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So yes, as a "boss", the work-from-home future is definitely and absolutely destroying my brain, but I think the whole discussion around control in the article

So yes, as a "boss", the work-from-home future is definitely and absolutely destroying my brain, but I think the whole discussion around control in the article completely misses my point. I couldn't care less about control and never cared about seat-in-the-ass time before. But as an engineer become manager, I can absolutely feel both sides here: While everything development is massively more chill remote (no interruptions and hey, just go fill your dishwasher while stuff compiles), everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me. Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog. Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me. I'm pretty curious on how all of this will turn out.

extr 5y ago
Agreed. I think people don't realize how much WFH sucks for people who are not ICs (or don't care). Pre-pandemic, I was pointing my career in a management direction. I enjoyed both development work and managing and they both took advantage of different skill sets. However, in my mind, management had more upside in the long run, and if I was going to be going into an office every day anyway, might as well keep at it. So at the start of the pandemic I was doing remote management of a technical team. And all those negatives you mention started to add up. In the last few months I got a different job as a senior developer to take advantage of the unbelievable W/L balance of permanent WFH. I decided "being a developer remotely" >> "being a manager in the office" >> "being a developer in the office" >> "being a manager remotely". On the other hand for my partner who is non-technical and squarely in management, WFH is an endless nightmare of virtual meetings with no breaks. Hard to read people, hard to get people engaged, nonstop pings preventing what little focus time she has left. She wants to get back to an office ASAP, and I don't blame her.
- cyberlurker 5y ago
  Why would those pings stop in office?
  - extr 5y ago
    They don't necessarily stop but they're...different, I would say. For one thing, if someone is grabbing your attention in the office for a "quick question", it's easy to make a clean break from that interaction and move on. Verbal communication is just more efficient, and it's obvious when you have a legitimate conflict and need to move on from the conversation (On my way out the door, to lunch, to a meeting, etc). It's also harder to get multiple "quick questions" at the same time, because in office people see when you're physically occupied. And it could be just me, but WFH I've noticed there is more psychological pressure to respond quickly to chats. Don't want people to think you're lounging off! A red "busy" indicator can mean a lot of things, in contrast to someone physically seeing you in conversation with your laptop closed in a meeting room. In theory you should enforce boundaries "I'll respond to all questions after this virtual meeting is over" or "I have a firm cut off at 5PM and will not respond after that". But that becomes tough when leadership, who should be setting expectations on this stuff, breaks it's own rules and multi-tasks during meetings or has unrealistic availability. Definitely a cultural thing that heavily depends on your exact role and the organization norms. TL;DR For "Zoom calls and text messaging" are not a drop in replacement for physically talking to someone, especially for people who spend a lot of their day having many small, ad-hoc conversations.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  > I think people don't realize how much WFH sucks for people who are not ICs (or don't care). yeah it probably sucks for managers to see huge parts of their jobs & supposed value-add automated away or otherwise proven unnecessary
  - extr 5y ago
    I think this kind of attitude says more about the person expressing it than it does about the value good management brings.
    - whateveracct 5y ago
      yeah it says that the person expressing it has worked with managers for years and years now and even the good ones' biggest value-add is just telling the bad ones to fuck off those managers are great for a remote IC. makes my life easy so I can minimize my hours and increase my effectively hourly rate
mediaman 5y ago
As a manager, how would you feel about a hybrid setup with people in the office say two days a week? Would it recapture a substantial portion of the benefits, or do you think you find that the manager utility of each extra day in the office doesn't diminish much?
- treespace88 5y ago
  Thanks for asking. Honestly I would like to be in the office as little as possible. I get knowing a person face to face has value, but having a fixed schedule of this would feel artificial and more draining.
zippergz 5y ago
This is a great point. For the most part, I love working from home, and will never go back to an office if I can help it. But I completely agree that these aspects of the job are much harder, and the perspective of someone who has never had to do them is going to miss some important things.
dtjohnnyb 5y ago
Sorry to hear that. This was a real jolt to read though. I've been really bullish about WFH or hybrid work for the future, since as an IC I've seen nothing but the benefits as you mention. I never thought of the stress of remote work in a management role though, so thanks for sharing!
