4 ms·

Probably also helps management tier look busy. I can imagine if you have a scheduled video-chat with 15 minutes per employee, you can cover a 10-employee team

by hakfoo 5y ago

Probably also helps management tier look busy. I can imagine if you have a scheduled video-chat with 15 minutes per employee, you can cover a 10-employee team in about 3 hours. If you have to hunt them across the company campus and find meeting rooms and times, it ballons to 8.

MathYouF 5y ago
This is very true from what I've seen, but it doesn't mean managers who only do 3 hours of work aren't worth their daily wage. There are many programmers who only realistically do 3 hours of programming, but spend others thinking about the problem, researching, ect. Good managers in my experience have three important jobs: Scoping projects and getting the team together, motivating employees and handling their compant interfacing problems (talking to HR for them, managing account access issues, ect.), and most importantly talking with clients/stakeholders in a sympathetic ans professional way that many developers just won't do at the same quality. All of that might only take 3 hours of video calls per day, but for the good ones, it's a full day's work. For some, certain functions they're doing aren't needed, but most of the managers I've had have done valuable work that I wouldn't do as well and wouldn't want to have to do which would distract me from my work. Could professional football teams likely also have the players figure out training schedules, plane flights, diets, plays, recruiting? Probably, and some might be pretty good at it. So why don't they? Probably the reason those teams have coaches is the same as why managers in the tech space aren't all going to be proven useless working remotely, because they actually aren't.
- yunohn 5y ago
  > Scoping projects Maybe yours is a very different experience, but this hasn’t been mine both in engineering or sales teams. Quite often that’s a separate role, like project or engagement manager. And I’ve seen this in both large corps and mid-size startups.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Yes, but people who take eight hours to get three hours of work done due to the problems with offices aren't the ones you want to do eight hours of quality people/communication work at home. They will either need to be retrained or replaced, they wish neither, so they want employees to return to the office so nothing changes.

by hakfoo 5y ago

MathYouF 5y ago

This is very true from what I've seen, but it doesn't mean managers who only do 3 hours of work aren't worth their daily wage. There are many programmers who only realistically do 3 hours of programming, but spend others thinking about the problem, researching, ect. Good managers in my experience have three important jobs: Scoping projects and getting the team together, motivating employees and handling their compant interfacing problems (talking to HR for them, managing account access issues, ect.), and most importantly talking with clients/stakeholders in a sympathetic ans professional way that many developers just won't do at the same quality. All of that might only take 3 hours of video calls per day, but for the good ones, it's a full day's work. For some, certain functions they're doing aren't needed, but most of the managers I've had have done valuable work that I wouldn't do as well and wouldn't want to have to do which would distract me from my work. Could professional football teams likely also have the players figure out training schedules, plane flights, diets, plays, recruiting? Probably, and some might be pretty good at it. So why don't they? Probably the reason those teams have coaches is the same as why managers in the tech space aren't all going to be proven useless working remotely, because they actually aren't.

yunohn 5y ago
> Scoping projects Maybe yours is a very different experience, but this hasn’t been mine both in engineering or sales teams. Quite often that’s a separate role, like project or engagement manager. And I’ve seen this in both large corps and mid-size startups.
1123581321 5y ago
Yes, but people who take eight hours to get three hours of work done due to the problems with offices aren't the ones you want to do eight hours of quality people/communication work at home. They will either need to be retrained or replaced, they wish neither, so they want employees to return to the office so nothing changes.