Bosses are using RTO mandates as a way to blame employees as a scapegoat
fortune.com
fortune.com
Not a personal sleight against you, just there are many features of the system around you that should at least cast doubt on your interpretation.
This is in general a good argument against WFH but one that managers are (for obvious reasons) reluctant to make: they’re just shitty managers and WFH makes it extra hard to get by with shitty management.
I usually like to think of it as winning at a fucked up system. But then, that might be pretty illustrative of the title and article here.
In any case, it’s good to be relatively good, so I’m really happy for your success so far! It’s not an easy job at all.
It's not worth me driving an hour and a half to the office (and her flying from many states away) just so we can discuss these things in person. And the product is coming along very well. We just had a successful demo that impressed a lot of people and secured another year of funding.
And this is the third major product I've worked on entirely remote, all have done very well. That's not including the video games I developed along with artists that I never met in person that also did well back in the day, where we only communicated with text via AOL Instant Messenger and sending files to each other via email.
Leadership and managers that don't take advantage of this and instead "listen to their gut" are gambling.
This was one of my biggest lessons transitioning to management. My biggest mistakes have all been cases where a feedback loop from engineering to PM/UX/leadership was missing and I failed to set one up. Biggest successes have been projects where I set that feedback loop up early and got out of the way, so that engineering and UX had a high-bandwidth communication pathway to negotiate issues and make product compromises based on real constraints.
Unfortunately it feels like I'm swimming upstream when it comes to actual org policies here, which have forcibly reclassified me from a TLM to an Engineering Manager (so my official job duties now include assigning work, but not necessarily understanding the work I'm assigning), given me a reporting load that's too big to understand the details of each project I'm managing, made my report's performance reviews independent of how well they work with others and instead fully dependent on how much they please me, made my performance reviews largely independent of how well I support my team but very dependent on how well I please my superiors, and so on. Somebody in upper management wants people to be responsible for things and yet doesn't seem to know or care much about how to actually get results in a knowledge-based org.
Your job is to understand the domain. Your job is to talk with users and technical support staff and product managers and read about the domain and care about what your users care about.
From there, your job is to explain what you have gathered, connect it to the technical challenges, and explain this to the ICs and work with them to make sure they understand what the right thing is.
You can do all of this on zoom calls and sending links for them to read and reinforcing this in every 1:1. Ask them questions about what they understand about the product and why it matters.
And if your reporting load is too high to dive in deep, you need to delegate many of those tasks. Explain why you are delegating them - writing a status is not the most fun task for an IC but you can use that to distill what your managers need to support the team.
I can do this over zoom calls & docs & links - my team is half remote, and they continue to be productive. But it's a lot less efficient. When everybody's at the office, ICs talk amongst themselves, if they're missing context on product goals or an important change to the codebase they'll hear it from their coworkers, if management is making a bone-headed decision they'll talk amongst themselves and eventually it'll generate enough buzz that it'll get reversed. The model of "manager figures out what to do and then tells remote employees" lacks this resilience, and these feedback points. Employees are usually pretty well incentivized to not tell their manager directly when the manager is screwing up (although I actually have a couple directs that are good at this, and I listen closely to it), and when touch-points all go through the manager and people see their job as to execute on what the manager decides, that information that "hey, this plan doesn't make any sense" doesn't really have a good way to bubble up.
BUT. And I say this with all respect, since I broadly find a lot of value in your comments: I strongly disagree to your assertion that remote "is less efficient."
My theory to what is happening is that there are existing methodologies people are used to working in, including 'hacks' to build consensus that were developed in an in-person environment. (Namely, pulling a bunch of people into a room and arguing it out.) My perspective is that remote work makes a bunch of things that are just as critical in-person (shared documentation, good communication channels, trust and rapport, etc etc) non-optional, and your previous hacks far less effective. But I don't see this as a bad thing. If anything, it's like a strongly typed language: It forces you into a more effective pathway. (For instance, imagine how remote folks or even folks-just-not-around-at-the-moment felt in not being able to participate evenly in the "in-person-bash-it-out" sessions or hallway chats without a strong culture of proliferating knowledge and documentation?)
While you may reasonably say "Ok, that's fine, people built up methodologies, why flip it on its head and disrupt a status quo that works" to which I'd emphasize the "we were relying on suboptimal ways to build consensus, and it was a local maxima." I would also propose that I believe a good manager _HAS_ to change their methodologies in some ways more disruptively than just the local/remote shift when dealing with certain styles of employee, (their own) manager, and org+busines structure/process/incentives, and as such, this should just be part and parcel with the constant process of adapting to refine your own methods and style.
(As an aside, I was tempted to make this comment on your upstream comment[0] talking about "maybe I'm not actually succeeding, it feels like winning at a fucked up system" since I definitely feel you there. I got into management in large part out of a "I'm frustrated by how management is often done and how it ends up percolating down to ICs, and I want to put my money where my mouth is that there's a better approach", and while I definitely feel like I've succeeded in some respects, and continue to get "rewarded" as you say, I'm intimately aware that I'm likely still screwing things up/finding the optimal way to balance pathological incentives, and still have a ton to learn. In short, I'd not be surprised if both of us are "doing fine but still have blind spots," so please take my above just as one person's opinions/"attempt to draw the elephant" :) )
I'll let some manager explain why you're misrepresenting the responsibilities of managers, but as an IC I can tell you I would be offended if any manager I worked with acted like it was THEIR Job to understand what is the right thing is, then just tell me what to do as part of that.
