I'm finishing my degree at the start of next year. I can only imagine to what world I will get into, after the pandemic, quarantines, and remote jobs. It's going to be such a different world compared to a few years ago. Damn.
After 9/11 there was talk about nobody wanting to work or live in skyscrapers. That the world was forever changed. Nothing really changed except the state gained more power and people lost some power. Last I checked, there were cranes all over manhattan throwing up skyscrapers left and right.
After the 2008 financial crisis, there was talk about breaking apart "too big to fail" banks and reigning in their financial shenanigans and the world was forever changed. Nothing really changed except the banks got bigger and now housing market is the hottest it has ever been.
After the Trump election, there was talk about end of democracy, financial collapse, end of globalization, etc and the world was forever changed. Nothing really changed except the state gained more power, the wealthy got wealthier.
Every few years there is a crisis that is going to change the world forever. After a few months/years, people forget and move on, til the next crisis that is going to end/change the world.
You'll realize this eventually. It's why news really should be taken with moderation. Too much news and it become poisonous and unhealthy for your well being.
Everyone eventually learns that "life goes on". In a few years, covid will seem like ancient history and most people will have moved on to other things.
Life went on after the far deadlier 1918 pandemic. Life went on after ww2. Life went on after 9/11. You'll be alright.
I am unsure why you are being downvoted, but I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment. You are not attempting to downplay any of those tragedies or the current pandemic, but I do believe it will eventually end. Or it will end us. Theres only two ways forward.
Seems like there might be another way forward, one in which we all muddle along with an ongoing pandemic that doesn't wipe us out but keeps evolving and infecting and killing significant numbers of people. We continue opening and closing economies, rushing out experimental vaccines, and begin seeing larger numbers of long term effects of the disease and attempts to mitigate it.
Life went on after the Great Depression, but it left its mark on the people who lived through it. Isn't that kind of a cliche?
The US has mostly escaped things that affected people more in other countries, like, say, WWI and WWII. So to some extent, I think saying "you'll get over it" is assuming the US will continue to be fortunate.
If you don't believe in divine providence looking over "fools, drunks, and the USA", it's not logical to count on it in the future.
> After the Trump election, there was talk about end of democracy, financial collapse, end of globalization
It's important that people understand the following before the 2022 and 2024 elections, where Trump and R will gain several seats.
Trump is a patriot - he represents America first, which is good for the US economy and citizens, and thus anti-globalization. That's what MAGA means.
Ironically, it's Democrat leaders that are pro-globalization and anti-American, proven by the current porous border and relaxation of sanctions against China. (The border is open to increase people who are predicted to vote D, and to lower wages for company backers of the party.)
We will have a financial collapse if Biden's Marxist policies make people wonder if the US dollar should continue to be the global currency - the US has a 1% economic advantage by being that currency.
Why do Democrat leaders behave that way? Because when you live in a gated community and have your own security, the rest of America can go screw themselves. (20/25 Democratic city mayors have their own security, yet want to "defund the police" for others.)
And wtf is this?
Incoherent Biden Town Hall Excerpt (with Don Lemon of CNN enabling it)
The point of Op-Eds is to be hot takes. They're supposed to be opinions that the editorial board disagrees with. They've got columnists on staff to write the respectable opinions.
Is "only publish non controversial opinions" really what we want from our news sources?
Op-eds are supposed to be interesting opinions the editorial board feels are worth sharing. While they may go against the leanings of the editorial board, they should be of the same caliber as what they would write themselves. Publishing an op-ed is an endorsement not necessarily of the article's thesis, but of the quality of the argument in favor of the thesis.
Publishing hot takes devoid of substance and lacking intellectual merit reflects poorly on the institution and the editors who made the call to do so, regardless of what position they advocate.
I disagree. Intellectual merit is in the eyes of the beholder. Sometimes it is valuable to hear a view for the simple fact that it is held by a lot of people or it's influential. If a bunch of people hold a view that I despise, at the very least I'd like to have a sense of why. I have no desire to have my own opinion regurgitated back at me. And no, I'm not afraid of readers of the NY Times being swayed by "propaganda." NY Times readers as a whole have a pretty firmly set worldview. One Op-Ed won't make a damn bit of difference.
“It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias.” (p. 2) -- Manufacturing Consent
Which is more valuable for real discussion: hearing an opinion you disagree with argued well and thus coming to see why it is widely held, or hearing a view you disagree with argued poorly, further convincing you that its adherents are simply morons?
If you're not getting the opinions you want to read, it's easy enough to pick up a different paper. The danger of a bad op-ed is tricking people into thinking they are getting both sides of the story when they aren't.
I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry. They are absolutely fucked. Like Wile E Coyote running over a cliff, they are desperate to not look down. In December 2019, I asked some guys in wealth management, what’s a hot tip, and they were all about Commercial Real Estate, it never goes down! I laughed, but then wondered, what would make it go down? Anyway, that question is now answered.
I’ve been working with a company that have done studies on remote work, at the beginning 4% of employees wanted to work from the office 100% of the time. 6 months later it was 2%.
Problem #1, Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them.
Problem #2, people new to the workforce are most likely to want to come into the office some of the time as they are struggling to figure out the culture and finding help and mentoring. This is actually another failing of employers.
Well Apple engineering involves (for some divisions) access to exorbitantly expensive capitalized equipment.
WFH for folks in engineering labs with millions of dollars of shared instruments doesn't make sense.
That was the fundamental reality inside Apple engineering that I lived, anyway: the millions of dollars of instruments for digital design and test can't be repurchased per engineer.
That makes sense, but I have a hunch that the majority of people that work at Apple (at least in the US, and not say the actual manufacturing plants [thats probably outsourced to many companies in asia]) don't need to work with expensive hardware for their day to day work.
The reality of the situation, globally, is that the commercial real estate market was showing signs of rolling over prior to the pandemic (as well as many other markets), and the bailoutistan operations since sept 2019 repo market intervention continue to enable a lot of the paper of CRE that has/is used as collateral (and rehypothicated many times over) to put alot of entities exposed to it on life support…
However it does nothing for cashflows in the CRE that no longer exist, which is why the situation will continue to get worse with out continuously increasing the interventions in markets, and the forces that influence behavior in those markets (i.e NYT posts shilling someones cornered book to try and get peoples behaviors/preferences to change).
Arguably, there has been a long shift to remote work going on since the 90's. Anecdote: My dad has been working from home not too long after P&G sold his division to HP and then to BT, and I have been for 5 years prior to march 2020 (and continue to do so today).
It's like the 2020 trope of the construction worker saying that work-from-home won't work because how can they work from home?
Of course in every company there will be a subset of people who cannot do their job from home. Nobody is saying that every job can be done remotely. So it doesn't help to roll out the exceptions and say that nobody can work from home.
yeah except for the tens of thousands of software engineers they employee that have worked from home this entire year. iphone app devs don’t need expensive hardware
I know for a fact that Google Maps alone has over 1k SWE's. Chrome and android have several thousands, same with YouTube. Uber and snapchat and airbnb have thousands of SWEs.
Apple has dozens of products that are comparable to the ones listed. So either each of their SWE's is worth 100x other companies or my estimate is correct.
I'm curious about the vocal disdain for 'managers' here at HN. I know it's just a subset of folks voicing these opinions but I'm intrigued by the level of vitriol and consistency of the message.
I've been filing taxes since 1988 and I've only had one or two managers that I would say are truly incompetent. I would say most of my managers have rusty but relevant technical skills, have been open to my input, are generally willing to negotiate through disagreements and, my favorite, leave me alone. I've had a handful of legendary managers, a word I am tempted to put in quotes because they inspired me, helped me grow, and left me in a much better state than they found me.
Having managed multiple teams myself, it can be a fuckin' slog. There have always been one or two extremely high maintenance people on the team, conflicts to resolve, bullshit HR stuff to take care of, commitments to defend, bullshit to block, misses to explain and some amount of time tending to vestigial organizational dependencies that somehow are impossible to shake. And that's without immigration to deal with...that's an entire mess of its own.
That is all in addition to actually developing some type of relationship with each member of the team. Trying to get a feel for their communication style, pull(!) out from them some idea of what they see on the horizon, continuously observe their interaction with the team and overall performance at their job. Look for recommendations to help them improve in areas that need it and then run that through what you've learned about them in order to deliver it in a way in which they will be receptive. Mine progress for evidence of efforts from the underrecognized and let them know they are seen.
Plan for promos when the time is right, begin evangelizing your employee early on, work on promo package with them, mine your network for support as you educate your employee on what is needed to get it done.
Then you have the periodic dumpster fires that 99% of the time are entirely avoidable. Intra and inter-team fights, liars and cowboys breaking shit, last minute disclosures of untenable delivery gaps, HR-issues, extra curricular issues, etc.
It's not a particularly easy job and I would say that the combination of technical and interpersonal skills that would be required to meet expectations I see voiced here and elsewhere are in extremely limited supply. I know I have and will continue to fall short of that standard many times.
You’ve said it yourself that your favorite behavior of managers is to leave you alone. But what’s their use then? If apart from having autonomy you only have negative experiences with management your idea of them ranges from useless to harmful.
