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> Sometimes that translates to aloofness for staff, but what more often happens is that when the CEO _does_ come in they expect other people to be there.

Anecdotally, I have seen companies that have "oscillations" in their WFH policy and this, in my experience, has often been the driver of it. Instead of putting trust in the process or the data, you will simply have a situation where the CEO or (especially) where a group of the top level execs are all in the office on a particular day when the office 'feels empty', which then results in a "where is everyone" conversation. Couple that with a sniff of an internal deadline being missed or something behind schedule and suddenly you have a perfect storm of discontent resulting in updated WFH rules and policies being hastily fired off without regard to actual performance data or previous commitments or conclusions drawn around WFH policy.

> Make a fun space, and make people's work schedules be loose enough to where they can actually relax in the space, and some people will show up!

Personally, I don't care about having my workplace be fun or loaded with too many amenities. But if I'm going to be in a company workplace, I do need an office with a closing door if I'm expected to be able to focus and be productive. So much of the insanity with the WFH debate is employers who think that people can be productive or enjoy their work when working in loud, open-concept office configurations. For a lot of employees the WFH vs. office debate then feels very much a "my private, quiet home office vs. chaotic, loud office environment" debate.

> a group of the top level execs are all in the office on a particular day when the office 'feels empty'

> internal deadline being missed

What indicators would justify a change in WFH policy?

No worthwhile indicators, other than the gut feelings of the decision makers in that moment.

I think they were talking about internal deadlines being missed at about baseline levels, but the timing coincides with when the execs happen to feel like the office is empty so they make a mental association.

A measurable increase in missed deadlines is not what I think they meant.

I think the introduction of WFH during the pandemic hurt a lot of IT workers in the long-run.

In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the office post-Covid even when their work processes mean they can be done perfectly well remotely, and even if they have widely geographically-distributed teams.

Anecdotal, but we had a team that was split with 50% working remotely before Covid, and we saw an improvement when everyone was forced to work remotely: conversations that were being held in person were shared openly.

I see the opposite. Conversations that used to happen in ear reach so I'd know what was going on with various team members and be able to contribute when I knew a solution are now conversation that happen in private chat or private VC.

Productivity is way down.

Even more interesting, a team lead lives in another country 6 times zones away. Some times they visit the main office for 1-2 weeks. Productivity shoots through the roof those weeks.

Well yea, when I go on a work trip I tend to work a lot more those weeks because I’m not home. That doesn’t mean productivity during those two weeks are representative of normal.

It’s the local team, not the traveling team lead, that’s being spoken of here.

It’s the same root cause. If there are foreign workers in town for a week then the whole team will often work around the visitors schedule.

Sounds like you need a group chat that people are willing to talk in. If that isn’t happening, then there’s a barrier to doing it that you need to resolve. Could be they’re fine with you listening in, but not the manager. Could be something else. Fix that, and get back to productive remotely.

That's a shame. We're a mostly remote workplace with very high productivity. Hopefully you can figure out how to make it work, or move to a place that suits you better.

That doesn’t seem like a sustainable alternative. In the case you are describing, the productivity boost is highly dependent on actually having the right people within ear reach. You are relying on the right people happening to hear other conversations. What if your team is large, so that even if you are all in office, the chances of stumbling into the right conversation is lower? What if you are grabbing lunch, or in the bathroom, or meeting with someone else when that conversation is happening?

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.

>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.

IME a lot of the really useful "in earshot range" conversations are those that were intended privately but were overheard by someone that has an idea.

Engineer A might go to engineer B to ask B on how to do X. B is being asked because they are usually knowledgeable about similar topics. In this case they don't know.

In slack A would message B directly. B answers that they don't know.

In the office C might overhear it and have an idea and chime in.

I think this unintentional broadcasting can be really helpful to productivity and spreading ideas. It just doesn't work so well in a messaging app.

> Conversations that used to happen in ear reach

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.

I think the real pain comes from many managers discovering that if they're going to have remote workers, might as well go whole hog and hire them in Bangalore for 1/10th the price instead of paying SV salaries.

