Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.
These are all things you should do as the team lead or manager whether you are in person or remote.
And it's not just the dev manager, but generally all team members get this information passively when co-located. It's much easier to read the room when people are in the same place, and you see how they interact. When remote, devs often have no idea about other devs, unless they again chase the information (which usually doesn't happen).
What you are describing, following them around to observe what they are doing, sounds a lot more like "chasing them" than asking a couple of follow-up questions in the standup.
Which is how it should be. Life is a lot more than living for your employer.
Nevertheless, it proves that RTO is not bullshit, contradicting the title of the article.
If you like working in office, that's cool, I liked to do it when I was younger, but own the fact that it is a preference and not a superior position.
Most seemingly useless bullshit team bonding activities will benefit the company long term. [This is especially true for slow-moving large companies, e.g. FANG, where very few lines of actual code is written by each employee and most of the "work" is in fact is to ensure business continuity, replicating institutional knowledge and context in employees' heads, and of the nature you describe.]
I agree there are different preferences, but it's not about employee's preference for the most part, but employer's — and the case I am making is it is not at all surprising or stupid that the employers are demanding RTO by default.
My direct peer whom I work with closely every day takes hours to respond when in the office, while at home it takes him a few minutes at most. PRs take 10x as long to get done when he's at the office (even on the rare occasion I'm in the office, it actually takes longer cause all he wants to do is just chat), the PRs themselves are of a lower quality and less useful etc...
> Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.
I mean, good? I prioritize a lot of things, arguably MOST things over work. If I had the option to do nothing yet still earn money you bet I'd do it, but since we don't live in a post-scarcity Utopia I will in the meantime give minimal effort and not let my job dictate how I live my life.
I believe that is the main thing that is so disturbing to these employers that lament remote work, not that productivity is affected.
At least in Software Engineering, tasks are rarely that clear-cut and specific. Yes, as a remote employee you will have enough data to justify "I did what was expected of me," and the employer have no specific performance concerns, but at the same time, I posit that you would have likely done more stuff that was not particularly written handed down to you had you been in the office.
> they might not respond to that urgent request immediately
It is not just your boss that you'd respond to immediately if you were in office. It is also the random questions, code review requests, etc. from everyone else that would be prioritized and the other party would get unblocked much more quickly if done synchronously, which would lead to more work done across the team.
100% true story.
You make an interesting point. I think in the office, what you wrote is the unwritten rule and people understand it automatically. At home it needs to be explicitly written down and it appears the employer is particularly abusive if they say you are expected to sit down at your VC and leave video on. Just demanding RTO is much easier and better PR for the HR.
Agreed on your last paragraph, no one wants to say that, and just making everyone RTO seems to be the less offensive way to accomplish the goal: control of an employee's time. The alternative that they will go with next is probably employee spyware, in fact I imagine it's already in use at many companies.
From “The Joel Test”:
> Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers—especially interruptions by coworkers—all knock you out of the zone. If a coworker asks you a question, causing a 1 minute interruption, but this knocks you out of the zone badly enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble.
That’s how I know it’s BS on both sides. No one has ever admitted they exploit it - but we all know it happens.
Besides, it is absolutely not clear that home workers "waste" more time than office workers. The number one reason people who prefer the office cite as a reason for preferring the office is that it surrounds them with other people. That is, working in an office surrounds you with distractions and occasions to "waste" one's time.