Sam Altman says the remote work ‘experiment’ was a mistake
fortune.com
fortune.com
WeWork as an idea could be updated. Refined.
Provide execs with a day care situation. Fancy meeting rooms, little snacks, speakerphones for conference calls. (The calls don’t have to involve real employees, so work can happen!) Maybe someone to offer massages, since it is just so stressful being in charge. Fancy chefs so nobody has to leave for lunch.
Once the day is over, executive assistants can pick up their charges.
"Young workers learn by osmosis" - what, by learning body language so they can LARP as a developer instead of reading/writing code? No evidence presented for this claim.
"Supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them" - Not sure if "talent" here is a euphemism for hostile environment sexual harassment or not. You can't read or understand their code or evaluate their contributions in meetings? But I digress, it's another claim for which, apparently, evidence is not required.
"Managers order workers in to office / workers insist work from home is working fine" - Who has access to the relevant information here? Who should we listen to? The same people who just admitted they can't "spot talent" or even tell if their workers are moonlighting or not without eyes-on at all times?
Altman claim that you need to spend time in person with colleagues. What evidence is presented? Why of course: "I feel strongly". Good enough for journalists at Fortune! Intrepid journalist also adds "[Altman] knows a thing or two." Presumably this is meant literally. He must know at most two things.
Of course, Altman is a CEO, so all of these people he yearns to spend more time with are his inferiors. Their careers will suffer if they don't act as if their regard for him is at least as high as his regard for himself. Or does Sam also yearn for the day when shareholders breathe down his neck for every working hour? We'll never know. Journalist didn't think to ask that.
Another CEO adds: "You might be just as good working from home, but your 'career' does suffer." Thanks to who? The decision-making of afore-mentioned delicate geniuses?
Still, it's interesting to step inside the dream-yurt, take a bong hit, and learn about the deeply intimate and personal insecurities, hopes, dreams and feelings of our bosses and betters. Thanks for sharing, Sam, it takes courage to be this vulnerable.
Sam Altman says remote work "experiment" was a mistake (literally, since the results of the experiment prove to be true a proposition that Altman "strongly feels" ought to be false)
As a stroke of timely irony, we really need a GPT product that will critique this kind of garbage journalism, including hot takes by AI fathers, denouncing & shaming them from the rooftops of the internet.
Sam Altman is a remote worker who only sees his bosses 4 times a year on quarterly earnings calls. Why do the shareholders not demand his physical presence to ensure he is collaborating properly with his executives?
I think the answer is basically structural: the shareholders are other corporations like banks, pension funds, hedge funds.
While the people investing may be rank-and-file asset managers and not CEO's, in order to be trusted with that amount of capital, they really have to have a similar amount of regard for their own CEO as he has for himself (otherwise your career will be in jeopardy, as the IBM exec in OP's link readily explains).
The same goes for the press, especially the business press. The journalist really needs to have a high regard for his editors who, in turn, really need to have a high regard for their CEO, because these people are, by their own admission, quite emotionally sensitive to how they are perceived by others. They only feel in charge when others around them assure them that they are in charge.
In this way, you end up with sort of personality cults (God is all-powerful, but at the same time, he really needs you to believe in him, because God's own self-worth is insufficient and highly contingent on constant external validation). In this case it manifests as a very inflated sense of the worth and value of CEO's, and a sort of endless fascination with the minutiae of their thoughts and feelings, regardless of how contrary they might be to scientific evidence, or the evidence of one's own immediate experience. Fortune is a magazine almost entirely dedicated to this form of worship.
Edit: and yes, combine it with what you said, there is a sort of mystique around tech and AI that probably gives the average fund-manager or CEO-type a feeling of awe, purely because it's not their own field where they're fully aware of all the foibles and all the ways that reality doesn't match external perception.