8 ms·

I have a theory about this, I already know some people hate it, and others totally agree. Basically it is that executives, management types, people who worked t

I have a theory about this, I already know some people hate it, and others totally agree. Basically it is that executives, management types, people who worked their whole career to get ahead and get that corner office, they really like walking around an office, it is like their fiefdom. It's not just the meetings or whatever, it is being a big shot and having people see them that way. It is a big part of what they worked for. This is a generalization, of course, not all executives and managers are completely that way, but, I think all have, if they are completely honest, will admit, they kind of like being the big man on campus and miss that a little bit. I am not casting shade here, it would be human nature, of course, you worked hard to be head of things, you want to walk around and enjoy that, it is completely understandable. Those of us who do not care about that sort of thing and are happy writing code, developing circuits or network designs and etc. We are completely fine working from home. In fact, not having the distractions of an office is actually really nice. But if part of your fulfilment is being "the big boss" or whatever, it's just not as satisfying sitting in your basement on Zoom with the rest of us. Just my little theory.

pfisherman 5y ago
I think it has more to do with the nature of the job. Management is mostly communication and collaborative planning. This type of work benefits from having people together in one place to a much greater degree than most IC work.
- waynesonfire 5y ago
  totally, i'd go occam's razor on this one.
prawn 5y ago
I could see this being part of it. Managing people surely has a bit of performance to it, and the physical office is a stage. Similarly, I quite like working from home and walking around the house (getting drinks/snacks/etc) looking at the garden. That's all something I've worked for - things I planted or bought or paid off - and it's comforting to see it.
mellavora 5y ago
[disclaimer: manager] To echo Humbledrone's note: > If anything, my "big shot" factor is higher remotely than it is in person. Physically, I'm just a normal person, made of meat and vulnerable like anyone else. This truth has been caricatured in many movies and TV shows, where the boss speaks from some large screen on the wall. Or think of Star Wars, when the bad guy is talking to the Dark Lord, who shows up as this massive 3-d projects.
barrenko 5y ago
Trust me, there are shitty managers that are just fine with Slack and text.
la6471 5y ago
+100
birdyrooster 5y ago
I like getting raises by stroking their egos and it’s hard to do remotely. I want to go back to the office too.
- okareaman 5y ago
  Whether I take you seriously or I take you jokingly, it's funny either way
lostcolony 5y ago
Some of us entered management explicitly because they had such a good manager themselves, who truly enabled them, that they want to provide that to others. And are constantly tempted to go back being a developer because of the pain of dealing with the organization. And some of us are enthused about remote, and have spent the pandemic finding new ways of working. Agreed that we're rare and vastly outnumbered by people with bad motivations though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Reminds me of this one guy in the analytics office on the floor of my office building who was somehow cordoned off from the other parts of the same business. This guy dressed like total "mover and shaker" dudebro: always business casual with the top 2 buttons undone, sunglasses hanging from his shirt at all times, Michael P. Keaton hairstyle, and a blazer, and ALWAYS wandering around in circles while gesticulating and talking to SOMEBODY via earbud microphones in his office. Meanwhile, the company president was a friend of a friend, worth 8 figures, and just a normal dude.
- pm90 5y ago
  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to do that as long as this person is providing value. People have their own tastes, some people don’t care much about appearances while others do. In fact it would be a pretty boring office if everyone had the same tastes.
tjs8rj 5y ago
Part of it I’m sure is: the kind of people who become executives tend to be the kind that like work. Nothing wrong with that, there’s a lot to enjoy in “being productive”, accomplishing tasks, feeling like you’re making an impact, optimizing things, or competing in a new market with novel technology and strategies. The kind of people who make it to the top love it in one way or another, or in multiple ways.
coding123 5y ago
We are a 100% remote company, have been forever. We have been going through some growth and one of the executives we added recently put a slide deck together where he basically said everything you just wrote - (and kinda saying everyone will be coming to an office even though we all work out of about 6 different states). He was fired like 2 weeks later.
- nickysielicki 5y ago
  Who do you work for and how do I get a job there?
djrobstep 5y ago
Slavoj Zizek has a great bit about how much of the power of bosses stems not just from being able to order you about, but to force you to be their friend also, as he explains in this interview: https://youtu.be/XS_Lzo4S8lA?t=5m20s https://youtu.be/XS_Lzo4S8lA?t=5m20s Much of this social dimension of power is lost without a physical presence in an office, and I think a lot of managers and bosses fear this.
- zw123456 5y ago
