8 ms·

I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry. They are absolutely fucked. Like Wile E Coyote running over a cliff, they a

by dade_ 5y ago

I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry. They are absolutely fucked. Like Wile E Coyote running over a cliff, they are desperate to not look down. In December 2019, I asked some guys in wealth management, what’s a hot tip, and they were all about Commercial Real Estate, it never goes down! I laughed, but then wondered, what would make it go down? Anyway, that question is now answered. I’ve been working with a company that have done studies on remote work, at the beginning 4% of employees wanted to work from the office 100% of the time. 6 months later it was 2%. Problem #1, Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them. Problem #2, people new to the workforce are most likely to want to come into the office some of the time as they are struggling to figure out the culture and finding help and mentoring. This is actually another failing of employers.

ffggvv 5y ago
yeah google and apple also spent massive budgets on commercial real estate holdings. billions. that’s why they’re trying to prevent wfh
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  I think Google and Apple are smart enough to see past sunk cost fallacies.
  - black_13 5y ago
    Really?
  - 1270018080 5y ago
    I wonder how long Stadia will be around
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Well Apple engineering involves (for some divisions) access to exorbitantly expensive capitalized equipment. WFH for folks in engineering labs with millions of dollars of shared instruments doesn't make sense. That was the fundamental reality inside Apple engineering that I lived, anyway: the millions of dollars of instruments for digital design and test can't be repurchased per engineer.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    That makes sense, but I have a hunch that the majority of people that work at Apple (at least in the US, and not say the actual manufacturing plants [thats probably outsourced to many companies in asia]) don't need to work with expensive hardware for their day to day work. The reality of the situation, globally, is that the commercial real estate market was showing signs of rolling over prior to the pandemic (as well as many other markets), and the bailoutistan operations since sept 2019 repo market intervention continue to enable a lot of the paper of CRE that has/is used as collateral (and rehypothicated many times over) to put alot of entities exposed to it on life support… However it does nothing for cashflows in the CRE that no longer exist, which is why the situation will continue to get worse with out continuously increasing the interventions in markets, and the forces that influence behavior in those markets (i.e NYT posts shilling someones cornered book to try and get peoples behaviors/preferences to change). Arguably, there has been a long shift to remote work going on since the 90's. Anecdote: My dad has been working from home not too long after P&G sold his division to HP and then to BT, and I have been for 5 years prior to march 2020 (and continue to do so today).
  - llampx 5y ago
    It's like the 2020 trope of the construction worker saying that work-from-home won't work because how can they work from home? Of course in every company there will be a subset of people who cannot do their job from home. Nobody is saying that every job can be done remotely. So it doesn't help to roll out the exceptions and say that nobody can work from home.
  - ffggvv 5y ago
    yeah except for the tens of thousands of software engineers they employee that have worked from home this entire year. iphone app devs don’t need expensive hardware
    - jjtheblunt 5y ago
      i don't know current counts but tens of thousands of software engineers sounds (maybe 100x ?) too many. there are huge numbers of hourly employees across the stores, though i don't know where they break down numbers of employees by type.
perfopt 5y ago
Problem #3 Many managers really contribute nothing. WFH is exposing that
- diragon 5y ago
  That's only true if your team is miraculously self-sufficient. Also, good managers don't need offices.
- jcims 5y ago
  I'm curious about the vocal disdain for 'managers' here at HN. I know it's just a subset of folks voicing these opinions but I'm intrigued by the level of vitriol and consistency of the message. I've been filing taxes since 1988 and I've only had one or two managers that I would say are truly incompetent. I would say most of my managers have rusty but relevant technical skills, have been open to my input, are generally willing to negotiate through disagreements and, my favorite, leave me alone. I've had a handful of legendary managers, a word I am tempted to put in quotes because they inspired me, helped me grow, and left me in a much better state than they found me. Having managed multiple teams myself, it can be a fuckin' slog. There have always been one or two extremely high maintenance people on the team, conflicts to resolve, bullshit HR stuff to take care