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It does seem that that there is a pretty strong push for return to on site in a lot of organizations. However it is interesting the premise is often not well ar

by zmmmmm 5y ago

It does seem that that there is a pretty strong push for return to on site in a lot of organizations. However it is interesting the premise is often not well articulated beyond diffuse sentiments such as improving "team work" etc etc. Few seem to be arguing that productivity is the issue. By and large, everyone is acknowledging that the work gets done either way. Which leaves the question of what is motivating it? I feel like this is more managers struggling to recapture their previous sense of identity which was founded in some way on there being a physical place full of warm bodies with a specific culture shaped by management through various decisions. Without that managers are left with a much more intangible sense of what their role and value is. Everything seems a lot more hollow if your only reason to exist is to deliver on bare bones work requirements. Then, managers also feel they have a lot of influence over employees by controlling their physical environment which they don't have with WFH. The problem the managers have is, the factors in favor of WFH are pretty clear and objective. Just eliminating commute saves most employees a couple of hours a day which is already probably more productivity gain than you could achieve through any other kind of workplace measure. The benefits for the environment, reduction in burden on infrastructure, etc etc are all pretty easy to add up. So we are left with management weirdly struggling to assert a rationale made up entirely of intangibles against pretty obvious hard objective facts. It's going to be pretty interesting to see who wins this one.

dvtrn 5y ago
Which leaves the question of what is motivating it? As someone who works in a software shop that sells directly to this sector, I have a guess (and it’s just a guess but a quasi-informed one): Office/Building leases.
- rtomanek 5y ago
  What about them?
  - swearwolf 5y ago
    Many companies, like mine, are somewhere in the middle of a 10 year lease with very steep early exit penalties. People think that having everyone working from home saves the company money, but when it comes to the office, chances are it’s already a sunk cost. In my company’s case, we’re paying for quite a bit of space, but currently allowing people to choose whether to come in or not. Most of the time only a handful of people do, but the office is still there whether 10, 100 or 1,000 people are using it. Plus, there’s a lot of capitalized equipment set up there, already paid for and waiting for people to use it. Moving out would be expensive (because of the lease break fees), and a hassle. So instead, the people in charge of a lot of companies probably rationalize that they might as well get some benefit out of those sunk costs by forcing people to use them again.
NeverFade 5y ago
There are many considerations that organizations have, that they will never articulate to their employees because they are either orthogonal or to some degree opposed to these employees' interests. As a notable example, it's much easier for employees to hop between remote jobs. Forcing you into a physical location is a way to lock you into the job: you socialize and make friends at work, you buy a house close to work, you build an entire life around work. No employer will tell their employees "let's all get back to the office so you will find it harder to leave your role even if we underpay and overwork you."
- derefr 5y ago
  A slightly more sympathetic concern: remote work makes a manager's job harder. Said job still does get done either way; but it's the difference between a manager being able to goof off for most of the day and end up finding out everything they need to know anyway through simple off-hand questions whenever someone walks by; vs. needing to actively arrange high-scheduling-overhead Zoom meetings + actively probe one's reports on Slack for relevant updates.
  - allisdust 5y ago
    That's what the daily Standups are for. And if that's not sufficient, the manager isn't suited for management anyway.
    - pragmatic 5y ago
      There’s always a shortage of good X whether it’s devs, doctors or managers. The ones that already struggling in the office aren’t going to have a better time in a wfh env.
  - 6510 5y ago