  Yes, agree, people who seek to be in charge value the feeling of power. That feeling is diminished without physical proximity. That is actually better expressing what I was trying to get at.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  > force you to be their friend also Imagine going for a lunch with a group of coworkers, and then your boss joins you... because he is one of you, right? Nope. Lunch is a precious opportunity to complain about the work (including your boss) with people who understand what you are talking about. Now the workers are losing even this trivial right.
agumonkey 5y ago
There's probably a biological basis for these traits. Having a place to go daily and be seen in a positive light, even if achieving near nothing, by a bunch of people is a strong human desire. Then you add the hierarchical superiority as a bonus..
- zw123456 5y ago
  I think that could be. This is completely anecdotal but I there is a friend of mine, he and I have worked together for probably 20 years on and off in various companies and so forth. He moved up the ranks and became a VP for a big company, same one as me now. I never wanted that, I don't like having a lot of responsibility, I like being innovative, developing things but I just don't want the responsibility of having people report to me or anything like that, I am just not comfortable with it, tried it, did not enjoy it. He on the other hand, loves it, he devours it. He is a good guy, we are friends, but just different. Recently he decided to retire, I joked with him that it was probably not as much fun being a VP now that he can't go into the office and have all the attention. He laughed and said ya, it's just not as much fun anymore, and we are not even allowed now to ask people to turn on their cameras (long story for another thread). He was joking a bit of course, but you know, sometimes when we joke, there is an element of truth in there. I think that was the case here. He is just one guy but, I am guessing there is a personality trait at work here.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  If there is a biological basis for this, why wouldn’t it be randomly distributed among ICs too?
  - yxhuvud 5y ago
    Why do you think it isn't? There are definitely developers that can't stand working from home all the time.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    sorry IC means integrated circuit to me, what is it in workplace terminology ?
imgabe 5y ago
I bet it almost entirely comes down to offices. People who have an office don't mind, or are happy to, go back to an office. People who have to work in the open plan would rather work at home.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  At least in SV startup land the executives are on the same floor as the ICs.
  - s17n 5y ago
    They tend to camp in conference rooms more or less permanently, though.
- BarryMilo 5y ago
  Right? You don't have to bring ego into it, of course the guy with the only closed office in the open space doesn't mind going back!
register 5y ago
I believe that the explanation is simply because an executive job is more about managing relationships with clients, partners, stakeholder, suppliers and the first line of management rather than building something or executing some specific task. Or in other words: it's politics. And this "relationship job" is definitely better done in person rather than remotely. Actually I am surprised that the percentage is not higher. The disconnect between the executives and employees is first of all in the kind of job that one is expected to do vs the other. P.S: I am just a mundane employee.
- judge2020 5y ago
  > Actually I am surprised that the percentage is not higher. I feel like a good amount of executives will end up putting the needs of their own workers above their ego/this desire to play office politics, and the scentiment for keeping remote work will influence how much they'll be for it. After all, management just manages, and the negotiating power of these skilled workers is very high; not offering remote work, while competitors do, means bleeding talent.
luckydata 5y ago
I think it has more to do with the fact that most management has very little "deliverables" for work and most of their work has to do with meeting people and understanding how people feel about things. It's easier to do that type of work face to face as it's extenuating to manage through email and zoom. ICs tend to have more heads down work so going to the office is a net negative for most of them, as there's more interruptions and the commute to account for.
- worrycue 5y ago
  I don’t know about not having deliverables. Aren’t the deliverables of their subordinates their deliverables as well? i.e. If things don’t go well the guy in charge eats the blame as it’s his/her job to make sure it does.
xrd 5y ago
Originally I was really looking to find holes in what you said but I do think it's basically the same result but from a different path. Meritocracy is never totally there, but it is more practiced in the engineering roles. For management, it's who you know. And who you have beers with at the end of the day. In a large e-commerce company at which I once worked I was both a manager and an IC. My family grew from 1 kid to 3 during my three plus years there. So I never could stay late to have those beers with the other managers. My career there suffered (in addition to all the other awful stuff). When you looked around, teams were almost always composed of people that looked the same way. That company was 60% East Asian heritage, either India or largely Chinese immigrants. The teams were often grouped along ethnic lines. It makes sense, if English isn't your first language, you would prefer to work with people who spoke your first language. But, that's the point. We hire people that look like us. And management isn't a meritocracy, so you want to be in the office to make sure people see your face and get to know you. They will more likely listen to you, consider your opinions, etc. if you are meeting face to face. It is vital for managers to keep their jobs. The exciting thing is perhaps this will be a Renaissance for a better form of manager. But, of course, the Renaissance also had Machiavelli, and there will be lots of people who will successfully subvert this new reality.