of, commitments to defend, bullshit to block, misses to explain and some amount of time tending to vestigial organizational dependencies that somehow are impossible to shake. And that's without immigration to deal with...that's an entire mess of its own. That is all in addition to actually developing some type of relationship with each member of the team. Trying to get a feel for their communication style, pull(!) out from them some idea of what they see on the horizon, continuously observe their interaction with the team and overall performance at their job. Look for recommendations to help them improve in areas that need it and then run that through what you've learned about them in order to deliver it in a way in which they will be receptive. Mine progress for evidence of efforts from the underrecognized and let them know they are seen. Plan for promos when the time is right, begin evangelizing your employee early on, work on promo package with them, mine your network for support as you educate your employee on what is needed to get it done. Then you have the periodic dumpster fires that 99% of the time are entirely avoidable. Intra and inter-team fights, liars and cowboys breaking shit, last minute disclosures of untenable delivery gaps, HR-issues, extra curricular issues, etc. It's not a particularly easy job and I would say that the combination of technical and interpersonal skills that would be required to meet expectations I see voiced here and elsewhere are in extremely limited supply. I know I have and will continue to fall short of that standard many times. Dunno, maybe I've just been lucky.
Invictus0 5y ago
Per 1 and 2: my brother got his first internship at a miserable finance firm in June 2020. All meetings were camera off. No introductions, welcomes, or onboarding whatsoever, just faceless screennames handing out assignments. Needless to say he's looking for a new job.
- ecshafer 5y ago
  What I am seeing is managers, corporate side, HR and finance side people love cameras on. They are mostly dressed up and in their houses with cameras on. IT, Development, Engineering are cameras off. I prefer cameras off. On the one hand I could see it being kind of isolating and you aren't building those social connection, on the other, is that the place of work?
  - warkdarrior 5y ago
    If you're just a name on the screen, you're easy to replace. Half-competent programmers are a dime a dozen in India, Eastern Europe, and South America. And they know how to use Zoom too!
  - novok 5y ago
    I work in software engineering, and it's frankly annoying to deal with the always camera off people in zoom meetings. Usually it's well correlated with bad audio too and you have to strain to understand them. I don't want to make an argument about it because they are usually rare, but if any of my 1:1 teammates was always video off then I would bring it up to them. Get a good A/V setup people, you have the technical ability and it's one of your main job interfaces. At the very least use a wired headphone setup and microphone so we don't play walkie talkie games as echo cancellation mutes one of us dynamically and your bluetooth headset adds 100ms random delays and a lower bit rate of audio. Also do ethernet to remove the delays and packet drops from wifi.
  - kilburn 5y ago
    I ask for camera-on whenever there are less than 5 persons in a call. The fact of the matter is that most people (myself included) are able to read visual cues from others and adapt their message accordingly. Actual communication (which entails understanding) is just easier this way.
dcolkitt 5y ago
> Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them. If a manager is struggling with a remote team, that’s usually a sign that they’re generally incompetent as a manager. There may be a few cases of good overall managers that struggle with remote. But they’re few and far between. The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. It’s not a lack of training. Remote management is pretty much nothing more than basic management 101. Mediocre operators prefer in-office because it’s easier to kludge something that gives off the appearance of actual management. When a team transitions to full remote, it’s like the tide going out and finding out who’s swimming naked. If companies were sensible, they’d embrace full remote because it quickly reveals where the weak points in the org chart are. And rather than capitulating to demands, any middle manager lobbying for a return to the office is probably a good candidate to trim the fat.
- jayd16 5y ago
  I personally find it much harder to onboard new people. It was easier to notice when someone is lost/struggling when you could see more body language. Mentoring in a pair/XP style feels a bit harder over Zoom but the tools are getting better. Planning meetings (or any type of open discussions) are much more grating to me with the Zoom lag and cross talk. Heads down, ticket based work has less distractions though. Maybe I just suck but I feel much more adept at in person interactions than remote interactions and its not about appearances.
- _nalply 5y ago
