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I think a significant number of people get into leadership roles because they enjoy having power over others. The ultimate power is control over the bodies of o

I think a significant number of people get into leadership roles because they enjoy having power over others. The ultimate power is control over the bodies of others. Why settle for slack chats and zoom calls when you could have your employees sitting all around you at your beck and call? We individual contributors may not think about this much, but the absolute thrill of being above others in the hierarchy only reaches its fullness when the employees get out of the damn pajamas and into the open offices. Please pick me up a coffee while you are at it.

api 5y ago
There's also a direct threat to the jobs of a lot of middle managers from telework. The company's upper level management may realize a lot of these high salary managers are not necessary or that they obviously aren't doing their jobs well since the same value gets created with people out of the office. The push to get butts back in seats is 100% about job security for middle management and maintaining the value of commercial real estate. I've seen evidence of CRE leaning on the media and politicians to push a "return to work" narrative.
- outsidetheparty 5y ago
  Maybe it’s just because I’m a teleworking middle manager, but I’ve never understood this argument that telework threatens middle management. Middle management doesn’t magically become unnecessary when employees are working from home instead of the office — if anything it’s _more_ important when everyone isn’t in the same physical location picking up their direction by osmosis.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Not every manager is Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss but some people just have that impression.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      Not every manager is Dilbert's PHB, but some are. And you can bet the pressure to go back to the office for tasks that don't require an office mostly comes from those.
      - jonathankoren 5y ago
        But middle management doesn’t make these decisions. Decisions that effect the whole company come from the C-Suite.
        greedo 5y ago
        Our CSO and CFO are the epitome of PHBs.
  - api 5y ago
    I wasn't clear. Telework doesn't threaten all middle management, just superfluous middle management.
    - outsidetheparty 5y ago
      I still don't get it. Yes, certainly some managers (at every level!) add no real value, but I don't see what about remote work is supposed to reveal those managers as useless.
  - n4r9 5y ago
    My ~80 person company is pushing hard for return to office despite only a few middle managers / team leads. If anything the leads are the ones happily wfh whilst the senior management are doing the pushing. The reasoning is ostensibly that the business works better due to lots of little in-person interactions. It does make some sense when a lot of the staff are junior (which they are).
jacknews 5y ago
I agree, in some sense the office is like the wonky low chair in some interviews. It's much easier for management to intimidate workers when they are there in person. Now is really a good opportunity to redefine the relationship between employer and employee, and 'work' in general, and I hope we collectively push forward with it, not just sink back into the semi-abusive situation of before.
jayd16 5y ago
If you're reading this and at the whim of a coffee request, get a new job. Managers really do need to communicate with the team and the team really does need to communicate with each other. That really does happen better in person. Even if it feels like a distraction when someone needs to communicate with you but you don't with them.
- johnwheeler 5y ago
  > That really does happen better in person Says who? Some management study? My anecdotal experience tells me I’ve formed stronger relationships over zoom and slack than I have working in person with people I truly cannot stand. At least with zoom and slack, if I don’t like you, I can hide your window behind my IDE. And there’s no rule that says I have to like everyone and everyone has to like me. There’s no rule that says I should want to spend my free time with so and so. How about, I choose who I spend my time with and you choose what I work on and pay me for that?
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    > My anecdotal experience tells me I’ve formed stronger relationships over zoom and slack than I have working in person with people I truly cannot stand. I mean if you can't stand the people then you're going to have poor relationships with them regardless.
    - johnwheeler 5y ago
      Right, so might as well stay home and hide their window behind my IDE I once worked with a dude that would come into my cubicle every morning eating chunks of watermelon out of a sandwich baggie. He would just stand there smacking his lips and slurping up watermelon juice, purposefully trying to be a dick. I shouldn’t have to deal with that or be expected to get a new job. And management shouldn’t have to sift through that passive aggressive behavior and make arbitrary judgement calls of who the dick is. Just let me spend the least amount of time as possible with him, and I’ll be happy. Respect my freedom to choose who I want to associate with.
