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Comment by Aromasin | Hacker News Reader

My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job).

Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable.

It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.

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It's part of "hostile environment" tactic to force reduction in headcount without appearing to be firing anyone.

That it results in more experienced people leaving is just a bonus to the all-governing excel chart that gives orders to the CEO.

Stop assuming that these people are competent. I've been in the c-suite meetings where these things are decided and it boils down to "In my day the office was good enough for me, so it will be good enough for everyone else too".

Equally, stop assuming that their intent is good. Unless we have internal details, we can argue either way, but assuming anything at all seems wrong. Just as likely as they're just stupid, it feels as likely they're doing it to reduce costs/headcount.

Being disconnected from reality, or not being able to adapt is not the same as being stupid.

One of my bosses while being absurdly smart for work related things, has no clue about how to deal with millenials and younger. He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above. The younger laugh and leave

That's really nothing new. Most people get to a point where they don't quite understand the generations behind them.

You grow up in a different time with different norms. It may be easy enough to understand at a more surface level what younger generations seem to care about, how they talk, etc but it's much harder to deeply understand what it's like to be that younger generation and how, therefore, to fundamentally adjust the way you work and interact or even view the world yourself.

Another angle that makes this even more complicated is that younger people can and do get things wrong too. A fresh perspective is not automatically a correct perspective. A leader would be rightfully wary about letting someone experiencing their first transition into the workforce make major decisions about workplace design, etc.

Of course, this leads to the opposite problem of never trusting the younger generations, which is equally if not more problematic. Because a fresh perspective may not always be correct, but often it does have some kind of value that needs to be extracted and acted on.

I've also seen it go the other way, with leads trusting more junior engineers way more than they probably should have. I wasn't too surprised when most (all?) of the concerns that senior engineers raised and were overruled on came back to bite them 6 months later.

In that instance it seemed like leadership was focusing too hard on making sure the more junior members had their voices heard and, I think, expected that the team would be able to just figure out how to handle the concerns raised later. Pros and cons to everything, but at least in that one instance it was really odd to see senior engineers' proposals and reasoning be thrown out with a focus almost entirely on protecting team dynamics or something similar.

Also, diversity more broadly, not just generation.

Scenario: Say you're a Zoomer, affluent parents, everything material you could want, security and opportunity, all the college prep and application angles covered, Stanford, Leetcode, FAANG, substantial war chest, now founder, family seed money and connections and safety net... designing a consumer tech product targeted foremost at "other" Zoomers in general...

In that scenario, you're going to have huge cultural blind spots, among your generation.

You might be best off throwing away the well-to-do fratbro culture-fit hiring funnel, and hopefully get a diversity of perspectives.

Diversity of thought should have always been the goal. That's really hard to do though, especially when you can instead focus on easily noticed external traits and claim that's diversity.

Throwing away the well-to-do fratbro hiring funnel would actually be a mistake though, wouldn't it? We should be adding more, different hiring funnels to try to better capture diversity of thought and background. Throwing out one funnel entirely and replacing it with another would still have a blindspot, it's just the opposite blindspot that they had before.

Of course a fresh perspective is not always correct. In fact, they usually get things wrong for lack of experience. And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL) and adore the latest hype. But we seniors should be open to their opinions, and we should be open to mix with them and "exploit" their strength. E.g. our social media (Twitter, Insta and Facebook mainly) are handled by a ~50 y.o. woman who volunteered. People younger than 35'ish laugh about how lengthy the posts and the videos are, and the general tone of "Buscemy: how do you do, fellow kids?", lack of social networks that are actually used, and so on. But nobody asked them for advise, because nobody wants to be told how old and out of the loop they are.

On a more serious note, they can't take seriously they have to be available on weekends or holidays, so they prefer to change jobs rather than confronting or negotiate with their manager. It looks that our future is one of overworked seniors training short term juniors for our competition: extintion in 10-15 years.

Recently one of our juniors asked for a day per week working from home, and was denied because "team building" or something like that. Since them, I have the impression he's on a quest on how many days per week he can go without talking to anyone (avoiding team building), and I'm 100% sure he's now hunting for a fully remote job.

>And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL)

I was there when we gave up on SQL. It wasn't because we wanted to. It was because we had a terabytes of data that needed to be accessed in micro-seconds.

SQL in 2006 was simply incapable of that. Looking at what a modern machine can do is ridiculous by comparison. Try and do it on a 8 year old phone and you will have as close to the experience we had back then.

> He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above.

That only barely worked when corporations were a little bit loyal to employees. There's not one of those left now.

To be clear, I'm from Spain, and that loyalty is still a selling item among 40-and-over. Also, seniority is a plus almost everywhere, where you can win arguments with "I've been working here twenty years", even to people the same age than you but with less seniority. Going to other place even with higher salary is a loss for lots of people.