I haven’t seen what they do in the background and am working for not so long but so far managers have not really impressed me.
The best managers I've worked with unblock ICs, and defend from company-wide politics. Maybe set direction at a team level. Ordering smart, creative people around just obliterates 99% of their value.
Managers are also like movie directors. I’ve been on projects where smart people can focus on the wrong parts of a project. Sometimes it takes one person to orchestrate the band, hone in one what is the true impactful work. Shepard the sheep through to the finish line, especially if they are headed in an ambiguous direction.
Now, what’s all that got to do with having butts in a seat that you can physically see? Jack shit really.
I think what you are talking about with the former and technical leads and product owners, not typical people managers. There is overlap, as it gets fuzzy, but most managers I've experienced have terrible technical insights and are instead an active blocker to great results.
I think it depends on what you want. I don't spend a lot of time dealing with my manager. He leaves me alone. But he also deals with all the stuff coming down from above so my job is just coding. To me that is a win as I don't want to have to deal with anything on his schedule.
> favorite behavior of managers is to leave you alone. But what’s their use then?
To allow you to be left alone to be happy and productive.
With an ineffective manager, you'll be bombarded with all the interruptions and BS from the layers above and every side. With a great manager you won't be bothered by any of this, leaving you to be happy and productive.
In my humble opinion I think it might be easier than that: people don’t like to be managed, and people don’t like to have supervisors. It feels more like a personality issue than an actual work problem.
"they inspired me, helped me grow, and left me in a much better state than they found me.
Having managed multiple teams myself, it can be a fuckin' slog. There have always been one or two extremely high maintenance people on the team, conflicts to resolve, bullshit HR stuff to take care of, commitments to defend, bullshit to block, misses to explain and some amount of time tending to vestigial organizational dependencies that somehow are impossible to shake."
The vast majority of HN commenters are young and have never been managers themselves, so don't have much appreciation for what the role really entails or its difficulties. Also, tech seems to have a higher percentage of bad managers than some other industries I've worked around, possibly because a lot of tech workers don't actually want to be managers but get forced into the role either by promotion or pursuit of money/power.
I'm assuming that by "managers" we mean project managers here... These are a few things which come to mind which managers are involved with, which developers are often protected from:
1. Financial decisions
2. Client relationship management
3. Proposal writing
4. Progress reporting
5. Managing changes in scope/schedule
5. Delivery Forecasting
6. Accountability for delivery
It depends on what you think management should be like.
In practice, I mostly speak to my boss once every week or two weeks (if even that, I have gone two months without it while remote in a past role). They exist as someone who stops by once in a while and otherwise does not exist. This has been the case for both my current job and my last job. I can't imagine that either had any clear view of what I did day to day.
For me, that works. But I have known a lot of co-workers who have an issue with that as to them that impacts their advancement in the organization and they feel unrecognized as their manager couldn't tell someone else what they did that week.
I think many want an engaged super champion manager they work closely with.
You describe the workload of a conscientious manager well. The problem is that the work is largely not necessary. The team would do just fine without you, handling the same problems closer to the source and interacting with the rest of the company directly or through a non-managerial coordinator. All the effort a manager must undertake just to maintain some familiarity with the situation on the ground is an unfortunate waste as it will never be perfect and always will introduce additional steps and noise and need for corrections into the communication chain, or worse, just lead to misrepresentation and flawed personnel calls.
It can indeed be amazing to work with an inspiring and challenging person but that does not need to be a manager. Any inspiring manager could probably have been an even greater coworker.
Hopefully that makes some sense, and yes, I am criticizing myself as well in this comment.
I've had good managers and bad managers. The damage done by the bad managers was far bigger than the help I got from the good managers; in the worst case the manager lied and forced me out and there was nothing I could do. It's a position where there seems to be very little accountability for doing it poorly and no way of dealing with those who do - see Bezos' famous "You should quit."
For my part, I’ve worked with people who sincerely claim to have never had a good manager like the one you describe, informing their opinion that management borders on expensive futility.
I think both experiences are valid. I think good managers are in as short supply as good engineers are, and good people generally. Both hiring markets tend to be markets for lemons. Hyper growth startups that need to fill headcount can’t afford to be choosy, and within companies like this the Pareto principle applies. Unfortunately many people have decades+ of experience with the 80% and have never witnessed the 20%.
I have about the same length of a career, and the majority of managers I have had have been poor. Except for one, the best managers just left me alone. The worst are the ones that try to help and be involved and caused great people to leave, screwed up projects, and caused a great deal of damage to organizations.
However, on the opposite side, technical leaders are awesome. Most of mine have been great. They are team captains, leading through inspiration and excitement and performance. I love leaders.
The push back to the office is at least 50% driven by managers that are freaking out because their uselessness has been revealed. Many orgs and people I know of have been performing better during the pandemic - now it is tough to correlate to overall remote performance, since the situation is different. In normal remote work, you can interact with other people easier, can visit your team on fun trips, and generally be more social, which has the downside that you aren't as focused on your work, either. Also, you don't have your kids at home, which is huge.
But if I were running a company, I'd take notice at the fact that many managers can be cut, and that a good chunk of management is merely gaining and holding on to power via social manipulation.
I've done management and leadership throughout my career, although predominantly I've been an IC, and I see managers taking credit for the good things that happen and believing they are responsible for them, and the opposite for the bad things. When in reality, many bad things are the managers fault, and rarely do they have much responsibility for the good things.
I have a very dim view of management in general, although there are the rare really good ones, but they are almost always the "get out of the way" kinda.
I'm sure there are cases where that is true, but doubt (hope?) it is not the norm. Perhaps instead of assuming they have zero value, maybe you don't have visibility of their value and contribution?
Per 1 and 2: my brother got his first internship at a miserable finance firm in June 2020. All meetings were camera off. No introductions, welcomes, or onboarding whatsoever, just faceless screennames handing out assignments. Needless to say he's looking for a new job.
What I am seeing is managers, corporate side, HR and finance side people love cameras on. They are mostly dressed up and in their houses with cameras on. IT, Development, Engineering are cameras off. I prefer cameras off. On the one hand I could see it being kind of isolating and you aren't building those social connection, on the other, is that the place of work?
If you're just a name on the screen, you're easy to replace. Half-competent programmers are a dime a dozen in India, Eastern Europe, and South America. And they know how to use Zoom too!
I work in software engineering, and it's frankly annoying to deal with the always camera off people in zoom meetings. Usually it's well correlated with bad audio too and you have to strain to understand them. I don't want to make an argument about it because they are usually rare, but if any of my 1:1 teammates was always video off then I would bring it up to them.
Get a good A/V setup people, you have the technical ability and it's one of your main job interfaces. At the very least use a wired headphone setup and microphone so we don't play walkie talkie games as echo cancellation mutes one of us dynamically and your bluetooth headset adds 100ms random delays and a lower bit rate of audio. Also do ethernet to remove the delays and packet drops from wifi.
I ask for camera-on whenever there are less than 5 persons in a call.
The fact of the matter is that most people (myself included) are able to read visual cues from others and adapt their message accordingly. Actual communication (which entails understanding) is just easier this way.
Frankly, I don't even understand the discussion about cameras. In the meetings I'm at, 80% of the time someone is either presenting slides, some document that is being discussed, some plots/figures, or code.
Even when that's not the case, nobody ever complained about the general cameras-off culture of the outfit, and I don't see any reason either.
Another finding, companies are struggling to attract talent and when they do hire, a substantial number of new hires aren’t even staying for 90 days. Easy for them to find a new remote job.
Some managers where I work tried to pressure people to have their cameras on. It was later implied this was based on personal assumptions about what the "big boss" preferred.
But then some people ignored it, and someone else said "wait, they can't make us, if they push it the union will back us up".
> Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them.
If a manager is struggling with a remote team, that’s usually a sign that they’re generally incompetent as a manager. There may be a few cases of good overall managers that struggle with remote. But they’re few and far between.
The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. It’s not a lack of training. Remote management is pretty much nothing more than basic management 101. Mediocre operators prefer in-office because it’s easier to kludge something that gives off the appearance of actual management.
When a team transitions to full remote, it’s like the tide going out and finding out who’s swimming naked. If companies were sensible, they’d embrace full remote because it quickly reveals where the weak points in the org chart are. And rather than capitulating to demands, any middle manager lobbying for a return to the office is probably a good candidate to trim the fat.
Many companies function on thick layers of bullshit [1]. I liked your metaphor: when the tide goes out we see the shit below the water. Managers don't like when they lose face.
[1]: please read David Graeber, may he rest in peace.
> The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers.
1000x this. Much of the time, people in management were promoted there because they were complete shit at line / front of house / customer or client-facing work and someone up top didn't feel like firing them that day. After all, if you were good at line work, why would they promote you away from it?
It makes perfect sense that they'd be complete shit at managing teams, too -- remote or in-person.
Do any of my parent comments have any actual management experience?
Because while it‘s super easy to ramble about managers, they‘re essential to any company that‘s larger than a dozen people.
Management attracts scorn. I have to ignore it as people who don‘t see the importance have no clue what it takes to build a winning team and company.