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Don't forget interns. Those poor souls are absolutely screwed by all this. In no circumstance can I see mentoring an intern working remotely. At least not nearly as effectively as in person.
  - FearlessNebula 5y ago
    Google measures intern productivity each year and this year remote has been within the amount of typical variation.
  - xvilka 5y ago
    There's entire class of remote internships like Google Summer of Code, ESA Summer of Code, etc. Everyone doing just fine - mentors and interns.
silicon2401 5y ago
Hopefully leaders can learn some empathy from this pandemic. > everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me. As an engineer, everything about working in-person completely sucks for me. I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face, I hate sitting in office chairs and desks, and I hate commuting. > Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. Again, these all completely suck for me in-person. I'm an introvert and I hate having to put on a happy face for the manager (my resting face looks anywhere from tired to murderous), I hate "sitting in a war room" pretending to focus while my time is just wasted by people talking, I hate traveling and waiting in a lobby for interviews when I'm already nervous, and I hate having to mime the emotions and interactions that leaders think are meaningful but that I just do because it's part of office politics. Maybe you're an exception, and it would be great if you are. But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager. I think in 2021 it's fair to raise the bar and expect managers/leaders to learn basic online communication to the level that teenagers were doing like 10-20 years ago, rather than shackle everyone to the office and commutes because leaders can't learn how to use slack/zoom
- auiya 5y ago
  I don't feel the WFH pros/cons align perfectly with engineer/managers either. I know many managers who are very comfortable with managing a geo-distributed remote team. Mine in particular is quite good at it.
- walshemj 5y ago
  You really think your peers are going to appreciate your attitude? Don't take this the wrong way but I think you need to think about Therapy.
  - arlompcritiq 5y ago
    It’s not clear what exactly you’re referring to by “attitude” or how you think “Therapy” will affect it. On the other hand, I can easily see how the sort of non-constructive verbal lashing-out demonstrated in your comment could be a problem in the workplace, and a behavior that one can learn to avoid through Therapy.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I'm curious if/how this could be addressed with better collaboration systems. E.g., suppose everyone's WFH office had a Google Jamboard and high-quality videoconferencing system. If it addressed your concerns and per-employee cost was $10k initial + $5k/year, I would think it's still a win given the typical total-comp cost of a U.S.-based software developer.
auiya 5y ago
> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done As a person who at a previous job was often pulled into said "war rooms", we almost never "got that hard problem done", but we did always make management feel good about not being able to fully solve hard problems. Mostly these "huddle-work" scenarios created more problems (long term) than they solved, because people weren't motivated to solve the problem, they were motivated to leave the war room. I do my best work when I'm not constantly distracted by others, but many managers simply can't understand this and instead hamstring their employees by having "war rooms" and white-boarding sessions and stand-ups and deep-dives and all the other nonsensical ways of preventing people from actually focusing and accomplishing a task. Good riddance to the on-location office and all the hot garbo that comes with it; the rest of us will be quietly humming away, getting tasks done and solving major problems without such managerial hindrances.
- fastasucan 5y ago
  I'm at least 50% convinced that there is a natural selection where managers are the people who like that stuff but people who stay developers hate it. I totally agree with you, from the moment I step into one of these rooms with my laptop in hand I just want to get out of there and back to my chair, my monitors and time to think things through.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    "war rooms" are excellent in three cases: 1) creative brainstorming (ux, ui, branding, early architectural decisions) to ensure everyone can present and validate their ideas, and people are more on board with decisions as they saw democratic backing (or, at the very least, feel that objections they raise were heard!) 2) bringing staff that would normally be spread across multiple buildings and units together - the bigger the org and the more stakeholders involved, the more important a common space for (at least) the leadership team is, especially to cut through red tape and organizational barriers. 3) when you have an immediate problem (outages, GDPR incidents) to solve and secrecy is involved - no need to take care about people not in the loop, seeing stuff they are not supposed to etc. What "war rooms" often enough end at, unfortunately, is cramped chicken coops. Not enough space, sales/PM people directly sitting and blathering in their phones next to developers, ... for months. That's a farce.
