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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

Utterly baffling.

Even with a short commute, I am still so much more productive at home than at the office.

Everything I need for lunch is in a kitchen in the next room, no more going out to lunch, wasting time looking for food or cooking.

Long commutes suck energy and time out of what would otherwise be productive hours.

Even the bathroom takes longer to get to and use in an office.

This move at large by the industry makes almost no sense to me. Only way it does is if these are actually targeted layoffs, or managers have a pride/visibility necessity of being seen with their peons all together.

Edit to add: They can also let those pricey RE contracts expire, save on electricity, water, and internet and all the other subscriptions and services they were paying for by having a centralized office. That's a large chunk of expenses they get to put onto employees, and for the most part employees are ok with it!

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It's a lot less baffling when you start looking at it as managers trying to control things. Managers don't feel in control if they don't feel like they know what people are doing, and they don't feel like they know what people are doing unless they can see those people in person. Emphasis on feel. At this point I think it's evident that managers can collect all the information they need remotely in most cases--it just doesn't feel that way to managers.

If you look through my post history, you'll see I'm generally not on the side of administration, but this is one case where I'm a bit sympathetic. When things are going well it's easy to stay calm. But when things are going poorly, it's hard to shake the feeling that there's a solution you're missing because you're not there to see it.

But ultimately I think going back in person is bad for everyone, both employers and empoyees.

Most ICs and EMs I've talked with prefer remote. I think it's coming from higher up, execs or maybe even VCs. Probably whoever is looking at the ROI on those pricy multi-year leases.

Eh, I don't think real estate leases are the motivating thing here. Execs/VCs are aware of the sunk cost fallacy, and leases will end eventually.

Just because one knows of it doens't mean one isn't influenced/affected by it.

I suppose that's true, I'm aware of some fallacies (such as anchoring bias) which don't seem to be changed by knowing they exist, and some fallacies which seem to change pretty drastically upon finding out about them (such as fixed mindset (as opposed to growth mindset)). I'm not sure which category sunk cost fallacy falls into.

Just because they are aware doesn't mean they aren't susceptible.

Most ICs and EMs I have talked with prefer hybrid - 2 to 3 days in office, the rest from home. Maybe we live in different bubbles?

ICs too?

My current team manager is also an IC and is the first manager I had this last two years who understand that code review and mentorship were harder and less efficient onprem and that our non-remote days should be dedicated to informal meetings about architecture and design decisions. And eating together.

First time I have less than 3 hours of meeting a week too (the rule he enforce is no more than 5 hours, even the tech lead/architect), everything else should be 1:1. First time I've been this productive (and I'm only two months in).

> ICs too?

Yes. Typically, those were very junior ones in their first job, who were still learning the ropes. Ramping up on a complicated codebase in a remote setup was very hard for them. Also some senior ICs who wanted to design nuances of a complex system. Amount of work we got done in a few hours with a whiteboard was much more than what we achieved over a few weeks of remote "collaboration".

Unfortunately a lot of people are taking advantage of remote only to do much less work. In some cases at the company I work basically no work at all.

I'd be all for remote only if all those people were fired.

They've increased their effective hourly rate and, given that they haven't been fired, the company seems to be fine with it. What's not to like? Sounds like you should take notes.

Marissa Meyer found this out and she gave her remote workers an ultimatum because it was such a lost cause --when she had her people check access logs many had not logged in to the systems they worked on in some time.

It’ll be interesting to see what the productivity numbers reveal in the coming years.

Yahoo was a cesspool at that time, right?

But it still illustrates the pitfalls some employees fall into.

Before and After Mayer, yes.

I'm reading "Deep Work" by Cal Newport at the moment. He calls out this event specifically in a very negative light. His stance is that it's enforcing a nefarious belief that appearing to be busy is more important than being productive by punishing those who were performing deep work and rewarding those who habitually check their email, etc.

I think I am in agreement with him? Results matter not appearances. EMs should be able to tell who is working productively and access logs are a poor proxy for that.

What do you think?

I agree that it's nuanced. There are people whose contributions cannot be measured in discrete units of output. But others are. Also some people who are naturally lazy can be made more productive by virtue of being next to others who depend on them in some way.

> appearing to be busy is more important than being productive

It's like a bad code review, or bike shedding. It's so easy to look at who's at their desk with their heads down. It's hard to look into what they're doing and how it fits into larger objectives.

I think write a script to satisfy the idiots and move on.

Great book! Imagine EMs reading it, and reflecting deeply about it and what role they have in an organisation. There is so much bike shedding, fake knowledge, and nonsense in management. At best someone read a book once. How great is the average EM at management compared to programming, for example. The sentiment on scrum here on HN is a good example of that evidence imo. Management is a very underdeveloped area both in many companies, and society as a whole.