And while I‘m still trying to learn how to manage a remote team and getting good feedback, I hate it. As in, I utterly, completely despise it and I‘m close to burnout and think about leaving the profession to just do engineering on my own.
Maybe I still haven‘t figured it out, but I feel like I have the choice between still trying to connect to humans and suffer from Zoom fatigue — or go all-in on async, having the feeling that I‘m chatting all day with a black box of meaningless, replaceable NLP models.
It‘s lonely, it‘s tiring and I‘m so looking back to connecting to real humans. If you have tips, I welcome them.
Try to get a non-work private life with non-virtual contacts. Or maybe move to Sweden - it's more common to seek family and friends in your company - with all strings attached…
I’m from Sweden and most of my friends are old or current coworkers except for my oldest that’s from my school or university days. Is this not common elsewhere? If it’s not I think I should consider myself lucky as I believe that is a big factor in how much I enjoy going to work.
I’m somewhat split on remote or not. For me I enjoy work more at a office with my coworkers but having a commute around 30 minutes and not having the possibility of just eating whatever’s in the fridge or being able to split the responsibility of a sick child in smaller pieces than a full day makes the practicalities of remote work very nice.
I've been working/managing remote for 15-20 years. I agree with the posters, that the skills which make a manager successful can be executed remotely as well as in person.
Buy "High Output Management" by Andy Grove. Read it. I've read it cover to cover 6 times now and still find gold each time I review it.
It is hard to know everything about your situation from you post, but your more emphasized issue is you seem to be missing a 'real connection to real humans'. Yes, of course a manager needs to be connected to the team, and that empathy/earned respect is essential.... but it can be built using remote means as well as in person. You show respect through words and actions, those can be written as well as spoken. Maybe you personally put a lot of emphasis on the immediate feedback of face to face to feel that connection? Truth is, while that immediate feedback feels great and helps you tune your message, it isn't the foundation. The foundation is the thing you are getting the feedback on.
If the message is "Team, here is the goal for the week and why it matters", the foundation is that each person sees the goal and how their effort contributes to it. It is great when everyone high-fives around the room, but high-fives without the understanding are a false signal.
You are correct that managers are essential to building a winning team. You probably have a list of what roles/jobs/tasks a manager does to achieve this.
You could write down that list, and for each item write your current process for achieving it. You could then think about how you can map that process to a remote work framework.
> I agree with the posters, that the skills which make a manager successful can be executed remotely as well as in person.
I agree as well and just for the record, I wouldn't say I'm ineffective. We 10x'ed our revenue and tripled the team during the pandemic. I'm getting top notch reviews from my peers and I've got a kick-ass team around me that I really like.
It's just that my job itself went from an onsite one that I loved to a remote one which I absolutely hate, and I'm at loss about what to do with that or what I'm doing wrong.
I'll definitely check out your book suggestion though.
The scorn you read here is not against all management, but against the notion of "we can't manage remote employees effectively". Your results above show that it can be done even when you hate it, which most of us assumed was the case all along and we've been suffering the "back to work" talk track needlessly.
Yes, and my apologies. Your comment made it sound like you were new at this. But I think I found your profile on LI. If so, you are clearly highly experienced, and what you have done is pretty impressive. I'm not surprised that you get top reviews.
Also impressive that you have the professionalism to continue this despite your low mood.
Wish I could help more with the 'what you are doing wrong' bit. I wouldn't use those words, you probably aren't doing anything wrong. It sounds like you just miss being in the same room as your team. I get that, the human contact is real, and on-line is a thin and stale version of it.
You can be an effective leader either way, but yeah, emotionally there isn't a substitute for getting everyone in the same room.
I'm not the original poster, but I agree with the sentiment and can explain how it's not easier:
Take any number of "fundamentals" of management: having regular 1-1s, regular reviews, having planning meetings with the team, long term goal setting, operations reviews, etc, etc (yes, management is a lot of meetings).
If an office setting, you can feel like you're doing these on an ad hoc basis, and maybe you or others can do successfully this in an ad hoc way (although if this is the general way of doing things, and your org is large enough, I would guarantee there is a manager that isn't doing this well). But this way of managing completely falls on its face when people start going remote. If you aren't regularly scheduling this stuff then it's just not happening, or people are getting left out.
So I would say that remote management isn't easier, but it makes it very apparent who is doing the management basics, and who is not.
I'm down to bang out JIRA tickets from the comfort of my home in exchange for money. But that's as far as it goes. The skeuomorphism of "team" and the skeuomorphism of "culture" are vile.
I'm not going to "mentor" an object on my computer screen as if it were a human being who showed up to be my teammate.
That just shows a lack of understanding on your part. There is a human being on the other side with the same feelings and subjective experiences as in person.
You may argue that team and culture is reinforced by doing activities that intrinsically require you to be in person (e.g. board game, sports etc.)
But I don’t quite follow why you absolutely need to be in person to find mentoring someone worthwhile.
It does take some time for a new employee to figure out how to visibly contribute. Whereas more established ones have gained trust and confidence, so that they are considered fully engaged even when remote.
I wonder if a good hybrid approach would be that managers with reports having less than a year or two tenure, along with those new reports, go in to the office every day. At the end of that time the worker can work remotely. When the manager no longer has new reports, that manager can work remotely.
I'm likely biased in that I've run a nearly 100% remote team for almost a decade. I don't find it difficult (most of the time; some days trying to manage multiple geos when multiple escalations are in play can be trying, but having excellent, competent staff helps) but I do think it requires mindset and approach that is different from folks who operate from a "I need to see them in a desk" mentality.
It starts from hiring people that inspire trust, and then...trusting them. Get them their assignments, mentor/coach them when and where needed, but otherwise let them do the work. Let them shine on their own.
Metrics are largely measurable anywhere, if you picked the right ones.
Build esprit d'corps. The rest starts to fall into place naturally after...
Meanwhile she had the privilege of having a private office where she had a nursery installed for her newborn child. Doubly toxic, both to every remote worker and to every parent who has to take care of their children without being able to install a creche in their own office.
> I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry.
You're right.
Idea: I live out west, where there's not enough housing. I was walking by a now completely shuttered cluster of office buildings near me the other day and wondered two things. First, "wow, commercial real estate people must be sweating" and second, "why don't we rezone this all this stuff and turn it into apartments?"
There's a former office building near me that has been converted into an apartment hotel, so it's certainly possible if the zoning etc can be sorted out.
I hadn't even thought of that - but I do have several friends whose offices are downsizing due to WFH policies, so I wouldn't be surprised. Surely you could just repurpose some of the buildings into residential real estate though?
there is a good amount of research I've heard about that describes workers working more during the pandemic but having less productivity and more stress overall
hence why I think management want ppl back to the office, to get productivity back up - as unintuitive as that sounds
I'm only speaking for myself but I need to go back to the office. I have hobbies and friends, but most of my friends are busy with their kids as I am with mine, my hobbies are solitary and to be blunt, I miss the social aspect of the office and co-workers that frankly are also my friends with whom I can have fun conversations at lunch, coffee breaks with and such. I've actually entered a bit of a depression and I think that it's from working from home. I know my sentiments are not those of the majority, or at least if we are, we're not vocal about it. Also my cat stares at me all day.
Have you thought about finding more social hobbies like swing dancing, yoga or joining a sports rec league that will allow you to make friends outside of the workplace?
HN makes it seem like the majority is die hard work from home, but I guarantee you that you are by far the minority.
Remote work is not for everyone, it has its pros and cons. One of the biggest cons is isolation.
For a lot of people, the work place is an incredibly social place, and when you rely on that for your socializing (which is 100% okay!) then the impact of forced WFH very often leads to isolation and slight depression.
I personally prefer a mix, and believe you should use each for the strengths they have. Without a shadow of a doubt, casual collaboration is easier in person. Similarly, I’m far less disturbed at home.
At my current work, we’ve built up a work style where you decide yourself when you’re in and when you’re not. Notably though, this does mean that everything needs to assume everyone is fully remote for it to work well though.
most of my colleagues (40 odd engineers) might have been very enthusiastic about wfh at the start, but this has reverted to wanting to go back to the office for the social aspect of things with the understanding that wfh would be part of the equation going back.
So many absolutist opinions on remote work, but as someone who spent years doing both before the pandemic, I can say with some authority that there are pros and cons—it's not a one-size-fits-all thing. The biggest barrier was companies willing to go all in, as mixed on-site/remote meetings are terrible. So now that the we've broken the ice on this, the market will sort it out. Basically we're going to see a bunch of remote first companies dominate the war for talent, and we'll see some companies leveraging the strength of still being in-person. But individuals will have much more freedom to find a working arrangement that suits them. The landscape will shift in aggregate as a result of where this balances out, not as a result of arrogant op-ed writers who think they know what's right for everyone.
for me this is the trickiest part. A lot of people and companies are looking at hybrid as a sort of compromise but the brutal reality is that hybrid may be hellishly bad and lead to far worse outcomes than all on-premise or all-remote. I feel like there is a high risk of a lot of dumpster fire disasters and not sure which way it'll go in the end.
Make it standard practice to do meetings virtual whenever there is someone remote joining in. Most meetings will be virtual (and that's fine), and whenever a certain problem benefits from people meeting physically, just plan it.