  Many companies function on thick layers of bullshit [1]. I liked your metaphor: when the tide goes out we see the shit below the water. Managers don't like when they lose face. [1]: please read David Graeber, may he rest in peace.
- maybelsyrup 5y ago
  > The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. 1000x this. Much of the time, people in management were promoted there because they were complete shit at line / front of house / customer or client-facing work and someone up top didn't feel like firing them that day. After all, if you were good at line work, why would they promote you away from it? It makes perfect sense that they'd be complete shit at managing teams, too -- remote or in-person.
closeparen 5y ago
I'm down to bang out JIRA tickets from the comfort of my home in exchange for money. But that's as far as it goes. The skeuomorphism of "team" and the skeuomorphism of "culture" are vile. I'm not going to "mentor" an object on my computer screen as if it were a human being who showed up to be my teammate.
- machinelearning 5y ago
  That just shows a lack of understanding on your part. There is a human being on the other side with the same feelings and subjective experiences as in person. You may argue that team and culture is reinforced by doing activities that intrinsically require you to be in person (e.g. board game, sports etc.) But I don’t quite follow why you absolutely need to be in person to find mentoring someone worthwhile.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    No, it is a mistaken assumption on the part of remote partisans that humanity carries over through the internet. It doesn’t.
- pacifika 5y ago
  You’re that object to the other humans on your team, so perhaps that is not the best thought out strategy
  - closeparen 5y ago
    I know, that’s why it’s very important to avoid any team that indulges remote workers.
spfzero 5y ago
It does take some time for a new employee to figure out how to visibly contribute. Whereas more established ones have gained trust and confidence, so that they are considered fully engaged even when remote. I wonder if a good hybrid approach would be that managers with reports having less than a year or two tenure, along with those new reports, go in to the office every day. At the end of that time the worker can work remotely. When the manager no longer has new reports, that manager can work remotely.
zeruch 5y ago
I'm likely biased in that I've run a nearly 100% remote team for almost a decade. I don't find it difficult (most of the time; some days trying to manage multiple geos when multiple escalations are in play can be trying, but having excellent, competent staff helps) but I do think it requires mindset and approach that is different from folks who operate from a "I need to see them in a desk" mentality. It starts from hiring people that inspire trust, and then...trusting them. Get them their assignments, mentor/coach them when and where needed, but otherwise let them do the work. Let them shine on their own. Metrics are largely measurable anywhere, if you picked the right ones. Build esprit d'corps. The rest starts to fall into place naturally after...
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  this is the most resonatingly true thing i've read lately
mgh2 5y ago
I remember the time when Marissa Mayer became Yahoo's CEO and canceled WFH saying that it was ineffective. Pretty sure there was no correlation in the firm's demise (Yahoo was already underwater), but not sure it did help either.
- gaius_baltar 5y ago
  That was not a ban on WFH, but a disguised layoff.
- llampx 5y ago
  Meanwhile she had the privilege of having a private office where she had a nursery installed for her newborn child. Doubly toxic, both to every remote worker and to every parent who has to take care of their children without being able to install a creche in their own office.
Overton-Window 5y ago
Repurpose commercial real estate into residential, leaving ground floor retail intact. Housing shortage eliminated.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  But who wants to live in an office block. We have done some of this in the UK and in general it hasn't gone well.
maybelsyrup 5y ago
> I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry. You're right. Idea: I live out west, where there's not enough housing. I was walking by a now completely shuttered cluster of office buildings near me the other day and wondered two things. First, "wow, commercial real estate people must be sweating" and second, "why don't we rezone this all this stuff and turn it into apartments?"
- caf 5y ago
  There's a former office building near me that has been converted into an apartment hotel, so it's certainly possible if the zoning etc can be sorted out.
GaryTang 5y ago
FYI: There are multiple asset types categorized under CRE. Offices are just one of those types.
bluebubble56 5y ago
I hadn't even thought of that - but I do have several friends whose offices are downsizing due to WFH policies, so I wouldn't be surprised. Surely you could just repurpose some of the buildings into residential real estate though?

