At my previous company, productivity increased on some teams. Other teams saw a significant drop in productivity, and for certain high performers, it meant they

At my previous company, productivity increased on some teams. Other teams saw a significant drop in productivity, and for certain high performers, it meant they changed teams or left the company. As we continued hiring managers and engineers, we realized building a culture where everyone was remote was hard but not impossible. Again, seem teams thrived. Other teams were disasters. Difficulty getting a roadmap straight, engineers coming to standup habitually late and with fake updates, delivery constantly getting pushed, and entire sprints where the work load simply gets pushed to the next sprint. Several engineers I spoke with, who joined during COVID, told me flat out they’re not very productive, and they had come to understood this as being “normal” for their role. My take away is that working from home is not a universal solution. If you have strong teams that can continue their culture remotely, you should do what keeps them happy and work from home. If you have teams who cannot deliver remotely, then SOMETHING needs to happen. I am convinced that having those teams come in and show productivity is a pre-requisite. It might just be that we need to replace managers. The solution might be coaching or replacing certain individuals, and coming into the office makes the underlying problems very visible. At Amazon, I had three different women Senior engineers (my mentees) break down into tears during 1:1s. Their teams weren’t progressing on delivery. Their stakeholders were directly reaching out to the senior SDEs and applying pressure. Their SDMs seemed careless but then happy to throw the senior SDEs under the bus. The company didn’t want to ask anyone to come in, because they were looking at this as an opportunity to hire engineers from other companies. The companies asking employees to return. Other engineers on the team were skipping team meetings and not showing progress in their sprints. I spoke directly with one of the managers trying to understand his concerns, at one point asking if he could walk me through his top 3 challenges. They involved getting promoted to the next level, and complaints about his partner teams who were frustrated with his team not delivering. I’ll stop this long story here. One take away is that companies who are struggling to hire engineers, especially because of their toxic culture and other gaps, are ready to offer remote work as a perk.