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i agree with all of what you said, but i think the main change is just that these companies aren't growing the same way they were pre-pandemic. everything feels resource constrained in a way it didn't in the mid-2010s and this makes everything inherently political and negative

edit: to give an example, you probably don't think at all about an exec's value when you see him once a quarter in an all-hands explaining the great growth and complimenting teams, your paycheck is high and growing, and your team has happy hours, lavish team all hands, and tons of autonomy. when the same exec is announcing layoffs, no growth, and reduced benefits, you start to look at the deal a little differently

what is that warren buffet about "when the tide goes out, something something naked"?

searches ...

One of Warren Buffett’s most famous quotes is: “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.”

from

https://fortune.com/2022/10/03/warren-buffett-famous-quotes-...

You’re probably right in general. But I was lucky enough to have some great middle managers during COVID who definitely had their fingers on the pulse of what was going on, clearly communicated goals and strategy, actually understood how the sausage got made. I had some poor managers/middle managers too, but they tended to get managed out and their damage was minimized by communication routing around them.

Maybe I’m just personally unlucky to have had some especially weak ones that didn’t get managed out and that happened to coincide with hybrid work.

> skip managers/directors who I’m almost certain are barely working and just milking out huge salaries while hiding behind their remote status

Sounds like you're describing Amazon, at least it's very clear this was the case when I worked there, and it contrasted with several happy healthy years engineering in a core group at Apple, which was exactly the opposite description, partly because of keeping hierarchies very shallow, so everyone was involved in real work, not posing as valuable.

A few years after quitting to work on cancer research at a startup which soon failed, i found Amazon's 13 or whatever levels to be a complete joke, and didn't need to put up with the corrupt bureaucracy, so left.

The levelling system is a joke everywhere. HR needs to be totally annihilated

I agree, something about working hybrid just feels like “why are we doing this?”

It’s like an awkward inbetween

I also don’t get why companies seem unphased about paying for a giant office that is empty the majority of the week

Hybrid doesn't make sense. It's just "working in an office with some days at home" which was something I remember doing in the mid 1990s. Basically as soon as the Internet and laptops existed, it was done.

It seems more like a frog boiling exercise on the way to full in-office (which imho will never return).

For some people it's an intentional exercise into full home office.

Hybrid can make sense _if_ there are scheduled in person activities on the in office days. If you're coming in to the office just to work by yourself then it should have just been a work from home day.

This is what drives me nuts. I don't mind coming to work if we are doing in person meetings or something. I like seeing my coworkers. If I am gonna be alone in an office the whole time might as well be at home where my already purchased food is.

I would suggest a shift in language.

I don't mind coming to work either. If it's in my home. I do mind coming to work if it's in the office ;)

Same. Most of the time when I'm in the office it's 50% or less empty, anyway.

And most of the people there aren't on my team / projects, so it's pointless. Schlep half-way across the city to sit in an empty office and have Teams calls with the same folks two timezones away... like, why leave home?

Not to peek behind the curtain, but it's pretty difficult to hold down 2 jobs when you need to physically be in the office 2 days a week. Which, if my anecdotal evidence in my circle is to be believed, that was definitely happening during the pandemic.

Companies need to give up on this whole "we own your time" thing. Work product should be all that matters. If an employee has two or three jobs, but is able to get their work done with the quality expected of them, that's all that should matter.

(Certainly there are exceptions; working for two competitors at the same time is not ok for hopefully obvious reasons.)

Get serious unless the employee is open about what is going on none of that is ok. And if they are open they won’t be employees by multi employers for long.

Just be careful if your contract says you're working exclusively or 40 hours. Otherwise, agreed.

I have seen companies who have mandated "You _will_ be on video when you're on Zoom calls", which I think is much to the same end, in varying ways (are you working from another office, are you multitasking meetings, etc).

I wonder if there would be a massive boost in productivity if everybody was doing mandatory pair programming.

My company does week in-office, then week remote. Quite a bit of flexibility during the in-office weeks too if you have a doctor appt or whatever. I personally really like it. People get stuff done in-office, and then during the remote weeks we bust stuff out that doesn't need to be face-to-face.

We are not at all a tech company.

I'm hybrid too, and while I personally like it overall [1], it doesn't help with one of the main sticking points regarding remote work vs in-office: Needing to live within commuting distance of an office. It's expensive, it limits people with kids to certain school districts etc. — In some ways it's the worst of both worlds for some people.

[1] I however, really, really dislike going into the office only to have a bunch of zoom meetings anyway.

I will second this, at my previous role, we had one day a week in the office. Which, unsurprisingly meant that my team would hoof it to the office, and sit around in dead silence at our computers, or sit through zoom meetings with the rest of the teams who were either in different offices or had a "permanent remote status" as management...

As you can imagine, being forced into an hour+ commute to sit in a zoom call with management who weren't even there was the opposite of motivating

That sounds great. I think I’d love something like that if, during in-office week, it was more than just half my immediate team that showed up.

I think one reason this isn’t more popular is that it’s harder for parents to plan around. Most of the parents I work with want the same in-office schedule every week - easier to plan around other weekly things like daycare and after school activities that way.

> I feel like I never know how to contact someone and can never expect a quick reply

MS Teams and similar products have a color-coding scheme (green - active, yellow - inactive, probably afk, red - busy, white - offline) that solves that quite effectively (maybe even too much). Have you tried it, and if so, in what sense did you find it lacking? Also, if instant gratification is what you're craving, then I'm not sure fully on-site has you covered either - people spend much more time away from their desks than at home (in meetings and other places). I'm also not sure if it's the best measure of what 'works', because every instant response for you is a possible distraction from their flow state for someone else.

Exactly. It is basically never okay to expect a quick reply, whether you are working remotely or in office. Doing that just fragments that person's attention and makes them get out of flow.