And it pisses me off when other IC's I work with don't seek or desire agency.
By the way just knowing WHAT to do is only part of the task - HOW to do it is another one that also requires collaboration between technical IC's - whiteboarding, pair programming, etc.
The job of the line manager is to take a giant amount of information and develop a mental map in which he can present the context to the team. It isn't that an IC cannot do this (though I see this as more rare than I would like!) but rather if an IC did this, they would be in 20 hours of meetings.
"The right thing," in this case, is not breaking down the tasks into mindless coffee to code, but rather "Four of our customers are really frustrated by the lack of this feature, so our PM has prioritized it. It's in an area we've identified as having some technical debt. Design has a proposed idea of how we could solve it. Talking with support, two of these customers are enterprise and want more ability to customize to their processes, and two are mid-market and would rather it was easy to use. This is going to touch an area you all have identified as having technical debt, so it'd be great if we could use some of that time to make progress in cleaning it up. We'd ideally like to constrain this to three months of work. Now, team, how much is possible given those constraints? What scope do we need to cut if it all won't fit?"
That cliffs notes can be as a result of 20 hours of meetings and research. Now, it's the team's job to take that brief and work toward the art of the possible and help the team if they also need to talk with the stakeholders to gather more information. However, somebody needs to do that work. That person needs to have a technical background at the senior level, a high tolerance for meetings, the ability to work across the organization and maintain relationships, an understanding of business as a craft, and an understanding of the domain.
Can a senior engineer do all that? Sure! However, it is hard to do all of that and have as much time to actually code. And most individual contributors start losing joy in the job if that becomes a significant portion of the job. (That, or they end up as managers.)
In truth, we could completely divorce this role from people management. The authority is the least interesting part of the job, and is a relatively small portion of it. But even if you completely went to a communist, non-hierarchical system, you would still need someone to work in this role.
Anyway, I think we are seeing a rethinking of what management is - and that will have implications for elite / aristocracy as well. There will be a fight.
My two cents are that the “workers” for many industries are moving from human beings to CPUs. There are amazing photos of rooms of “accountants” simply adding numbers on adding machines which are passed up the line till the corporation gets a final number. Each of those got replaced with whatever IBM made in 1956 (besides Fortran). The manager of that room of humans suddenly stopped worrying about Bob’s attitude and had to worry about silicon.
Something less obvious and photogenic has been happening for years.
Coders in short are the new managers (supervisors)
But we have three other jobs of “management”
- technical lead : understands the details of his area deeply and can make trade offs and build a better engineered product (ie door plugs that don’t fall out)
Product management- honestly I remain dubious about this as a category - with good user communication a tech lead can do most of this, until we shade into strongly fashion / FMCG
- organisational manager - someone looking at the needs of the org - how will this affect the nebulous idea of the company. This is the point at which politics takes over - this level of management is primarily running budgets 100x their own salary and so can be seen more as financier or VC than part of the company. However this is how for example the Post Office justifies jailing it’s own employees
I am wandering off the point a bit - paint fumes I suspect, but there is one final point to make - management differs above from working in the company - on day to day operations - and working on changing the company - new projects and initiatives. Theoretically the cut off is supervisory (ie. Coders are new managers)
But that’s never true - most innovation bubbles up and is then selected in a competition by various hierarchies
I think the point I am making is that we do not need superman as manager - we need properly aligned systems and incentives, which I suspect only happens in open daylight
But I have a blog I'm half in the middle of that dives deeper here. The manager is less "superman" and more a collection of part time jobs, one of which is to be contextual hubs for the organization. Within most IT organizations, it is their job to gather information from across and outside the organization. That isn't as much a "superhuman" job as much as a role that takes a job.
The real problem is that we tied "people management" to this job. I don't think that's a necessary feature but rather a historical coincidence.
I think you are pointing at a disaggregation of the manager role - and I agree My take on the various roles is
- (Model, Monitor, Mentor)
- resource allocation
- hierarchical politics (ensuring the continued existence of the hierarchy and shifting currents within that hierarchy for rights to resource allocation. Certainly not significant rethinking of hierarchy)
The first two are replaceable by software, resource allocation and hire by politics are replaceable by democracy.
The combination of software and democracy in our organisations threatens everything
Most places are bad.
Is it this way because they have "manager" on the task name?
We have biweekly meetings where we arrange our goals and strategies, and share what we've been working on. We call each other constantly when we're struggling with a problem, and I have 1 on 1 meetings with everyone at a frequency of their choosing to talk out potential problems, bitch about engineering challenges, or just shoot the shit for a little bit. This is possible to be done and the fact that it's kind of vaguely easier to do it in an office, IMO, is a shitty trade-off to offer for all the costs, both financial and personal, of RTO.
