The WFH future is destroying bosses' brains (2021)

People who want to WFH? Great! People who want to work in the office? Great! People who want to work in the office, but only if everyone else is there to fulfil their desired workday experience? That’s a problem.

And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.

There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.

In part, this is because it’s too challenging to value and measure each person’s output, especially in orgs with a lot of different roles. It’s just easier to say, “well the market for a designer is X so let’s pay some % of that”.

The problem with that, often, is that folks don’t actually know how much output they might expect from a lot of roles. Is this designer performing? This PM? Unless you have a real breadth of experience in these roles (almost nobody does), you look to other metrics like “are my teams unblocked”, “did this product ship”, “do these slides seem reasonable”, etc. IMO those are also imperfect because a great team, a great project, etc. can sometimes easily mask someone’s meagre contributions.

I think some employees knowingly exploit this knowledge gap. I don’t think it’s common, but it happens. We’ve seen people post their own examples of doing that here on HN.

So, given they often lack experience evaluating output, some managers want to see their high-priced employees at work to even understand what they’re buying. You can call that onerous micromanaging, if you want. A less cynical take could be “managers want other signals to understand how their team members contribute.”

That’s my 2 cents, at least.

It does not matter if the job is done or not, some people (quite a few) are not in this to be efficient, prestige is part of the pay.

I am not saying that WFH is perfect, there are issues, but in most cases it is overall superior than mandatory office work.

Given the global nature of labor, as well as the ability to envision new ways of working the only barrier to these changes are entrenched powers

The only viable and ethical pathway I see going forward is re-organizing globally as cooperatives and union workplaces. I see no other way to rebalance our economic system to prioritize the growth of everybody.

However, this has always been the most existential, largest fight in human history, and that means that individuals as laborers need to actively collectivize

Self-employed knowledge workers generally work both 'remotely' and 'at the office' everywhere, all of the time. Salaried people don't have this kind of attachment to their work so they need to be compelled to. Being present at the office is a good behavioral tool for that, forcefully isolating them from other concerns and temptations. There are many ways to replicate that in a remote working situation, but they mostly require pervasive monitoring of the employee.

As the world is coming out of the trough of disillusionement from WFH, it seems that the trend will be towards new monitoring tools or other ways of proof of work. This is the compromise workers will have to make, because working remotely is a too damn good thing to miss.

Edit: the other option is for everyone to become contractors and charge for results

If the employee is doing all that's expected of them, then the "contract for owning someone for a period of time" (not my words - and relatively creepy) should be fulfilled. It doesn't seem a period of time that is expected but a force of work delivered.

I am willing to be wrong in this assumption, however, given the right argument.

In my view, the biggest crime of a manager is disconnecting my incentives from my work as an IC. If I create more value, it should be a manager's top priority to create the positive feedback loop of incentives. Because why else am I doing more, then? It should seem like common sense, but every manager I've had has not been remotely interested in creating that positive feedback loop. Instead "that salary is too far out of the band for this role and wouldn't be fair to everyone else, and you have to do X,Y,and Z to qualify for this other role, and your last self-review was too honest so I'm going to use it to negotiate against you..." I've even had a manager complain about my salary being too close to his salary, as if there was some requirement for his ego that I make less than him!

Every raise or promotion I've ever had has devolved into some form of "you're giving me this or I'm going to leave", and then 9/10 times they reluctantly fork it over. There is no good faith, only power. And power is getting what you want after calling all the bluffs. Managers are adversarial, and their role is to get you to do as much as possible for as little as possible, while at the same time swallowing their pride when their bluffs are called. I hate that it is like this, because it could be a lot better. But nobody seems to know how to manage.

Don't get me wrong, I get the position that managers are in. The upper management demands they get certain results, and if they don't do it, they get replaced. But it's still a failure of the manager for not communicating effectively how creating positive feedback loops with your top performers will make everybody money. Of course this depends on the upper management to actually pick valuable things to work on...

I started here at the beginning of the pandemic, so my only times at the office have been to pick up equipment, or for large all-hands meetings. The majority of my team does not live in state, and half do not live in the country.

Yet, prior to the acquisition, management had begun to talk about transitioning back to the office. It made no sense to me. We'd been working perfectly fine as an all-remote team for nearly 3 years. I'd heard similar sentiments from other departments.

For example, some software developers in these discussions will say things like "What do you care, if I only work 1 hour a day, so long as I get my work done?!?!?! :emoji: :emoji:"

My answer is not "There should be butts-in-seats for 40 hours a week, because that's what we pay you for!!! :emoji: :emoji:"

My answer is that (for the kind of things I'd like to be working on) the kind of work we do requires creativity, thinking holistically, diligence, effort, perseverance, team focus, etc.

