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Well not every job is well suited for remote work. As a developer, you know if they're not cranking out code. You miss sprint goals. Sprint demoes are a disaste

Well not every job is well suited for remote work. As a developer, you know if they're not cranking out code. You miss sprint goals. Sprint demoes are a disaster. You don't see commits. When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working. That's been my experience at least. That said, I think it was a poor choice to abolish the WFH policy.

HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working How do you tell whether or not they're actually working when they're in the office?
- laichzeit0 11y ago
  It's difficult to manage something if you don't have measurable outputs. The emphasis is on the word "measurable". Give a manager some way of objectively measuring what you're doing and most of them will be happy. It's easy for them to measure office hours or lines of code or commits or bugs fixed, etc. This does not logically imply that the person is actually doing any "real" work but it creates the perception and it's easy to measure and so managers are fond of it. At the end of the day you need to manage the perception that you're working or not working. When you're not working in an office it's even worse. You just lost the easiest way: creating the perception that you "put in the hours". Don't make this difficult for your manager. That's my experience anyway.
someone7x 11y ago
If QA or design doesn't work, you still hit sprint goals and have non-disastrous sprint demoes? I would say there's a more universal difficulty of understanding the productivity of jobs different from our own. Surely a design or QA lead would easily detect when someone is not actually working?
Fradow 11y ago
When designers don't work, your developer or your marketing department (or whoever they produce designs for), they will tell you they are missing the designs and are blocked for this or that. When QA does not work, there will be very few bug reports, and your support will see the number of tickets shoot up. But you must have some process in place to really identify the bottleneck. Something I assume a big company should have.

HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago

When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working How do you tell whether or not they're actually working when they're in the office?

laichzeit0 11y ago
It's difficult to manage something if you don't have measurable outputs. The emphasis is on the word "measurable". Give a manager some way of objectively measuring what you're doing and most of them will be happy. It's easy for them to measure office hours or lines of code or commits or bugs fixed, etc. This does not logically imply that the person is actually doing any "real" work but it creates the perception and it's easy to measure and so managers are fond of it. At the end of the day you need to manage the perception that you're working or not working. When you're not working in an office it's even worse. You just lost the easiest way: creating the perception that you "put in the hours". Don't make this difficult for your manager. That's my experience anyway.

someone7x 11y ago

If QA or design doesn't work, you still hit sprint goals and have non-disastrous sprint demoes? I would say there's a more universal difficulty of understanding the productivity of jobs different from our own. Surely a design or QA lead would easily detect when someone is not actually working?

Fradow 11y ago

When designers don't work, your developer or your marketing department (or whoever they produce designs for), they will tell you they are missing the designs and are blocked for this or that. When QA does not work, there will be very few bug reports, and your support will see the number of tickets shoot up. But you must have some process in place to really identify the bottleneck. Something I assume a big company should have.