When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason.
If this was already the case at your company before the WFH, then yes, WFH didn't change anything, or even maybe let your emloyees work on the wrong thing even faster.
The other thing people don't appreciate is that it's significantly harder to find good managers than good individual contributers. I believe that management is about 300% more efficient in an in-person environment. As in, I can effectively make sure that 3x the number of people are working on the correct things in an in-office environment.
I find it nearly impossible to find people with the ability to do this correctly right now, let alone somehow needing to find 3x this number.
Even if people worked at half speed at the office (which I don't really believe), that is still worthwhile.
It doesn't match my experience though. The person I hired during WFH consistently works on the right things and has great judgment, while the other team members who predate it are either neutral or struggling in the same way they did before the pandemic.
Why do you believe seeing a person live makes it easier for you to instruct them on what is worth spending time on? What's your evidence?
(There is of course a lot of nuance in my specific situation but would love to hear general thoughts on what makes a manager good.)
Training materials and “what good looks like” references for self guided study
Mentoring from yourself or good performance seniors on team
Specific goals and projects to aid in development
But emphatically the solution is not to force the rest of the team back to office as some sort of punitive measure.
But I was never a good manager, and I don't know how to do better.
I've seen two strategies that seemed to work for teams. A) foster a healthy culture of people who want to do a good job and let their interactions increase the standards. B) Have a ton of process.
Option A flows top down and requires the people to interact. In-person friendly nudges to bring the new kid up to speed are effective and not taken as criticism. Nudging over email or chat, it's hard to convey that we're all on the same team, and I think it leads to resentment.
Option B is unpleasant and achieves maybe 10% efficiency, but progress keeps moving. People tend not to squabble because nobody cares enough to put the energy into it. I hated these environments.
There really is a difference between communicating in person vs online. For instance, you'll probably lock your heals in response to what I wrote in this post, whereas in-person we'd probably exchange some smiles and body language and we'd both know it's just a friendly conversation. :-)
I guess I’m trying to say that a lot of managers are afraid to give the negative feedback they hold privately and even lament to their peers about.
So some underperformers have no idea they are on thin ice until it is far too late. By being nice this type of management isn’t actually helping the person grow.
Sometimes a blunt conversation works wonders for that one person on the team that everyone knows is a problem child. Sometimes the conversation uncovers the person is unhappy due to something outside work and needs a little time/space. Sometimes it turns out the person doesn’t like their current role and you can help carve out a better fit for them.
Waiting for the annual review process to mark someone down or to start a PIP once forced to do so doesn’t help them.
Anyway I doubt I was a good manager either and am glad to be a high paid IC instead.
If someone wasn't working out, I tended to sideline them and try to move them to some other group. It was certainly better for me, and honestly I think it was better for (most of) those people too. I was happy to see several of them find a better fit away from me.
Being retired now, it's easy to think back on all the mistakes I made. I much prefer working on solo projects for fun.
Just like if there’s something at a company I work for is unacceptable, first I see if it can be changed, and if not find another job.
It’s like finding someone who’s lost, but doesn’t know it. Letting them continue on unaided is callous. Calling them an idiot for getting lost is unhelpful. Giving them a map and checking in with them is the decent thing to do.
I've found a lot of managers don't really give feedback in a way that is clear & actionable. Some assume that bad performers are either 1) aware they are performing badly or 2) just unable to perform any differently. So either 1) resentment at the bad performer for "gaming the system" or 2) "soft bigotry of low expectations" that the idiot can't help themselves. A lot of these managers put aside their low performers as a lost cause and spend all their time trying to make their A player perform A+. The ROI of making an D player into even a C+/B- is much higher!!
I have never had to sideline anyone. Either they perform, respond to constructive feedback, or they’re gone. I don’t have the time or mental energy to do anything else.
If you are not giving timely candid feedback as to the what/why/when/how to that team member as to their performance issues, you are doing them a disservice. The sooner they have an opportunity to course correct, give their feedback to you, or ask for a role change.. the better. Coasting along without agency for a year or two until PIP season is not fair to them.
With Remote, many things have to be put in writing, organized, and referenced back to.
Way less room for misinterpretation than the occasional drive-by chat.
What drives (drove) most of it is that as a product matures and the user base grows, polishing smaller features and chasing 0.1% wins can meaningfully drive metrics to a point that having a team focus just on a single user flow is a net positive. Enabling this often means a more modular codebase and system architecture so people aren't stepping on each other's toes. There are also exploratory features that are unlikely to pan out, but at the scale of 500M users, if they do, it's huge. A lot of this work might be wrong, but some of it isn't, and you won't know what's what until you try.
At 500M users, you also need more spam detection, account protection, content moderation, etc.
You can run status quo Twitter with fewer engineers, but don't expect incremental growth, and expect more issues like the recent SEC mishap.
Twitter doesnt seem to be doing the latter.
I'm going to be a bit blunt but most of management in reality is useless, if not actively harming people under them. 300% of 0 in those cases still remains 0.