fastasucan 5y ago
I think some of the reason that so many workers welcome this change is that they have had bad managers (which it sounds like you are not). For my self I had a on-site manager managing a team of 6-7 people out at a customer, however he failed to pick up on my detoriating mental health which lead to a severe case of burnout and me leaving the company. The signs was there, and I am still baffled what on earth he spent 8 hours on each day since the didn't do anything to stop that (at least for the sake of the company - I was not productive to say the least). Given that experience there is nothing gained in having a manager that I physically meet. Interesting to know if the different feelings people have regarding this is due to their experience with different managers. I hope that you find some way to adjust for the new way of working, if it is having regular workshops, having workers come in regularly, or if it all blows over and thing go back to normal.
dmitrygr 5y ago
> is an energy hog. Now you know how introverts feel about in-person meetings
matwood 5y ago
> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog. Being in any meeting or war room is also an energy hog. I do understand what you're saying though. What worked before, doesn't work anymore. Remote means management has to change. IC work for the most part was easy to move remote. Work that involved coordinating people and communication is going to take longer to figure out. It can be done, as many pre-COVID remote companies showed. But, it takes work to adapt.
rodgerd 5y ago
> Reading emotions and connecting to people. Literally every day of my life with autism.
solids 5y ago
When the pandemic started, I was working as a manager. It was my 6th year in that company. I thought, working remote is the best that ever happened to me. Now I changed my job three months ago and remote work is killing me. I realized that managing remotely it’s easy if you already have build strong relationships while in the office. You know how to approach each team member, who you can trust. It also takes much more time for people to trust you.
- kgilpin 5y ago
  People will trust you if you demonstrate leadership.
  - cheese_van 5y ago
    Ah, depends on the audience. A good portion of the workplace population seem, to managers, to be unmanageable. Another good portion seem, to workers, to be unable to manage. It will take real skill to ameliorate that remotely. Perhaps "remote leadership" is a new skill, a growth area to be exploited by the talented?
    - engineeringwoke 5y ago
      > A good portion of the workplace population seem, to managers, to be unmanageable. Another good portion seem, to workers, to be unable to manage. Seems more like theory of mind deficiencies as opposed to anything real
the_gipsy 5y ago
> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done What would you say exactly, you "do" here?
edem 5y ago
> I couldn't care less about control ... > just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done Sure, it is not about control, yeah yeah. Good riddance.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  no you don't get it if they don't get those 6 people in a room, then they'll just solve the same problem in the same time remotely and mr manager won't get any credit!
myndpage 5y ago
This is an organizational problem. You should not have that many meetings. People need to learn how to write. I manage people and we work fully asynchronously by using gitlab to its full potential. I have close to zero meeting a week. Everything is in writing. We write epics for new features and discuss there. A
remoteguy 5y ago
> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, you're doing it wrong. As a leader you should be adjusting to the dynamic that ensures meetings respect your teams' time, have clear outputs and follow-ups, etc. As someone who has been, and will continue to be, remote for many years in a leadership capacity, it's not the attendees of a meeting's fault if the person putting it on doesn't respect their time. The reality of remote work being forced in the office crowd that I see is a reckoning of where mere presence was taken for value. I would never expect to get the best work out of someone by sticking them in a dungeon for a week. Let them walk in the sunshine with a headset, sit in the shade with their laptop, or take a breather to enjoy their own safe space while exploring new ideas.
bastardoperator 5y ago
"six people in a war room for week" This sounds like hell, stop doing this to your employees.
slavapestov 5y ago
> Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me. Managing people in-person requires you to develop certain skills. Managing people remotely requires an overlapping but different set of skills. It is not harder or easier, just different, and like any skill, it can be learned with practice.
smsm42 5y ago
I've worked in organizations that were from ~20% remote to ~90% remote (for the teams I worked with), and while I've never been the boss - never had more than a couple of people reporting to me - I observed that somehow the bosses' work was getting done, and the organization has not descended into chaos any more than usual. I have to conclude from that that there are ways to run a remote engineering org, with results no worse than for a meatspace-local one. Maybe you're just about to discover them.