It's not hitting metrics of number of sprint tasks you can plausibly claim you completed satisfactorily. The hiring and compensation should be guided by the idea that people are neither fungible commodities nor simple automatons. We're looking for a large chunk of some of this particular person's best work, while they're also having a non-work life.

If they're outsourcing their work, phoning it in, thrashing their mental swap space with their side gig, taking on a second job that leaves them fatigued, etc.... the team isn't getting much of their best work.

We will be flexible and supportive when life takes more time&energy than usual, as it sometimes will, for anyone. And there's daily ebb&flow for how available a person's best work can be.

But something like a second "full-time" job is harder to accept.

Also hard to accept is someone who treats software engineering like a factory job, thinking all that matters is the metric for how many fungible widgets they assemble over the course of a week. In software, that usually means: piles of half-butted unthinking new tech debt liability grunted out.

Also hard to accept is this article attempting to deconstruct and critique societal structures, with the author's particular perspective and theories... when it's unclear how that informs an organization where people just want to do great work as a team, benefit financially from that, and have lives besides.

Want to end WFH? Don a revolutionary beret, and gift-wrap a bunch strawperson-argument blog posts that help discredit WFH in the minds of some of those you most need to persuade.

Please, for the sake of WFH, don't make ostensibly pro-WFH arguments that go full anti-corporate in ten different ways.

I get that, sometimes being around the wife and kids can be grating 24/7. Thankfully I'm not one of them.

Then there are bosses who simply want the control.

Last contract I had I was required to go into an office 3 days a week. All of my meetings were on chat and video. None were in person. They just wanted adult daycare.

I wish we could just do hybrid in office days Monday through Wednesday and then remote Thursday and Friday. No one does this and it drives me nuts.

The trend over the long term however are fully remote companies based in co working offices. My wife works for a fortune 500 that is pushing towards remote first because that means eliminating expensive office rent.

Companies that have spent a lot of money on flashy offices or outright own their real estate will be more resistant to this simply because of sunk cost. However not having to pay rent or a mortgage speaks to shareholders.

Outside of FAANG and a few select finance companies, ove the long term if companies can avoid rent they'll do so and I don't blame them.

And that dynamics require a senior and a junior employee in the same room every once in a while, so the senior can speed up learning.

I have a Linkedin profile, connections to SWEs that I have previously worked with in my country and who have since moved to the US/EU. Plenty of those connections posted gushing words about our time together in the same engineering team on the recommendations section of my Linkedin profile.

I have a huge Nota bene at the top of my profile telling recruiters that I'm only interested in fully remote positions and that I'm not interested in leaving my country no matter what.

I work for a telecom company here and over the years I have worked with all sorts of stacks/technologies ranging from reverse engineering, embedded C, crypto.. and even more recently rewriting a (small) production tool from C++ to Rust. My salary over the last 10 years has gotten to an impressive ~ $40_000 per annum, and that's before taxes.

It's a safe/stable job and I have family to take care of that I can not leave, so the prospect of landing a fully remote job writing js for a mouth watering TC of $200_000+ makes me salivate.

But every advertized "fully remote" job out there comes with a huge asterisk: "it's fully remote but you have to be in a country where our company has offices, or you'll have to settle for being a contractor getting paid half that and dealing with taxes in your country and time zones that ungodly, or better yet, get paid in stable shitcoins!".

So whenever I see the people with mouth watering TCs rewriting the same crappy code bases in $new_hyped_js_framework on HN/Reddit complain about hybrid work schedules or fully remote but once in 6 months you have to hop on a flight to be at the bi-annual work barbecue... I wonder when a truly full remote positions will be available, because there are a lot of us out there with incredible skills/YoE working for peanuts because we can't leave our disabled loved ones behind to be in the US/EU... or when a non-shitty-LLM will be good enough to turn english sentences into viable business logic. Now, _that_ will make me too appreciate my shitty salary instead of being envious of you guys' TCs.

WFH creates another, national and in some cases international job market alongside every local job market. A lot of local job markets are captive labor pools, because of family ties, low cost of living, and inertia. It is an easier coordination problem for a small number of local employers to set wages for that market than it is to coordinate setting national wages.

WFH makes it harder to have pricing power on local wages. Even if remote employers adjust wages for local cost of living, those wages are still often higher than local employers' wages, or the benefits are better, or the work is more interesting. Many local employers cannot compete for talent in a WFH environment.

By breaking apart a national labor market into many local markets, the problem of managing wages becomes a more tractable problem.

This is a bit silly.

Kind of like saying Netflix imprisons our bodies on the couch for hours on end, and even charges us $20/month!