Having ICs in the office doesn’t suddenly cause managers, product owners, or business people to figure out what the true direction is. And ICs typically only work on what’s assigned to them.
Our experience with software development team was WFH actually helped with the larger picture. It allowed people to be more strategic and intentional about decisions, instead of trying to do that in the daily tilt-a-whirl that is the office.
I don't think I would ever want to do a full WFH/remote arrangement, rather one that allows for flexibility without judgement and mistrust.
What I would add as someone who has been managing collaborative science teams embedded in large companies remotely, pre- and post-pandemic, is that some forms of alignment translate to the remote setting, but other forms of alignment are more challenged. I think the boundary is probably: if the teams were aligned pre-remote, you can sustain the alignment, even with new collaborative initiatives, but gaining new alignment with new teams is way more challenging.
Which is fine when what you are doing is Business as Usual, but falls apart when there are crises or disruptions that require net new collaborative relationships.
And yeah completely agree on working on the right things. Programmers (me included) pine for “focus time”, but we need a lot of talking to know if we’re overengineering or underengineering. I’ve watched a lot of people get their way with too much focus time and implement the wrong things, wasting weeks or months at a time.
But... that's kinda ok? A company might be upset at any negative effects that might have, but I personally think it's a completely acceptable (fantastic, even) trade off for the ability to eliminate a commute, work in comfort, and have a more flexible schedule.
Obviously not all companies are going to do remote onboarding well. Just as many companies don't do a great job of in-person onboarding either. But that doesn't mean throw up your hands, give up, and make people go back to the office. It means... do better.
I do think remote onboarding is especially hard for people starting their first job in the industry. But I'm not convinced these problems don't have solutions. Maybe not perfect solutions, but good-enough solutions.
I keep hearing this while at the same time seeing very little evidence for this.
Most 'water cooler social stuff' is absolutely pointless small talk at best that you have to often engage in to remain polite. I'd rather not if I could avoid it except for certain circumstances with people I am already 'friends' with.
Guess what I do with those coworkers I am friends with? we have a separate channel/group from official channels where we do that already. Nothing's missing there.
It's easier to just go "hey want to grab lunch?" in office, I'll grant you that, but it by no means is an 'absolute stop' for new hires from socializing with coworkers.
Sure, communication isn't as fluid, and you lose some context cues, but we're not talking about things that need intense physical interaction.
I did enjoy going into the office from time to time for group meetings (I lived close enough to the office for that to be easy to do), but never felt like the meeting was significantly more productive in-person.
It's been my experience, that everyone (from the lowliest IC to the CEO) fails to understand the cost of team synchronization. That's a [set of] topic[s] that would fill an entire bookshelf, and anyone that gets it right, could live in opulence.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be planned for, by managers and architects.
Architects need to design systems that allow ICs to have more personal agency, while encouraging synchronization (an approach that I use, is blackbox implementations, and whitebox APIs). The more an IC can work on their own, the better, but we still need that transparency.
Managers need to know when it's OK to send work to remote agents, and when work is required in-office. They need to know their teams well enough to be able to choose wisely. Human nature is a big deal. Until the entire workforce is AI, you'll always have those pesky humans in the mix, with their annoying emotions and personal lives.
Also, and this is almost never talked about, is that different people work differently. Some folks are almost superhuman, when left alone, while others just screw the pooch.
They may both be incredible employees, but they need to be handled differently.
Unfortunately, modern HR practice, is to treat every employee exactly the same as every other one (and there are actually valid reasons for this).
TL;DR, it's not simple, there's no "one policy to rule them all," and good managers are hard to find.
Where are we seeing this? I'm a manager at a mostly WFH company and we don't fall short on this.
Big thing is this was never an office based company, WFH is in the DNA from the co-founders and while we regroup occasionally, remoteness has not affected our ability to grow and build meaningful things. One could argue that we might do better if we were an office based company but as far as I know there's no data out there showing that this would be the case.
IMO companies should embrace what they truly are and not force it.
Meeting from time to time is great, but the RTO push has been problematic across multiple dimensions.
No need for this antagonism, regardless of whether it's true.
Anyway, yes, I think your theory is based on something true on average about RTO vs WFH. However, improving collaboration under WFH is simply an easier problem than improving focus/efficiency/work-life-balance/happiness/etc under RTO, for most people.
Somewhat similar to retail stores blaming theft for store closures when it's their fundamentals [1]. Like a magician, misdirection.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602429 (Retailers Lobby: “We Lied About Organized Theft”)
I feel like the anti theft is performance art to scare voters into voting for tax dollars to replace Walgreens store security.
One is to let people walk into the distribution centers and touch everything, hopefully making them more emotionally attached to the product and thus pay a higher price. This carries the risk of people walking out with the merchandise without paying, but it's offset by the improved convenience. ("Is this the right size? Let me just take it over to that closet and see. Yeah it is, here is my credit card, can I wear this out?")
The other strategy is to publish a list of what's in your distribution center, and then have an employee of the store bring it to your house. Since the general public can't get into the distribution center, the risk that they walk off without paying is lower.