But youngers doesn't care, and I have the impression they actually fear being for too long, say more than 5 years, in the same place. They value the novelty of knowing new people and ways to get stuff done.

Exactly

Human psychology is wild, when employees do something unusual, it is always presumed that it’s because they are stupid or lazy

When executives do something unusual, it’s rarely assumed that they’ve lost touch with reality and factory floor. Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity

> Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity

Somewhat because people don't want to know that the people who lead them are idiots. They'll go so far as to bury their heads in the sand to not hear it.

Ye that does seem to be the case. If we are led by idiots, then that means we are idiots too for allowing this to happen

This is how some of it spreads.

But excel models of operating costs have stronger staying power than CEO fads, at least from my experience.

"Our most important work happens during on the back of napkin meetings" has been said unironicly

Wow, you still have an expense budget for routine employee lunches such that you’re doing work out at restaurants and stuff!? /s

Same with "Our most important business conversations happen spontaneously at the water cooler."

This person gets it. Been in the room for many years and it's never the conspiracy people think it is, it's never that deep.

Yep, with a dash of "All my work goes better in face-to-face meetings, so everyone else's must too."

Chatting with some major-firm management consultants was enough to remove any lingering “… but surely they’re smarter than I’m giving them credit for” doubts I had about the C-suite.

Their view was way less favorable and more comprehensive than mine, and they’ve seen more of them and from bigger companies than I have. They talked about them like they’re toddlers.

Doesn't that explanation makes very little sense in this context? We're talking about a company that just spun out on its own and has an enormous amount of work ahead of it and presumably a window of time where the investors expect things to be bumpy financially—why would a CEO intentionally try to reduce headcount in that situation? A year in when things have settled down, sure, but right after the split?

Or they might have whatever indicators, real or imagined, saying that they should be shedding costs as much as possible.

I've even seen once spinning off a new company as a way to avoid the word "layoff" or "firing" for cultural reasons. Every few years the company would spin out a new one, moving all the parts they wanted to keep, then liquidate the old.

I should note that we've had a huge amount of redundancies on top of people leaving for other opportunities. My guess is they want a very low-cost business that looks good in terms of its balance sheet so when it goes to IPO everything looks to investors.

Even more bizarre considering that there have been numerous studies showing that remote working is more productive and less costly

Can you link these studies? I often feel like people greatly misrepresent what these studies find. Anecdotally, we've been happy to cut remote senior engineers and bring in local people, sometimes at a significantly higher total comp, just because they play such an important role in coordination, which is far more important than their trivia knowledge about our system.

Here are some: 1) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... 2) https://www.nber.org/papers/w28731 3) https://scholar.harvard.edu/eharrington/publications/working...

You should use DOI links: 1) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274728 2) https://doi.org/10.3386/w28731 3) https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4466130 , respectively

A few things:

- the first two were conducted while we were in the thick of the pandemic and loathe to be near anyone outside of our pod. WFH made sense then, and I’m sure people were more comfortable knowing they wouldn’t get Covid WFH

- the third was in 2023 when the world opened up, but studied call center operators. Yes, I can see how they would be more productive at home. However, imho any position that requires collaboration and many interactions between staff is more productive in the office and this study doesn’t address that.

Let me quote the first one, which is meta-analysis: ". Of the articles published prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 79% (n = 19) demonstrated that work-from-home increased productivity and performance whereas 21% (n = 5) showed mixed or no effects. Of the articles published during the pandemic, 23% (n = 3) showed positive effects, 38% (n = 5) revealed mixed results, and 38% (n = 5) showed negative effects."

So it seems that there are numerous studies that show WFH is beneficial to productivity, that are done before pandemic.

Just a note that from your anecdote it sounds like you're a company that is partially (and decreasingly) remote. My experience has been that that kind of hybrid—where some employees are always colocated and others are always not—doesn't work because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented, so the remote employees are hamstrung in ways that don't happen in an organization where remote is evenly distributed.

I think it's the opposite, remote workers are not reliable teammates. When we need ad hoc help from a remote engineer, we need to grab a 30 minute slot on their calendar, or we need to send them a long async email or DM chain. Eventually the conversation slows down, and they start responding once a day. When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me. More remote-more slow.

What you're describing is exactly the kind of problematic culture difference that I'm warning about. This is what I said earlier:

> because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented

Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that.

It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.

> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.

Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).

> Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that.

> It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.

This is wishful thinking. Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project, which is the most important part, and in many cases senior engineers are on the critical path. But hey, if you're able to be productive at scale with remote work, guess you'll have a large pool of talent to draw from, so I'm hoping to see many successful companies replace FAANG.

> Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).

Yes, this is what YOU want. It's not for the benefit of the company, no matter how remote people try to frame it. But hey, if that's my only choice, then we should hire top talent in Bangalore or Warsaw instead of remote mid talent from high cost areas.