That’ll cause real pain for the management. Unless you pay near western market rates, you’re getting the bottom of the barrel in India or anywhere else, much like if you tried to hire US developers for even 50% of the market rate. The low priced contractors do such poor work it’s almost not useful.

Or they'll get hired, get taught really basic shit (chmod/chown) on the job, get a cisco/AWS certificate then leave 6 month later to join a better paying job.

But not before misapplying chmod/chown settings in your environment.

In my first job we loaned Hadoop clusters that we either managed ourselves or let the client manage the IT. One of our client decided to use a contractor instead (I might miss details, it was almost 10 year ago) .

The day after configuring the cluster and giving him the metaphorical keys, we saw low-level alert on one computer in that cluster, some monitoring daemon couldn't be reached but nothing really concerning (could still be pinged, no issues with the virtualisation). We still tried to look at it, but could't ssh on the computer (which explains why our daemons couldn't be reached). We contacted the client, said basically: 'we can remove the monitoring and our access keys if you want, but please tell us before you do this. Do you want it done on the other computers?'.

He came back the day after that saying basically 'what?' then talking about a shard that couldn't be reached (he was nice about it).

Turns out, 'chmod 777 /' is the dumbest way of breaking your workstation I've ever seen. We all hear about 'rm -rf /' but let's be real, no one has ever done it, not outside of school at least. Chmod 777 / because you couldn't manage to understand a Java stacktrace has 100% been done in a professional environment: I had to fix it.

Luckily you can copy the permissions of filesystem A onto filesystem B (can't remember how, but it was easy) so the fix didn't involve any reinstallation and Hadoop wizardry.

For the next manager, perhaps, but the first guy gets a promotion for cost cutting and leaves for greener pastures before the shit hits the fan.

From what I've heard, you aren't getting anywhere near the same quality in Bangalore for 1/10th the price these days. Maybe 1/3rd and that gap is shrinking.

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

Have you ever dealt with outsourced workers? They might cost 1/10th the price, but they will provide 1/20th the value. Every single time I deal with teams in India it's all about quantity, not quality. Some businesses might be fine with that, but for many it will destroy your business.

Silicon Valley compensation in India and LatAm is broadly in line with US median for all software developers ($120k ish). It's not dramatically cheaper in absolute terms than the US low/medium cost of living markets. The idea is that it gets you the best of the best in India, vs. middle of the road in the US.

Really depends on your org structure.

If you already had a global org, then it was already running poorly due to bad VC hardware and inability to book conference leading to lots of drive-by chats. Great for the office which has >40% of the staff in it, bad for the 3 other offices with 20%.

Hybrid/remote/zoom leveled the playing field so that our non-primary-HQ devs were able to fully contribute whereas in many cases they were bodies in seat for follow-the-sun coverage who would do rote Jiras assigned to them.

yeah, I meant "fun" perhaps in a more open sense of "people are not just annoyed at everything all the time", perhaps "relaxed" is the right word.

I am not a superfan of actual closet office given, like, CO2 and friends, but having at least semi-closed spaces with some degree of privacy for groups of people feels totally reasonable. I always think about how some grad students at my university (paired 4 off to an office) had a nicer-feeling office space than any tech office I've been to short of a handful

Yes and some people don't appreciate that some jobs really do require quiet focus for extended periods of time.

Asking someone to be a programmer in a loud chaotic open office environment is not dissimilar to asking them to program while juggling two balls and sitting on a unicycle. Its just excess difficulty that doesn't need to be added on top of the jobs.

in hindsight its amazing anything actually ever got done

Realistically the actual work got done in the evening after going home.

Hell this is still the case for high meeting days

My team is very small remote-primary, but we will travel to each others cities / offices quarterly or so.

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

I actually like that environment, unless I'm having problems debugging something. If something is not working after an hour or so I am on edge and need peace and quiet, but otherwise I can program fine for most tasks with noise around me.

I just always assumed an "open office", really meaning a non-office, an empty building, was what was available for startups after the dot com bust in SF.

Then after the fact we made up a bunch of bullshit as to why this is some brilliant idea. Then this idea spread as if it was some kind of technological advancement because it worked for small tech companies trying to not spend money on furniture and walls.