(But not zero. Employees steal. Customers steal by claiming they never received what they order.
To me, that's the same thing as smashing the glass of a retailer and walking out with their stuff. But, it doesn't make for an emotional photograph, so people don't treat it that way. They're wrong, though. Stealing $1000 worth of stuff through deception is the same as stealing $1000 worth of stuff by force.)
Strategy two is doing very well these days. But it's always done well. Remember when you could order a house kit from Sears and they would put it on the next train to your town? Same thing as Amazon. It was popular then and it's popular now.
Walgreens has stolen MUCH more from its employees than shoplifters have
I see so much of it. Serious problems that need creative solutions instead being hit with antics to show everyone is “working hard” or doing their best. Gratitude channels that were created with the intention of genuinely celebrating “wins” turning into political schemes abused by some to portray how much they’re “winning”. Its all very gross and seems like a huge distraction while the real issues remain unaddressed.
There is an early-seasons Simpsons clip for every "new phenomenon" that people notice today.
At my company with thousands of employees, informal polls (where every employee can participate anonymously) show that people who are in favor/against of RTO is 1:4. At least that's a number I can quote.
The results came out very comparable to yours, 78% against RTO but the company is still enforcing it.
This is like voting for a tax increase on other people.
well yes, that's what managers do - make life miserable for others lol. (mostly /s but not really)
For me personally, being able to move somewhere with a lower cost of living without having a lengthy commute is a huge benefit. Especially in the face of ongoing layoffs.
If people (or a team) wants to be in office 2-3 days a week, fine, good for them. If you don't, _you should_ be allowed that choice.
My impression from working at Google was that mentorship was one of the most important software engineering job responsibilities. There were many summers there where I had interns and my full-time job was answering their questions, and that seemed to be what was expected. (They made some neat stuff that I would have prioritized for myself to do!) Big Tech's goal is to get huge, so they can pursue any opportunity that comes up. It isn't necessarily for Engineer #23847 on Team #8734 to type in as much code as possible.
(Whether or not this strategy is a good idea is up for debate, several rounds of layoffs later.)
Force RTO has also been devastating for caregivers (which are, usually, non-white & immigrants due to larger family sizes and less-established parents).
I know some people who like working in the office, and some whose home arrangements make WFH hard, and that is fine. However, the majority of my colleagues I have spoken to have the opposite view and prefer WFH. I haven't found anyone who withholds their view.
Just anecdata of course, like yourself, but I haven't seen substantial RTO support, even if some people prefer it.
The problem with the RTO boosters is they aren't happy enough to just RTO themselves. RTO boosters generally start demanding OTHER people return to the office with them. So the problem is RTO boosters demand other people conform to their preference because "the office is dead without my team there" or similar statements.
Hybrid/WFH boosters don't care what OTHER people do. You wanna work from the office, go for it man, I literally could not care less. Work from the moon, your beach house, your moms house, Holiday Inn, Starbucks, or the office.. whatever.
Even if your immediate teammates may not be in the same physical space as you, hopefully you're "extended team" is. And I'd argue that even if no one from your team or department shares your physical space, there's still absolute value in returning to office because it promotes a sense of community and networking.
I'm pointing out that the RTO boosters are making a much larger ask of their teammates.
In the age of open floor plans, no cubes, no offices.. many of us find it near impossible to do "deep work" in the office. Sitting on an open floorplan with noise cancelling headphones on for 8 hours per day is not a life I want to go back to living.
Some of this may be fixed with process changes and better tooling; but that does not exist today for the company I work for.
I signed a contract that said I would come to the office when I took my offer, and honestly, if WFH people are serious; that should be more vocal about allowing folks to leave the state boundaries too. Silicon Valley folks who live in 3+ mil houses seem to be really happy with WFH…
As a personal anecdote, many of our local restaurants near my office have closed down, people I cared about lost jobs and livelihoods from these somewhat self-centered changes. I want more people to understand that these arguments have perverse secondary effects on society as well.
If they aren’t performing they can be fired
2 things follow from tips mode of thought:
The first is that you view (and presumably you believe others view) RTO as some sort of punishment. ("Oh, Jones, we caught you abusing WFH, therefore we're going to force you to RTO. That'll teach ya!")
Second, you have a presumption that OTHER PEOPLE will be there in the office with Jones! (Or else, why exactly force him to go into the office?) Now those "other people" can either be folks who choose to be there, or else it'll be made up of an army of Joneses! I'm not sure if I want to work in an office environment where EVERYTHING is forced to be there against their wishes.
> If they aren’t performing they can be fired
Yeah, business as usual. The trick is, how do employers retain happy peoductive employees, especially around the issue of RTO?
It's not as easy as "fire poor performers", especially if the employees claim (as many here are doing right now) that RTO is an absolutely miserable and unproductive experience for them.
Firing and rehiring people is expensive. :-/
It is much easier to add community and networking to a remote team (e.g. by frequent colocation) than it is to remove distraction from an in-person team.
I fly every 3-6 months to meet in person for a week and it has its benefits.