> But individuals will have much more freedom to find a working arrangement that suits them.
Agree with your comment in general. On this point, I wonder if this is only true whilst power remains in the supply side of the labour market. When the next recession hits, maybe we'll see a migration of workers to where the main employers are.
I do wonder if remote working suits the workers a lot more than the employers.
I've come to look at remote/onsite preference as a sort of dietary restriction/preference: some people's personality/temperament absolutely makes remote 10x better. For some people it's a tasteless/flavorless existence. Both can be right. The problem in a company setting is that we're all 'eating' off the same menu. So, my guess is longer-term companies will sort out to remote-only, onsite-only or light-hybrid (sort of like 'Vegan Fridays' at the cafeteria...)
Every company with even an ounce of asset has at least some part of it lying in real estate. Corporate real estate is going to be the biggest loser if WFH becomes the norm post-covid.
In other words, it's in almost every corporate's best interest to push people towards offices.
Add to this the fact that they get to lobby politicians many of whom invest heavily in real estate.
Do not be surprised if governments create tax hurdles for companies operating remotely.
I couldn't disagree more strongly with the author of the linked article. I'd almost call it pro-remote-work propaganda.
But, I say that as a software developer who is extroverted (at least relative to the profession as a whole), and is in my early 30s. Working from home can be super isolating and depressing, and I would rather leave a lucrative career than start another remote job (I already quit my previous remote job, currently living off savings rather than work remotely).
I know some people who like working remotely. But I also have friends who hate it as I do, and are super eager to return to the office (some already have, at least on a part-time/hybrid basis. The two biggest factors are see are introversion vs extroversion, and whether they live with other people. My extroverted friend whose wife works at an in person job, and is thus alone all day, hates it. Another friend who lives by herself hates it. A third whose social life centered on work hated it, and wound up moving in with her parents despite being in her 30s just to have some other people around.
Productivity-wise, I agree with the studies I've seen showing more time, but no more results. I think of my friend who is not confident in his job security and is working at least 50% more hours than in his pre-pandemic in-person job; I've told him several times his colleagues probably don't realize how many hours he is putting in or how effective he is, because he only interacts with about three people and it's all remote. In the first couple months of his job, before his workload went sky-high, he complained that some of his colleagues were completely burnt out and unproductive; now it's no mystery why some of his colleagues are like that.
Another reason I think it's introvert vs extrovert is my conversations with recruiters. I'm that odd software developers who enjoys talking with recruiters, at least the ones who take the time to get to know you. Almost if not 100% of the recruiters I talk with miss being in person. Most of them are young. And guess what, recruiting is a highly extroverted profession.
My prediction for the software industry is there are going to be a lot of people switching jobs over the next year or two, as the people who want to be in the office but are stuck at remote gigs leave, and similarly the people who want to be remote but are stuck at in office gigs leave. Some people will probably prefer hybrid too, but most of the people I know have strong opinions on the topic, and I wouldn't be surprised if hybrid mostly falls by the wayside once uncertainty around covid protocols subsides.
Small addendum: I've also noticed that, especially among the more extroverted developers, people who were on a team that went remote tend to be happier than people who join a team that is already remote. I think a lot of this is that the pre-pandemic team members already had good rapport and communication among themselves, and could use that to bridge over to being remote. Whereas when people joined teams as new members post-March 2020, it was much harder for them to build that camaraderie and - importantly - trust with their colleagues.
On the team I joined mid-pandemic, one of the ways this evidenced itself was higher turnover among the people who joined after March. The tech lead also noticed universally slower uptake on team-specific knowledge among the new folks, compared to when previous folks had joined. None of the new folks became team experts in the year I was there, despite having the past experience that would suggest it would be likely they would. And generally, the team continued to rely on its pre-pandemic experts.
All this is having joined a remote team where I think I would have really enjoyed being on the team in the office, and which I know from industry colleagues was a successful team pre-pandemic. Even with those advantages, joining remotely was rough.
In other words, I think we may still be in the honeymoon period for remote work appearing productive among the industry at large. For some people, it may work well in general, and if you specifically recruit those people you may be able to build a successful remote team (some companies did it pre-pandemic, after all). But across the industry, I suspect remote teams will become less productive over time as experienced members switch jobs, and (if they aren't the type that naturally likes being remote) experiences the slower uptake and more isolating experience of being on a team where they've never met their colleagues in real life.
I'm not sure how much I buy this. I fit the introvert profile pretty heavily, with most of my time spent on computers or DIY stuff growing up. The main thing for me is that I'm very entrepreneurial, so my life centers very heavily around work and sometimes side projects. This made the transition to WFH very painful as I no longer had a real way to separate the "work me" from the "home me". Burnout soon came on, and even looking back at rough proxy metrics like KLoC or time in meetings, I completely dipped in Feb 2020 and never recovered. Learning has also severely slowed down. So yeah, as much as I do not enjoy the prospect of city life again, I am ready to go back.
I feel like I should chime in here. I love going out and partying. I love meeting new people face-to-face. Yet I strongly, strongly prefer working remote as opposed to going to an office. I do not need an office to supply me with human contact - I can go find human contact on my own. Indeed, I much prefer finding human contact on my own rather than at the office because at the office, I have to be careful and somewhat repressed if I do not want to endanger my job, whereas in many other social contexts I can be much freer and truer to myself.
As much as I've enjoyed remote work, I can't help but wonder if it makes offshoring more attractive to companies based in western countries. If hiring locally is more expensive and offers no real benefit over offshoring, why keep doing it?
I agree, I think it will very much be a "be careful what you wish for" type of situation in the end.
Time zones I think will be the biggest advantage to hire within the western hemisphere, nobody likes the PST <-> IST timezone meeting gap, there aren't many to hire in latin america and they speak English well and communicate well. If latin america had a large base of engineers to hire in the first place, I think many places would choose there just on a timezone and english communication skills basis.
But you see big compensation gaps even between NYC / SFO / SEA and the rest of the USA, so you could very well see a drop from that.
Exactly right. If your role can be done remotely, you will soon find yourself competing against the international market. It’s shortsighted to think that your value to the company is just completing development tasks which are easily completed by cheap offshore labour.
The cost of office space in Bangalore is not high. Offshore developers are not some secret mystery that corporate managers have never heard from.
If the benefits outweighed the cost, companies would have already offshored well before the pandemic. It’s not like WFH changes that calculus. If a BigCo would rather pay a programmer in Bangalore over one in Boise, than they almost certainly would also prefer him to one in Mountain View too.
An offshore branch imposes a lot of inconveniently long distance work (set up and recruitment or acqui-hiring, and then management) on the "home" staff, while an offshore contractor is always high risk compared to a close one.
I'm working remote (on and off) since 2012, mostly in the same timezone. I never felt the danger of being replaced by someone in a cheaper country.
Perhaps the problem with offshoring is not just the fact that the people are working remote. What about (very) different timezones, different working culture, different culture of communication etc.?
If offshoring was going to be successful, it would have been at some point in the last thirty years.
Inevitably what I see is that some company tries to outsource some function, to save some money, or just because they don't want to deal with it themselves, and then the experience is so bumpy and acrimonious that they bring it back in house after eighteen months or two years.
Remote work enabled me to live outside of a busy city I only lived in for employment opportunities, afford property as a result, gain back 10 hours of commuting time a week, spend less money on commuting and eating out. If the price of that is missing out on HR organised 'fun' that's fine - I can be at the bar with friends at 5:05pm anyway.
Be careful what you wish for. If your role can be done fully remotely, you will soon find yourself competing against the international market instead of just the local one.
I hear this a lot and I don't buy it. There's still a big advantage to being in the same (or +/-a few hrs). I work in a remote team right now with people across the world. It is hard to make meeting times where everyone can join. There's also laws that make it easier to hire nationally vs internationally.
This claim is more a scare tactic than a real warning.
In Germany the market decided already. After years of propaganda by consulting firms how India will develop all software for pennies soon, companies in Germany are abandoning near and farshoring to eastern EU countries and India en masse because it caused more problems than it solved. VW for example ended all software contracting and now does software development themselves. So I'm not worried.
I am with you on your stance on outsourcing. But we decouple that narrative from various countries. Some of the software produced in Germany is absolute crap and I've seen software made locally in India be a lot better in quality. For eastern european countries I onow for fact that the developers there dont compromise on salary esp the educated ones. Just because a country isnt as rich doesnt mean that they are worse in every aspect. By that logic Saudi Arabia or UAE would be a power house.
I absolutely agree with this. Sure, there are a lot of bad developers in India, but guess what? There are also bad developers everywhere else on this planet. People forget that the scale of the pool of developers over there is huge and they overlook the exceptional talent, which while a small fraction of the whole market is still an enormous number of resources.
Just to be clear: I never made a statement about quality of software. It's mostly because of timezones, cultural differences, and language.
I specifically mentioned India because more than one consulting firm told me that India would be the future and software developers would not be needed in Germany anymore, only project managers.
No need for snark. All evidence points away from your point. Why should companies like Apple, Amazon, Google want their employees back in the office if they could get remote work for cheap?