A long time ago when everyone was in office, a cultural norm was that if someone was wearing headphones, regardless of whether they were listening to anything, they do not welcome interruptions. That cultural norm was gradually eroded during the pandemic.

I go into the office twice a week to sit on Zoom calls with coworkers around the country. I'm the only one on my team that has to do so because of where I live.

Time to invest in a green screen.

I've all but given up on finding anything in Canada even after opening up the possibility of on-site or hybrid. Was hoping it would allow me to tap into a market that not everyone was applying for, but surprisingly it's still a dead-end. I don't think it's an unreasonable ask if you're not fresh out of school to have a somewhat dignified space to get your work done in. In-house lawyers get a private space, oftentimes accountants, sales people, but people who write code are relegated to a big open space or a cube of soul-crushing greyness.

I think hybrid can work too, but it requires proactive transparency. In my workplace, a tech scale-up, we switched to hybrid after the pandemic and IMO it's working like a charm.

Everybody puts in their calendar each day whether they are going to work remotely or in the office. They also put their working hours or availability, they put when they are going to be off etc. Everybody I interact with shows up to meetings, some later than others, but that's no different than when we were onsite. Work is getting done faster than when we were fully onsite, although slower than during the pandemic.

The office is fully prepared for this working arrangement, with many "booths" for having calls, plenty of meeting rooms, all with great videoconferencing equipment, a meeting room booking system integrated with the calendar that "just works". Everybody is available on Slack while working, although IMO Slack is a bit overused and abused.

Now everyone works where they are more comfortable. Many have moved to smaller cities, others to the countryside. There are people that always go to the office, others that never go. There are teams that agree on certain days to go to the office, but AFAIK is not mandated by their managers, they just like to work and hang out together.

All in all, a great working experience, while staying productive. In fact, the workforce has increased about 20% since just before the pandemic, but the company has more than doubled in revenue, and volume of business and it doesn't feel chaotic at all. So I'd say that's the proof that hybrid is working for us.

I personally don't think it's related to hybrid (or remote or whatever) work. It's more that the pandemic made it obvious that there are so many jobs and functions in corporations that are simply not needed and don't add any value.

Those people already did not really contribute before, it just wasn't so visible maybe.

And I think this is highly demotivating for the people who do actually contribute.

It's pretty simple.

If there is an office, people in the office talk to those in the office and forget there are other people around. You get a similar effect with flexitime, but it is not as pronounced.

For remote to work, everybody has to be hamstrung with the same lack of colocation. Only then do the alternative management techniques necessary to make remote function get the time and attention they require.

My team of 5 synchronized our hybrid schedules (same two days in the office together). We love the mix of in-person collaboration days and remote "leave me alone so I can accomplish something" days. We're a small startup in the Midwest, so I have no idea how it would scale to FAANG-level problems, but it's the best of both worlds for us.

It wouldn't work where I'm working because we have less seats assigned to us in the building than there are people in the team...

Hybrid companies need the full remote AND on-site apparatus at the same time. They can't be half remote or people will be left off of office discussions all the time and they have to maintain expensive real estate.

Imagine having to wait for the office day in a hybrid company to discuss something important. Nobody does that.

It’s easiest to schedule meetings on remote days, since they are not constrained by conference rooms or commute blocks.

> I believe that hybrid work is not going well. Fully remote teams are good, fully onsite teams are good

I don't work here any more but I wrote this a few years ago about how there's a 'tipping point' with remote work:

https://business.dutchie.com/post/dutchies-remote-work-cultu...

tl;dr if you have 1 remote person and 9 people in the office, that remote person is just someone to hand work to but not really "part of the team". If everyone has to use the 'remote tools' rather than go chat over lunch, then remote is going to work pretty well in a lot of situations.

I agree on principal, but believe it is more nuanced and hybrid can work if you implement it uniformly across the company. For example, I’ve seen places where everyone can WFH Tue & Thu or Mon, Wed, Fri where hybrid have a quite smooth collaboration culture. But if it is “random”, every day ends up being WFH - that’s in effect just the same as fully remote, and you need to act accordingly. And if you work in a global company with globally distributed teams, the company already is de facto fully remote, and the picture becomes even more nuanced.

Hybrid is definitely the worst of both worlds. I worked there from the early days so may be biased, but I think Sid (GitLab CEO) really gets it and summed it up well here: https://www.wired.com/story/hybrid-remote-work-offers-the-wo...

I'm working at a company where hybrid is working fine. Everyone treats the situation as full remote, but some people are just at the office. There will be a con call invite for every single meeting.

Do you mark a difference between hybrid where not everyone goes in on the same days and hybrid where everyone goes in on the same days and stays away on the same days?

Yeah. My company is in principle set 2, in practice set 1. But even so, I’m on a team where almost half of us are fully remote or working out of other offices and so don’t go in on our “dedicated in office days”. I stopped going in on those days too because it felt pointless.

I think part of what’s so insanely demotivating about all this is how hard it makes leadership/management. Or rather, how it allows poor leadership/management to get away with doing poorly and how much worse the impact of poor management becomes in this setting. Because right now, even though I’m a TL I have absolutely no idea what the people controlling the purse strings want or care about, or what their goals are. I just wait for things to filter down through the org chart to me. There is no osmosis of knowledge or thought or strategy, and I feel like lazy/inattentive/unknowledgable management kicks up politics and siloing to the next level - when we were fully remote this didn’t seem to happen as much.

> Yeah. My company is in principle set 2, in practice set 1. But even so, I’m on a team where almost half of us are fully remote or working out of other offices and so don’t go in on our “dedicated in office days”. I stopped going in on those days too because it felt pointless.

Same. Essentially an open secret that most folks aren't going in at all, or if so, 1 of 2 days.