4 ms·
Right, except the elephant in the room isn't laziness or the value of face to face interaction, it's trust. The driver of this lack of trust is the rise of man
by crdoconnor 9y ago
Right, except the elephant in the room isn't laziness or the value of face to face interaction, it's trust.
The driver of this lack of trust is the rise of managers (e.g. MBAs) who have limited expertise in the fields which they manage.
For jobs where there are measures of performance that are accurate and not gameable (e.g. certain call center workers) and/or it is a job executives probably reckon that they could do themselves, they are generally happy to let employees work from home.
IMO this is why Github and Mozilla are remote-first - by and large they're managed by developers.
- pythonboi 9y agoI don't understand why you are being downvoted. I just started working as a software developer 10 months ago and my supervisor had told me the work culture has changed so much since upper management has transitioned to MBAs and previous military over promoting workers from within who have worked on projects. I doubt that the government will allow any remote work any time soon because most of the people here have never heard of a VPN or even know what a secure password is.
- wernercd 9y agoI doubt it's just "Stupid MBA's and military 'intelligence'"... We live in a post Snowden world. It only takes one mistake to have all your data out in the wild. I think attributing changes away from trusting employees to simply "bad management" and ignoring issues like employee malfeasance... is overly simplistic and dilutes complicated issue conversations. There needs to be a balance between trust and security. It's easy to take it too far in either direction.
- AstralStorm 9y agoDifferent kinds of trust. Trust that you will get the work done properly vs trust that you will not steal or expose critical business data.
- bluGill 9y agoThe best managers are the ones who know they don't know how to do your job so they get out of your way. The worst are those who don't know how to do your job and get in the way. Those who know how to do your job at least don't get in the way when they help.
- marcosdumay 9y agoIdeally, they would both know how to do your job, and get out of the way.
- bluGill 9y agoNo, ideally they know how to do their job well and do that instead of getting in your way. Your boss doens't need to know how to do your job.
- crdoconnor 9y agoHow does a boss who does not know how to do your job assess your performance? Without intimate knowledge of the tasks you do they have no idea of what you are asked to do is intrinsically hard or you are simply doing it badly.
- bluGill 9y agoIt doesn't matter. What matters is success. A good developer will be more successful in the marginal projects, and cheaper in the very worthwhile projects, but that is just a matter of dollars on the bottom line. The best developer in the world cannot save a stupid idea. The worst developers just ups how insanely profitable, and how long he need to wait a project must be before it is successful. The above assumes a single developer. If you have a team of developers it quickly becomes obvious. In fact a boss who knows nothing about programming is probably better able to judge if someone is doing a poor job in these cases: those who know the new guy see him trying to get up to speed, while the boss sees a bigger picture by comparing to others. (a good developer will be making useful contributions on the second day, while a bad one will flounder for a couple weeks before the others will give up on teaching him the project)