wisty 5y ago
The purpose of management is to keep all the stuff employees do actually be useful to the company. Executives are there to ensure that happens, and having employees onsite makes it easier. As far as I can tell, Bezos would sack every manager at Amazon if he could, and have every employee work from home, if that was best for Amazon's bottom line. I bet he'd love to save on salaries and office space. Yes, I hear a few Amazon employees are quitting, but it's not because he's just too nice to his employees. As far as I can tell, his entire philosophy in business is to make everyone a replaceable cog, and replaceable cogs don't really need managers or desks (especially if he could make everyone work from home, in some kind of mechanical turk type system). But he hasn't made it work. Maybe I'm wrong about Bezos, or he's wrong about how to make profits (and just happened to luck out getting rich). But surely someone else would just say "get everyone to code at home and don't have managers" and they'd destroy the competition with lower overheads and greater productivity, but there's not many of examples at scale. Here's how this debate will go: "Managers are needed to keep employees on task, so it needs to be onsite". "Wait, can't we just have performance reviews?" "So why not just have freelancers for everything?" It's basically a rehash of the theory of the firm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Employers don't know who is doing the best work. Sometimes it's virtually impossible to judge. But they can know that employees sit in a cube for the right amount of hours, and are apparently trying to get work done. It might annoy brilliant people (and people who think they're brilliant) that they can't just be judged on the quality of their work, but in reality the company is paying for time, not results, as they really can't just the quality of results all that easily. Yes, they can have 360 performance reviews, or negotiate everything as some kind of contract, or count lines of code or some kind of function points. There's plenty of problems with all of these, and it also means more work and probably a lot of ugly office politics. But unless it's something where results are easily judged then really just forcing people to be at their desks looking busy is going to be one of the best ways of ensuring that on average they get results.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > The purpose of management is to keep all the stuff employees do actually be useful to the company. Yes, but I think that's too broad a statement. The purpose of managers is to coordinate work between employees, and ensure employees are working on the company's priorities. It's telling that smaller companies tend not to have many (or even any) managers. Employees can do a perfectly fine job of coordinating and figuring out the right priorities on their own, up to a point. I'm not sure if this point is hit because after a certain size, coordination would take up all the employees' time (to the point where they wouldn't get any useful work done), or because people start getting political and selfish and can't agree what they should be working on. I really wish we could find a way to build successful companies without all the layers of management. While they do help with coordination, they also end up abstracting and watering down the company's mission and priorities to the point where the employees end up being so much less efficient than if they had greater control over their destiny. I view the need for management as a symptom of our failure to build better business processes, not as an obvious necessity. Of course, management's paycheck depends on them maintaining the status quo, and they call the shots, so I doubt this will change.
humbledrone 5y ago
[Disclaimer: I'm a manager.] Your theory seems to rely on a rather uncharitable set of assumptions. I wonder if an alternate explanation could be that the manager job role tends to involve a lot of talking to other people, and that there's something advantageous, or at least more fun, about doing that in person? Or perhaps the type of people that become managers tend to lean more toward extroversion, and thus on average managers enjoy in-person social interaction more? I often meet and talk with people for 6 hours in a day. Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc. It kind of sucks, like, a lot. Especially for people, like myself, who ended up managing because they simply enjoy being around other people. It's just not that fun to talk to a plastic rectangle all day. Now, I do still sneak in some IC work from time to time, and it's obviously great to do that remotely. And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall. But if you surveyed me, asking whether I'd like to return to the office? Fuck yeah, I'd like to. But my motivation has nothing to do with your ungracious views on managers needing to feel like bigshots. I'm sorry that you've evidently worked with poor management to the extent that this is your worldview.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zw123456 5y ago