closeparen 5y ago
I think a significant number of people get into leadership roles because they like human interaction. Their jobs still consist of doing human interaction all day. And human interaction is genuinely very unpleasant on Zoom/Slack relative to real life. Frankly I don’t think there is an amount you could pay me to do back-to-back Zoom meetings all day every day. My price would be high enough that I’d retire on it pretty quick. Management doesn’t have to flee the industry in protest of intolerable working conditions; it controls the working conditions. We should it expect it, all else being equal, to secure the working conditions best adapted to doing management work. And that means presence.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  I think communication is a different subject. I have no problem with true flexibility where people are free to meet in person when it makes sense. I think the original comment is around owning the employee's time, which is most effected when you have some ownership of their physical presence. For example, we often have mandatory company wide meetings where the subject is only of interest to 5% of people but yet everyone is forced to be present and attentive for the entire period, adding another level of forced fakery to our daily lives.
- johnwheeler 5y ago
  So, your desire to have in person human interaction trumps my desire to stay home because like you say, you control the working conditions. What kind of shit is that?
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    The hostility you feel toward people wanting real human interaction is the hostility I feel toward introverts who think in-person interaction is useless, rejecting the social nature of human beings and wanting to lock themselves in their houses for the rest of their lives getting Amazon grocery deliveries and playing games online. If it seems like I'm projecting some anger at a specific scenario, I am. Let me pivot. Hybrid seems like a good option for teams, though it takes away the geographic-flexibility perk of WFH. I think WFH can be successful, but I absolutely 100% think a lot of people are bullshitting how effective they are at home, because none of the workers want to lose the time- and location-flexibility of WFH. So we all just say "yeah it's great, it's just as productive" where I can plainly see a number of people are not. Flat out. Does that mean we should all go back to the office? Maybe not, but it takes more and better management, not less. Personally, the banter and whiteboarding and trips to get coffee and lunch with coworkers made working together better and more effective, it made work more enjoyable, and we worked together on problems a lot more effectively. Who enjoys Zoom meetings in themselves? --- I respect some people work better remotely. We need to respect that some people genuinely work better in person, and stop accusing them of "just wanting to wield power over others" or something. There are legitimate benefits to the person and to the mission when people are in person.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I'm an IC-turned-manager. There are definitely some bad managers out there, but generally managers aren't that different than ICs in terms of motivation. We all just want to get our jobs done and do good work as a team. > We individual contributors may not think about this much, but the absolute thrill of being above others in the hierarchy only reaches its fullness when the employees get out of the damn pajamas and into the open offices. Please pick me up a coffee while you are at it. This is a wildly cynical take. If you're dealing with managers like this, you're not in a normal tech office environment. Every decent tech company I've ever worked with has put a lot of pressure on managers to treat employees well. Retention is a huge issue, especially in this market, and managers actually spend a lot of time trying to cater to their IC's wishes rather than jerking them around. Any tech manager who acts like you describe will steadily fail out of tech companies due to employee attrition.
- akkartik 5y ago
  I'm curious what your take is on: * Whether people should go into work * Where the pressure to go into work comes from in an org
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > * Whether people should go into work I work remote. I manage remote teams. I love it and I think it's great. But it's definitely not for everyone. A lot of people can't handle remote work. A lot of people don't have the self discipline to get work done without being in a social context (some of my remote team members work in coworking spaces as a workaround). A lot of people see remote as an opportunity to isolate from the team and dodge important communications. I think we need to get past this idea that one type of work is best for everyone and every team. When people try to say that remote is superior, they don't know what they're talking about. It's one the most "it depends" topics out there right now. > * Where the pressure to go into work comes from in an org Let me answer this indirectly: If companies saw a net increase in productivity and employee well-being from going remote, they'd be falling all over themselves to go all-in on remote work. Getting rid of office space and being able to hire anywhere is a huge advantage and every executive team I know was enthralled with the idea. So