3 ms·
I actually think the ranks of middle managers will increase as more people work from home. Especially on the engineering side. The whole point of managers is to
by dumbfoundded 6y ago
I actually think the ranks of middle managers will increase as more people work from home. Especially on the engineering side. The whole point of managers is to facilitate communication between people and teams. WFH certainly doesn't help communication problems. HR should pretty much drop to 0 though.
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoWhat are the functions of HR that you imagine them doing such that they’ll all be made obsolete by WFH?
- dumbfoundded 6y agoPretty much anything related to the work environment. This can include maintaining a safe work environment, accommodations for specific employee needs, handling employee disputes.
- Joof 6y agoI don't see how this isn't still necessary.
- ranci 6y agoYou don't see why maintaining a work environment wouldn't be necessary if the entire company were allowed to work from home?
- umbos 6y agoThe work environment remains, it just shifts location.
- dumbfoundded 6y agoDo you see how these problems greatly diminish if people cannot interact physically?
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoThat's a fraction of what HR does. Compensation, benefits, hiring, wellness, training, performance reviews, etc, etc. I doubt that even 10% of what HR does is tightly related to a physical space.
- ranci 6y agoHow exactly does it help to pass communications through a person (the manager) that, for the most part, does not understand the technical details of which they are speaking? We literally pay for slack for communication. No one needs an arbitrary human to act as a gatekeeping communication conduit.
- dumbfoundded 6y agoMaybe at tiny companies. At larger companies, you can't scale communication as a fully connected graph.
- ranci 6y agoI guess that's why you have multiple slack channels instead of one. You're trying to justify paying someone over 100 grand a year to be a worse form of communication than the software you're already paying for to communicate.
- dumbfoundded 6y agoI don't think I'm trying to justify any San Francisco salaries, lol. The point I'm trying to make is that a single person can only have so much organizational knowledge overhead. Facilitating communication between the right people without spamming the wrong people is tough. The github corporate move from a flat structure to a hierarchical is probably a good case study to read if you're interested: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/800 https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/800