  Ahhh, sorry if it came off that way. Honestly, I have good friends that are managers. And I think I work for good managers. I just think it is probably not as satisfying being a manger or executive if you don't have people around you to manage. If everyone is doing their work just fine without all that close supervision, it probably feels like you are not as appreciated. But I was not trying to be uncharitable. I am sure you are a very good manger.
  - alexgartrell 5y ago
    Don't you think it's a lot more plausible that extroversion correlates with becoming a manager in the same way that it correlates with wanting to see people in the office? Or that it's simply easier to do the manager job in person than over the internet? I manage a linux team so this battle was lost for me long ago, but having managed a site-oriented team before, it was a lot easier to build relationships for me and the team members.
fidesomnes 5y ago
100% correct.
bentlegen 5y ago
I don’t understand how this dynamic works any less on Slack, when you are arguably more visible, provided you type something once and a while.
passivate 5y ago
Why even propose a theory that makes unfair generalizations? I suppose I don't see how to start a conversation around it when you admit to the flaw in your reasoning.
- zw123456 5y ago
  A theory with generalization can still have value. In this case, I think those who seek to be in charge do so because they value or appreciate having a certain amount of power. The lack of physical proximity diminishes that feeling. It's a theory based on a generalization, I bother to propose it because it is an interesting discussion.
  - passivate 5y ago
    Maybe its too abstract for me. I'll leave it to others who can understand the value. Many thanks for explaining!
nradov 5y ago
I also have a theory about this. If you're commuting to the "office" every day it's easier to cheat on your spouse.
monkeycantype 5y ago
Senior Managers at my work - one of Australia's largest companies - have actually said this. At an all staff meeting one of the exec's near the top, who is - though this will be received sceptically - a genuinely empathetic, good person said: "I miss walking around and seeing my team working, I can't wait to get back in the office"
bongoman37 5y ago
Personally, I am more on the introverted side but I would still like to return to office at least some of the time. It is far easier to zone out at the office. At the house, the 4-year old can be hard to tune out. Right now, a couple of friends of my wife are around and they are talking loudly and I can't tune it out and it would be rude to ask them to tone it down. It is far easier to be rude to co-workers than to your family.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
This seems plausible to me in theory, but wouldn't that be limited to the head office? If they're happy to outsource things to a different continent, then employees in satelitte offices working from home seems a smaller thing.
271828182846 5y ago
yes ... being a boss is for most bosses about being and feeling important. and you can only feel that in personal contact. also employees are less impressed by higher ups when they can hide behind a screen.
jrootabega 5y ago
You are absolutely correct. I have recently been in workplaces where, almost without exception, managers (mostly non-tech) at or above a certain level deliberately held loud phone conversations, or 1-on-1 conversations, while slowly walking laps around the roughly O-shaped open office layouts. They know it pisses people off. It is, almost literally, a pissing contest.
GuB-42 5y ago
The "big office" is not just a status symbol. It is also practical. It is essentially an extra room, free from the usual distractions you may have at home, and where you can do almost whatever you want with as long as it is work-related. Lower ranking employees are more likely to have a better setup at home, especially if they work on an open floor plan. Bosses are also advantaged when it comes to commutes. They may have designated parking space closer to their office, maybe even a car with a driver. Having more money also open other options, like hiring people to do housework when you are not at home or living in a location closer to your workplace.
specialist 5y ago
OC compares "executives" and "knowledge workers", does not define "manager". Spitballing: Director and above are executives, managers remain knowledge workers. -- My observation is that executives at any given publicly traded company are functionally insane. Whatever executive daily activities involve, it's disconnected from real work and real world. They generally have nicer clothes and hygiene. So it's not all bad. The transmutation from Manager to Director is kind of fun to watch. The Body Snatchers meets Battle Royale.
smsm42 5y ago
I may be partially true, but I think there's a more charitable way to explain it. Managers work with people. For a coder, talking to a manager is a distraction. For a manager, talking to a coder is literally most of what they do. So obviously a manager wants to create the optimal conditions for this - surely you can talk on video, but talking in person is better. Surely, you can manage 20 people by videochats, but getting them in the same room is better. Different work means different preferences, means different approaches.