extr 5y ago

Agreed. I think people don't realize how much WFH sucks for people who are not ICs (or don't care). Pre-pandemic, I was pointing my career in a management direction. I enjoyed both development work and managing and they both took advantage of different skill sets. However, in my mind, management had more upside in the long run, and if I was going to be going into an office every day anyway, might as well keep at it. So at the start of the pandemic I was doing remote management of a technical team. And all those negatives you mention started to add up. In the last few months I got a different job as a senior developer to take advantage of the unbelievable W/L balance of permanent WFH. I decided "being a developer remotely" >> "being a manager in the office" >> "being a developer in the office" >> "being a manager remotely". On the other hand for my partner who is non-technical and squarely in management, WFH is an endless nightmare of virtual meetings with no breaks. Hard to read people, hard to get people engaged, nonstop pings preventing what little focus time she has left. She wants to get back to an office ASAP, and I don't blame her.

cyberlurker 5y ago
Why would those pings stop in office?
- extr 5y ago
  They don't necessarily stop but they're...different, I would say. For one thing, if someone is grabbing your attention in the office for a "quick question", it's easy to make a clean break from that interaction and move on. Verbal communication is just more efficient, and it's obvious when you have a legitimate conflict and need to move on from the conversation (On my way out the door, to lunch, to a meeting, etc). It's also harder to get multiple "quick questions" at the same time, because in office people see when you're physically occupied. And it could be just me, but WFH I've noticed there is more psychological pressure to respond quickly to chats. Don't want people to think you're lounging off! A red "busy" indicator can mean a lot of things, in contrast to someone physically seeing you in conversation with your laptop closed in a meeting room. In theory you should enforce boundaries "I'll respond to all questions after this virtual meeting is over" or "I have a firm cut off at 5PM and will not respond after that". But that becomes tough when leadership, who should be setting expectations on this stuff, breaks it's own rules and multi-tasks during meetings or has unrealistic availability. Definitely a cultural thing that heavily depends on your exact role and the organization norms. TL;DR For "Zoom calls and text messaging" are not a drop in replacement for physically talking to someone, especially for people who spend a lot of their day having many small, ad-hoc conversations.
whateveracct 5y ago
> I think people don't realize how much WFH sucks for people who are not ICs (or don't care). yeah it probably sucks for managers to see huge parts of their jobs & supposed value-add automated away or otherwise proven unnecessary
- extr 5y ago
  I think this kind of attitude says more about the person expressing it than it does about the value good management brings.
  - whateveracct 5y ago
    yeah it says that the person expressing it has worked with managers for years and years now and even the good ones' biggest value-add is just telling the bad ones to fuck off those managers are great for a remote IC. makes my life easy so I can minimize my hours and increase my effectively hourly rate

mediaman 5y ago

As a manager, how would you feel about a hybrid setup with people in the office say two days a week? Would it recapture a substantial portion of the benefits, or do you think you find that the manager utility of each extra day in the office doesn't diminish much?

treespace88 5y ago
Thanks for asking. Honestly I would like to be in the office as little as possible. I get knowing a person face to face has value, but having a fixed schedule of this would feel artificial and more draining.

zippergz 5y ago

This is a great point. For the most part, I love working from home, and will never go back to an office if I can help it. But I completely agree that these aspects of the job are much harder, and the perspective of someone who has never had to do them is going to miss some important things.

dtjohnnyb 5y ago

Sorry to hear that. This was a real jolt to read though. I've been really bullish about WFH or hybrid work for the future, since as an IC I've seen nothing but the benefits as you mention. I never thought of the stress of remote work in a management role though, so thanks for sharing!

