6 ms·

First para hits the nail on the head. The issue is: trust between managers and employees. Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management par

by ak39 8y ago

First para hits the nail on the head. The issue is: trust between managers and employees. Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy. Managing outcomes requires managers to understand not only the strategic agendas set by the bosses higher up but also the technical paths to achieve them confronted by the "serfs" under. It also requires that managers themselves are empowered to make decisions on budgets and execute on outcomes - managers who can't make decisions daily without checking in on higher up bosses for authorisation will be unlikely to agree to a work from home scenario.

GordonS 8y ago
> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy I've been working 75-80% from home for several years now, and I've had 5 managers during that time. Before that, I mostly worked in an office, but my managers were located in another country. In that whole time, even having some terrible managers at points, all of my managers were more focused on managing outcomes - it always just seems to come naturally. I'm in the UK, working for a Norwegian company - maybe things are just more progressive here than in the US?
- Clubber 8y ago
  >maybe things are just more progressive here than in the US? Probably. For many in the US, managers tend to do very little to actually help things, but take all the credit (and rewards) for the positive outcomes. I suspect the US is successful in spite of how we do business, not because of it.
l5870uoo9y 8y ago
> managing time to managing outcome A task will take the time that have been reserved for it. That is inefficient. Changing to a result-orientated approach where an employee is giving weekly or daily tasks (if it isn't too complicated - which is really a good question) would also mean that if an employee is finished with his weekly tasks after 3 days, he gets to go home. For many seems counterintuitive (fixed time management is essentially used from the first day of school and is pervasive in society) and it does have it own difficulties changing. For instance, how does co-workers feel when one fast employee always gets to leave early? How easy is it to pick tasks for employees? Freelance programmers are one group where this result-orientated approach works, not sure it can be extended to other sectors easily.
- david-s 8y ago
  I don't think "managing outcomes" means your tasks are strictly limited to what your manager you you could finish and then you'll go home. In my situation, at least, there's a never ending list of tasks to accomplish. If you finish the "must do now" tasks, it's expected that you'll let them know and pull something else off the pile; not that you'll do nothing for the rest of the sprint.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    A lot of our work is done on a "Time and Materials" basis, so going home means that the company can't charge my rate to the client. Getting done early only helps my list of tasks and gives me more work to do. We deliver early and get on with the next project. There's little incentive to get done early.
- Groxx 8y ago
  I don't know about you, but when I finish the stuff I have tasked for the [time period], I immediately start building tools that scratch itches I've had. Some of these have gone on to be rather impactful where I've worked, and I'd never have built them if my time were tightly managed.
ivanhoe 8y ago
> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome Problem with this is that it puts the burden of bad estimates on employees. They'll end up working more hours to cover the mistakes in estimates in order to meet the expected outcomes. And that is exactly the same issue that makes freelancing suck, except that freelancers charge more in order to cover for those unexpected situations.
- deepGem 8y ago
  Almost all estimates are based on past experience. So good luck with such estimates when you are entering new domain or even new tech. I honestly believe that there is no need for estimates. Your delivery date is set by the customer or the market or competition. So it's a lot healthier to work backwards from that date and figure out which of the features can be delivered, than to breakdown the work into quite meaningless chunks, figure out the estimates for those chunks and god forbid, build a Gantt chart.
  - gregshap 8y ago
    how do you figure out which features can be completed by the delivery date, if not by estimating?
    - cbetti 8y ago
      Think of a video chat feature for a code pair website. Maybe you can deliver it faster if you build a central server based video chat model using a standard VP8 than if you go WebRTC and a heavily customized codec.
    - dionidium 8y ago
      In some cases, you'll have a specific client that wants something specific and you'll just have to make your best guess. But, at a lot of companies, there's no specific client who needs feature x by day y. Estimating in those companies is almost always a waste of time, a nonsense exercise designed to make managers feel like they're in control of the situation. I come to work at the same time every day for the same amount of time every day and I work on our product that whole time. What's going to get done is going to get done. If a situation requires more, then we'll work late. (And it's almost always obvious when something is important enough to require this.) The process of guessing how long each task is going to take is a complete waste of our time. Of course, we do it. And management thinks it's super important, because they spend their days making spreadsheets and Jira filters based on those guesses. But, the reality is that it simply doesn't matter one way or the other. We make a bunch of guesses, then we do the work we were going to do anyway and it takes as long as it was always going to take, and then at the end we have another pointless meeting, called the "retrospective," where we talk about how good or bad our guesses were. It's like a Tennessee Valley Authority make-work program for under-challenged product managers.
cameldrv 8y ago
Trust is a continuum. If I'm a manager, I can't afford to know every single detail of what you're doing. Managing outcome sounds nice, but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding, and it takes you two weeks. I have to figure out the cause. Some common ones are: 1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have to put in more work upfront to figure out the problem. 2. You're less capable than I thought you were -- it just takes you longer or you make more mistakes than I had expected. 3. I didn't adequately describe the job to you, and you spent time going down blind alleys and readjusting trying to figure out what exactly I want. 4. You're a slacker, you didn't work very hard on it and so it took longer. It's easy to say that I should manage outcome, but if you repeatedly fail to achieve the outcome, what should I do? It depends on why. If you're remote, you're going to say it was #1 with a fallback position of #3. If you're in the office I can probably get a reasonable sense of whether or not it's #4, and if it's #3, we're naturally going to communicate more and so I'm more likely to fix it sooner. This is why office space in SF costs so much.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  In practice, being a slacker when working from home is not really an option. I know very well that if I don't perform well enough, I'll be fired. Why should I take the risk? Also, when I realize a job is going to take longer than expected, I notify my boss immediately and clearly explain the reasons. It's not that I wake up after two weeks that I'm 12 days late - I probably realize something is wrong immediately or after a couple of hours at most.
  - occamrazor 8y ago
    It works for you, it may not work for others. Unfortunately slackers do exist (I know some people who boast their ability to be unproductive and deceive their boss) and working from home may make cheating easier.
    - wolco 8y ago
      It is easier to cheat in person because you can put a show where it appears you are working but remotely your work is the only thing to judge you on.
JepZ 8y ago
For some managers its not just a trust issue but also about loosing control. So even if they trust their employees to work hard from home they don't feel comfortable with the idea. I don't know why that is happening, but I have seen it first hand.
jahaja 8y ago
I'm continuously surprised how little attention social status gets here. People seem to always assume that all decisions in IT/Tech/SV are entirely or mostly due to economically rational factors. I think remote work is yet another example where social status play at least some part, if not a significant. Employees, probably especially managers, will of course see their social status diminish if everyone were to be remote. In an extreme case we're going from an in-person small kingdom to a somewhat depersonalized title online. Even beyond remote work, I think there's quite a few examples in tech, and white-collar work in general, where social status seems to trump economical rationality. But maybe it's hard to admit and thus best left out.
- greedo 8y ago
  Social status IMHO is the single driver for most of middle-management decisions. Just as when an athlete says "It's not about the money...", it's always about the money. For managers, social status is supreme. This status is measured in numerous ways; salary, trophy spouse, cars, office location, etc etc. Deny this at your peril.