    Reminds me of something I had noticed: There are a lot of occupations that previously (sometimes long ago) required a good bit of expertise and a good bit of thinking that nowadays have been placed under managers who took the thinking (and very often fake the experience doing the work they plan or have outdated experience) For some barely logical reason the more complicated work and the higher salary came with a kind of military authority position that use to be reserved for the level above or (longer ago) didn't exist. This gets interesting where management tasks, like all other tasks, need to be optimized. If it is the same person doing both the tasks and the planning optimization happens naturally. A is compared to B, one goes over the advantages and disadvantages of either and makes a choice. But now the manager has to chose between his own comfort and/or the effort he has to make and that of his underlings and the actual productivity. I don't think we need numbers to know what most would chose when the options are themselves or others. Its a damn hard choice to make objectively. But the thing is, didn't we get these big brain high salary guys to make everyone under them work more efficiently? I think comfort in a job makes the largest contribution to productivity out of all factors. At one end of the scale people just start walking off at the other you get the [rare] unimaginable performance only seen in people who love what they are doing. WFH is going to make management that much harder but also more valuable. If one is not excited about that the job seems to have evolved beyond capabilities. What more do we need than the employee himself stating: "I cant do the work like this" in a context where we know others are doing it with great success. Video chat is like the way PDF tries to replicate the paper office. I'm sure people are already building parsers for video chat and failing to match organized exchanges. I imagine some kind of analogy with using whatsapp as a bug tracker. Surely it would kinda work to some extend? You would be able to find things you know are in the log but if you don't know it is there it is going to be a huge waste of time. If the person filling the ticket has the tools to make that extra inch of effort it saves the person on the other end of it a mile of scrolling. A water cooler is designed to provide cups of water. It is only suppose to do one thing and it does it well.
notimetorelax 5y ago
I keep reading those comments where those proverbial managers want this or that. I don’t understand where it comes from - managers also people with similar needs to individual contributors. Myself, being a manager I’m not looking forward to us going to office and the teams are performing well as is. My peer managers are is a similar opinion. Is it the banal they vs us, search for an enemy and cause of one’s unhappiness?
- qaq 5y ago
  Because mandates are coming from managers? Or are suggesting they are coming from ICs?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- midhhhthrow 5y ago
  Managers tend to be more extroverted and thus also more lonely at home. Several even admitted this to me. And so they want to make everyone come back to the office so they can have their social needs met. But the way they phrase it is, it’s easier to communicate and have meetings
  - weatherlite 5y ago
    Which is understandable. WFH people are more introverted so they want to have their needs met by staying home. I'm introverted WFH btw.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Whether one prefers WFH or the office strongly depends on ones personality. I wouldn't be surprised if the personality type that tends to become a manager also tends to prefer to work in an office environment.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  If your manager told you to push your team back into the office. Would you do that or resist? That's my view that management are there to enforce the often unpleasant demands of those above. In most cases anyway.
thesumofall 5y ago
I think it originates from the feeling that cross-team innovations are somehow more difficult to pull off. Is this really measurable? No. Would it put a company at risk if there is a chance that such kind of innovation were reduced by 25%? Possibly. Combine this with the fear of many managers that they will not be able to change policy once they allowed everyone to work fully from home and you get the prevalent policies