pfisherman 5y ago

I think it has more to do with the nature of the job. Management is mostly communication and collaborative planning. This type of work benefits from having people together in one place to a much greater degree than most IC work.

waynesonfire 5y ago
totally, i'd go occam's razor on this one.

prawn 5y ago

I could see this being part of it. Managing people surely has a bit of performance to it, and the physical office is a stage. Similarly, I quite like working from home and walking around the house (getting drinks/snacks/etc) looking at the garden. That's all something I've worked for - things I planted or bought or paid off - and it's comforting to see it.

mellavora 5y ago

[disclaimer: manager] To echo Humbledrone's note: > If anything, my "big shot" factor is higher remotely than it is in person. Physically, I'm just a normal person, made of meat and vulnerable like anyone else. This truth has been caricatured in many movies and TV shows, where the boss speaks from some large screen on the wall. Or think of Star Wars, when the bad guy is talking to the Dark Lord, who shows up as this massive 3-d projects.

barrenko 5y ago

Trust me, there are shitty managers that are just fine with Slack and text.

la6471 5y ago

+100

birdyrooster 5y ago

I like getting raises by stroking their egos and it’s hard to do remotely. I want to go back to the office too.

okareaman 5y ago
Whether I take you seriously or I take you jokingly, it's funny either way

lostcolony 5y ago

Some of us entered management explicitly because they had such a good manager themselves, who truly enabled them, that they want to provide that to others. And are constantly tempted to go back being a developer because of the pain of dealing with the organization. And some of us are enthused about remote, and have spent the pandemic finding new ways of working. Agreed that we're rare and vastly outnumbered by people with bad motivations though.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

Reminds me of this one guy in the analytics office on the floor of my office building who was somehow cordoned off from the other parts of the same business. This guy dressed like total "mover and shaker" dudebro: always business casual with the top 2 buttons undone, sunglasses hanging from his shirt at all times, Michael P. Keaton hairstyle, and a blazer, and ALWAYS wandering around in circles while gesticulating and talking to SOMEBODY via earbud microphones in his office. Meanwhile, the company president was a friend of a friend, worth 8 figures, and just a normal dude.

pm90 5y ago
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to do that as long as this person is providing value. People have their own tastes, some people don’t care much about appearances while others do. In fact it would be a pretty boring office if everyone had the same tastes.

tjs8rj 5y ago

Part of it I’m sure is: the kind of people who become executives tend to be the kind that like work. Nothing wrong with that, there’s a lot to enjoy in “being productive”, accomplishing tasks, feeling like you’re making an impact, optimizing things, or competing in a new market with novel technology and strategies. The kind of people who make it to the top love it in one way or another, or in multiple ways.

coding123 5y ago

We are a 100% remote company, have been forever. We have been going through some growth and one of the executives we added recently put a slide deck together where he basically said everything you just wrote - (and kinda saying everyone will be coming to an office even though we all work out of about 6 different states). He was fired like 2 weeks later.

nickysielicki 5y ago
Who do you work for and how do I get a job there?

djrobstep 5y ago

Slavoj Zizek has a great bit about how much of the power of bosses stems not just from being able to order you about, but to force you to be their friend also, as he explains in this interview: https://youtu.be/XS_Lzo4S8lA?t=5m20s https://youtu.be/XS_Lzo4S8lA?t=5m20s Much of this social dimension of power is lost without a physical presence in an office, and I think a lot of managers and bosses fear this.