by ak39 8y ago

GordonS 8y ago

> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy I've been working 75-80% from home for several years now, and I've had 5 managers during that time. Before that, I mostly worked in an office, but my managers were located in another country. In that whole time, even having some terrible managers at points, all of my managers were more focused on managing outcomes - it always just seems to come naturally. I'm in the UK, working for a Norwegian company - maybe things are just more progressive here than in the US?

Clubber 8y ago
>maybe things are just more progressive here than in the US? Probably. For many in the US, managers tend to do very little to actually help things, but take all the credit (and rewards) for the positive outcomes. I suspect the US is successful in spite of how we do business, not because of it.

l5870uoo9y 8y ago

> managing time to managing outcome A task will take the time that have been reserved for it. That is inefficient. Changing to a result-orientated approach where an employee is giving weekly or daily tasks (if it isn't too complicated - which is really a good question) would also mean that if an employee is finished with his weekly tasks after 3 days, he gets to go home. For many seems counterintuitive (fixed time management is essentially used from the first day of school and is pervasive in society) and it does have it own difficulties changing. For instance, how does co-workers feel when one fast employee always gets to leave early? How easy is it to pick tasks for employees? Freelance programmers are one group where this result-orientated approach works, not sure it can be extended to other sectors easily.

david-s 8y ago
I don't think "managing outcomes" means your tasks are strictly limited to what your manager you you could finish and then you'll go home. In my situation, at least, there's a never ending list of tasks to accomplish. If you finish the "must do now" tasks, it's expected that you'll let them know and pull something else off the pile; not that you'll do nothing for the rest of the sprint.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  A lot of our work is done on a "Time and Materials" basis, so going home means that the company can't charge my rate to the client. Getting done early only helps my list of tasks and gives me more work to do. We deliver early and get on with the next project. There's little incentive to get done early.
Groxx 8y ago
I don't know about you, but when I finish the stuff I have tasked for the [time period], I immediately start building tools that scratch itches I've had. Some of these have gone on to be rather impactful where I've worked, and I'd never have built them if my time were tightly managed.