by dade_ 5y ago

ffggvv 5y ago

yeah google and apple also spent massive budgets on commercial real estate holdings. billions. that’s why they’re trying to prevent wfh

colinmhayes 5y ago
I think Google and Apple are smart enough to see past sunk cost fallacies.
- black_13 5y ago
  Really?
- 1270018080 5y ago
  I wonder how long Stadia will be around
jjtheblunt 5y ago
Well Apple engineering involves (for some divisions) access to exorbitantly expensive capitalized equipment. WFH for folks in engineering labs with millions of dollars of shared instruments doesn't make sense. That was the fundamental reality inside Apple engineering that I lived, anyway: the millions of dollars of instruments for digital design and test can't be repurchased per engineer.
- cinquemb 5y ago
  That makes sense, but I have a hunch that the majority of people that work at Apple (at least in the US, and not say the actual manufacturing plants [thats probably outsourced to many companies in asia]) don't need to work with expensive hardware for their day to day work. The reality of the situation, globally, is that the commercial real estate market was showing signs of rolling over prior to the pandemic (as well as many other markets), and the bailoutistan operations since sept 2019 repo market intervention continue to enable a lot of the paper of CRE that has/is used as collateral (and rehypothicated many times over) to put alot of entities exposed to it on life support… However it does nothing for cashflows in the CRE that no longer exist, which is why the situation will continue to get worse with out continuously increasing the interventions in markets, and the forces that influence behavior in those markets (i.e NYT posts shilling someones cornered book to try and get peoples behaviors/preferences to change). Arguably, there has been a long shift to remote work going on since the 90's. Anecdote: My dad has been working from home not too long after P&G sold his division to HP and then to BT, and I have been for 5 years prior to march 2020 (and continue to do so today).
- llampx 5y ago
  It's like the 2020 trope of the construction worker saying that work-from-home won't work because how can they work from home? Of course in every company there will be a subset of people who cannot do their job from home. Nobody is saying that every job can be done remotely. So it doesn't help to roll out the exceptions and say that nobody can work from home.
- ffggvv 5y ago
  yeah except for the tens of thousands of software engineers they employee that have worked from home this entire year. iphone app devs don’t need expensive hardware
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    i don't know current counts but tens of thousands of software engineers sounds (maybe 100x ?) too many. there are huge numbers of hourly employees across the stores, though i don't know where they break down numbers of employees by type.

perfopt 5y ago

Problem #3 Many managers really contribute nothing. WFH is exposing that

diragon 5y ago
That's only true if your team is miraculously self-sufficient. Also, good managers don't need offices.
jcims 5y ago
I'm curious about the vocal disdain for 'managers' here at HN. I know it's just a subset of folks voicing these opinions but I'm intrigued by the level of vitriol and consistency of the message. I've been filing taxes since 1988 and I've only had one or two managers that I would say are truly incompetent. I would say most of my managers have rusty but relevant technical skills, have been open to my input, are generally willing to negotiate through disagreements and, my favorite, leave me alone. I've had a handful of legendary managers, a word I am tempted to put in quotes because they inspired me, helped me grow, and left me in a much better state than they found me. Having managed multiple teams myself, it can be a fuckin' slog. There have always been one or two extremely high maintenance people on the team, conflicts to resolve, bullshit HR stuff to take care of, commitments to defend, bullshit to block, misses to explain and some amount of time tending to vestigial organizational dependencies that somehow are impossible to shake. And that's without immigration to deal with...that's an entire mess of its own. That is all in addition to actually developing some type of relationship with each member of the team. Trying to get a feel for their communication style, pull(!) out from them some idea of what they see on the horizon, continuously observe their interaction with the team and overall performance at their job. Look for recommendations to help them improve in areas that need it and then run that through what you've learned about them in order to deliver it in a way in which they will be receptive. Mine progress for evidence of efforts from the underrecognized and let them know they are seen. Plan for promos when the time is right, begin evangelizing your employee early on, work on promo package with them, mine your network for support as you educate your employee on what is needed to get it done. Then you have the periodic dumpster fires that 99% of the time are entirely avoidable. Intra and inter-team fights, liars and cowboys breaking shit, last minute disclosures of untenable delivery gaps, HR-issues, extra curricular issues, etc. It's not a particularly easy job and I would say that the combination of technical and interpersonal skills that would be required to meet expectations I see voiced here and elsewhere are in extremely limited supply. I know I have and will continue to fall short of that standard many times. Dunno, maybe I've just been lucky.

