Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know if it's bad management per se. I think some people are very well suited for remote; some people aren't. Probably a rough extension of introversion/extroversion in the people mix.

If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general).

Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan.

The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse.

My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.

I think both problems are real, and your last paragraph really gets at why. People and jobs vary widely, and so does the quality of management. If you have a strong business and reasonably mature teams, you might not even realize problems with your management culture and practice are until something big changes; conversely, if you have strong managers you might have been able to soak up a lot of personnel and job issues before they got attention because some unappreciated middle managers put a lid on potential problems first.

In all cases, you really someone with time to look at the business as a whole to evaluate these things. For example, one of the things which has made RTO unproductive for many workers are open plan offices, which is a really easy problem to see and fix if workplace productivity is someone’s job but not if the RTO push is being driven by politics or the need to justify leases.

Agreed, but falling commercial real estate prices will allow some forward thinking companies to go back to private offices for developers, which arguably is the best solution (apart from commute/flexibility) for most, productivity wise.

Funny you mention fraud... I worked for a company for quite a while that was absolutely dedicated to WFH for engineering - but swore up and down that sales just couldn't work without "bullpen" office setups.

Come to find out at least one entire office was engaged in widespread misreporting and fabrication. Turns out fraud is pretty tempting when you can easily avoid any paper trail.

yeah I feel like blaming management is like blaming teachers when students got bad scores during remote-schooling. You can give them all the resources they need to succeed, but if they'd rather go to the dog park in the middle of the day, there's not much that can be done.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.

The metaphor breaks down a bit when you consider that teachers don't generally get to pick their students while organizations get to choose their employees. Failing to choose the right employees is a failure of management.

Unfortunately many of the employees _most interested_ in remote work are such because they want to do things other than work.

Not all. I work with some remotes who are awesome. But the 24 year olds who want to work remotely from Thailand aren't getting their shit done.

Re:introvert/extravert I suspect it's the reverse.

Extraverts, broadly, aren't afraid of picking up the phone and calling you to chat about the email they sent you three minutes ago while driving and also on mute in a zoom; introverts can use remote work to be unreachable in a way they can't if you can just walk over and impose yourself on them.

Seeing posts on here and Blind advocating for interviews to go back on-site due to cheating next to "RTO bad" posts is wild af.

It's wilder still that the handful of times I've dealt with this have all been before RTO!

I don't mean completely in person, but I do expect a lot of companies will want to meet the person in real life at least once. Which adds huge logistics problems.

Btw I'm not saying 'cheating', that's one thing. I am meaning industrial scale fraud with remote candidates. Eg having one person interview then another (much worse) person gets the job. There are gangs that are going to almost unbelievable lengths to do this.

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