why would they want to retain expensive office space and limit themselves to hiring only nearby candidates? It's because for every 1 person who's great at remote work, there may be 1-3 others who aren't doing well at all. Juniors and new hires suffer the most because ramp-up times become extremely slow when the rest of the team is isolated away working on their tasks and uninterested in talking to anyone they don't have to. Interpersonal conflicts are way up because people misinterpret things as insulting or offensive because they can't see the other person's face. Fights and arguments break out everywhere because there's little difference between the company Slack and the other Discords where the person alt+tabs to argue with people. In short: Remote is hard, creates more work for management, is detrimental to juniors and new hires, and doesn't work for everyone. If a company is willing to invest a lot of money and time into hiring more managers to deal with it and churning through hires who can't handle remote, it can work. But it's often easier and happier for everyone to just go into the office a day or two per week to resolve these issues in person. Even as a remote team, flying everyone into the same location is hands down the easiest way to get people communicating efficiently and treating each other as human team members instead of Slack screen name enemies. Remote is hard.
bennyelv 5y ago
You must have had some very unlucky experiences to have this kind of cynical take on things. In my whole career (17 years at this point) I've encountered only one manager who was in it for the power and control... and he got fired. I spent a significant proportion of my career as an IC but I'm a senior manager now, and I can tell you that "power over people" is precisely not what I'm after. The fact that I have power (and not forgetting that that power comes with responsibility), is not relevant to me and not a positive part of the job. Telling people what to do is orders of magnitude less effective than convincing, inspiring, and motivating them to do it.
- streslip 5y ago
  It is highly dependent on the organization. Having worked for Apple, the opposite seemed true. Anyone with empathy, charisma, and leadership skills was quickly filtered out. There certainly were a few good eggs, but they were rare and far between. It takes a certain sort to succeed there. The company seemed to select for extreme psychopathy the higher you looked.
jdlyga 5y ago
The best leaders have people and leadership skills, but have no desire at all for the power and might not even want the position. Two of the best bosses I've ever worked with begrudgingly were put into that position and did an excellent job. Kind of like Cincinnatus or George Washington, being perfectly content giving it all up and going back to a simple farm life.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > Two of the best bosses I've ever worked with Well... two of the best bosses from whose perspective? Your perspective of a great boss might be way different than the perspective of a metrics-obsessed "data driven" CFO.
- greedo 5y ago
  Haha. Comparing business leaders to Cincinnatus and Washington is perfect manager porn. I bet someone has written a book on the parallels. Can you name one business leader, just one, who has demonstrated no desire for power (in all its forms) and who didn't even want the position. Just one of "The best leaders" you're talking about.
crossroadsguy 5y ago
I think managers are usually in it just for the money. Like most other people. It might be not fruitful to read much into it. Many teams find it easier to work sitting close to each other. Is this superior? Is WFH superior? Is hybrid superior? I don’t think there’s a fixed answer because such things work both individually and collectively. WFH can be better for you but not for 2 of your coworkers. Now who’s supposed to adapt to what? For example: for me meetings and discussions are too many times better in person. And hybrid is worse imho. You are stuck to living close to office so you can’t live wherever you wish. And then you’re working from office but also working from home so for many teams and folks that expectation of some sort of “always availability” (work/life blurred line) will continue.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  WFH is better in the long run for the environment and thus for everyone. Also, with fewer people commuting to large cities, smaller towns will grow. And wealth will redistribute to local neighbourhoods. Bedroom communities will have patrons with money (for a change) able to sustain businesses that were infeasible when everyone spent their entire day in the city. Youth might be less inclined to brain drain to the big city, and then support interesting local restaurants and bars. Parents will support local children's activities. Grand parents will live near their children. Bike paths, public transit, public parks will all have reasons to exist! Man, it sounds amazing all listed out here.
evilbob93 5y ago
My mom was a technical recruiter for a big Catholic hospital system in the Detroit area in the late 90's. She decided that she needed a copy of Doctor Seuss's _Yertle the Turtle_ for her cubicle because she thought it described her office situation (management creating new layers below them to lord over). Tech people often don't make the transition to management well.