> Yes, this is what YOU want.

Precisely. I don't want to work for you, you don't want me to work for you, so it's a win-win: I'll keep doing good work for a company that appreciates what I can do and is happy to give me the flexibility that I need to do it well. You keep hiring people who don't mind being interrupted by a boss who values their physical presence over all else. Everyone's happy!

> Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things.

This sounds like a project management failure. One of the cardinal rules of the remote programs I run is: Never let the critical path be blocked by one person having to physically do some synchronous task. If Task X requires Person Y to approve it by Date Z, then you obtain that approval asynchronously, waaaaay before Date Z, where you would otherwise become blocked.

> In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project

I mean, I think that's what you're getting at here, so design your business processes just like you'd design a multi-threaded program: such that there are no locks and mutexes.

1. Management is hard and failure is common. Now what? Just let the projects fail?

2. You can't always parallelize work, and even if you can, that doesn't mean it will be faster/more efficient

That sounds... terrible.

Having to constantly put out fires is always a sign of larger issues, especially in an engineering context.

It's not always a fire. Small issues or questions stack up if I need to wait 30 minutes for a reply.

The point still stands. If you feel you need immediate answers the moment you have a question, there's a larger issue.

When an employee's in a meeting and not at their desk, what do you do?

No it doesn't. You can't plan for every contingency.

If they're not at desk, I'll wait there.

The point isn't that the project will fail if I don't get my solution right now. The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail.

> The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail

That's a figment of your imagination.

We have a chat system which most people are on most of the day. If I want to talk to someone I ping them on there. We might arrange a video call, but mostly it's sorted out on chat. Email is also used for things which are not time critical and/or require more detailed explanation and discussion.

All I can figure from how some people react to being asked to type out their requests or otherwise interact over messaging rather than turning everything into a voice conversation, is that some folks, for whatever reason, find writing and maybe also reading extremely unpleasant. Poor typists? Just kinda bad at reading and writing so it requires a lot of effort rather than feeling as natural and easy as talking? Something else? Not sure.

Putting things in writing is anathema to the sociopath or socially savvy manipulator. Writing leaves paper trail. You can't ask for unscrupulous things with impunity, or utilize fast talk or other manipulation techniques without being completely transparent.

Some people just find it quicker to be able to point at a thing and ask "What does that do?" VS using the tools to do it via computers.

Some would say that's an issue with the tools, but the tools aren't ever going to get better if the WFH people don't acknowledge the deficiency of the current system.

To be honest, I hate chats. In the past I just had to worry about emails, and they probably weren't that important if they were emails, but now I have to split my attention onto chats because we have remote workers that need help. If they were in office, they could just come ask me a question when its important, and I could focus on my work otherwise. Still doesn't stop people from randomly just not replying when pinged.

When you get your car serviced, do you stay near the mechanic to check how the work is going every minute?

No, but when I'm in a car crash I hope I don't have to schedule my ambulance or doctor a week in advance.

> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.

Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers.

I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.

You have it backwards. I'm not a manager, I'm an IC. I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product. If the alternative is that I need to spend half my day spinning on a reply, then I hope you get managed out.

Oh, this information changes a lot. I don't know if you're in a place to accept feedback right now but here's some just in case: you need to fix your attitude fast or you won't last long at any company, remote or not.

If you treat your coworkers with anything approximating the dismissive, demanding, and entitled comments you've been leaving here you are making yourself a lot of enemies at work, and if you're not the boss you won't get away with that forever.

I'm much nicer in person :)

Doesn't matter if you think you act nicer, this attitude is the problem:

> I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product.

If this is how you actually perceive your relationship to these people then they will notice.

It's not my perception of the relationship, it's their job. But that's besides the point. In a healthy team people are not groaning every time they have to help someone.

I'm a lower level TL, and we just got an intern for the summer. They needed help figuring out how to set up SSH, and they came to me. Is my work more important? Yeah, but that doesn't matter. I don't want them spinning on this while waiting for me to grant them an audience. If I truly don't have time, that's my decision to deprioritize the work, or send it somewhere else. Same with the people above me.

I agree, I try to be a good mentor and understand new developers have higher level of anxiety and I help them as much as I can. But I also teach them how to get help without being too disruptive, remote or local.

That's good to know.

But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.

Each time you do this, you're forcing someone to forget whatever he was in the middle of doing. In the best case, your interruption might be for a much more urgent project, but often it won't.

> A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. - https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

"I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me."

What is going on in your organization?

Does 4-day week policy mean you have to be in the office 4 days a week, or that your work week is 4 days long?

I was also momentarily confused by this, but I assumed they meant 4 days in the office.

Apologies yes, I mean 4 days in the office and 1 work from home - not a 4 day work week.

