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Comment by 13of40 | Hacker News Reader

Not saying whether I believe it or not, and I personally work remote 100%, but one of the arguments for RTO is that remote work diminishes "social capital" in a company, where the social capital of a company is the combined value of all the social connections between the employees. In other words, if Bob has to fix the database and he knows that Zoe created it and is in the next cube over, he's going to be able to get through that problem a lot faster than if they've never met and he doesn't know what she works on. The idea being, of course, that at scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company.

(Edit: Just to be clear, last time I saw a presentation on this, they did have actual metrics. But numbers on a slide deck should always be taken with a big grain of salt.)

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> remote work diminishes "social capital"

Stack ranking forcing a number of your employees into "low performance" and putting them on PIP is awesome for social capital however. As are layoffs.

"it's all bullshit, and it's bad for you"

I think you're misunderstanding the point. "Social capital" isn't another way to say "happy workers". There's probably a ton of it in a gulag, for example. It's better for a prisoner to know who can patch a shoe versus having to walk their toes off in the snow, and it's better for the guards because they won't be short a log hauler. Social capital manifest, without a smile in sight.

A layoff is going to sever some of those connections in the short term, but the number and quality of connections isn't a function of how people feel about their job. Stack ranking and PIPs are tools that the company uses to mitigate the impact of letting people go. In other words, they're there to protect social capital (for the good of the company, don't get me wrong) versus doing something like picking a random 20% of people to eliminate.

I understand full well what "social capital" is supposed to mean.

My point is that fostering a culture of mistrust and competitiveness among the employees is antithetical to protecting social capital.

I won't effectively collaborate with you if it helps you being the low performer that will be laid off instead of me.

That's a fair point, but based on my experience I don't think most people are as deliberate as that. I've survived more layoffs than I care to count over the years, and it's always seemed like there were plenty of people on the far left of the bell curve without anyone needing to actively sabotage them.

That has been my observation as well.

And curiously enough, I normally don't care about being PIP'd or layoff, as I engage in healthy job hopping so that I was never actually laid off over my relatively long career. Typically I'm one to see the early signs of trouble ahead and line up a new job in the next month or so.

But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that the culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for the ones that are best at navigating the corporate culture in the way I described above.

> But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that the culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for the ones that are best at navigating the corporate culture in the way I described above.

Well, when you get down to it, if you find yourself back-stabbing a coworker to keep yourself out of the bottom 10% during a RIF, that's not a huge badge of honor either.

I don't expect people to be after badges of honor, generally speaking.

You’re only looking at those that are far to the left. There are plenty of the people in the right and middle that get dragged down all the same. Because 360 at Amazon didn’t just decide whether you stay or leave but also your raise and most importantly the RSUs that are issued 4 years out. Amazon issues RSUs based on your growth trajectory. And promotions.

None of the reviewers ever have to lie remember. They just have to cherry pick the right examples.

(To be clear, it’s not just Amazon. It’s all companies that have a peer review system that couples with a stack ranking system. If it’s simply feedback to help you grow or established goals and your performance against it, the system will be fine)

But that seems like a faulty reasoning, assuming I'm Bob, Slack and Email allow me to reach Zoe just as easily with the bonus that I'm not interrupting her flow.

> scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company

It does not though, if the culture is anything like Amazon's, Zoe will ask you to cut her a ticket instead of directly talking to her. There is nothing with in-person interactions that "scale".

That's not what social capital is.

A message or email works differently when you have an established relationship with the other party. It's one thing when I have to do something "because the company needs it" but totally different when I'm helping a flesh-and-blood coworker. You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.

> You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.

Assuming you're neurotypical.

Which most people are. You make structure how your business works on the typical case. That will provide the most transformation.

> Which most people are.

Definitely not in actual developers or sysadmins.

Most of them are in this manner.

Almost all the ones I've met.

We do an occasional get-together every few months (with a big break due to the plague). Seems to work just as well as when I worked at the office.

I absolutely have close work (and friend) relationships with people on far flung teams, and even companies I no longer work for in countries I'll never visit, whom I've never met in meatspace (or only a couple times at conferences or whatever). These relationships were built mainly by IRC/jabber/slack (depending on the vintage) and phone calls/videocon though, not tickets and email. Time zone probably matters more than anything -- I keep in touch with colleagues from India who I met when working third shift in web hosting support, but couldn't tell you the names of the daywalkers from the same office I was in.

Modern corporate environments are spread out all over the planet. If you can't build relationships without sharing air, you will be at a massive disadvantage. That's just how it is, and it isn't something that was caused by the pandemic, it's a consequence of intense globalization over the past ~40 years and an aggressive investor-driven acquisitions culture.

Yeah I think it is this. Teams glue easier when working physical together. Person in the office also buys managers bullshit and company peculiarities because there is social pressure to buy-in those . So in the end keeping remote workers is way harder and work is more transactional.

"Teams glue easier when working physical (sic) together."

You can't state this as a fact. My company has two main offices. Two of the other SREs I work with are in a different office/state. We're as tight as can be. A third SRE is in yet another city. Our teams performance since the start of remote work has been outstanding.

There are no "facts" to this RTO fetish. It's just a management fetish, just like Jack Welch's BS that spread like wildfire.

Yeah, except one has seen people next to each other in cubicles working on the same project not really talking with each other unless dragged into a meeting room (that also could be virtual later during pandemic) ... and others who drop just few chat messages around to identify their person of interest and just reach out regardless of whether they are near by or in another coorp office in another city? I believe it is a people are different problem, and also this is just belief ;)

Knowing who is in charge of what service is something that should be solved by a service registry, not by a flaky informal gossip network. If people believe they can't solve this problem without overhearing things in the office, they are probably spending their social capital on the wrong things.

"and he knows that Zoe created it"

There's a lot of ways to share that piece of knowledge other than relying on physical proximity. Documentation, metadata, AOB in the team meeting.

Companies who treat employees as meat-based dysfunctional robots diminish their social capital... If they want a "social capital, people who feel to be part of the company, something like a family" and so on, it's not WFH the point but how companies hire and behave.

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