4 ms·

Unfortunately the folks that get to make these decisions are so removed from the reality of their company's every day tasks that all they can think is "if I don

Unfortunately the folks that get to make these decisions are so removed from the reality of their company's every day tasks that all they can think is "if I don't see butts in the seats I bought, then obviously no work is getting done".

scarface74 4y ago
I worked for a small company in 2020 that wanted to get people back in the office by June of that year to “foster better communication” while Covid was still going strong. That next week, a recruiter from BigTech sent me a message about applying for a software engineering position. I asked them would it be permanently remote. They said “no”. I was about to end the conversation. But then we kept talking and they suggested I talk to another department that was always designed to be remote. I got a job there. There are way too many opportunities for software engineers to be begging a company to WFH.
randomsearch 4y ago
The problem is, for many people and jobs that heuristic is accurate. I’ve heard of countless examples of people spending their time gaming at home instead of working. Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
- paxys 4y ago
  So has no work happened at Apple the last 2+ years? If a company can't evaluate an employee's performance while they are out of sight, that sounds like a management problem.
  - loudthing 4y ago
    I completely agree, specifically a middle management problem that bubbles up.
- rsanek 4y ago
  It's so interesting to me that we still struggle to get out of the 'hours worked' mindset when considering how valuable someone is to a company. I would argue it's completely irrelevant if someone is gaming, even if it's almost all their time. The question to answer is, what value are they actually bringing to the organization? Would you rather have someone that's useless but working hard 10 hours a day over someone who's brilliant but only works 2 hours a day? I certainly wouldn't. I think competent organizations will actually do the counter and embrace trusting their employees. IME, it is basically already impossible not to -- there's just way too much work and complexity for someone to accurately know exactly what all of their reports are doing.

scarface74 4y ago

I worked for a small company in 2020 that wanted to get people back in the office by June of that year to “foster better communication” while Covid was still going strong. That next week, a recruiter from BigTech sent me a message about applying for a software engineering position. I asked them would it be permanently remote. They said “no”. I was about to end the conversation. But then we kept talking and they suggested I talk to another department that was always designed to be remote. I got a job there. There are way too many opportunities for software engineers to be begging a company to WFH.

randomsearch 4y ago

The problem is, for many people and jobs that heuristic is accurate. I’ve heard of countless examples of people spending their time gaming at home instead of working. Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.

paxys 4y ago
So has no work happened at Apple the last 2+ years? If a company can't evaluate an employee's performance while they are out of sight, that sounds like a management problem.
- loudthing 4y ago
  I completely agree, specifically a middle management problem that bubbles up.
rsanek 4y ago
It's so interesting to me that we still struggle to get out of the 'hours worked' mindset when considering how valuable someone is to a company. I would argue it's completely irrelevant if someone is gaming, even if it's almost all their time. The question to answer is, what value are they actually bringing to the organization? Would you rather have someone that's useless but working hard 10 hours a day over someone who's brilliant but only works 2 hours a day? I certainly wouldn't. I think competent organizations will actually do the counter and embrace trusting their employees. IME, it is basically already impossible not to -- there's just way too much work and complexity for someone to accurately know exactly what all of their reports are doing.