VW made a multi-billion investment against off-shoring and SV companies pay hundreds of thousands for webdevs that completed six week bootcamps, just for them to be in SV.
What laws? "Hiring internationally" is not a thing, you either hire international one man consulting firms that invoice you, or you open up a subsidiary in their country to hire them as an employee of that subsidiary, in which case the laws of their country applies, not yours
Those aren't the only two options - there are loads of contracting agencies. You can deal with (and pay) their US office, and that money goes to their in-country subsidiary. You can get a modest-size team in Latin America this way.
Thing is, the rates at these agencies (at least the LatAm ones) have run up to the point where they're not so far from the US. You can spend $80 USD an hour easily.
Well, outsourcing has been tried and has arguably been a failure in the past. Are you suggesting that vicinity was the sole reason for outsourcing not being successful?
funny you automatically assume them being the one on the "losing" side. I'm the one geting a job that pays 1.5x thanks to remote. It does come with cons for both me and my team in regard to logistic of meetings.
The biggest cons for me is that I don't have the choice to be on many random meetings which sound annoying on the surface but are good for building rapport and getting involved in company initiatives you whouldn't know.
Unless the company is completely async, there are always advantages to working in HQ (albeit virtually).
I work remotely (on and off) since 2012. Neither directly nor indirectly have I ever seen offshoring being considered because of people working remote.
In my experience, people working remote are often in the same timezone or even in the same area. Thus, they can easily come to the office if needed. They often share the same working habits, the same culture of communication and they speak the same language. This does not alway apply to offshoring.
i've been working with international clients for quite some time before the pandemic, and the local talent pool has been severely exhausted for several years now, so... remote has been a reality for a long time now.
Why do they so badly want us back in the offices? I really don't understand what they stand to lose by SWEs working remotely.
I don't know anyone that actually want to be back in the office full time, some are ok with part-time work.
Most people seem to be (anecdotally at least) reporting that they and their teams are more productive at home and their quality of life is improved because they aren't wasting time commuting.
Businesses could save money by renting smaller offices or doing away with offices completely.
Good engineers are just going to jump ship to wherever they can work fully remotely.
Just as a counter point, I can't wait to be back in the office.
Remote work, while granted is hyper productive, I've never felt so disconnected from my teammates. There are people I used to have contact with daily that I haven't even slacked with in months. A chat/Zoom window is a much higher barrier to conversation than meeting for lunch, coffee, hallway paths crossing, waiting for the bus etc. I'm completely out of touch with what they're working on, aside from little blurbs in stand-ups. We have all become little siloes. I miss whiteboard conversations.
And that's to say nothing about the personal connections that have suffered. As adults, the place where you spend the most time with non-friends is the workplace, so that's the best bet at making new friends (in the same way school is for adolescence).
The funny thing is, when I was in the office, I felt most productive when I was given long stretches of time to just do focused work. But productivity is not the end goal of a career. It's collaboration and team achievement.
I have a feeling that the powers that be that are beating the back to work drum recognize some of these aspects. Obviously they see the productivity metrics, but they see the amount disconnect as well.
> I've never felt so disconnected from my teammates.
That's a valid point, but having everyone back in the office isn't the only solution to that problem. It may be the best solution, but seems like the easiest rather than the best.
It’s about status and control. The pandemic revealed many useless employees in the management layer. They’re trying to make the case they aren’t useless by asserting the need to return to the office where they can “practice their craft”.
Frankly the best I can come up with is:
1. Because then think they can and it makes them feel good to be surrounded by their minions
2. To curb the other things you can do while working from home which are seen as a threat to 1
Love working remotely. Day to day comradery and communication is hard to replicate in the digital world though at least for me. Example: I walked by my reports office grumbling about a new network rebuild and the current state of our docs and he mentioned as I was passing how about Netbox. Well guess what I’d probably still be grumbling today except I’m knee deep in getting Netbox implemented. Going to make life a lot simpler for the next Sysadmin. That likely would not have happened if we were a remote team.
The problem is it’s not sustainable to build an org around grumbling. If problems are only getting discovered in serendipitous hallway encounters, then that means a lot of problems aren’t getting discovered at all.
Remote first may be painful in the short term. But in the long term it’s much healthier as it forces the org to rationalize structured lines of communication.
That is just one form of communication that you cannot easily replicate in a remote work force and another is social interaction. I have found that it is the glue that holds organizations together and helps keep teams producing quality work. With remote first I can see teams becoming individuals and thought processes becoming siloed. Through the pandemic I’ve seen our department pre covid, then during the pandemic we went mostly remote first then now as we are all back in the office with remote allowed on a less frequent basis. Both moral and productivity have improved since our return. It fun to work again and that also means it will be more than “just a job” as remote work can become.
I live in New York City where apartments are small and rents are high. I don't live alone. What remote work essentially does it makes the shared space in our apartment smaller since there are more people in it more often. In effect it shrinks your apartment.
If I am working for someone else I think they should bear the cost of renting the room where I am working in. If I'm not in the office they can use my share of the office-space to something else. They won't need so much space and thus will pay less rent.
So I think remote work is in many cases in the interest of the employers, at least financially. I do believe that in-person contacts are valuable. But I haven't seen it discussed much that remote work in effect shrinks the place where you live.
sometimes i have difficulties "leaving work" when I'm in the flow. so i started wearing "work clothes" to remind myself "i need to go home" and change into home clothes.
meetings are more time consuming and annoying in general. "can you hear me? can you see my shared screen?"
i'd prefer a 2/3 or 3/2 days wfh/office arrangement.
sometimes the office environment actually helps me to focus better. and i miss the ping pong table..
I am running job interviews and candidates ask to work remotely often, even from junior candidates that need at least 6-12 months of development to be truly useful to us. We teach valuable stuff, data engineering, we offer good salaries, they know they will get into a lucrative carrier with us, yet they think they can do all of this remotely. I have to tell them - it’s not realistic. It’s not realistic to learn complex concepts without meeting your more experienced colleagues at least 2-3 times per week. Online courses can only go so far, same with zoom calls and slack. Some candidates understand my point, some don’t, I am sorry for those who don’t. Of course there are people that are self-driven and can do all remotely, but in my experience if you need to develop you are much better off being in an office with people that can mentor you daily.
> It’s not realistic to learn complex concepts without meeting your more experienced colleagues [...]
Eh, dunno.
A) It's not the complex concepts that benefit from physical proximity to other members of our species, in my experience; it's the subtleties, the little tricks, hacks, and bits of hidden knowledge that are really amenable to someone shuffling over to your desk, grabbing your keyboard, and going "here look at this weird way of doing it" in 20 seconds of physical interaction. Junior people can learn complex things remotely, but maybe physical proximity can give them those little details better. Which leads me to
> [...] at least 2-3 times per week.
B) So let'em come in twice a week and work from home the other 3. What's the problem? One of my siblings hires junior people at their firm and this is the way they've been operating since before the pandemic. The kids get trained up real nice and are happier in their work not having to commute 3x/wk.
We already have a 2-3 days work from office policy but for some that is not good enough, they want full remote. Many other IT companies are now offering full remote... but I think it’s not in the interest of the employees that need to develop and learn. Again it’s my own experience, I might be wrong, I am just suggesting to approach this topic with care.
Screen sharing and cameras go a long way, office networking and what people say offline can be important, but I fully believe it is possible for tech work to be fully remote. Paired programming is possible if not better while remote.
Programmers don't have the best hygiene in my experience and not having a sweaty meatbag in the chair next to me while we share concepts is justification enough.
Perhaps if your work isn't all on a computer you can't get around this, but at least for programming I firmly believe in remote work.
When then debates and fights settle, I want to see remote as a genuine option given to employees. I have worked in "offshore" model most of my life, staying in India and being an early engineer to many startups around the world. I used to be very extroverted by nature.
In the last few years I have become more introverted. The transition started when I was living in Germany. Now I have fewer friends, but higher quality. No parties at all and I miss none of it. I live in a small village in the Himalayas, feel super connected to nature, feel happier on average. I just started a contract with a US East based early stage startup. I will travel and surely spend time in in-person huddles, but I want to be a remote worker for as long as my nature fits this mode.
I frequent online programming communities a lot more these days and I feel some of the best creators out there (not just in software) hone their skills by themselves, in themselves. I really do not get the point of "managing" people anyway. 1 or 2 short calls a day are enough even for fast paced work. If teams can not understand subject matter through documentation and asynchronous communication, then something is off.
Also, a remote company leans more toward documentation and online co-ordination. I see this as an asset to any company.
I found that most people have a very narrow and different view of "what needs to be done", and that's why there's so much tension on WFH.
Most engineers today seem to like just being assigned tasks, and don't consider the huge effort required to create, prioritize and properly articulate those tasks (some of which required engineering input). A good presenter probably know he need to rethink something if he has an audience with a "I don't get it" face.
On the other hand, managers can't empathize with how some people concentrate better in their home than in a noisy open office.
When my company was forced by covid to move to WFH, individual productivity increased while overall company productivity decreased. Both sides were right, just in different ways.