zw123456 5y ago
Yes, agree, people who seek to be in charge value the feeling of power. That feeling is diminished without physical proximity. That is actually better expressing what I was trying to get at.
Viliam1234 5y ago
> force you to be their friend also Imagine going for a lunch with a group of coworkers, and then your boss joins you... because he is one of you, right? Nope. Lunch is a precious opportunity to complain about the work (including your boss) with people who understand what you are talking about. Now the workers are losing even this trivial right.

agumonkey 5y ago

There's probably a biological basis for these traits. Having a place to go daily and be seen in a positive light, even if achieving near nothing, by a bunch of people is a strong human desire. Then you add the hierarchical superiority as a bonus..

zw123456 5y ago
I think that could be. This is completely anecdotal but I there is a friend of mine, he and I have worked together for probably 20 years on and off in various companies and so forth. He moved up the ranks and became a VP for a big company, same one as me now. I never wanted that, I don't like having a lot of responsibility, I like being innovative, developing things but I just don't want the responsibility of having people report to me or anything like that, I am just not comfortable with it, tried it, did not enjoy it. He on the other hand, loves it, he devours it. He is a good guy, we are friends, but just different. Recently he decided to retire, I joked with him that it was probably not as much fun being a VP now that he can't go into the office and have all the attention. He laughed and said ya, it's just not as much fun anymore, and we are not even allowed now to ask people to turn on their cameras (long story for another thread). He was joking a bit of course, but you know, sometimes when we joke, there is an element of truth in there. I think that was the case here. He is just one guy but, I am guessing there is a personality trait at work here.
jdavis703 5y ago
If there is a biological basis for this, why wouldn’t it be randomly distributed among ICs too?
- yxhuvud 5y ago
  Why do you think it isn't? There are definitely developers that can't stand working from home all the time.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  sorry IC means integrated circuit to me, what is it in workplace terminology ?

imgabe 5y ago

I bet it almost entirely comes down to offices. People who have an office don't mind, or are happy to, go back to an office. People who have to work in the open plan would rather work at home.

jdavis703 5y ago
At least in SV startup land the executives are on the same floor as the ICs.
- s17n 5y ago
  They tend to camp in conference rooms more or less permanently, though.
BarryMilo 5y ago
Right? You don't have to bring ego into it, of course the guy with the only closed office in the open space doesn't mind going back!

I believe that the explanation is simply because an executive job is more about managing relationships with clients, partners, stakeholder, suppliers and the first line of management rather than building something or executing some specific task. Or in other words: it's politics. And this "relationship job" is definitely better done in person rather than remotely. Actually I am surprised that the percentage is not higher. The disconnect between the executives and employees is first of all in the kind of job that one is expected to do vs the other. P.S: I am just a mundane employee.

judge2020 5y ago
> Actually I am surprised that the percentage is not higher. I feel like a good amount of executives will end up putting the needs of their own workers above their ego/this desire to play office politics, and the scentiment for keeping remote work will influence how much they'll be for it. After all, management just manages, and the negotiating power of these skilled workers is very high; not offering remote work, while competitors do, means bleeding talent.

luckydata 5y ago

I think it has more to do with the fact that most management has very little "deliverables" for work and most of their work has to do with meeting people and understanding how people feel about things. It's easier to do that type of work face to face as it's extenuating to manage through email and zoom. ICs tend to have more heads down work so going to the office is a net negative for most of them, as there's more interruptions and the commute to account for.

worrycue 5y ago
I don’t know about not having deliverables. Aren’t the deliverables of their subordinates their deliverables as well? i.e. If things don’t go well the guy in charge eats the blame as it’s his/her job to make sure it does.

xrd 5y ago

Originally I was really looking to find holes in what you said but I do think it's basically the same result but from a different path. Meritocracy is never totally there, but it is more practiced in the engineering roles. For management, it's who you know. And who you have beers with at the end of the day. In a large e-commerce company at which I once worked I was both a manager and an IC. My family grew from 1 kid to 3 during my three plus years there. So I never could stay late to have those beers with the other managers. My career there suffered (in addition to all the other awful stuff). When you looked around, teams were almost always composed of people that looked the same way. That company was 60% East Asian heritage, either India or largely Chinese immigrants. The teams were often grouped along ethnic lines. It makes sense, if English isn't your first language, you would prefer to work with people who spoke your first language. But, that's the point. We hire people that look like us. And management isn't a meritocracy, so you want to be in the office to make sure people see your face and get to know you. They will more likely listen to you, consider your opinions, etc. if you are meeting face to face. It is vital for managers to keep their jobs. The exciting thing is perhaps this will be a Renaissance for a better form of manager. But, of course, the Renaissance also had Machiavelli, and there will be lots of people who will successfully subvert this new reality.