But last two times we actually ran out of steam by day 3 and I found my team working physically adjacent but mentally remote in headphone land by day 3, with some not even coming in by day 4.
I’m not sure I’ll stay more than 3 nights next time.
Without data it is religion. Even sect. If you want to insist, provide data how "absolute value" increases productivity.
So far, I suffer productivity loss after RTO. I also spend less time working (after 3 hours of commute I have very hard time convincing myself that I want to do some overtime -- a normal situation when I am WfH).
I know people who prefer to work from office (e.g., because no children distraction). The action work here is prefer. They are good enough teammate of mine not to impose their preferences under disguise of culture and senses.
>because it promotes a sense of community and networking.
Value is often measured non-arbitrarily. _community_ and _networking_ are both arbitrary.
Once again assholes are finding ways to coerce other people into doing what they want to do. No room for live and let live.
And it's great for other people to be able to choose something more flexible, whether for family or some other desire, and be able to leverage the benefits that remote work provides.
But even in small company, it's absurd to think that there's a single answer to "which is better" for every employee.
What's more absurd is that the executive-level positions tend to be more flexible. If anyone's to benefit from in-person communication and spontaneous interactions it's those making decisions that impact those people.
As an outsider, neither employee or employer, to me the whole thing looks like an abusive relationship, particularly egregious on the employer side, but not without problematic actions from the employee side either.
And while HN is an outlier, most people work to survive, not the other way around. Imagine if the same energy that went into promoting RTO, or even WFH for that matter, went into "enabling individuals to make worthwhile contributions and feel good about what they do."
Queue the "people are lazy and can't be trusted" and "basic income is the only answer" choir.
/end rant (cost: -37 karma)
I wish people wouldn't sarcastically portray themselves as the underdog. It comes off as superior, rather than humble.
Ironically, I think ensuring that people don't starve and become homeless during durations they are unemployed (which unemployment insurance/payments doesn't really do in many locations), is actually a good idea.
It'll be nice to move away from "work because if I miss it we'll be homeless" to "work because I enjoy what I do, and can contribute positively in the field."
I don't mind going in to the office to meet up with my coworkers sometimes. People who took advantage of the opportunity to move to cheaper locales may have an incredibly hard time with that.
E.g. just looking at the efficiency variable alone, people who collaborate better remotely are not more or less hampered be being in-person with their colleagues than vice versa (unless you cherry-pick).
So there's no reason not to just allow both, other than those common petty motivations that poor leaders are susceptible to focusing on, usually for optics reasons or other bad second-order metrics.
Just pointing out that if someone wants to RTO but their office wants to WFH, that person will be slightly inconvenienced. If a person who built their lifestyle around WFH is required to RTO, they might face insurmountably major problems.
And I think that's why the WFH contingent, including myself, is so much more vocal. Even if it were true that there were roughly as many RTO and WFH fans, which I don't believe for a moment, the WFH group deals with way more hardship if they don't get their way than the RTO group would.
“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”
This has been an easy gauge for sussing out whether a new manager deserves my praise or not in the roles that came after. Leaders that embody that have, in my experience, always maintained a loyal, productive, non toxic team where individuals move up more rapidly, as well as the leader, due to the momentum that comes from not having constant turnover and a team that respects and enjoys their mission and mandate.
People do not advance in corporate America by being blame sponges for the people below them. You advance by being a nonstop self promoter and, on occasion, eating blame for your boss.
I think we'll end up with two types of companies, WFH and WFO, and right now it looks like the WFH companies will have an easier time recruiting and hiring. So imo this would work especially well for small, fast-growing companies. We'll see whether they can keep up WFH as they grow but maybe there's a limit where they'll need to transition to working from the office.
If that's true, it might be a good time to start companies again and take on some of the incumbents. WFH is a pretty strong selling point to those disgruntled by RTO policies.
I think this is exactly the issue. To rephrase: the biggest difference is management. There are different challenges of course, but the most significant is how to manage. Workers have an easier time shifting location. Furthermore, it's often more difficult to troubleshoot and repair bad management than bad workers, so it's not trivial to discover the source of the corporate problem when you flip your WFH/WFO setting.
I don't think transitioning a medium or large company with a WFH culture into WFO is even possible. If companies grow that way, I'm sure they will stay that way.
1) Need something? Post in the relevant channel. Use @s if appropriate. If you’re in the wrong place, someone will let you know. Break off to private chats when it makes sense, but mostly not. Folks have a good idea what‘s going on because most exchanges halfway-relevant to what they’re working on or connected to take place in public.
2) Need something? Ask around until you find the right person to talk to, then communicate with them. If electronic, DM or email them, don’t contact in a public channel (there may not even be one that makes sense for the chat). Communication is a network of who-knows-who-to-talk-to. Messaging app is mostly oriented around ad-hoc group and individual chats rather than channel-focused (thanks, fucking MS Teams, for practically enforcing this style at the tool level). If you’re not around to overhear things in person, you won’t know wtf is going on.