spookthesunset 5y ago
Don't forget interns. Those poor souls are absolutely screwed by all this. In no circumstance can I see mentoring an intern working remotely. At least not nearly as effectively as in person.
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  Google measures intern productivity each year and this year remote has been within the amount of typical variation.
- xvilka 5y ago
  There's entire class of remote internships like Google Summer of Code, ESA Summer of Code, etc. Everyone doing just fine - mentors and interns.

silicon2401 5y ago

Hopefully leaders can learn some empathy from this pandemic. > everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me. As an engineer, everything about working in-person completely sucks for me. I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face, I hate sitting in office chairs and desks, and I hate commuting. > Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. Again, these all completely suck for me in-person. I'm an introvert and I hate having to put on a happy face for the manager (my resting face looks anywhere from tired to murderous), I hate "sitting in a war room" pretending to focus while my time is just wasted by people talking, I hate traveling and waiting in a lobby for interviews when I'm already nervous, and I hate having to mime the emotions and interactions that leaders think are meaningful but that I just do because it's part of office politics. Maybe you're an exception, and it would be great if you are. But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager. I think in 2021 it's fair to raise the bar and expect managers/leaders to learn basic online communication to the level that teenagers were doing like 10-20 years ago, rather than shackle everyone to the office and commutes because leaders can't learn how to use slack/zoom

auiya 5y ago
I don't feel the WFH pros/cons align perfectly with engineer/managers either. I know many managers who are very comfortable with managing a geo-distributed remote team. Mine in particular is quite good at it.
walshemj 5y ago
You really think your peers are going to appreciate your attitude? Don't take this the wrong way but I think you need to think about Therapy.
- arlompcritiq 5y ago
  It’s not clear what exactly you’re referring to by “attitude” or how you think “Therapy” will affect it. On the other hand, I can easily see how the sort of non-constructive verbal lashing-out demonstrated in your comment could be a problem in the workplace, and a behavior that one can learn to avoid through Therapy.

CoastalCoder 5y ago

I'm curious if/how this could be addressed with better collaboration systems. E.g., suppose everyone's WFH office had a Google Jamboard and high-quality videoconferencing system. If it addressed your concerns and per-employee cost was $10k initial + $5k/year, I would think it's still a win given the typical total-comp cost of a U.S.-based software developer.

auiya 5y ago

> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done As a person who at a previous job was often pulled into said "war rooms", we almost never "got that hard problem done", but we did always make management feel good about not being able to fully solve hard problems. Mostly these "huddle-work" scenarios created more problems (long term) than they solved, because people weren't motivated to solve the problem, they were motivated to leave the war room. I do my best work when I'm not constantly distracted by others, but many managers simply can't understand this and instead hamstring their employees by having "war rooms" and white-boarding sessions and stand-ups and deep-dives and all the other nonsensical ways of preventing people from actually focusing and accomplishing a task. Good riddance to the on-location office and all the hot garbo that comes with it; the rest of us will be quietly humming away, getting tasks done and solving major problems without such managerial hindrances.

fastasucan 5y ago
I'm at least 50% convinced that there is a natural selection where managers are the people who like that stuff but people who stay developers hate it. I totally agree with you, from the moment I step into one of these rooms with my laptop in hand I just want to get out of there and back to my chair, my monitors and time to think things through.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  "war rooms" are excellent in three cases: 1) creative brainstorming (ux, ui, branding, early architectural decisions) to ensure everyone can present and validate their ideas, and people are more on board with decisions as they saw democratic backing (or, at the very least, feel that objections they raise were heard!) 2) bringing staff that would normally be spread across multiple buildings and units together - the bigger the org and the more stakeholders involved, the more important a common space for (at least) the leadership team is, especially to cut through red tape and organizational barriers. 3) when you have an immediate problem (outages, GDPR incidents) to solve and secrecy is involved - no need to take care about people not in the loop, seeing stuff they are not supposed to etc. What "war rooms" often enough end at, unfortunately, is cramped chicken coops. Not enough space, sales/PM people directly sitting and blathering in their phones next to developers, ... for months. That's a farce.