wisty 5y ago

The purpose of management is to keep all the stuff employees do actually be useful to the company. Executives are there to ensure that happens, and having employees onsite makes it easier. As far as I can tell, Bezos would sack every manager at Amazon if he could, and have every employee work from home, if that was best for Amazon's bottom line. I bet he'd love to save on salaries and office space. Yes, I hear a few Amazon employees are quitting, but it's not because he's just too nice to his employees. As far as I can tell, his entire philosophy in business is to make everyone a replaceable cog, and replaceable cogs don't really need managers or desks (especially if he could make everyone work from home, in some kind of mechanical turk type system). But he hasn't made it work. Maybe I'm wrong about Bezos, or he's wrong about how to make profits (and just happened to luck out getting rich). But surely someone else would just say "get everyone to code at home and don't have managers" and they'd destroy the competition with lower overheads and greater productivity, but there's not many of examples at scale. Here's how this debate will go: "Managers are needed to keep employees on task, so it needs to be onsite". "Wait, can't we just have performance reviews?" "So why not just have freelancers for everything?" It's basically a rehash of the theory of the firm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Employers don't know who is doing the best work. Sometimes it's virtually impossible to judge. But they can know that employees sit in a cube for the right amount of hours, and are apparently trying to get work done. It might annoy brilliant people (and people who think they're brilliant) that they can't just be judged on the quality of their work, but in reality the company is paying for time, not results, as they really can't just the quality of results all that easily. Yes, they can have 360 performance reviews, or negotiate everything as some kind of contract, or count lines of code or some kind of function points. There's plenty of problems with all of these, and it also means more work and probably a lot of ugly office politics. But unless it's something where results are easily judged then really just forcing people to be at their desks looking busy is going to be one of the best ways of ensuring that on average they get results.

kelnos 5y ago
> The purpose of management is to keep all the stuff employees do actually be useful to the company. Yes, but I think that's too broad a statement. The purpose of managers is to coordinate work between employees, and ensure employees are working on the company's priorities. It's telling that smaller companies tend not to have many (or even any) managers. Employees can do a perfectly fine job of coordinating and figuring out the right priorities on their own, up to a point. I'm not sure if this point is hit because after a certain size, coordination would take up all the employees' time (to the point where they wouldn't get any useful work done), or because people start getting political and selfish and can't agree what they should be working on. I really wish we could find a way to build successful companies without all the layers of management. While they do help with coordination, they also end up abstracting and watering down the company's mission and priorities to the point where the employees end up being so much less efficient than if they had greater control over their destiny. I view the need for management as a symptom of our failure to build better business processes, not as an obvious necessity. Of course, management's paycheck depends on them maintaining the status quo, and they call the shots, so I doubt this will change.

humbledrone 5y ago

[Disclaimer: I'm a manager.] Your theory seems to rely on a rather uncharitable set of assumptions. I wonder if an alternate explanation could be that the manager job role tends to involve a lot of talking to other people, and that there's something advantageous, or at least more fun, about doing that in person? Or perhaps the type of people that become managers tend to lean more toward extroversion, and thus on average managers enjoy in-person social interaction more? I often meet and talk with people for 6 hours in a day. Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc. It kind of sucks, like, a lot. Especially for people, like myself, who ended up managing because they simply enjoy being around other people. It's just not that fun to talk to a plastic rectangle all day. Now, I do still sneak in some IC work from time to time, and it's obviously great to do that remotely. And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall. But if you surveyed me, asking whether I'd like to return to the office? Fuck yeah, I'd like to. But my motivation has nothing to do with your ungracious views on managers needing to feel like bigshots. I'm sorry that you've evidently worked with poor management to the extent that this is your worldview.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zw123456 5y ago
Ahhh, sorry if it came off that way. Honestly, I have good friends that are managers. And I think I work for good managers. I just think it is probably not as satisfying being a manger or executive if you don't have people around you to manage. If everyone is doing their work just fine without all that close supervision, it probably feels like you are not as appreciated. But I was not trying to be uncharitable. I am sure you are a very good manger.
- alexgartrell 5y ago
  Don't you think it's a lot more plausible that extroversion correlates with becoming a manager in the same way that it correlates with wanting to see people in the office? Or that it's simply easier to do the manager job in person than over the internet? I manage a linux team so this battle was lost for me long ago, but having managed a site-oriented team before, it was a lot easier to build relationships for me and the team members.

