Hacker News Reader

> Now, this is strictly not true as plenty of people choose to live close to their work

This implies that they picked their home based on where their employer's offices are located. For a lot of people (those with families, for instance), relocating is a massive pain, which makes it hard to switch employers. Remote work is more equitable because the cost of relocating is no longer a factor in job decisions.

> That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment. Your job is to know your people, to understand how they are doing, and to understand what they need, so that you can help them succeed. While it is possible to do this remotely, it is so very much harder and more intrusive, whereas in person you can just look around and see who is smiling and who looks stressed out without bothering anyone.

I think what a lot of us object to from management—especially management that pushes for RTO—is that it tends to infantilize us well into adulthood. A child needs to be watched in order to understand how they're feeling, because they have difficulty understanding—much less expressing!—their emotions. But you're dealing with adults! Why don't you just ask how people are doing instead of trying to read minds?

As an aside, if you tried this "look to see who's smiling" method on me, you'd think I'm always struggling because I have major RBF.

> why don’t you just ask how people are doing instead of trying to read minds?

This feels analogous to “why don’t you just ask the users if the product if working, instead of setting up all these time consuming quality checks?”

Like, yea, that catches some stuff, but ignores almost all of the real complexity and will miss everything that could have been solved before it became a real problem.

What "quality checks" do you propose for office work that would work better than asking people how they're doing?

Counterpoint to your point on management: lots of companies have absolutely terrible management and they keep tromping on for decades. IBM and GM are notorious. I've heard even worse things about Raytheon and Lockheed. Deloitte was my own experience with pervasive, institutionalized managerial incompetence. These are all very large, very old companies. It doesn't seem like "good management" is noticeably different at the market scale than "bad management".

Yeah, product-market fit, first mover advantage, barriers to entry/moat and regulatory capture are much more important.

Good management is probably #30 on the list, and companies with bad management (especially abusive management!) live for decades.

Big established companies flat out take a long time to die even if they are run by complete morons. It takes something truly catastrophic to die quickly like "the entire company is fraudulent and they got caught" level bad.

Agreed, the peasants forgot the needs of managers. These are the atlases who carry the burden of the world on their shoulders. Whither productivity if they don’t know how many shits you’re taking a day?

>Having an open office for 600 is hell

Sadly, as companies are demanding RTO under the guise of 'increasing collaboration', I don't think the right ears will be hearing this message.

My manager lives a town over and hates this "increasing collaboration" idea. He and I are the only employees who live here. The other three on the team are each in a different country.

We may be able to hold on forever this way. What are we going to do? Book a meeting room then 3/5 are remote anyway? Doesn't make sense.

(a) management is necessary, and is a key differentiator of good companies versus lousy companies, (b) no matter how good the managers are, it is much harder to manage remotely than it is to manage in person

Going to ask for a source for both of these.

> It can be a lot of fun to have an open office when you’re a team of six. Having an open office for 600 is hell.

This reminds me of a job I once had, where there was a cafe near the working area. That was shit, trying to work while the noise of espresso machines hiss and squeal away. Then at Christmas they decided to put an impromptu choir singing away for a few hours.

What the actual fuck. They weren't even any good, some funky jazzy Christmas choir that was just absolute noise. But it completely messed with my ability to talk to customers, and existing scheduled meeting.

Once you are open plan then everyone feels like they have the right to encroach on your attention without asking.

You just tripped my "had a desk next to the ping pong table" PTSD.

> Most legit: the complaint that RTO means “everyone must drive 1-2 hours each day.” Now, this is strictly not true as plenty of people choose to live close to their work, and some people live in places where they can take transit, etc.

Got a source for this?

Cause I dont think this can be true taking into consideration people change job relatively often once per a couple of years thus it cannot be true that most of them are living near their office.

You seem to be mixing managers and babysitters

While I can't speak for every manager, I can speak for myself managing a hybrid team going on 5 years now (obvious disclaimer, not necessarily the views of my company etc)

> Imagine being an IC software developer and being stuck on dial up. That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment.

This is hyperbolic. I would also suggest it takes some autonomy and responsibility away from managers to adapt and learn new ways for building an understanding of your engineers. If adapting to remote is problematic, adapting to employees with dramatically different methods of thinking and communication (of which there are many) will also be problematic.

Are there challenges? Sure. From my perspective, the largest among them likely being the loss of organic opportunities to casually interact and build rapport, such as over lunch. The second worth mentioning is the friction added to nonverbal communication. (Onboarding is one of the most critical places these hit, but they're ongoing headwinds as well.) But neither of these are in any way insurmountable, or even high on the list of "things that keep me up at night" managing a team. At the risk of a simple answer, I've found they're usually well addressed by intentionally making opportunities to just... interact, and of course finding what works for an individual dev, with a team-wide emphasis on async methods of alignment, knowledge sharing, and consistency/coordination.

None of the things you mentioned, what a dev is doing, what they want and need, should have in-person as a requirement. The statement of "more intrusive" is especially ironic, as I find knocking on an office door and interrupting flow, or bugging someone in the hallway or over lunch "what's the status of X" far more intrusive than having a good process and cadence and ongoing awareness for work being done, and trusting/cultivating engineers to reach out if something comes up. (These are systems which, to emphasize my point, come very naturally when one is supporting a remote or hybrid team, but have broad benefit.) I'd add as well that "is someone smiling" is an... extremely lossy and unreliable heuristic for knowing your engineer, to put it more gently than I probably should.

The funny part with all this said: Your core point, that managers are contributing to the RTO push, potentially has some truth to it. (although I'm inclined to disagree that it's THE major component just knowing the discussions and tax implications between legislators/business owners/bigcos in my own city, it's totally a guess on my part) I've just been reading a bunch of posts lately that seem to defend what is, in my eyes, a cop-out for a manager who should be adapting to far more than remote on a day-by-day basis, resulting in concrete costs both for employees in location/commute and for managers in being unable to hire high quality remote engineers, and this being said so overtly pushed me to write this wall-of-text.