CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. That way, everyone can contribute to the conversation, it’s asynchronous so you don’t have to be in exactly the right place and right time to participate, and people can go back and review details very easily if needed.

You are right that that doesn’t apply if the conversations are happening in private DMs, but that’s a matter of team culture. You have to be intentional in a remote setting, just the same as you do in an office setting. But if you are it can work very well in my experience, perhaps even better than in person.

Sorry, is this a real thing? I've never experienced this.

We all have cubes and sure, maybe sometimes I can hear someone kind of close to me. But not very often. And typically, people actually speak in a low voice as to not disturb others.

We have many floors in the office too, so all our meetings are on Teams. I can't remember the last time I went to a conference room.

I actually really enjoy the async nature of chats. Because you can come and go in the conversation, and you don't have to grind everything you're doing to a halt. Plus, I can go back later and refresh my memory.

At that price you might as well hire in Western Europe and have better timezone overlaps.

We have long since given up on getting any work done on our in-office days, but see them as collaborative / bonding / light planning only.

It's gotten to the point that even if we fly to each others city for a week, we might only go to the office 2~3 days, or by Wednesday/Thursday we might by physically collocated but go to different rooms in silence with headphones to actually get work done.

As a dev these days are actually pretty stressful as they have the feeling of creating work faster than doing any of it. It makes me remember how unproductive my dev teams used to be with the constant in-office interruptions. At prior jobs, I used to do most of my actual dev work after hours, and on unilaterally declared WFH days

A lauromat can have big machines that produce steam and hot water. You can power an indoor troppical garden with a swinming pool and an interesting lunchroom. Desk work can be done laying in the grass etc etc

Thats the general formula.

The office can be a showroom for a vintage motorcycle shop.

That’s a great idea, we could create a web portal and basically make a techy office management rental interface. Let’s pitch the idea to YComb together, we can call the venture OurWork.

The reasoning is that it reduces traffic and reduces stress.

This existed since 2000 ish. It has expanded since covid. I now only go to the office once every two weeks. Used to be two times a week.

Think about how absurd it is to argue that Zoom is enough to sustain family or intimate relationships over the long haul.

Zoom isn’t enough. Having that walk with a potential client, that colleague or that supplier might well be.

Nobody is suggesting this but you. It’s understandable that leadership would make more money. But 39x more money is harder to justify, especially with historical context.

I'm not at all saying all FAANG bosses are great, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue that all they do is "make a couple decisions a week and then play golf." Anyone that says that is just showing how clueless they are as to what goes in to running a large company.

You can argue that these two aren't representative and put in more effort than the average CEO, but you can't argue that their experience of being CEO isn't extremely intense.

Good CEOs are constantly juggling all kinds of complex thought-work, to a much greater extent than the average line worker would be happy doing. Programmers in particular get stressed and unhappy if you ask them to context switch between unrelated tasks, deal with interruptions and regularly make decisions that are completely ambiguous. They also probably won't be happy if they have to spend a lot of time on relationship building, performance evaluations or managing the performance of people under them.

A good CEO's typical day will easily switch between a dozen different things - a product review in the morning where they're expected to give immediate and ideally insightful feedback to a team that's been preparing for months (remembering to manage their own expectations and happyness, you wouldn't want your star designer quitting on you), then immediately after a meeting with the finance team about some complicated tax issue, and then a recruiting call with someone to replace the head of sales who you just had to fire because they {missed their targets, leaked confidential info to the press, insulted a key customer, got targeted by a woke mob} and then you move on to lunch, briefly, which you probably eat alone because none of your immediate reports particularly want to hang out with the boss and anyway you need to read a report on your competitor's new product launch. Oh and then it's time to go to the airport because {a key customer the other side of the country is upset, the government is demanding to question you, your PR team set up a speaking event at a conference and only told you yesterday}, so hopefully your spouse isn't too upset that you won't be home for dinner tonight. On the way to the airport you'll have to be on the phone with a lawyer because your company is getting sued, again, and so you need to know the status of the case but couldn't find time to fit an in-person meeting (which you'd have much preferred). You'll probably also need to plan for how to pay if you lose that case, which realistically means who you'll have to lay off or break comp promises to.

And then dawn breaks, and it all begins again. That's a good day, when you didn't have to do layoffs or explain to the board why the new product you'd hoped would turn things around is now subject to a recall.

I've seen how this stuff affects people up close. You do need to be very tough, and even then it can grind people down pretty catastrophically. There's nobody to blame at that level and you can't just quit because you don't like it anymore. If it starts going wrong you're sort of trapped.

Some may receive compensation of this nature, many more may not. You are making wild assumptions. Just putting that out there.

I've had great bosses, but that's not what we're discussing. This is about executives. And while I agree that executives are certainly highly motivated, I just think that at a certain level mostly that is motivation to lie, misdirect, deflect, and steal. This also isn't about small businesses, which are much more likely to have legitimate entrepreneurs or merit-based processes, even at the top. For most medium-sized businesses and certainly for large ones, everything is different and anyone can see that pedigree, nepotism, and failing upwards all become more dominant factors. Take an honest look at yourself and your bubble and the line workers. Who can do who's job, really? Which work is more skilled?

You can start a company on a library computer...