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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

My wife's company does this hybrid office bullshit at a fortune 500 and they not only track the days you come in, but they will bring it up in annual reviews if it hits a certain threshold.

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Who will bring it up? I've never worked at a company where managers are suddenly assholes who diligently apply unreasonable policies. My experience is committees make all sorts of policies, but unless consequences are doled out by some automated system, no on actually cares or follows the policy.

At my current company, there's a place I think I can see my reports' office attendance, but I've never actually checked it. Why would I? I'm not even a WFH zealot myself; I just don't see why I should care if they're in the office.

The managers will bring it up because they have pressure on them coming from higher up to have their reports all be compliant with the work-from-office policy, and in extreme cases, they would be expected to manage out the people who are flouting it. Not doing these things could easily result in an unsatisfactory performance rating for the manager.

Completely ignoring any RTO/WFH-specific aspects, one of the jobs of a manager is to communicate and explain corporate policies to their direct reports, and enforce those policies.

i bet working for you is like working for a dictator.

a job of a manager is to gain trust both up and down the chain. if you’re forcing your employees to do something, you’ve lost their trust.

Yes, a job (not the job) of a manager is to gain trust up and down. Imagine, just for a fleeting moment, that "communicating and explaining corporate policies" may actually play a role in this! "Here is why we have to RTO 5 days a week: [corporate bs]."

Now let's also imagine that you already have the trust of your direct reports (I would think a lot of Amazon managers don't but that's neither here nor there). You explain a policy to them - they have to be in the office 5 days a week or Things happen, whatever they may be. This person just refuses to do it. Is the manager to just say "oh well I don't want to 'be a dictator' so I'll just let them ignore this policy?" Of course not. They'd be abdicating part of their job if they did that.

yes the manager at that point decides if it’s worth burning the trust they’ve built or if they should push back harder.

see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business. or to put it another way, a human over money. so poof, gone is the trust if you did have any.

Anecdotally, I'm aware of managers who've been sacked for pushing back. Knowledge of this is probably enough to reshuffle priorities in the current economic situation.

As a random line manager of a small team, you can't meaningfully push back against a company-wide mandate. Hell, even directors can't do that. That decision is being made by the CEO. You either enforce it or suffer the consequences.

> see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business

I mean yes, this is how businesses work. Of course the business is of primary importance over any individual employee, especially employees who are in violation of prioritized corporate mandates. Anytime someone is fired, for pretty much any reason including poor performance, that's prioritizing the business's needs over the individual's. But that's literally just what everyone signed up for; the business is a mission and profit-driven organization, and it puts its needs above those of any individual cog in the machine.

The GP's comments in this subthread make it pretty clear their opinion of business owners, executives, even middle and lower management are mustache-twirling villain billionaires (or billionaire wannabes) trying to suck every last penny out of their poor witless employees.

HR will bring it up, because it's a KPI they track. They don't tell you this and you have no idea what the threshold is, so the manager can't help you beyond a vague "HR won't approve the higher rating I want to give due to your in office attendance".

What I don’t understand is why people tolerate this. Of course companies will do this and worse if people let them.

People tolerate this, coz companies fired a lot of them recently.

A lot of ppl on the market means we have no leverage in discussion.

The only viable option here is to make yourself non-replaceable. Stuff as much knowledge in your head as possible, share bare minimum, use non-standard tech stack, write no documentation, ground as much project on yourself.

And be fired for your terrible technical judgement instead.

And in the interim, before you're non-replaceable (which very, very few people actually are even if they follow your suggestions), you'll definitely be fired for being an asshole to your coworkers, barely doing half your job, and as jensens said having horrific technical judgment. And rightfully so, and now there's a company of people who know you and what kind of coworker you are.

Several times in my career I've had my boss or one of my boss's peers send someone's resume to me because our tenures at another company lined up. Sometimes I knew them, and sometimes someone otherwise very well qualified for a job on the technical merits didn't get an initial interview because they were horrible to work with.

this will be countered by denied code reviews and security reviews because of the nonstandard tech, forced to write documentation and finally knowledge sharing.

they won’t let you make yourself irreplaceable

> Stuff as much knowledge in your head as possible, share bare minimum, use non-standard tech stack, write no documentation, ground as much project on yourself

This will work only if your manager has 62 IQ.

I've found it doesn't work, they just lay you off anyway and when things are bad afterwards they just accept that it's the cost of layoffs.

Because employees have no leverage in negotiations. In addition, your job is directly tied to your own well-being, as well as the well-being of your family.

You mean an employer set an expectation, checks to see if people are meeting the expectation, and holds them accountable if they aren't? What incredible bs.

companies shouldn’t care the physical location of an employee, only that they’re meeting performance goals.

why do you need to see me to do my job?

Companies need you to perform a certain amount of defined work (as captured by performance goals) to keep the lights on, and aside from some jobs that require the physical touch this can be done remotely just fine, but what they really want to see is the impromptu networking between people doing entirely different jobs to discover new opportunities where there is overlap. That is where the magic happens.

Having worked from home for 20+ years, I'm in favour of remotely working more than just about anyone, but I'd be remiss to claim that said networking isn't harder remotely. I don't think it is impossible, but it is different, and not very well understood. I expect most people working from home don't engage in this much, if at all.

Now, keep in mind that the people running these companies are every day normal people who aren't particularly intelligent. They don't really know or understand how to get people working remotely to network better (or even at all). All they know is that there is some chance that if you bump into someone else at the water cooler that you might start talking, so they lean into that. Even that is not a great solution, but it is seen as being better than what happens remotely.

I assume from what description of your job you have given us that you are in a problem solving-type role (e.g. software development). There is the problem they face. Here is your time to shine!

> see is the impromptu networking between people doing entirely different jobs to discover new opportunities where there is overlap. That is where the magic happens.

there is none of this happening regularly enough to warrant coming in the office full time. teams are already so isolated they cannot interact much less network and converse. then you also have distributed teams, so you end up with offices that have 1 team member in them with the other coworkers working in some entirely different field with no hope of ever interacting.

so again, why do they need to see people work? this is an outdated idea

> there is none of this happening regularly enough to warrant coming in the office full time.

Even if it only happens just once, that's more than enough justification on the employer's side. That's a huge win.

The employee can choose if the slim chance of a win is equally valuable to them or not. It takes two to tango, as they say.

> so again, why do they need to see people work?

I like that you assume they are actually taking time to watch and not just on the golf course.

It really depends of when the expectation is set. Amazon right now has a combination of people hired when:

* Teams when working 5 days in office, but nobody checked (other than maybe your direct manager) and you could wfh if you needed it to

* Teams were completely remote

* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times in the week

* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times a week for a certain amount of time

And now the expectation is completely different to all of those. Again.

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