ivanhoe 8y ago

> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome Problem with this is that it puts the burden of bad estimates on employees. They'll end up working more hours to cover the mistakes in estimates in order to meet the expected outcomes. And that is exactly the same issue that makes freelancing suck, except that freelancers charge more in order to cover for those unexpected situations.

deepGem 8y ago
Almost all estimates are based on past experience. So good luck with such estimates when you are entering new domain or even new tech. I honestly believe that there is no need for estimates. Your delivery date is set by the customer or the market or competition. So it's a lot healthier to work backwards from that date and figure out which of the features can be delivered, than to breakdown the work into quite meaningless chunks, figure out the estimates for those chunks and god forbid, build a Gantt chart.
- gregshap 8y ago
  how do you figure out which features can be completed by the delivery date, if not by estimating?
  - cbetti 8y ago
    Think of a video chat feature for a code pair website. Maybe you can deliver it faster if you build a central server based video chat model using a standard VP8 than if you go WebRTC and a heavily customized codec.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    In some cases, you'll have a specific client that wants something specific and you'll just have to make your best guess. But, at a lot of companies, there's no specific client who needs feature x by day y. Estimating in those companies is almost always a waste of time, a nonsense exercise designed to make managers feel like they're in control of the situation. I come to work at the same time every day for the same amount of time every day and I work on our product that whole time. What's going to get done is going to get done. If a situation requires more, then we'll work late. (And it's almost always obvious when something is important enough to require this.) The process of guessing how long each task is going to take is a complete waste of our time. Of course, we do it. And management thinks it's super important, because they spend their days making spreadsheets and Jira filters based on those guesses. But, the reality is that it simply doesn't matter one way or the other. We make a bunch of guesses, then we do the work we were going to do anyway and it takes as long as it was always going to take, and then at the end we have another pointless meeting, called the "retrospective," where we talk about how good or bad our guesses were. It's like a Tennessee Valley Authority make-work program for under-challenged product managers.

cameldrv 8y ago

Trust is a continuum. If I'm a manager, I can't afford to know every single detail of what you're doing. Managing outcome sounds nice, but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding, and it takes you two weeks. I have to figure out the cause. Some common ones are: 1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have to put in more work upfront to figure out the problem. 2. You're less capable than I thought you were -- it just takes you longer or you make more mistakes than I had expected. 3. I didn't adequately describe the job to you, and you spent time going down blind alleys and readjusting trying to figure out what exactly I want. 4. You're a slacker, you didn't work very hard on it and so it took longer. It's easy to say that I should manage outcome, but if you repeatedly fail to achieve the outcome, what should I do? It depends on why. If you're remote, you're going to say it was #1 with a fallback position of #3. If you're in the office I can probably get a reasonable sense of whether or not it's #4, and if it's #3, we're naturally going to communicate more and so I'm more likely to fix it sooner. This is why office space in SF costs so much.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
In practice, being a slacker when working from home is not really an option. I know very well that if I don't perform well enough, I'll be fired. Why should I take the risk? Also, when I realize a job is going to take longer than expected, I notify my boss immediately and clearly explain the reasons. It's not that I wake up after two weeks that I'm 12 days late - I probably realize something is wrong immediately or after a couple of hours at most.
- occamrazor 8y ago
  It works for you, it may not work for others. Unfortunately slackers do exist (I know some people who boast their ability to be unproductive and deceive their boss) and working from home may make cheating easier.
  - wolco 8y ago
    It is easier to cheat in person because you can put a show where it appears you are working but remotely your work is the only thing to judge you on.

JepZ 8y ago

For some managers its not just a trust issue but also about loosing control. So even if they trust their employees to work hard from home they don't feel comfortable with the idea. I don't know why that is happening, but I have seen it first hand.

jahaja 8y ago

I'm continuously surprised how little attention social status gets here. People seem to always assume that all decisions in IT/Tech/SV are entirely or mostly due to economically rational factors. I think remote work is yet another example where social status play at least some part, if not a significant. Employees, probably especially managers, will of course see their social status diminish if everyone were to be remote. In an extreme case we're going from an in-person small kingdom to a somewhat depersonalized title online. Even beyond remote work, I think there's quite a few examples in tech, and white-collar work in general, where social status seems to trump economical rationality. But maybe it's hard to admit and thus best left out.

greedo 8y ago
Social status IMHO is the single driver for most of middle-management decisions. Just as when an athlete says "It's not about the money...", it's always about the money. For managers, social status is supreme. This status is measured in numerous ways; salary, trophy spouse, cars, office location, etc etc. Deny this at your peril.