Elon Musk says remote workers are pretending to work. He’s (sort of) right

"The survey polled 2,000 workers and found that 54% reported feeling pressure to show their online status by replying to emails and messages, adding comments to Google Docs, or updating project management tools."

But that's work, though? I don't get the disconnect where management somehow holds the incompatible views that programmers should be robots that only make code and lots of it, but also think that they need to make water cooler chat to intangibly generate synergy and value (and hence MUST return to the office so they can do this at a real water cooler and nowhere else).

Regardless, software engineers are paid to do non-coding tasks, which includes sitting, doing nothing material and thinking, commenting and documenting things, responding to emails and making idle chat over apps equivalent to water cooler talk.

I would like to just quietly program all day, but I can't, my butt and my head don't have the fortitude.

How about retitling this “Musk hires clueless managers. Unable to tell whether projects are progressing.” If you can’t see that work is being done (or not done) remotely or f2f, the problem isn’t the worker, it’s the evaluator. If you’ve hired a lot of people who don’t actually do work (or only work when supervised like an 8 year old), whose fault is that?

I've worked for software companies most of my career and they understand from the top down that getting work done doesn't equate to interaction with other people. In the few other places I worked there was obvious tension in the style of workplace behaviour.

I think this is a misunderstanding.

I think I do about 50% more work from home than I ever did at the office. It's much easier to pretend to work at the office than it is to pretend to work from home. If you are in the office, the management sees you staring at the code on your big screen and nods to himself, "Yes, work!" At home, the management only sees what you have accomplished, most of which they would need a 2 year refresher course to understand how hard it was.

Sometimes I'll whip up a piece of code that makes me cry because it was so difficult to achieve and makes me realize how far I've come. A freaking miracle, and management will not give a flying fig because they don't understand what I really did. Other times I'll spend ten minutes on a one line fix, most of which was spent sipping coffee and groaning and I'll be nominated for some award...

This would only be a concern if you're paid by hour. I would think Elon's companies have mostly salaried employees, and that should be more objective driven. Even without that consideration, if that claim was true then why are there so many companies outsourcing to remote teams around the world.

Time spent performing digital presenteeism tasks = time saved not commuting to office