api 5y ago

There's also a direct threat to the jobs of a lot of middle managers from telework. The company's upper level management may realize a lot of these high salary managers are not necessary or that they obviously aren't doing their jobs well since the same value gets created with people out of the office. The push to get butts back in seats is 100% about job security for middle management and maintaining the value of commercial real estate. I've seen evidence of CRE leaning on the media and politicians to push a "return to work" narrative.

outsidetheparty 5y ago
Maybe it’s just because I’m a teleworking middle manager, but I’ve never understood this argument that telework threatens middle management. Middle management doesn’t magically become unnecessary when employees are working from home instead of the office — if anything it’s _more_ important when everyone isn’t in the same physical location picking up their direction by osmosis.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Not every manager is Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss but some people just have that impression.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Not every manager is Dilbert's PHB, but some are. And you can bet the pressure to go back to the office for tasks that don't require an office mostly comes from those.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      But middle management doesn’t make these decisions. Decisions that effect the whole company come from the C-Suite.
      - greedo 5y ago
        Our CSO and CFO are the epitome of PHBs.
- api 5y ago
  I wasn't clear. Telework doesn't threaten all middle management, just superfluous middle management.
  - outsidetheparty 5y ago
    I still don't get it. Yes, certainly some managers (at every level!) add no real value, but I don't see what about remote work is supposed to reveal those managers as useless.
- n4r9 5y ago
  My ~80 person company is pushing hard for return to office despite only a few middle managers / team leads. If anything the leads are the ones happily wfh whilst the senior management are doing the pushing. The reasoning is ostensibly that the business works better due to lots of little in-person interactions. It does make some sense when a lot of the staff are junior (which they are).

jacknews 5y ago

I agree, in some sense the office is like the wonky low chair in some interviews. It's much easier for management to intimidate workers when they are there in person. Now is really a good opportunity to redefine the relationship between employer and employee, and 'work' in general, and I hope we collectively push forward with it, not just sink back into the semi-abusive situation of before.

jayd16 5y ago

If you're reading this and at the whim of a coffee request, get a new job. Managers really do need to communicate with the team and the team really does need to communicate with each other. That really does happen better in person. Even if it feels like a distraction when someone needs to communicate with you but you don't with them.

johnwheeler 5y ago
> That really does happen better in person Says who? Some management study? My anecdotal experience tells me I’ve formed stronger relationships over zoom and slack than I have working in person with people I truly cannot stand. At least with zoom and slack, if I don’t like you, I can hide your window behind my IDE. And there’s no rule that says I have to like everyone and everyone has to like me. There’s no rule that says I should want to spend my free time with so and so. How about, I choose who I spend my time with and you choose what I work on and pay me for that?
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > My anecdotal experience tells me I’ve formed stronger relationships over zoom and slack than I have working in person with people I truly cannot stand. I mean if you can't stand the people then you're going to have poor relationships with them regardless.
  - johnwheeler 5y ago
    Right, so might as well stay home and hide their window behind my IDE I once worked with a dude that would come into my cubicle every morning eating chunks of watermelon out of a sandwich baggie. He would just stand there smacking his lips and slurping up watermelon juice, purposefully trying to be a dick. I shouldn’t have to deal with that or be expected to get a new job. And management shouldn’t have to sift through that passive aggressive behavior and make arbitrary judgement calls of who the dick is. Just let me spend the least amount of time as possible with him, and I’ll be happy. Respect my freedom to choose who I want to associate with.