fastasucan 5y ago

I think some of the reason that so many workers welcome this change is that they have had bad managers (which it sounds like you are not). For my self I had a on-site manager managing a team of 6-7 people out at a customer, however he failed to pick up on my detoriating mental health which lead to a severe case of burnout and me leaving the company. The signs was there, and I am still baffled what on earth he spent 8 hours on each day since the didn't do anything to stop that (at least for the sake of the company - I was not productive to say the least). Given that experience there is nothing gained in having a manager that I physically meet. Interesting to know if the different feelings people have regarding this is due to their experience with different managers. I hope that you find some way to adjust for the new way of working, if it is having regular workshops, having workers come in regularly, or if it all blows over and thing go back to normal.

dmitrygr 5y ago

> is an energy hog. Now you know how introverts feel about in-person meetings

matwood 5y ago

rodgerd 5y ago

> Reading emotions and connecting to people. Literally every day of my life with autism.

solids 5y ago

When the pandemic started, I was working as a manager. It was my 6th year in that company. I thought, working remote is the best that ever happened to me. Now I changed my job three months ago and remote work is killing me. I realized that managing remotely it’s easy if you already have build strong relationships while in the office. You know how to approach each team member, who you can trust. It also takes much more time for people to trust you.

kgilpin 5y ago
People will trust you if you demonstrate leadership.
- cheese_van 5y ago
  Ah, depends on the audience. A good portion of the workplace population seem, to managers, to be unmanageable. Another good portion seem, to workers, to be unable to manage. It will take real skill to ameliorate that remotely. Perhaps "remote leadership" is a new skill, a growth area to be exploited by the talented?
  - engineeringwoke 5y ago
    > A good portion of the workplace population seem, to managers, to be unmanageable. Another good portion seem, to workers, to be unable to manage. Seems more like theory of mind deficiencies as opposed to anything real

the_gipsy 5y ago

> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done What would you say exactly, you "do" here?

edem 5y ago

> I couldn't care less about control ... > just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done Sure, it is not about control, yeah yeah. Good riddance.

whateveracct 5y ago
no you don't get it if they don't get those 6 people in a room, then they'll just solve the same problem in the same time remotely and mr manager won't get any credit!

myndpage 5y ago

This is an organizational problem. You should not have that many meetings. People need to learn how to write. I manage people and we work fully asynchronously by using gitlab to its full potential. I have close to zero meeting a week. Everything is in writing. We write epics for new features and discuss there. A

remoteguy 5y ago

> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, you're doing it wrong. As a leader you should be adjusting to the dynamic that ensures meetings respect your teams' time, have clear outputs and follow-ups, etc. As someone who has been, and will continue to be, remote for many years in a leadership capacity, it's not the attendees of a meeting's fault if the person putting it on doesn't respect their time. The reality of remote work being forced in the office crowd that I see is a reckoning of where mere presence was taken for value. I would never expect to get the best work out of someone by sticking them in a dungeon for a week. Let them walk in the sunshine with a headset, sit in the shade with their laptop, or take a breather to enjoy their own safe space while exploring new ideas.

bastardoperator 5y ago

"six people in a war room for week" This sounds like hell, stop doing this to your employees.

slavapestov 5y ago

> Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me. Managing people in-person requires you to develop certain skills. Managing people remotely requires an overlapping but different set of skills. It is not harder or easier, just different, and like any skill, it can be learned with practice.

smsm42 5y ago

I've worked in organizations that were from ~20% remote to ~90% remote (for the teams I worked with), and while I've never been the boss - never had more than a couple of people reporting to me - I observed that somehow the bosses' work was getting done, and the organization has not descended into chaos any more than usual. I have to conclude from that that there are ways to run a remote engineering org, with results no worse than for a meatspace-local one. Maybe you're just about to discover them.