I find it hilarious each time this subject comes up on HN (seems weekly now), everyone saying it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I know several(!) people, who while 'working remotely', are two timing it, having two jobs simultaneously, obviously unbeknown to the employer. And even then, they 'find' time during their working hours, to go to the gym, do the laundry, do some groceries. They are not some productivity geniuses, no, they are just regular lazy people, like most people are. I get why those people LOVE remote working, because they get paid and not so much work done. Win-Win?
It really is just so incredibly simple, the people who want an office the whole week or just for a few days, or part of the weekdays, should be able to do it, and stay home when they need/want it. (As long as the work gets done obviously)
The primary obstacle is the large contingent of authoritarian managers who are fundamentally and completely unable to either trust or delegate, so they crave control over every detail to compensate for being placed in a position they can’t handle.
The saddest part that these completely useless, drains on human productivity, fascist individuals are rewarded greatly by the incentives of our paltry economic system..
165 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadAfter the 2008 financial crisis, there was talk about breaking apart "too big to fail" banks and reigning in their financial shenanigans and the world was forever changed. Nothing really changed except the banks got bigger and now housing market is the hottest it has ever been.
After the Trump election, there was talk about end of democracy, financial collapse, end of globalization, etc and the world was forever changed. Nothing really changed except the state gained more power, the wealthy got wealthier.
Every few years there is a crisis that is going to change the world forever. After a few months/years, people forget and move on, til the next crisis that is going to end/change the world.
You'll realize this eventually. It's why news really should be taken with moderation. Too much news and it become poisonous and unhealthy for your well being.
Everyone eventually learns that "life goes on". In a few years, covid will seem like ancient history and most people will have moved on to other things.
Life went on after the far deadlier 1918 pandemic. Life went on after ww2. Life went on after 9/11. You'll be alright.
The US has mostly escaped things that affected people more in other countries, like, say, WWI and WWII. So to some extent, I think saying "you'll get over it" is assuming the US will continue to be fortunate.
If you don't believe in divine providence looking over "fools, drunks, and the USA", it's not logical to count on it in the future.
It's important that people understand the following before the 2022 and 2024 elections, where Trump and R will gain several seats.
Trump is a patriot - he represents America first, which is good for the US economy and citizens, and thus anti-globalization. That's what MAGA means.
Ironically, it's Democrat leaders that are pro-globalization and anti-American, proven by the current porous border and relaxation of sanctions against China. (The border is open to increase people who are predicted to vote D, and to lower wages for company backers of the party.)
We will have a financial collapse if Biden's Marxist policies make people wonder if the US dollar should continue to be the global currency - the US has a 1% economic advantage by being that currency.
Why do Democrat leaders behave that way? Because when you live in a gated community and have your own security, the rest of America can go screw themselves. (20/25 Democratic city mayors have their own security, yet want to "defund the police" for others.)
And wtf is this?
Incoherent Biden Town Hall Excerpt (with Don Lemon of CNN enabling it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB9MOJUS6L8
Is "only publish non controversial opinions" really what we want from our news sources?
Publishing hot takes devoid of substance and lacking intellectual merit reflects poorly on the institution and the editors who made the call to do so, regardless of what position they advocate.
If you're not getting the opinions you want to read, it's easy enough to pick up a different paper. The danger of a bad op-ed is tricking people into thinking they are getting both sides of the story when they aren't.
I never thought that was what the op-ed section was for though. Isn't it so you can see more aggressive arguments for or against something?
Op-ed has published the Taliban.
I’ve been working with a company that have done studies on remote work, at the beginning 4% of employees wanted to work from the office 100% of the time. 6 months later it was 2%.
Problem #1, Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them.
Problem #2, people new to the workforce are most likely to want to come into the office some of the time as they are struggling to figure out the culture and finding help and mentoring. This is actually another failing of employers.
WFH for folks in engineering labs with millions of dollars of shared instruments doesn't make sense.
That was the fundamental reality inside Apple engineering that I lived, anyway: the millions of dollars of instruments for digital design and test can't be repurchased per engineer.
The reality of the situation, globally, is that the commercial real estate market was showing signs of rolling over prior to the pandemic (as well as many other markets), and the bailoutistan operations since sept 2019 repo market intervention continue to enable a lot of the paper of CRE that has/is used as collateral (and rehypothicated many times over) to put alot of entities exposed to it on life support…
However it does nothing for cashflows in the CRE that no longer exist, which is why the situation will continue to get worse with out continuously increasing the interventions in markets, and the forces that influence behavior in those markets (i.e NYT posts shilling someones cornered book to try and get peoples behaviors/preferences to change).
Arguably, there has been a long shift to remote work going on since the 90's. Anecdote: My dad has been working from home not too long after P&G sold his division to HP and then to BT, and I have been for 5 years prior to march 2020 (and continue to do so today).
Of course in every company there will be a subset of people who cannot do their job from home. Nobody is saying that every job can be done remotely. So it doesn't help to roll out the exceptions and say that nobody can work from home.
there are huge numbers of hourly employees across the stores, though i don't know where they break down numbers of employees by type.
I know for a fact that Google Maps alone has over 1k SWE's. Chrome and android have several thousands, same with YouTube. Uber and snapchat and airbnb have thousands of SWEs.
Apple has dozens of products that are comparable to the ones listed. So either each of their SWE's is worth 100x other companies or my estimate is correct.
I've been filing taxes since 1988 and I've only had one or two managers that I would say are truly incompetent. I would say most of my managers have rusty but relevant technical skills, have been open to my input, are generally willing to negotiate through disagreements and, my favorite, leave me alone. I've had a handful of legendary managers, a word I am tempted to put in quotes because they inspired me, helped me grow, and left me in a much better state than they found me.
Having managed multiple teams myself, it can be a fuckin' slog. There have always been one or two extremely high maintenance people on the team, conflicts to resolve, bullshit HR stuff to take care of, commitments to defend, bullshit to block, misses to explain and some amount of time tending to vestigial organizational dependencies that somehow are impossible to shake. And that's without immigration to deal with...that's an entire mess of its own.
That is all in addition to actually developing some type of relationship with each member of the team. Trying to get a feel for their communication style, pull(!) out from them some idea of what they see on the horizon, continuously observe their interaction with the team and overall performance at their job. Look for recommendations to help them improve in areas that need it and then run that through what you've learned about them in order to deliver it in a way in which they will be receptive. Mine progress for evidence of efforts from the underrecognized and let them know they are seen. Plan for promos when the time is right, begin evangelizing your employee early on, work on promo package with them, mine your network for support as you educate your employee on what is needed to get it done.
Then you have the periodic dumpster fires that 99% of the time are entirely avoidable. Intra and inter-team fights, liars and cowboys breaking shit, last minute disclosures of untenable delivery gaps, HR-issues, extra curricular issues, etc.
It's not a particularly easy job and I would say that the combination of technical and interpersonal skills that would be required to meet expectations I see voiced here and elsewhere are in extremely limited supply. I know I have and will continue to fall short of that standard many times.
Dunno, maybe I've just been lucky.
I haven’t seen what they do in the background and am working for not so long but so far managers have not really impressed me.
Now, what’s all that got to do with having butts in a seat that you can physically see? Jack shit really.
To allow you to be left alone to be happy and productive.
With an ineffective manager, you'll be bombarded with all the interruptions and BS from the layers above and every side. With a great manager you won't be bothered by any of this, leaving you to be happy and productive.
Having managed multiple teams myself, it can be a fuckin' slog. There have always been one or two extremely high maintenance people on the team, conflicts to resolve, bullshit HR stuff to take care of, commitments to defend, bullshit to block, misses to explain and some amount of time tending to vestigial organizational dependencies that somehow are impossible to shake."
And that is pretty much what the gig should be.
In practice, I mostly speak to my boss once every week or two weeks (if even that, I have gone two months without it while remote in a past role). They exist as someone who stops by once in a while and otherwise does not exist. This has been the case for both my current job and my last job. I can't imagine that either had any clear view of what I did day to day.
For me, that works. But I have known a lot of co-workers who have an issue with that as to them that impacts their advancement in the organization and they feel unrecognized as their manager couldn't tell someone else what they did that week.
I think many want an engaged super champion manager they work closely with.
It can indeed be amazing to work with an inspiring and challenging person but that does not need to be a manager. Any inspiring manager could probably have been an even greater coworker.
Hopefully that makes some sense, and yes, I am criticizing myself as well in this comment.
I think both experiences are valid. I think good managers are in as short supply as good engineers are, and good people generally. Both hiring markets tend to be markets for lemons. Hyper growth startups that need to fill headcount can’t afford to be choosy, and within companies like this the Pareto principle applies. Unfortunately many people have decades+ of experience with the 80% and have never witnessed the 20%.
However, on the opposite side, technical leaders are awesome. Most of mine have been great. They are team captains, leading through inspiration and excitement and performance. I love leaders.
The push back to the office is at least 50% driven by managers that are freaking out because their uselessness has been revealed. Many orgs and people I know of have been performing better during the pandemic - now it is tough to correlate to overall remote performance, since the situation is different. In normal remote work, you can interact with other people easier, can visit your team on fun trips, and generally be more social, which has the downside that you aren't as focused on your work, either. Also, you don't have your kids at home, which is huge.