closeparen 5y ago

I think a significant number of people get into leadership roles because they like human interaction. Their jobs still consist of doing human interaction all day. And human interaction is genuinely very unpleasant on Zoom/Slack relative to real life. Frankly I don’t think there is an amount you could pay me to do back-to-back Zoom meetings all day every day. My price would be high enough that I’d retire on it pretty quick. Management doesn’t have to flee the industry in protest of intolerable working conditions; it controls the working conditions. We should it expect it, all else being equal, to secure the working conditions best adapted to doing management work. And that means presence.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
I think communication is a different subject. I have no problem with true flexibility where people are free to meet in person when it makes sense. I think the original comment is around owning the employee's time, which is most effected when you have some ownership of their physical presence. For example, we often have mandatory company wide meetings where the subject is only of interest to 5% of people but yet everyone is forced to be present and attentive for the entire period, adding another level of forced fakery to our daily lives.
johnwheeler 5y ago
So, your desire to have in person human interaction trumps my desire to stay home because like you say, you control the working conditions. What kind of shit is that?
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  The hostility you feel toward people wanting real human interaction is the hostility I feel toward introverts who think in-person interaction is useless, rejecting the social nature of human beings and wanting to lock themselves in their houses for the rest of their lives getting Amazon grocery deliveries and playing games online. If it seems like I'm projecting some anger at a specific scenario, I am. Let me pivot. Hybrid seems like a good option for teams, though it takes away the geographic-flexibility perk of WFH. I think WFH can be successful, but I absolutely 100% think a lot of people are bullshitting how effective they are at home, because none of the workers want to lose the time- and location-flexibility of WFH. So we all just say "yeah it's great, it's just as productive" where I can plainly see a number of people are not. Flat out. Does that mean we should all go back to the office? Maybe not, but it takes more and better management, not less. Personally, the banter and whiteboarding and trips to get coffee and lunch with coworkers made working together better and more effective, it made work more enjoyable, and we worked together on problems a lot more effectively. Who enjoys Zoom meetings in themselves? --- I respect some people work better remotely. We need to respect that some people genuinely work better in person, and stop accusing them of "just wanting to wield power over others" or something. There are legitimate benefits to the person and to the mission when people are in person.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I'm an IC-turned-manager. There are definitely some bad managers out there, but generally managers aren't that different than ICs in terms of motivation. We all just want to get our jobs done and do good work as a team. > We individual contributors may not think about this much, but the absolute thrill of being above others in the hierarchy only reaches its fullness when the employees get out of the damn pajamas and into the open offices. Please pick me up a coffee while you are at it. This is a wildly cynical take. If you're dealing with managers like this, you're not in a normal tech office environment. Every decent tech company I've ever worked with has put a lot of pressure on managers to treat employees well. Retention is a huge issue, especially in this market, and managers actually spend a lot of time trying to cater to their IC's wishes rather than jerking them around. Any tech manager who acts like you describe will steadily fail out of tech companies due to employee attrition.

akkartik 5y ago
I'm curious what your take is on: * Whether people should go into work * Where the pressure to go into work comes from in an org
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > * Whether people should go into work I work remote. I manage remote teams. I love it and I think it's great. But it's definitely not for everyone. A lot of people can't handle remote work. A lot of people don't have the self discipline to get work done without being in a social context (some of my remote team members work in coworking spaces as a workaround). A lot of people see remote as an opportunity to isolate from the team and dodge important communications. I think we need to get past this idea that one type of work is best for everyone and every team. When people try to say that remote is superior, they don't know what they're talking about. It's one the most "it depends" topics out there right now. > * Where the pressure to go into work comes from in an org Let me answer this indirectly: If companies saw a net increase in productivity and employee well-being from going remote, they'd be falling all over themselves to go all-in on remote work. Getting rid of office space and being able to hire anywhere is a huge advantage and every executive team I know was enthralled with the idea. So why would they want to retain expensive office space and limit themselves to hiring only nearby candidates? It's because for every 1 person who's great at remote work, there may be 1-3 others who aren't doing well at all. Juniors and new hires suffer the most because ramp-up times become extremely slow when the rest of the team is isolated away working on their tasks and uninterested in talking to anyone they don't have to. Interpersonal conflicts are way up because people misinterpret things as insulting or offensive because they can't see the other person's face. Fights and arguments break out everywhere because there's little difference between the company Slack and the other Discords where the person alt+tabs to argue with people. In short: Remote is hard, creates more work for management, is detrimental to juniors and new hires, and doesn't work for everyone. If a company is willing to invest a lot of money and time into hiring more managers to deal with it and churning through hires who can't handle remote, it can work. But it's often easier and happier for everyone to just go into the office a day or two per week to resolve these issues in person. Even as a remote team, flying everyone into the same location is hands down the easiest way to get people communicating efficiently and treating each other as human team members instead of Slack screen name enemies. Remote is hard.