We just aren't very good at any of this at scale. The open "office" and battle against remote work are different flavors of the same type of stupidity.

Nah it's because walls cost money and take up space. Open plan is cheaper with the trade-off that nobody likes it

We just send out an email when the boss is in town and ask folks to come in, and enough people do to make the office seem full - and that works, we will even fly people in sometimes.

It’s a shame you can’t hire extras for the day to make the office lively.

Edit: Maybe you can? Check with someone who does local casting?

> Edit: Maybe you can? Check with someone who does local casting?

And start an office pool on whether or not the boss even notices that they’re not real employees.

Give them good plot lines like: i dont think ive seen you here before? Do you normally work remote?

It's probably just enough to dress them in business casual, and have them walk around the office looking very serious and busy, talking on their cellphones about business-y stuff. All that matters is the "buzz" and "hum" and "pop" of SeriousBusiness getting done.

> It's probably just enough to dress them in business casual…

Bonus points for how little effort you can get the actors to put in while still getting away with it. Just have them wear shorts, some tech vendor t-shirts, and put most of them in a conference room, while two people talk about the last “feature” release.

If it’s not a tech related portion of the business, do the same, but say something about making casual “insert-day-of-the-week” and have said business group talk about how the last “feature” release impacted their section.

Triple bonus points if you get the boss to join in on the discussion with no one knowing what the actual “feature” released was, without the boss figuring the whole thing out.

shouting the following into a phone: "YES, FRAN. I KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS, BUT I'M LOOKING AT THE WENUS, AND I'M NOT HAPPY." will be good, but what happens if the management says "I like that guy! What's his name?"

later on "Hey Chandler, Did you get that WENUS problem sorted out? Chandler, I'd like you to come to the main office and give a presentation, we need your kind of can-do attitude"

Walk fast and look worried.

Best startup idea of the week. Unfamiliar buts in seats. UBIS! the guilt of not knowing anyone

BISAAS?

pronounced "biz-ass?"

Your business needs biz-ass to look biz-ay!

Share an office with a completely different type of company, for fun?

You could have shared employees. It reminds me of many strange hybrid company ideas I use to ponder.

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.

I had the idea for a bookstore/pizza place/laundromat/bar years ago.

Maybe an llm can go over all the possible combinations. Start with just 2 then look for ingredient 3 etc using the best results.

Just rent your office out as a co-working space. That way you can even run a profit off it.

And keep an eye out how long it takes the board to realize that the assistant to the CEO is no longer a pure cost, but actually returning a profit for the company. /s

> Just rent your office out as a co-working space. That way you can even run a profit off it.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFihTRIxCkg

I am available on short notice. Available in formal, business casual, dont care and hipster attire. Skills include annoyingly fast typing and a full pallet of emotions; Anger, Sadness, Fear, Surprise, Disgust, Contempt, Happiness and Working all included in the standard rate*.

* I charge extra for so-called "high-fives" on a per-five basis due to the added physical danger.

> A proper theory of the mind can often be quite absent.

+1 spicy!

> Make a fun space, and make people's work schedules be loose enough to where they can actually relax in the space, and some people will show up!

I've tried to tell this to a couple of places that wanted me to work in a office. The conversations didn't go anywhere - perhaps because of your prior quote? :)

IMO theory of mind fails at scale and distance due to the sheer diversity of humanity and disconnection from local signals. No human can accomplish this, which is why we need population-level studies.

I found the solution one time but it is hard to reproduce: I make an angry face and shout from up close "It is important that people enjoy working here. Do you understand?" Then I laugh at my own joke.

> And to a lesser extent other executives who have decided that their job is their life.

This is key. CEO is one individual, maybe you luck out with someone thats self aware and doesn’t have their head up their behind. But with the exec team, almost certainly there will be one motherfucker that needs their ego stroked by having minions around when they’re in an office, taking calls or meetings.

> pyramind

this word fits in there perfectly

This sort of CEO behavior is simply not so thinly veiled classism.

Or… the ceo has a job where they need to be out meeting people. For sales, recruiting, etc

They generally expect people who can work from the office are working from the office. For example they wouldn’t expect to see forward deployed engineers sitting at the office twiddling their thumbs…