Sounds like an excuse to me. Pretending to work in-office is only marginally more difficult than doing so remotely.

It's a lot more boring though. Which is probably why they don't want to go back.

Then they should get fired, just like they would by doing no work in an office. Remote work doesn't somehow remove the obligation to work or for the employer to drop unproductive employees.

So fire them. Or bring them back to the office where they are going to be bored and maybe quit.

Or, bring them back to the office where they will still slack off

> Then they should get fired, just like they would by doing no work in an office

Oh dear. I don't think you've seen corporate America.

My company fired a senior engineer last year when we found out they had another full-time job. You might think "more power to them if they can pull it off" but they had a lot of sympathy from us because we could tell they were struggling, and it seemed smart to give them extra time to sort our their performance because they were obviously capable of doing better.

How did you find out about his other job?

I don't know, actually, except that I'm pretty sure his direct manager wasn't the first to know. It seems like HR knew first and informed his management chain as a group. Among his team, our guesses are that he let something slip and one of us figured it out and tipped off HR, or his other company found out and contacted us. Or, less likely, management got suspicious and asked HR to hire an outside firm to re-check his background.

This seems like the root problem, which frankly doesn't require one to think of VPs or execs as villains.

However, there are ways of seeing if people are doing less work that don't require forcing everyone back into the office.

* Regular check-ins.

* Measurable objectives.

* A culture of trust.

* Asynchronous, public status boards for fostering communication.

* Lots and lots of writing.

* The expectation of frequent video calls.

I have worked at remote only companies well before the pandemic and they had different organizational structures than the in-person companies.

What were the differences in organizational structure?

These come to mind:

Meeting free days.

Yearly in-person meetups.

Leverage of online task management tools like trello.

Lots and lots of written docs and procedures.

How about trusting your employees first? Most of the items on that lists are just busy works to give paranoid higher-ups peace of mind which actually has negative effects on employees that are actually doing work.

There is arguably 1 item on that list which is strictly busy work, not many. Every other piece seems either good for communication or at worst neutral.

Every other piece seems either good for communication or at worst neutral.

Most of the other pieces increase time spent on communication. That is not necessarily the same thing.

Having worked remote-first for a long time and at several different places I would say the #1 thing you need to be effective is a different style of communication. You don't want to rely on large group meetings much. In fact ideally you don't want to force much real-time interaction at all. Save that for either genuinely urgent issues - which shouldn't happen often - or casual collaboration that your people set up whenever it suits everyone involved.

One big win from having people WFH - assuming they have a sensible working environment at home of course - is that they can actually do deep work for long periods of time. You don't have the constant "background noise" and casual interruptions that come with working in a crowded, open plan office. But if you want to take advantage of that then you need two things.

Firstly you need some other way of getting the useful incidental information sharing around the team. You'll be missing the casual aside when someone at the office overhears two other people on the team discussing something they used to work on that ends up saving those two people an entire day of investigation. You need ways for people to keep aware of what's generally happening that might relate to them and to make open requests for help or advice without it becoming a hassle for anyone.

Secondly you need to not keep interrupting the person trying to do deep work in new and different ways just because they're at home now. Tools like Slack and Teams might be great for giving the appearance of everyone keeping busy but they can be terrible for everyone actually being productive. Usually that happens if there is a culture of expecting everyone to be permanently online, replying instantly to messages, and updating their status whenever their response time might be more than ten seconds. Same goes for having multiple group video calls per day and insisting that tasks in a project management tool only take a few hours to do yet still require real-time status updates throughout the day so Monty Manager can "report on the team's progress" or whatever else he does to feel useful.

To me all these are busy works. I'm an adult. Not a child that need to constantly be checked-in or monitored to see if I'm actually working.

* Regular check-ins.

* Lots and lots of writing.

* The expectation of frequent video calls.

I'm all for trusting employees, but employees need to also show progress and deliver results. Otherwise, they aren't, well, doing their job.

BTW, failing to deliver results is not always (or even, I daresay usually) due to employee maliciousness. Other reasons someone can fail to deliver:

* They don't have the training they need.

* The task is ill-defined.

* They are in the wrong job.

* They don't have the resources they need to do the task.

* They are overwhelmed.

* They are stuck.

You could say "well, employees should be raising the red flag when this occurs" but I have found that some people don't do that, preferring to dig in and try to solve it themselves. That works sometimes, but other times much pain and time can be avoided if someone checks in and offers help/connections/knowledge.