Invictus0 5y ago

Per 1 and 2: my brother got his first internship at a miserable finance firm in June 2020. All meetings were camera off. No introductions, welcomes, or onboarding whatsoever, just faceless screennames handing out assignments. Needless to say he's looking for a new job.

ecshafer 5y ago
What I am seeing is managers, corporate side, HR and finance side people love cameras on. They are mostly dressed up and in their houses with cameras on. IT, Development, Engineering are cameras off. I prefer cameras off. On the one hand I could see it being kind of isolating and you aren't building those social connection, on the other, is that the place of work?
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  If you're just a name on the screen, you're easy to replace. Half-competent programmers are a dime a dozen in India, Eastern Europe, and South America. And they know how to use Zoom too!
- novok 5y ago
  I work in software engineering, and it's frankly annoying to deal with the always camera off people in zoom meetings. Usually it's well correlated with bad audio too and you have to strain to understand them. I don't want to make an argument about it because they are usually rare, but if any of my 1:1 teammates was always video off then I would bring it up to them. Get a good A/V setup people, you have the technical ability and it's one of your main job interfaces. At the very least use a wired headphone setup and microphone so we don't play walkie talkie games as echo cancellation mutes one of us dynamically and your bluetooth headset adds 100ms random delays and a lower bit rate of audio. Also do ethernet to remove the delays and packet drops from wifi.
- kilburn 5y ago
  I ask for camera-on whenever there are less than 5 persons in a call. The fact of the matter is that most people (myself included) are able to read visual cues from others and adapt their message accordingly. Actual communication (which entails understanding) is just easier this way.

dcolkitt 5y ago

> Most managers don’t know how to manage a remote team and their employer still hasn’t trained them. If a manager is struggling with a remote team, that’s usually a sign that they’re generally incompetent as a manager. There may be a few cases of good overall managers that struggle with remote. But they’re few and far between. The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. It’s not a lack of training. Remote management is pretty much nothing more than basic management 101. Mediocre operators prefer in-office because it’s easier to kludge something that gives off the appearance of actual management. When a team transitions to full remote, it’s like the tide going out and finding out who’s swimming naked. If companies were sensible, they’d embrace full remote because it quickly reveals where the weak points in the org chart are. And rather than capitulating to demands, any middle manager lobbying for a return to the office is probably a good candidate to trim the fat.

jayd16 5y ago
I personally find it much harder to onboard new people. It was easier to notice when someone is lost/struggling when you could see more body language. Mentoring in a pair/XP style feels a bit harder over Zoom but the tools are getting better. Planning meetings (or any type of open discussions) are much more grating to me with the Zoom lag and cross talk. Heads down, ticket based work has less distractions though. Maybe I just suck but I feel much more adept at in person interactions than remote interactions and its not about appearances.
_nalply 5y ago
Many companies function on thick layers of bullshit [1]. I liked your metaphor: when the tide goes out we see the shit below the water. Managers don't like when they lose face. [1]: please read David Graeber, may he rest in peace.
maybelsyrup 5y ago
> The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. 1000x this. Much of the time, people in management were promoted there because they were complete shit at line / front of house / customer or client-facing work and someone up top didn't feel like firing them that day. After all, if you were good at line work, why would they promote you away from it? It makes perfect sense that they'd be complete shit at managing teams, too -- remote or in-person.

