4 ms·
You see this attitude in some senior (who are also, maybe relevantly or not, older) folks in the large company I work for. When asked questions about how to ca
by mft_ 6y ago
You see this attitude in some senior (who are also, maybe relevantly or not, older) folks in the large company I work for.
When asked questions about how to capture the positives and lessons of the pandemic/lockdown for our working practises, they consistently resort to “we’re a people company” and “can’t wait to have meetings face to face again”. It’s like they lack the mental flexibility to see how well remote working works for many people most of the time, or that they have a deeper reason they’re not sharing for wanting everyone back on site.
Thankfully, I think the cat is far too far out of the bag now, to ever be fully put back inside. We were already losing out on promising hires due to old-fashioned remote working policies; and I suspect that the majority of people will want to retain at least a reasonable degree of location flexibility even if/when Covid is only a memory.
- birdyrooster 6y agoI work for a FAANG and none of my colleagues have relocated. It doesn't seem like anyone is moving far enough that management would seem unreasonable to ask them to come in on a daily basis.
- vmlpA 6y agoLet's spell out the deeper reason: These people rely on personal interactions, charisma and the illusion of work afforded by on-site presence. It's much easier to identify the real workers in a remote setting. You can also see it in open source projects like Python, where always the same people go to sponsored core developer summits where nothing is achieved apart from showing presence, being in the in-group and gaining power.
- majormunky 6y agoI was more guessing that these people have a bunch of money tied up in commercial real estate and they want people out and about again.
- brundolf 6y agoFree-form collaboration has been a lot harder at my startup in a remote setting. The remote arrangement may benefit productivity when people are mostly working in silos, just crunching out code, but if you need to brainstorm or whiteboard something it's a genuine downgrade. Lots of companies will be switching to a part-time-remote model, which makes the most sense to me
- tal8d 6y agoThis reminds me of a supplier that was notorious in the security industry for stacking the sales dept with very friendly but otherwise unqualified "closers". I can't imagine that sales strategy is working so well right now.