The reality is we’re getting compensated in exchange (monetarily in the case of a job, and with entertainment for the Netflix example).

For anyone who feels like their soul is captured or imprisoned at work, it’s time to start looking around for a new job or a new career that you’ll enjoy more than whatever you’re currently doing.

Because here in EU it's pretty normal to work full time and also being self-employed and do your own things. Would be crazy, that your employer can dictate what you can do with your free time. I mean, there is automatic non-compete clause by law, but in this case you usually let your employer hire you as self-employed from the start.

> This is a misinterpretation of what capitalism is (for better or for worse, the most efficient extraction of money from labor - which also means getting the most from workers), and what attracts people to management roles (misinterpreting control as an efficient way of extracting value). The reason that there are so many bad managers - middle and otherwise - is that lots of people see management as delegation of work that you take credit for, mostly because that’s how many corporations function on a grand scheme. It’s framed palatably as contributing a small piece to a larger whole, but middle management’s truly noxious existence proves that people absolutely love it. The attraction to these positions isn’t what a true manager is - fostering talent, making the company better, getting more done, winning together - it’s about control and abuse.

Pretty clearly laying out the corporate capitalist office environment as nothing other than a big MLM scam.

Rest of it was really good as well, but I felt like highlighting that bit for the people who only read the title.

Over dial-up. In the 90s. Using CVS.

We know how to run efficient distributed organizations.

This is a problem primarily with executives who came of age in a marginally digitized world unable to navigate the new fully digital reality.

It is the final form of the pointy-haired boomer boss who looks around his physical desk whenever asked to find an icon “on his desktop.”

1. Gig jobs v/s ‘full time’ jobs:

Assessment in favour of the bosses - Companies seem to be okay with people in gig jobs working multiple jobs.

Assessment against the bosses - Most full-time jobs need not be full-time jobs. And thus most full time jobs can be done by people working multiple jobs. And thus most full time jobs can be done from home.

Conclusion: Contract laws need to change to prevent certain types of contracts from being drawn. For example, no contracts should prevent a person seeking additional employment.

2. Culture: Bossess feel that culture development slows with WFH. A hybrid work setup can help prevent this.

Not only is commuting a (potentially huge) waste of time, but it forces me to risk my life on the road.

In the US this commuting time is uncompensated, and I've never heard of anyone being compensated for risking their life by driving/flying to work, and that risk is not even acknowledged.

It's also far less stressful to roll out of bed and "be at work", as it were, than brave the commute, rush hour traffic, the belligerence of other stressed-out commuters, potential road rage, traffic tickets, stressing out even more when you're late or you're stuck in traffic, etc...

All for what? I'd rather spend more time with my friends and family than my coworkers.

No, now that I've tasted WFH life, I'm going to do everything in my power to avoid commuting. Maybe if they doubled or tripled my salary I might consider it, but nothing short of that is remotely worth it (pardon the pun).

So... there's a bit of an economic argument.

Also, I have a team that contains people in Spain and Poland (mostly Poland), my customers are in London, New York and India. So, wtf am I supposed to work?!

I find working from home sad and depressing.

My home is great. I like going outside of it. I like to meet my colleagues in person. I need the seperation. I find video calls dystopian.

I am in a minority, it seems.

So it goes. I moved on from professional software development two years ago now.

edit, my replies are limited: Being in my home is great! But it's designed for leisure, not for fake sugar-free social interactions through a screen. I leave my work at work, and I use my home as a base to explore from, not as some sort of tortoiseshell to retreat into.

My view is that it's perfectly fine for companies to choose how they want to work, and people can choose to work at the companies that match their preference. If there is a significant business advantage to working one way or another, the problem will solve itself.

Personally, I think I work about twice as well or more in the office than at home. But I also want to be able to not go into the office if I'm not feeling up for it whenever I want. So I wouldn't want to work at an office-only company.

One of the big problems in this area is it's really difficult to come up with an alternate metric than "butt-in-seat" time for employees, even though that's a terrible metric for most office jobs.

But I think it's fair to say, hey at our company the deal is we pay you X for Y hours of time per year. That's not the deal I'd want, I'd prefer to be more flexible on timing and be measured in some way on output, but I don't know a generalizable way to do that.

I am an engineer-became-manager, and I have anecdata about it. In the last 3 years I had 4 cases of sudden productivity decline. One case was because of a family problem, three others — because of second job/own project. Overall I had about 50 direct and indirect reports during these years, so it's about 5%.

I also know about at least 3 pals who has two jobs now. One of them actually had three jobs, but quickly burned out and quit one of them.

Before COVID and lockdowns I had only two or three cases of one-time side gigs and zero second jobs cases in 10+ years of being an engineering manager.

This is a real problem for the industry.