by zmmmmm 5y ago

dvtrn 5y ago

Which leaves the question of what is motivating it? As someone who works in a software shop that sells directly to this sector, I have a guess (and it’s just a guess but a quasi-informed one): Office/Building leases.

rtomanek 5y ago
What about them?
- swearwolf 5y ago
  Many companies, like mine, are somewhere in the middle of a 10 year lease with very steep early exit penalties. People think that having everyone working from home saves the company money, but when it comes to the office, chances are it’s already a sunk cost. In my company’s case, we’re paying for quite a bit of space, but currently allowing people to choose whether to come in or not. Most of the time only a handful of people do, but the office is still there whether 10, 100 or 1,000 people are using it. Plus, there’s a lot of capitalized equipment set up there, already paid for and waiting for people to use it. Moving out would be expensive (because of the lease break fees), and a hassle. So instead, the people in charge of a lot of companies probably rationalize that they might as well get some benefit out of those sunk costs by forcing people to use them again.

NeverFade 5y ago

There are many considerations that organizations have, that they will never articulate to their employees because they are either orthogonal or to some degree opposed to these employees' interests. As a notable example, it's much easier for employees to hop between remote jobs. Forcing you into a physical location is a way to lock you into the job: you socialize and make friends at work, you buy a house close to work, you build an entire life around work. No employer will tell their employees "let's all get back to the office so you will find it harder to leave your role even if we underpay and overwork you."

derefr 5y ago
A slightly more sympathetic concern: remote work makes a manager's job harder. Said job still does get done either way; but it's the difference between a manager being able to goof off for most of the day and end up finding out everything they need to know anyway through simple off-hand questions whenever someone walks by; vs. needing to actively arrange high-scheduling-overhead Zoom meetings + actively probe one's reports on Slack for relevant updates.
- allisdust 5y ago
  That's what the daily Standups are for. And if that's not sufficient, the manager isn't suited for management anyway.
  - pragmatic 5y ago
    There’s always a shortage of good X whether it’s devs, doctors or managers. The ones that already struggling in the office aren’t going to have a better time in a wfh env.
- 6510 5y ago
  Reminds me of something I had noticed: There are a lot of occupations that previously (sometimes long ago) required a good bit of expertise and a good bit of thinking that nowadays have been placed under managers who took the thinking (and very often fake the experience doing the work they plan or have outdated experience) For some barely logical reason the more complicated work and the higher salary came with a kind of military authority position that use to be reserved for the level above or (longer ago) didn't exist. This gets interesting where management tasks, like all other tasks, need to be optimized. If it is the same person doing both the tasks and the planning optimization happens naturally. A is compared to B, one goes over the advantages and disadvantages of either and makes a choice. But now the manager has to chose between his own comfort and/or the effort he has to make and that of his underlings and the actual productivity. I don't think we need numbers to know what most would chose when the options are themselves or others. Its a damn hard choice to make objectively. But the thing is, didn't we get these big brain high salary guys to make everyone under them work more efficiently? I think comfort in a job makes the largest contribution to productivity out of all factors. At one end of the scale people just start walking off at the other you get the [rare] unimaginable performance only seen in people who love what they are doing. WFH is going to make management that much harder but also more valuable. If one is not excited about that the job seems to have evolved beyond capabilities. What more do we need than the employee himself stating: "I cant do the work like this" in a context where we know others are doing it with great success. Video chat is like the way PDF tries to replicate the paper office. I'm sure people are already building parsers for video chat and failing to match organized exchanges. I imagine some kind of analogy with using whatsapp as a bug tracker. Surely it would kinda work to some extend? You would be able to find things you know are in the log but if you don't know it is there it is going to be a huge waste of time. If the person filling the ticket has the tools to make that extra inch of effort it saves the person on the other end of it a mile of scrolling. A water cooler is designed to provide cups of water. It is only suppose to do one thing and it does it well.

notimetorelax 5y ago

I keep reading those comments where those proverbial managers want this or that. I don’t understand where it comes from - managers also people with similar needs to individual contributors. Myself, being a manager I’m not looking forward to us going to office and the teams are performing well as is. My peer managers are is a similar opinion. Is it the banal they vs us, search for an enemy and cause of one’s unhappiness?

qaq 5y ago
Because mandates are coming from managers? Or are suggesting they are coming from ICs?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
midhhhthrow 5y ago
Managers tend to be more extroverted and thus also more lonely at home. Several even admitted this to me. And so they want to make everyone come back to the office so they can have their social needs met. But the way they phrase it is, it’s easier to communicate and have meetings
- weatherlite 5y ago
  Which is understandable. WFH people are more introverted so they want to have their needs met by staying home. I'm introverted WFH btw.
adrianN 5y ago
Whether one prefers WFH or the office strongly depends on ones personality. I wouldn't be surprised if the personality type that tends to become a manager also tends to prefer to work in an office environment.
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
If your manager told you to push your team back into the office. Would you do that or resist? That's my view that management are there to enforce the often unpleasant demands of those above. In most cases anyway.

thesumofall 5y ago

I think it originates from the feeling that cross-team innovations are somehow more difficult to pull off. Is this really measurable? No. Would it put a company at risk if there is a chance that such kind of innovation were reduced by 25%? Possibly. Combine this with the fear of many managers that they will not be able to change policy once they allowed everyone to work fully from home and you get the prevalent policies