bennyelv 5y ago

You must have had some very unlucky experiences to have this kind of cynical take on things. In my whole career (17 years at this point) I've encountered only one manager who was in it for the power and control... and he got fired. I spent a significant proportion of my career as an IC but I'm a senior manager now, and I can tell you that "power over people" is precisely not what I'm after. The fact that I have power (and not forgetting that that power comes with responsibility), is not relevant to me and not a positive part of the job. Telling people what to do is orders of magnitude less effective than convincing, inspiring, and motivating them to do it.

streslip 5y ago
It is highly dependent on the organization. Having worked for Apple, the opposite seemed true. Anyone with empathy, charisma, and leadership skills was quickly filtered out. There certainly were a few good eggs, but they were rare and far between. It takes a certain sort to succeed there. The company seemed to select for extreme psychopathy the higher you looked.

jdlyga 5y ago

The best leaders have people and leadership skills, but have no desire at all for the power and might not even want the position. Two of the best bosses I've ever worked with begrudgingly were put into that position and did an excellent job. Kind of like Cincinnatus or George Washington, being perfectly content giving it all up and going back to a simple farm life.

commandlinefan 5y ago
> Two of the best bosses I've ever worked with Well... two of the best bosses from whose perspective? Your perspective of a great boss might be way different than the perspective of a metrics-obsessed "data driven" CFO.
greedo 5y ago
Haha. Comparing business leaders to Cincinnatus and Washington is perfect manager porn. I bet someone has written a book on the parallels. Can you name one business leader, just one, who has demonstrated no desire for power (in all its forms) and who didn't even want the position. Just one of "The best leaders" you're talking about.

crossroadsguy 5y ago

I think managers are usually in it just for the money. Like most other people. It might be not fruitful to read much into it. Many teams find it easier to work sitting close to each other. Is this superior? Is WFH superior? Is hybrid superior? I don’t think there’s a fixed answer because such things work both individually and collectively. WFH can be better for you but not for 2 of your coworkers. Now who’s supposed to adapt to what? For example: for me meetings and discussions are too many times better in person. And hybrid is worse imho. You are stuck to living close to office so you can’t live wherever you wish. And then you’re working from office but also working from home so for many teams and folks that expectation of some sort of “always availability” (work/life blurred line) will continue.

fartcannon 5y ago
WFH is better in the long run for the environment and thus for everyone. Also, with fewer people commuting to large cities, smaller towns will grow. And wealth will redistribute to local neighbourhoods. Bedroom communities will have patrons with money (for a change) able to sustain businesses that were infeasible when everyone spent their entire day in the city. Youth might be less inclined to brain drain to the big city, and then support interesting local restaurants and bars. Parents will support local children's activities. Grand parents will live near their children. Bike paths, public transit, public parks will all have reasons to exist! Man, it sounds amazing all listed out here.

evilbob93 5y ago

My mom was a technical recruiter for a big Catholic hospital system in the Detroit area in the late 90's. She decided that she needed a copy of Doctor Seuss's _Yertle the Turtle_ for her cubicle because she thought it described her office situation (management creating new layers below them to lord over). Tech people often don't make the transition to management well.