But if I were running a company, I'd take notice at the fact that many managers can be cut, and that a good chunk of management is merely gaining and holding on to power via social manipulation.
I've done management and leadership throughout my career, although predominantly I've been an IC, and I see managers taking credit for the good things that happen and believing they are responsible for them, and the opposite for the bad things. When in reality, many bad things are the managers fault, and rarely do they have much responsibility for the good things.
I have a very dim view of management in general, although there are the rare really good ones, but they are almost always the "get out of the way" kinda.
Get a good A/V setup people, you have the technical ability and it's one of your main job interfaces. At the very least use a wired headphone setup and microphone so we don't play walkie talkie games as echo cancellation mutes one of us dynamically and your bluetooth headset adds 100ms random delays and a lower bit rate of audio. Also do ethernet to remove the delays and packet drops from wifi.
The fact of the matter is that most people (myself included) are able to read visual cues from others and adapt their message accordingly. Actual communication (which entails understanding) is just easier this way.
Some managers where I work tried to pressure people to have their cameras on. It was later implied this was based on personal assumptions about what the "big boss" preferred.
But then some people ignored it, and someone else said "wait, they can't make us, if they push it the union will back us up".
If a manager is struggling with a remote team, that’s usually a sign that they’re generally incompetent as a manager. There may be a few cases of good overall managers that struggle with remote. But they’re few and far between.
The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. It’s not a lack of training. Remote management is pretty much nothing more than basic management 101. Mediocre operators prefer in-office because it’s easier to kludge something that gives off the appearance of actual management.
When a team transitions to full remote, it’s like the tide going out and finding out who’s swimming naked. If companies were sensible, they’d embrace full remote because it quickly reveals where the weak points in the org chart are. And rather than capitulating to demands, any middle manager lobbying for a return to the office is probably a good candidate to trim the fat.
Mentoring in a pair/XP style feels a bit harder over Zoom but the tools are getting better.
Planning meetings (or any type of open discussions) are much more grating to me with the Zoom lag and cross talk.
Heads down, ticket based work has less distractions though.
Maybe I just suck but I feel much more adept at in person interactions than remote interactions and its not about appearances.
[1]: please read David Graeber, may he rest in peace.
1000x this. Much of the time, people in management were promoted there because they were complete shit at line / front of house / customer or client-facing work and someone up top didn't feel like firing them that day. After all, if you were good at line work, why would they promote you away from it?
It makes perfect sense that they'd be complete shit at managing teams, too -- remote or in-person.
Because while it‘s super easy to ramble about managers, they‘re essential to any company that‘s larger than a dozen people.
Management attracts scorn. I have to ignore it as people who don‘t see the importance have no clue what it takes to build a winning team and company.
And while I‘m still trying to learn how to manage a remote team and getting good feedback, I hate it. As in, I utterly, completely despise it and I‘m close to burnout and think about leaving the profession to just do engineering on my own.
Maybe I still haven‘t figured it out, but I feel like I have the choice between still trying to connect to humans and suffer from Zoom fatigue — or go all-in on async, having the feeling that I‘m chatting all day with a black box of meaningless, replaceable NLP models.
It‘s lonely, it‘s tiring and I‘m so looking back to connecting to real humans. If you have tips, I welcome them.
Buy "High Output Management" by Andy Grove. Read it. I've read it cover to cover 6 times now and still find gold each time I review it.
It is hard to know everything about your situation from you post, but your more emphasized issue is you seem to be missing a 'real connection to real humans'. Yes, of course a manager needs to be connected to the team, and that empathy/earned respect is essential.... but it can be built using remote means as well as in person. You show respect through words and actions, those can be written as well as spoken. Maybe you personally put a lot of emphasis on the immediate feedback of face to face to feel that connection? Truth is, while that immediate feedback feels great and helps you tune your message, it isn't the foundation. The foundation is the thing you are getting the feedback on.
If the message is "Team, here is the goal for the week and why it matters", the foundation is that each person sees the goal and how their effort contributes to it. It is great when everyone high-fives around the room, but high-fives without the understanding are a false signal.
You are correct that managers are essential to building a winning team. You probably have a list of what roles/jobs/tasks a manager does to achieve this.
You could write down that list, and for each item write your current process for achieving it. You could then think about how you can map that process to a remote work framework.
I agree as well and just for the record, I wouldn't say I'm ineffective. We 10x'ed our revenue and tripled the team during the pandemic. I'm getting top notch reviews from my peers and I've got a kick-ass team around me that I really like.
It's just that my job itself went from an onsite one that I loved to a remote one which I absolutely hate, and I'm at loss about what to do with that or what I'm doing wrong.
I'll definitely check out your book suggestion though.
Also impressive that you have the professionalism to continue this despite your low mood.
Wish I could help more with the 'what you are doing wrong' bit. I wouldn't use those words, you probably aren't doing anything wrong. It sounds like you just miss being in the same room as your team. I get that, the human contact is real, and on-line is a thin and stale version of it.
You can be an effective leader either way, but yeah, emotionally there isn't a substitute for getting everyone in the same room.
this seems to be saying that remote management is easier than normal management without the ability to observe people during the course the day.
maybe this seems counterintuitive to me because I don't really know much about management; perhaps you can expand?
Take any number of "fundamentals" of management: having regular 1-1s, regular reviews, having planning meetings with the team, long term goal setting, operations reviews, etc, etc (yes, management is a lot of meetings).
If an office setting, you can feel like you're doing these on an ad hoc basis, and maybe you or others can do successfully this in an ad hoc way (although if this is the general way of doing things, and your org is large enough, I would guarantee there is a manager that isn't doing this well). But this way of managing completely falls on its face when people start going remote. If you aren't regularly scheduling this stuff then it's just not happening, or people are getting left out.
So I would say that remote management isn't easier, but it makes it very apparent who is doing the management basics, and who is not.
I'm not going to "mentor" an object on my computer screen as if it were a human being who showed up to be my teammate.
You may argue that team and culture is reinforced by doing activities that intrinsically require you to be in person (e.g. board game, sports etc.)
But I don’t quite follow why you absolutely need to be in person to find mentoring someone worthwhile.
I wonder if a good hybrid approach would be that managers with reports having less than a year or two tenure, along with those new reports, go in to the office every day. At the end of that time the worker can work remotely. When the manager no longer has new reports, that manager can work remotely.
It starts from hiring people that inspire trust, and then...trusting them. Get them their assignments, mentor/coach them when and where needed, but otherwise let them do the work. Let them shine on their own.
Metrics are largely measurable anywhere, if you picked the right ones.
Build esprit d'corps. The rest starts to fall into place naturally after...
Pretty sure there was no correlation in the firm's demise (Yahoo was already underwater), but not sure it did help either.
You're right.
Idea: I live out west, where there's not enough housing. I was walking by a now completely shuttered cluster of office buildings near me the other day and wondered two things. First, "wow, commercial real estate people must be sweating" and second, "why don't we rezone this all this stuff and turn it into apartments?"
hence why I think management want ppl back to the office, to get productivity back up - as unintuitive as that sounds
Remote work is not for everyone, it has its pros and cons. One of the biggest cons is isolation.
For a lot of people, the work place is an incredibly social place, and when you rely on that for your socializing (which is 100% okay!) then the impact of forced WFH very often leads to isolation and slight depression.
I personally prefer a mix, and believe you should use each for the strengths they have. Without a shadow of a doubt, casual collaboration is easier in person. Similarly, I’m far less disturbed at home.
At my current work, we’ve built up a work style where you decide yourself when you’re in and when you’re not. Notably though, this does mean that everything needs to assume everyone is fully remote for it to work well though.
for me this is the trickiest part. A lot of people and companies are looking at hybrid as a sort of compromise but the brutal reality is that hybrid may be hellishly bad and lead to far worse outcomes than all on-premise or all-remote. I feel like there is a high risk of a lot of dumpster fire disasters and not sure which way it'll go in the end.
Agree with your comment in general. On this point, I wonder if this is only true whilst power remains in the supply side of the labour market. When the next recession hits, maybe we'll see a migration of workers to where the main employers are.
I do wonder if remote working suits the workers a lot more than the employers.
In other words, it's in almost every corporate's best interest to push people towards offices.
Add to this the fact that they get to lobby politicians many of whom invest heavily in real estate.
Do not be surprised if governments create tax hurdles for companies operating remotely.
I couldn't disagree more strongly with the author of the linked article. I'd almost call it pro-remote-work propaganda.
But, I say that as a software developer who is extroverted (at least relative to the profession as a whole), and is in my early 30s. Working from home can be super isolating and depressing, and I would rather leave a lucrative career than start another remote job (I already quit my previous remote job, currently living off savings rather than work remotely).
I know some people who like working remotely. But I also have friends who hate it as I do, and are super eager to return to the office (some already have, at least on a part-time/hybrid basis. The two biggest factors are see are introversion vs extroversion, and whether they live with other people. My extroverted friend whose wife works at an in person job, and is thus alone all day, hates it. Another friend who lives by herself hates it. A third whose social life centered on work hated it, and wound up moving in with her parents despite being in her 30s just to have some other people around.