fidesomnes 5y ago

100% correct.

bentlegen 5y ago

I don’t understand how this dynamic works any less on Slack, when you are arguably more visible, provided you type something once and a while.

passivate 5y ago

Why even propose a theory that makes unfair generalizations? I suppose I don't see how to start a conversation around it when you admit to the flaw in your reasoning.

zw123456 5y ago
A theory with generalization can still have value. In this case, I think those who seek to be in charge do so because they value or appreciate having a certain amount of power. The lack of physical proximity diminishes that feeling. It's a theory based on a generalization, I bother to propose it because it is an interesting discussion.
- passivate 5y ago
  Maybe its too abstract for me. I'll leave it to others who can understand the value. Many thanks for explaining!

nradov 5y ago

I also have a theory about this. If you're commuting to the "office" every day it's easier to cheat on your spouse.

monkeycantype 5y ago

Senior Managers at my work - one of Australia's largest companies - have actually said this. At an all staff meeting one of the exec's near the top, who is - though this will be received sceptically - a genuinely empathetic, good person said: "I miss walking around and seeing my team working, I can't wait to get back in the office"

bongoman37 5y ago

Personally, I am more on the introverted side but I would still like to return to office at least some of the time. It is far easier to zone out at the office. At the house, the 4-year old can be hard to tune out. Right now, a couple of friends of my wife are around and they are talking loudly and I can't tune it out and it would be rude to ask them to tone it down. It is far easier to be rude to co-workers than to your family.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

This seems plausible to me in theory, but wouldn't that be limited to the head office? If they're happy to outsource things to a different continent, then employees in satelitte offices working from home seems a smaller thing.

271828182846 5y ago

yes ... being a boss is for most bosses about being and feeling important. and you can only feel that in personal contact. also employees are less impressed by higher ups when they can hide behind a screen.

jrootabega 5y ago

You are absolutely correct. I have recently been in workplaces where, almost without exception, managers (mostly non-tech) at or above a certain level deliberately held loud phone conversations, or 1-on-1 conversations, while slowly walking laps around the roughly O-shaped open office layouts. They know it pisses people off. It is, almost literally, a pissing contest.

GuB-42 5y ago

The "big office" is not just a status symbol. It is also practical. It is essentially an extra room, free from the usual distractions you may have at home, and where you can do almost whatever you want with as long as it is work-related. Lower ranking employees are more likely to have a better setup at home, especially if they work on an open floor plan. Bosses are also advantaged when it comes to commutes. They may have designated parking space closer to their office, maybe even a car with a driver. Having more money also open other options, like hiring people to do housework when you are not at home or living in a location closer to your workplace.

specialist 5y ago

OC compares "executives" and "knowledge workers", does not define "manager". Spitballing: Director and above are executives, managers remain knowledge workers. -- My observation is that executives at any given publicly traded company are functionally insane. Whatever executive daily activities involve, it's disconnected from real work and real world. They generally have nicer clothes and hygiene. So it's not all bad. The transmutation from Manager to Director is kind of fun to watch. The Body Snatchers meets Battle Royale.

smsm42 5y ago

I may be partially true, but I think there's a more charitable way to explain it. Managers work with people. For a coder, talking to a manager is a distraction. For a manager, talking to a coder is literally most of what they do. So obviously a manager wants to create the optimal conditions for this - surely you can talk on video, but talking in person is better. Surely, you can manage 20 people by videochats, but getting them in the same room is better. Different work means different preferences, means different approaches.