My experience has been that "spin off" CEOs are often there only so they can check a "CEO experience" box in the hope that it will help them climb higher in the larger corporation. This leads to all sorts of bad decisions and a pretty miserable environment because they don't actually care about building something that will be successful and endure. They only care about speedrunning the experience they think a CEO needs so they can talk about it when interviewing for something better.

It does feel that way. They are an ex-division executive. If anything, I feel like this could be a case of them getting nicely managed out while building out that CEO experience before they go off and retire successfully into the sunset after making a shit tonne through an IPO, ignoring the gutting of the company they've done to make sure the short term balance sheet looks good; while the long term viability of it is in shambles.

What's "ZBB"?

probably zero based budgeting

Thanks. :)

https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/planning/zero-...

A thing that tells you to run away fast.

What's wrong with having to justify a budget each year rather than assuming last year's budget was fine and still makes sense as a starting point for this year?

One issue I can see is a massive performance hit at the year boundary as everyone goes into 'justification' mode to ensure their jobs and projects persist. Or just dusts off the forecasts and justifications they used last year, which sort of defeats the whole point.

Thats a fair point. Trust would definitely have to be a requirement for a functional zero-based budget.

Employees would need to know their jobs are secure and the company is just going through a regular process of deciding where to invest. As long as the perception, whether true or not, is that companies are always willing to fire employees to save a buck then no one really has incentives to honestly propose budgets and priorities.

It imposes an enormous amount of operational overhead involved and destroys organization stability. All you need is a single manager in a single year who doesn't understand the benefit of something for its budget to get gutted with ZBB, and once that happens it can take years to rebuild. ZBB starts from the premise that employees are fungible and can either be freely replaced or freely reassigned, which is not very realistic.

I don't know much about how companies really implement a ZBB, if anyone even does, but I'd argue that if organizational changes are om the table every year that's an unnecessary recipe for disaster.

Budgeting doesn't have to mean asking the question of whether you need all the people you have, it's just asking what the priorities are and how to allocate capital. Priority number one should always be maintaining the best team possible, any other priority is going to fail anyway if there's no trust and everyone at the company is worried about getting fired just for budget.

If that's the main issue with ZBB for a company, budgeting really is the least of their problems in my opinion. Employees need to trust leadership and leaderhsip needs to both earn that trust and trust their employees as well.

This is actually really similar to a problem I have with how OKRs are done. They should be done from the bottom up not the top down. The idea of OKRs, and agile, sound great but they're just used as a mechanism for top down control because the company is fundamentally lacking trust.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ZBB&ia=web

"Zac Brown Band"

Obviously! (j/k - I was also lost, and tried the web search, and was still lost.)

> 4-day week policy

You mean 4 days in the office, not a 4-day work week, right?

Sorry less, I mean 4 days in the office, 1 from home.

Sounds like someone got drunk on power on day one.

Oh hey, our new CEO did the same exact "hybrid 4" bullshit so he technically didn't violate our employment contracts that said we were hybrid employees. Literally at his 6 month mark announced a thing that made everyone hate him which is a pretty bold move for a new CEO. The only person who supported him was a newly hired director who was kissing ass so hard it almost a rimjob. I just don't get it, there was no issue that caused the change, no metric he was looking to improve. He even told us he was willing to eat 20% productivity to be in the office.

But turns out the overlap between someone willing to write code all day and adhd is pretty strong so my team all put in the paperwork for ADA exceptions and got them, literally the only reason I'm still here.

> He even told us he was willing to eat 20% productivity to be in the office.

I'm not shocked that an exec would think this. But I am shocked that one would say this publicly.

Let me guess: Sandra Rivera

4-day work week is a "gift" to keep people in the office, and I hope it FAILS miserably because being in the office in 2024 it's not different than dress like ancient Celts to go to a court. A nonsense.

Some want slaves and to ensure them, to reach the "in 2030 you'll own nothing" they need the city, tall buildings used less than half of the day moving between them for the rest of the day only to keep people busy and unable to own. This is simply untenable: a city can't really evolve and we are in changing world and in a changing society, cities to change needs to be rebuild, something impossible for actual available resources, we must be no more than 3 billion to have enough planetary resources to evolve in cities, while we can be the double to live spread and have more intelligence and ideas being more in a spread model where we can evolve and sustain the climate change as well.

That's why ruling class want cities https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ and we should say no thanks.

> spun out of a much larger corporation

> ZBB

Microsoft?

Not in this instance no. ZBB is a pretty common budgeting method I think. All the corporations I've worked at have used in in some regard.

It's about rule and control. Some people see employees as "less than equals" and they need a thumb on them at all times. Others are steeped in Right-Wing Bullshit and are willing to burn it all to the ground for one more profitable quarter.

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