Productivity-wise, I agree with the studies I've seen showing more time, but no more results. I think of my friend who is not confident in his job security and is working at least 50% more hours than in his pre-pandemic in-person job; I've told him several times his colleagues probably don't realize how many hours he is putting in or how effective he is, because he only interacts with about three people and it's all remote. In the first couple months of his job, before his workload went sky-high, he complained that some of his colleagues were completely burnt out and unproductive; now it's no mystery why some of his colleagues are like that.
Another reason I think it's introvert vs extrovert is my conversations with recruiters. I'm that odd software developers who enjoys talking with recruiters, at least the ones who take the time to get to know you. Almost if not 100% of the recruiters I talk with miss being in person. Most of them are young. And guess what, recruiting is a highly extroverted profession.
My prediction for the software industry is there are going to be a lot of people switching jobs over the next year or two, as the people who want to be in the office but are stuck at remote gigs leave, and similarly the people who want to be remote but are stuck at in office gigs leave. Some people will probably prefer hybrid too, but most of the people I know have strong opinions on the topic, and I wouldn't be surprised if hybrid mostly falls by the wayside once uncertainty around covid protocols subsides.
On the team I joined mid-pandemic, one of the ways this evidenced itself was higher turnover among the people who joined after March. The tech lead also noticed universally slower uptake on team-specific knowledge among the new folks, compared to when previous folks had joined. None of the new folks became team experts in the year I was there, despite having the past experience that would suggest it would be likely they would. And generally, the team continued to rely on its pre-pandemic experts.
All this is having joined a remote team where I think I would have really enjoyed being on the team in the office, and which I know from industry colleagues was a successful team pre-pandemic. Even with those advantages, joining remotely was rough.
In other words, I think we may still be in the honeymoon period for remote work appearing productive among the industry at large. For some people, it may work well in general, and if you specifically recruit those people you may be able to build a successful remote team (some companies did it pre-pandemic, after all). But across the industry, I suspect remote teams will become less productive over time as experienced members switch jobs, and (if they aren't the type that naturally likes being remote) experiences the slower uptake and more isolating experience of being on a team where they've never met their colleagues in real life.
Time zones I think will be the biggest advantage to hire within the western hemisphere, nobody likes the PST <-> IST timezone meeting gap, there aren't many to hire in latin america and they speak English well and communicate well. If latin america had a large base of engineers to hire in the first place, I think many places would choose there just on a timezone and english communication skills basis.
But you see big compensation gaps even between NYC / SFO / SEA and the rest of the USA, so you could very well see a drop from that.
If the benefits outweighed the cost, companies would have already offshored well before the pandemic. It’s not like WFH changes that calculus. If a BigCo would rather pay a programmer in Bangalore over one in Boise, than they almost certainly would also prefer him to one in Mountain View too.
Perhaps the problem with offshoring is not just the fact that the people are working remote. What about (very) different timezones, different working culture, different culture of communication etc.?
Inevitably what I see is that some company tries to outsource some function, to save some money, or just because they don't want to deal with it themselves, and then the experience is so bumpy and acrimonious that they bring it back in house after eighteen months or two years.
No chance I'm going back.
This claim is more a scare tactic than a real warning.
I specifically mentioned India because more than one consulting firm told me that India would be the future and software developers would not be needed in Germany anymore, only project managers.
VW made a multi-billion investment against off-shoring and SV companies pay hundreds of thousands for webdevs that completed six week bootcamps, just for them to be in SV.
Thing is, the rates at these agencies (at least the LatAm ones) have run up to the point where they're not so far from the US. You can spend $80 USD an hour easily.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-so...
From my limited observation it's swing back towards on-shore preference since like 2017.
Unionize.
The biggest cons for me is that I don't have the choice to be on many random meetings which sound annoying on the surface but are good for building rapport and getting involved in company initiatives you whouldn't know.
Unless the company is completely async, there are always advantages to working in HQ (albeit virtually).
In my experience, people working remote are often in the same timezone or even in the same area. Thus, they can easily come to the office if needed. They often share the same working habits, the same culture of communication and they speak the same language. This does not alway apply to offshoring.
Well yes, but that's moving the goalposts.
I don't know anyone that actually want to be back in the office full time, some are ok with part-time work.
Most people seem to be (anecdotally at least) reporting that they and their teams are more productive at home and their quality of life is improved because they aren't wasting time commuting.
Businesses could save money by renting smaller offices or doing away with offices completely.
Good engineers are just going to jump ship to wherever they can work fully remotely.
Remote work, while granted is hyper productive, I've never felt so disconnected from my teammates. There are people I used to have contact with daily that I haven't even slacked with in months. A chat/Zoom window is a much higher barrier to conversation than meeting for lunch, coffee, hallway paths crossing, waiting for the bus etc. I'm completely out of touch with what they're working on, aside from little blurbs in stand-ups. We have all become little siloes. I miss whiteboard conversations.
And that's to say nothing about the personal connections that have suffered. As adults, the place where you spend the most time with non-friends is the workplace, so that's the best bet at making new friends (in the same way school is for adolescence).
The funny thing is, when I was in the office, I felt most productive when I was given long stretches of time to just do focused work. But productivity is not the end goal of a career. It's collaboration and team achievement.
I have a feeling that the powers that be that are beating the back to work drum recognize some of these aspects. Obviously they see the productivity metrics, but they see the amount disconnect as well.
That's a valid point, but having everyone back in the office isn't the only solution to that problem. It may be the best solution, but seems like the easiest rather than the best.
Remote first may be painful in the short term. But in the long term it’s much healthier as it forces the org to rationalize structured lines of communication.
If I am working for someone else I think they should bear the cost of renting the room where I am working in. If I'm not in the office they can use my share of the office-space to something else. They won't need so much space and thus will pay less rent.
So I think remote work is in many cases in the interest of the employers, at least financially. I do believe that in-person contacts are valuable. But I haven't seen it discussed much that remote work in effect shrinks the place where you live.
sometimes i have difficulties "leaving work" when I'm in the flow. so i started wearing "work clothes" to remind myself "i need to go home" and change into home clothes.
meetings are more time consuming and annoying in general. "can you hear me? can you see my shared screen?"
i'd prefer a 2/3 or 3/2 days wfh/office arrangement.
sometimes the office environment actually helps me to focus better. and i miss the ping pong table..
You had me until the end. Nicely done.
We all know the ping-pong table is there for the same reason as the couch in front of the break room TV, or the cheese on the mousetrap.
Eh, dunno.
A) It's not the complex concepts that benefit from physical proximity to other members of our species, in my experience; it's the subtleties, the little tricks, hacks, and bits of hidden knowledge that are really amenable to someone shuffling over to your desk, grabbing your keyboard, and going "here look at this weird way of doing it" in 20 seconds of physical interaction. Junior people can learn complex things remotely, but maybe physical proximity can give them those little details better. Which leads me to
> [...] at least 2-3 times per week.
B) So let'em come in twice a week and work from home the other 3. What's the problem? One of my siblings hires junior people at their firm and this is the way they've been operating since before the pandemic. The kids get trained up real nice and are happier in their work not having to commute 3x/wk.
Programmers don't have the best hygiene in my experience and not having a sweaty meatbag in the chair next to me while we share concepts is justification enough.
Perhaps if your work isn't all on a computer you can't get around this, but at least for programming I firmly believe in remote work.
In the last few years I have become more introverted. The transition started when I was living in Germany. Now I have fewer friends, but higher quality. No parties at all and I miss none of it. I live in a small village in the Himalayas, feel super connected to nature, feel happier on average. I just started a contract with a US East based early stage startup. I will travel and surely spend time in in-person huddles, but I want to be a remote worker for as long as my nature fits this mode.
I frequent online programming communities a lot more these days and I feel some of the best creators out there (not just in software) hone their skills by themselves, in themselves. I really do not get the point of "managing" people anyway. 1 or 2 short calls a day are enough even for fast paced work. If teams can not understand subject matter through documentation and asynchronous communication, then something is off.
Also, a remote company leans more toward documentation and online co-ordination. I see this as an asset to any company.
Most engineers today seem to like just being assigned tasks, and don't consider the huge effort required to create, prioritize and properly articulate those tasks (some of which required engineering input). A good presenter probably know he need to rethink something if he has an audience with a "I don't get it" face.
On the other hand, managers can't empathize with how some people concentrate better in their home than in a noisy open office.
When my company was forced by covid to move to WFH, individual productivity increased while overall company productivity decreased. Both sides were right, just in different ways.
I know several(!) people, who while 'working remotely', are two timing it, having two jobs simultaneously, obviously unbeknown to the employer. And even then, they 'find' time during their working hours, to go to the gym, do the laundry, do some groceries. They are not some productivity geniuses, no, they are just regular lazy people, like most people are. I get why those people LOVE remote working, because they get paid and not so much work done. Win-Win?
Web: https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/NYT/job/New-York...
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210728020438/https://nytimes.w...
The primary obstacle is the large contingent of authoritarian managers who are fundamentally and completely unable to either trust or delegate, so they crave control over every detail to compensate for being placed in a position they can’t handle.
The saddest part that these completely useless, drains on human productivity, fascist individuals are rewarded greatly by the incentives of our paltry economic system..