. For one, a lot of people with performance issues know they have performance issues and want to be better - so if they have trouble concentrating/dealing with the temptation to slack at home, establishing formal work-from-office policies could actually help them. Basically, it's almost always better to try to coach underperforming people or create/find an environment that works for them rather than just let them go (especially for software where it's hard to find people already, it's a bad look to fire someone in under X months, and where as a line manager you actually have little discretion over firing people).

Also, once a culture of not delivering gets entrenched, letting people go gets hard. You don't want to let go of 4 out of 6 members of a team at once, even if they aren't doing anything. It's a bad look for the entire management chain and makes other employees scared. Investors may interpret it as a sign of trouble with financials.

I don't think there's anything wrong with requiring underperforming employees to work out of an office, as long as their job wasn't advertised as fully remote and the employer never formally told them they were not expected to return the office. I do agree that people who are doing a good job working remotely have every right to continue working remotely though. I just also agree with the GP that remote work enables slackers and can make getting shit done hard/frustrating.

They'll just slack at work. They'll watch tiktok on their phones, hang out at the coffee machine, chat with their coworkers. It's worse because their activities will waste other peoples time, not just their own.

Some people find it genuinely motivating working alongside other people working hard. It’s not so simple as someone being a slacker or not.

Middle managers who are slackers or simply incompetent will be busy all the time arranging having plenty of pointless demoralising meetings in the office with people who would otherwise be productive.

Issue for manages is that:

- Slackers are a pretty big % of corpo workforce. They are not as useless in the office.

- You cannot pressure hard-workers to do even more and more on remote.

So the balance is broken. Slackers do fkall and hardworkers do only whats needed.

If you fire slackers -> hiring process costs a lot and you have no guarantee you get a hardworker. So for employer its a lose-lose situation.

The other comment explains in more details why firing is hard.

In my engineering career everyone has always had a list of tasks as long as their arm. The assumption is that if one of your tasks hits a blocker or you finish it, you work on one of your many other tasks.

If everyone else is working to fill in their full hours even if they finish ahead of schedule, it seems unfair that one person who finishes early then just puts their feet up.

The opposite is true of course, some tasks naturally take longer than expected and you borrow time from the tasks you finished early

> If everyone else is working to fill in their full hours even if they finish ahead of schedule, it seems unfair that one person who finishes early then just puts their feet up.

So you rather they pretend to work or drag their feet getting work done? That's usually what happens when managers think this way because there is no incentive to finish faster. In fact, I remember there was a term for it: Sandbagging. That's the type of behavior you are incentivizing.

Delivery of coding tasks is a proxy for your effectiveness as an employee in at most the first 2-4 years of your career. Past entry level, your work is the effect you have on the team's collective functioning (or if more senior, the org’s collective functioning), via the effect you have on its meetings. People dialing in remotely have a steeply negative effect on meetings by default.

It takes an extremely brilliant remote worker to add as much value to a collaboration as an average-skilled worker who is in the room. Most people aren't that brilliant.

Managers who focus on activity instead of results are incompetent. I would prefer an employee who is never looking busy but delivers, compared with a constantly running at full speed employee who delivers the same results. There is no such thing as “slackers”. You either get stuff done or you don’t.

It's kind of amazing how so many people rallied against dev estimation. How so many people said that it was basically impossible and you never know when additional complexities will come up that require more time.

How times have changed.

This. People who are against working from home are the same ones who measure productivity by measuring activity. They make horrible managers.

Commuting also guarantees you will waste what is likely the most productive hour -- the first one -- actually producing nothing but harmful emissions

Damn yeah, I never thought about it that way. The difference between the job I had a 45 min commute to and the one I could walk to in 2 mins was night and day. Now I know why. I’m finally not showing up tired to work.

Was working from home with COVID (second time, yay) this week and having that 1:20 of total commute time back every day was a huge improvement to my mental health. Second biggest was being able to go outside and throw the frisbee with my dog for 5 minutes every once in a while. I dread going back tomorrow.

I commute in an ancient electric train called trolley. =)

Unless you cycle in which case you wake yourself up and get some exercise in

And yet all the research showed that people were working longer during the pandemic for the same outcomes.

Output didn’t drop but productivity did.

Eh? You measure productivity by output.

You measure productivity by output divided by time, eg. 10 items produced by hour. If output was the same during lock down, but worked time increased, then productivity decreased.

I'd say that is efficiency, not productivity. Productivity is the total output, not output per unit time.

It’s funny how people act as if commute time is completely outside of the control of individuals.

Maybe that’s true in some places, but in the majority of places people can choose how long they want their commute to be. It’s usually a trade off between having a big house, a short commute, and saving money.

The median commute is 27 minutes. Fewer than 10% of commuters have an hour's drive [0]. At a software engineer's income level, a commute like that is a reflection on your personal choice of home and neighborhood, not something inherent to working from an office or something your employer is doing to you.

[0] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Unless you live in the bay area, which is where a huge number of software engineers live. My commute was over an hour and I still couldn't afford to buy anything.

Average commute in London is 74 minutes. Average commute in the world is 40 minutes.

How much of the RTO movement is motived by real estate and rental contracts those companies got themselves into? Almost a sunken cost fallacy of sort?

As someone with self control issues, work from home has been a disaster for me.

Which is why I think the solution is “office available.” You wanna come in and work, great — we have desks, coffee, soda, snacks, hardwired business internet and quiet. If you don’t that also cool.

It's a solution to that, but worse one than the disease for my office, where's there less bandwidth (shared among ~100 people), bad tea/coffee, and having to listen to other people on Zooms (or be on a Zoom myself in a noisy environment).

I find that most of the tech companies don't actually have that last one.

My problem with that is that I kinda have to be forced to go to the office or I will more likely than not WFH. I hate myself for it, but find it VERY hard to change my habit. I am definitely not strong mentally.

Buy why force everyone? Since I have ADHD I've made these kinds of arrangement with my manager before to be harder on me in some ways for motivation and softer in others because I get RSD real bad; it's never been that weird. Different management styles for different people.

Oh did I imply it should be forced for everyone? That wasn't really my intention.

But yeah, I probably have to talk to my supervisor about it.

But that isn't a work from home issue at all. You complain about people not delivering. That wouldn't change if they are at home or on premise.

Management must set timelines here or employees will maximize the time they can get away with. That is the exact same optimization we try to achieve in any other business process. Spend your budget or it will be cut.

Sure, intrinsic motivation exists in some teams but that can be highly dependent on the task. I have ones that I like and those that I don't. I won't hide the fact that the tasks I like might get done quicker. Shouldn't be that way perhaps but people aren't robots.

But still, the problem is the same if people are at home or at work. I personally didn't even like working from home but my office is just 10 minutes from where I live. Not true for most employees though.

Forcing people to waste time commuting is unlikely to motivate them.

We unfortunately have one of those people in our team and he just can't be trusted to work from home. Unless he has people basically watching over his shoulder, then he gets nothing done

Over the 18 months of lockdown, his weekly engineering updates showed little change from week to week.

No surprise that when the order to return to the office came in, he argued for months about it

You found that when they were required to come into the office, the underperforming employees+teams did more work? I wonder if you have any thoughts on why that is, I'm not necessarily surprised but I'm interested to hear more about your scenario.

Do you feel it was because they were held to a higher standard by managers etc. or ended up being motivated to do more because of camaraderie of irl interactions or something else?

Some people do better with more structure and accountability controls. Others do better with less.