IMO the latter is clearly just dysfunctional, but this dysfunction is far less painful in-person—it seems to work basically ok, mostly, except that everything takes a little longer than it should. However, all its problems are brought in the open with WFH, and for someone who hadn’t seen the other (better, no matter where everyone’s working) style, I can see how they might think their struggles with WFH are because of WFH.
You rarely hear about voluntary redundancies these days for good reason. If, say, you wanted to downsize by 10% you'd seek volunteers within each division. They'd get a severance package. The net result? All the best people left because they could take the money and get another job.
RTO mandates are quiet layoffs. They're layoffs without having to pay severance. It's great (for the employer). At least in theory. Layoffs are a tool for increasing uncompensated workload (as the 5 remaining people still have to do the work of 8) and suppressing wages. Some people can't RTO (eg they moved during the pandemic). Some just don't want to. Particularly in the Bay Area, the commute is a giant waste of hours a day. So, again, the best people just leave. The ones who stay usually can't leave because they're being held captive by work visas and green card applications.
Blaming employees is nothing new here. In any large company you will see reorgs happen every 6 months, maybe more often. Some VP you've never heard of (but is in your direct management chain) now reports to a different VP who you've also never heard of. Some orgs have their names changed and there's a new set of priorities.
The point of these reorgs is for leadership to escape responsibility for consequences. There's a perpetual handover or ramping up period. Nothing lasts long enough to fail. Nothing lasts long enough to succeed either but there's little value in success and a huge cost to failure so the people involved optimize to avoid failure. More specifically, the appearance of failure.
In all of this, you, the employee, are entirely expendable. Your life can be completely upended for no other reason than someone wanted to cancel a project to give the appearance of a reorg or your name was randomly picked for a layoff on a spreadsheet. Always act in your own best interests.
velocity is a vector. ICs may bear some responsibility for its magnitude but direction is straight from the top baby
What people call "velocity" is an inherently relative measure, but they insist on treating it as an absolute. You can have a really slow team have a "great" velocity if their estimates account for moving slowly, and a fast team have awful "velocity" if their estimates are too short.
Ultimately, it's a measure of something like predictability or consistency. Treating it as if it actually measures development speed is a category error.
And hey, maybe consistency is what you want to prioritize over everything else! But, well, probably not.
ENG LEAD: I can add that experimentation to the Gantt chart, but normally any new ask will push out other things.
BIZ PERSON: Can we do it without slipping our next MVP milestone? It would help with a sales prospect, but isn't worth slipping.
ENG LEAD: OK, since you want it in a week, to minimize impact to the MVP schedule, I can task Jimmy 90% on it. Plus myself 20%, to mentor and keep this on the right track, while Jimmy gets up to speed. We just heard that other customer pilot project was canceled, so I can probably shuffle those resources towards the experiment, without slipping MVP. OK?
BIZ PERSON: Sounds good.
(Of course, if the business people are bad at business, this can go wrong...)
BAD BIZ PERSON: Isn't Jimmy a junior engineer? This experiment is my best drug-fueled mindfulness epiphany yet, and needs the best engineers.
ENG LEAD: If this were key for the MVP, without time for anyone to ramp up their skills, I'd normally plan for Jane or Bob to do it. But interrupting their current immersed critical path MVP work for even a couple days now would probably throw them off for calendar weeks, and likely result in a poorer solution too. And that would end up blocking half a dozen other people for a couple calendar weeks, and they'd only be able to work on lower-priority things. Which would be a immediate 2-week hit to the MVP milestone, plus, worse, a hit to morale of everyone, which would slow us and introduce more risk, just as we're entering the aggressive MVP final stretch where we need everyone rising to do their best work. So I recommend Jimmy, with me working closely with him.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Sounds like this needs my charisma to inspire Jane and Bob to squeeze this in without slipping the schedule.
ENG LEAD: They're already hyper-motivated, on a great path towards MVP, and are operating at peak efficiency. This is an almost mythical moment of greatness, rarely attained by any company, and is startup-defining magic, which will not only make our successful MVP possible, but will also become an instant company-internal legend, setting our engineering and product culture to achieve greatness, for years. If we broke that now, we'd be the world's greatest imbeciles.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Great, the rest of this week, let's do a company stand down for team-building retreat, where I can have 100% of their attention, to leadership them. That will increase their velocity, and we can do the experiment without slipping the schedule.
ENG MANAGER: I should've just said yes, without giving implementation detail, rationale, or tradeoffs.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Jane and Bob can also work on the experiment in the evenings during the retreat, from their tents, after each day of Executive Forest Survival(tm) zip line trust falls. Bam. More time saved. Now go do your magic, buddy! [flashes best confident smile]
It's certainly not as simple as "look at us...we're using Slack...we're a remote-minded organization now." Tho I've seen such a naive - and lazy? - approach happen more than once.
That aside, I also sense there's pressure from above. WFH is putting commercial real estate in a tail spin. Anyone who has investments in such real estate isn't going to be in favor of WFH. These smaller forces add up.