closeparen 5y ago

I'm down to bang out JIRA tickets from the comfort of my home in exchange for money. But that's as far as it goes. The skeuomorphism of "team" and the skeuomorphism of "culture" are vile. I'm not going to "mentor" an object on my computer screen as if it were a human being who showed up to be my teammate.

machinelearning 5y ago
That just shows a lack of understanding on your part. There is a human being on the other side with the same feelings and subjective experiences as in person. You may argue that team and culture is reinforced by doing activities that intrinsically require you to be in person (e.g. board game, sports etc.) But I don’t quite follow why you absolutely need to be in person to find mentoring someone worthwhile.
- closeparen 5y ago
  No, it is a mistaken assumption on the part of remote partisans that humanity carries over through the internet. It doesn’t.
pacifika 5y ago
You’re that object to the other humans on your team, so perhaps that is not the best thought out strategy
- closeparen 5y ago
  I know, that’s why it’s very important to avoid any team that indulges remote workers.

spfzero 5y ago

It does take some time for a new employee to figure out how to visibly contribute. Whereas more established ones have gained trust and confidence, so that they are considered fully engaged even when remote. I wonder if a good hybrid approach would be that managers with reports having less than a year or two tenure, along with those new reports, go in to the office every day. At the end of that time the worker can work remotely. When the manager no longer has new reports, that manager can work remotely.

zeruch 5y ago

I'm likely biased in that I've run a nearly 100% remote team for almost a decade. I don't find it difficult (most of the time; some days trying to manage multiple geos when multiple escalations are in play can be trying, but having excellent, competent staff helps) but I do think it requires mindset and approach that is different from folks who operate from a "I need to see them in a desk" mentality. It starts from hiring people that inspire trust, and then...trusting them. Get them their assignments, mentor/coach them when and where needed, but otherwise let them do the work. Let them shine on their own. Metrics are largely measurable anywhere, if you picked the right ones. Build esprit d'corps. The rest starts to fall into place naturally after...

jjtheblunt 5y ago
this is the most resonatingly true thing i've read lately

mgh2 5y ago

I remember the time when Marissa Mayer became Yahoo's CEO and canceled WFH saying that it was ineffective. Pretty sure there was no correlation in the firm's demise (Yahoo was already underwater), but not sure it did help either.

gaius_baltar 5y ago
That was not a ban on WFH, but a disguised layoff.
llampx 5y ago
Meanwhile she had the privilege of having a private office where she had a nursery installed for her newborn child. Doubly toxic, both to every remote worker and to every parent who has to take care of their children without being able to install a creche in their own office.

Overton-Window 5y ago

Repurpose commercial real estate into residential, leaving ground floor retail intact. Housing shortage eliminated.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
But who wants to live in an office block. We have done some of this in the UK and in general it hasn't gone well.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

> I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry. You're right. Idea: I live out west, where there's not enough housing. I was walking by a now completely shuttered cluster of office buildings near me the other day and wondered two things. First, "wow, commercial real estate people must be sweating" and second, "why don't we rezone this all this stuff and turn it into apartments?"

caf 5y ago
There's a former office building near me that has been converted into an apartment hotel, so it's certainly possible if the zoning etc can be sorted out.

GaryTang 5y ago

FYI: There are multiple asset types categorized under CRE. Offices are just one of those types.

bluebubble56 5y ago

I hadn't even thought of that - but I do have several friends whose offices are downsizing due to WFH policies, so I wouldn't be surprised. Surely you could just repurpose some of the buildings into residential real estate though?