> * Measurable objectives.

I kind of feel like this is the only item on this list that actually matters. If you don't know what people are meant to be achieving and whether they're achieving it then either (a) they don't report to you, (b) they aren't needed and should be let go, or (c) you aren't needed and you should be let go.

Which, when I put it that way, kind of explains why some middle managers hate remote work.

I'd be all for remote only if all those people were fired.

Why haven't they been? If your company's entire management structure hasn't noticed that there are a lot of people not contributing anything for a long time - or worse they've noticed and not responded to that situation - doesn't that just mean your company has incompetent management?

I've been amazed by some of the stories I've seen about the "overemployment" trend where people are taking on two or even three full time jobs at the same time while working remotely. I've worked mostly remote-first for a long time but I can't think of anywhere I've ever worked where someone who was only contributing at 50% or even 33% of what they should be wouldn't have been called out within days.

If nothing else a good employer that looks after its people would want to know if there was a legitimate and probably unfortunate reason for sustained poor performance. It could be a medical issue or maybe a bad family situation. Providing some kind of official support might be appropriate.

Of course if it really was deliberate abuse then management has to deal with that situation decisively as well. Given the dishonesty involved with secret overemployment the reaction is likely to be swift and brutal. If it's someone who just can't be bothered to do the job properly working from home then that's more of a disciplinary but not terminal matter. But one way or another management has to step in and do its own job if something isn't working.

> I can't think of anywhere I've ever worked where someone who was only contributing at 50% or even 33% of what they should be wouldn't have been called out within days.

I’ve worked at 50% or less capacity at every place I worked at. I’d say as low as 25% even. Haven’t gotten called out, remote or not.

What stops them (or you) from doing much less work in the office? Do your managers not know what you're meant to be doing, or how to tell whether you've done it?

I know of a company that had sent most employees to work remote during COVID. While this worked well for most departments, there were a couple of departments where a large percentage of people were not working (not online during required meetings, etc).

In a sane world: The CEO makes it clear to those department heads that their future depends on their teams working, and the department heads come down on the managers. People get written up quickly for not being online working, and maybe the worst few are fired. Both the workers and the managers (who should have been watching this all along) get their heads straight.

In the real world: The CEO ordered 100% of employees back to office (still during COVID), to avoid hurting anyone's feelings by calling them out for not doing their jobs.

talk to your manager about company culture then instead of campaigning against remote work wholesale then

How do you spot these people though? In a large organization, it's hard to know. Hell, even in my team of 10 people I only really know how much 2 or 3 of my teammates are doing.

You may be productive from home. Many people are quite productive working from home --but a big amount of people are less productive working from home. They have distractions or simply do not have the habits that allow them to be productive at home and need the environment at work to push them to be less unproductive. Some people are more productive with supervision/office environment.

I'm calling bullshit on this. I think that people just assume that remote workers goof off at home when they don't goof off at home any more than they do at the office. Does the work get done, yes or no?

It's like a whisper campaign... One person says it to another, then to another, until the first person hears it second hand again and believes the story they made up.

Then you must know something Zuck, Pichai, Tim Apple, Musk and many others don’t know…

That their sunk costs in paying for massive real estate office complexes is making them stupid.

With all fair play to (some of) the hardware development portions of those businesses.

30 something folks with big apartments and 10 years of experience might be fine working from home, but now imagine your 21 year old intern / new hire sharing a house with 3 other people. I did multiple internships in my career while living with housemates, and it would have been inconceivable for me to do that remotely... Looking back at what I learned and experienced in that office environment. I feel genuinely sad for this generation's remote interns.

I wish this was the case for me. I have a wife and child. At home the distractions on constant. No amount of boundary setting seems to work as well as not being physically there.

I'd like to work from home one day but it's not possible in my current circumstances.

Utterly baffling.

Even with a long commute, I am still so much more productive at office than at home.

Everything I need for lunch and snacks is provided by my employer, no more having to figure out what to cook or order, wasting time cooking and cleaning.

Commutes are a good way to enforce separation between work and personal life, also a great way to catch up on podcasts and audibles.

And forget about productivity when kids and family are at home.

This move at large by the industry makes almost no sense to me.

Why is it baffling? Not everyone needs a company to create a work environment for them, and not everyone has to be commuting in order to catch up on their podcasts. Not everyone needs a company to decide what they eat for lunch, and most people do not get lunch provided anyway. Not everyone has a chaotic family life with children and spouses that don’t recognize their boundaries when they are working.

In case you didn't realize, I took OP's words and spun them around to create an opposite effect. I agree with you that different folks have different strokes, which was my point too.

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