RTO makes little sense. It the same as twenty years saying "The internet is a fad..." WFH is the future. There's no turning back at this point, is there?
manufacturing consent.
stage 1: demonise workers "quiet quitters"
stage 2: implement mass layoffs
stage 3: re-hire those positions remotely in cheaper locations
The office was a ghost town. Completely empty, eerie, creepy. I think the applications engineers, accountants, office folks, etc. work from home 3-4 days a week. Meanwhile, there were 80 some employees in the factory on the lower level milling and lapping away, and fabricating pump skids.
I don't see this ending well. I know a lot of young folks and admins are singing the work from home praise, but it does create a lot of animosity when machinists are grinding away on 8 hour shifts and HAVE to be there. On the other hand, it's really fresh for someone like me to state any opinion since I'm a sales engineer and work alone out of an aircraft hangar and only see people when I go see clients at their own facilities or travel to see my vendors.
I don't think humans are meant to be in isolation, though. But, the modern American life is full of shitty commutes, long hours in traffic, and mental drain. With the rising cost of homes, fuel, life in general, who the hell wants to sit in an hour traffic each way to work? And at the end of the day, who the fuck cares? Any extra profit you generate is going to some boomer shareholder. Might as well sit at home and create what little sanity you can.
I think consultants, programmers, sales, and some technical folks and the like are safe. They could do their jobs from home in 1990, and usually frequently travel. Programmers have had svn and git for a long time. Consulting / professional engineers tend to sit on software packages and conference calls much of the day, etc. etc.
1. No one work arrangement is optimal for all firms.
2. Most policies around RTO (or remote work) are not meaningfully exploring optima (with respect to organizational health and work product quality).
3. Therefore, the amount of preserveration and energy spent on RTO steals focus from main drivers for firm success. Which is probably the point, as the article points out.So it's not exactly surprising that companies are stopping with remote work, or at least are becoming careful with remote work.
In my view and experience it works great for many companies. No massive problems.
IME I’ve worked in offices where at least 20% if not more did absolutely nothing. I mean literally nothing, not that they were doing things that just weren’t visible to me. It has a lot more to do with company culture and performance management than onsite/offsite. I’m not against the idea that the proportion of people who can succeed with remote work is lower, but most of the RTO push seems to be more to do with current management fads than anything else.
https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-rto-hybrid-work-rea...
https://fortune.com/2023/11/12/return-to-office-hybrid-work-...
> The survey also found that 80% of companies have already downsized their office since the pandemic, and 82% are worried about being able to keep their current one, whether that’s due to a recession or an underutilization of space.
I have a hard time believing this take. I work at a fully remote company. Our calendars are public so everyone can see what everyone elses meeting schedule is. We have GitHub so you can certainly see the activity of others. We have CI systems so you can see deploys kick off. We have OKRs so you can see business objectives being met.
It would have to be a pretty extraordinary set of circumstances, maybe outright reckless laziness that would also provide cover for people in the office who do nothing, in order to cover for someone doing absolutely nothing. I think the idea that there are remote workers sitting around soaking up beaucoup bucks while doing nothing is a projection of incredible levels of insecurity.
In my own experience, companies that do RTO mandates fall into one of two categories:
- They have outstanding investments in real estate that act as collateral for other debts that they do not know how to cover yet.
- They have extreme dysfunction in their middle management arm, to the extent that peoples productivity is almost entirely based on presence rather than the merit of metrics.
Yep, we all know that would never happen. Not in tech. Never!
This argument has never made sense to me. Businesses don't want offices and most lease them for the long-term. It's a cost of doing business they begrudgingly pay for so employees have a space for equipment, away from family, etc.
https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-rto-hybrid-work-rea...
https://fortune.com/2023/11/12/return-to-office-hybrid-work-...
> The survey also found that 80% of companies have already downsized their office since the pandemic, and 82% are worried about being able to keep their current one, whether that’s due to a recession or an underutilization of space.
I didn't say that. Whether we want to be with our family or not, the business believes it's a distraction.
How does downsizing contradict anything I said? The logic that they want to force people to the office to justify the payment doesn't make sense. Employees are the cost they they are trying to optimize by having the office in the first place.
Not sure where I got 'WHO' from.
I'm pretty sure the big firms get tax breaks for forcing RTO, as it helps local businesses.
As a manager it is your job to see that and behave accordingly. Punishing your entire org because you can't be bothered to PIP, and if necessary fire the bad Y% means you are a bad manager.
- https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-making-workers-emp...
If anybody has a more comprehensive list, please share. I am personally blacklisting any of these companies.
If this was truly about in-office efficiency then why keep so many external contractors?
My take is that this is yet another mechanism for soft layoffs and control and the cost savings of external contractors are still worthwhile. So we’re left with hybrid teams and being in office still means remote meetings with the majority of ICs. The most charitable take I can give is that leadership truly believes that their immediate reports/teams will do better. My less charitable take is that this is for reasons not shared because they wouldn’t be well received.
It seems like such viewpoints are mostly mind-virus based; they simply saw lots of other people on HN/Reddit/Twitter say the same thing so it's now become "true" in their mind, and now they've become another cog in the machine blindly repeating the same thing, influencing other people, and spreading the virus onwards.