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If they are delivering, who cares if they run errands or do hobbies? Look at their work and if they don’t meet the bar, let them go. This whole attendance equal

If they are delivering, who cares if they run errands or do hobbies? Look at their work and if they don’t meet the bar, let them go. This whole attendance equals work thing is more often than not coming from insecure/micro managers.

opportune 4y ago
I was responding to my parent/gp comment about slackers WFH. I think by definition we can say "slackers" are people who aren't delivering at an adequate level - or at least that's how I interpreted it. I am not sure how much you have been in leadership positions or dealt with hiring in tech, but things aren't as simple as letting people go. For one, a lot of people with performance issues know they have performance issues and want to be better - so if they have trouble concentrating/dealing with the temptation to slack at home, establishing formal work-from-office policies could actually help them. Basically, it's almost always better to try to coach underperforming people or create/find an environment that works for them rather than just let them go (especially for software where it's hard to find people already, it's a bad look to fire someone in under X months, and where as a line manager you actually have little discretion over firing people). Also, once a culture of not delivering gets entrenched, letting people go gets hard. You don't want to let go of 4 out of 6 members of a team at once, even if they aren't doing anything. It's a bad look for the entire management chain and makes other employees scared. Investors may interpret it as a sign of trouble with financials. I don't think there's anything wrong with requiring underperforming employees to work out of an office, as long as their job wasn't advertised as fully remote and the employer never formally told them they were not expected to return the office. I do agree that people who are doing a good job working remotely have every right to continue working remotely though. I just also agree with the GP that remote work enables slackers and can make getting shit done hard/frustrating.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  They'll just slack at work. They'll watch tiktok on their phones, hang out at the coffee machine, chat with their coworkers. It's worse because their activities will waste other peoples time, not just their own.
  - dfcowell 4y ago
    Some people find it genuinely motivating working alongside other people working hard. It’s not so simple as someone being a slacker or not.
- mbrodersen 4y ago
  Middle managers who are slackers or simply incompetent will be busy all the time arranging having plenty of pointless demoralising meetings in the office with people who would otherwise be productive.
pojzon 4y ago
Issue for manages is that: - Slackers are a pretty big % of corpo workforce. They are not as useless in the office. - You cannot pressure hard-workers to do even more and more on remote. So the balance is broken. Slackers do fkall and hardworkers do only whats needed. If you fire slackers -> hiring process costs a lot and you have no guarantee you get a hardworker. So for employer its a lose-lose situation. The other comment explains in more details why firing is hard.
ChrisRR 4y ago
In my engineering career everyone has always had a list of tasks as long as their arm. The assumption is that if one of your tasks hits a blocker or you finish it, you work on one of your many other tasks. If everyone else is working to fill in their full hours even if they finish ahead of schedule, it seems unfair that one person who finishes early then just puts their feet up. The opposite is true of course, some tasks naturally take longer than expected and you borrow time from the tasks you finished early
- nowherebeen 4y ago
  > If everyone else is working to fill in their full hours even if they finish ahead of schedule, it seems unfair that one person who finishes early then just puts their feet up. So you rather they pretend to work or drag their feet getting work done? That's usually what happens when managers think this way because there is no incentive to finish faster. In fact, I remember there was a term for it: Sandbagging. That's the type of behavior you are incentivizing.
closeparen 4y ago
Delivery of coding tasks is a proxy for your effectiveness as an employee in at most the first 2-4 years of your career. Past entry level, your work is the effect you have on the team's collective functioning (or if more senior, the org’s collective functioning), via the effect you have on its meetings. People dialing in remotely have a steeply negative effect on meetings by default. It takes an extremely brilliant remote worker to add as much value to a collaboration as an average-skilled worker who is in the room. Most people aren't that brilliant.

opportune 4y ago

I was responding to my parent/gp comment about slackers WFH. I think by definition we can say "slackers" are people who aren't delivering at an adequate level - or at least that's how I interpreted it. I am not sure how much you have been in leadership positions or dealt with hiring in tech, but things aren't as simple as letting people go. For one, a lot of people with performance issues know they have performance issues and want to be better - so if they have trouble concentrating/dealing with the temptation to slack at home, establishing formal work-from-office policies could actually help them. Basically, it's almost always better to try to coach underperforming people or create/find an environment that works for them rather than just let them go (especially for software where it's hard to find people already, it's a bad look to fire someone in under X months, and where as a line manager you actually have little discretion over firing people). Also, once a culture of not delivering gets entrenched, letting people go gets hard. You don't want to let go of 4 out of 6 members of a team at once, even if they aren't doing anything. It's a bad look for the entire management chain and makes other employees scared. Investors may interpret it as a sign of trouble with financials. I don't think there's anything wrong with requiring underperforming employees to work out of an office, as long as their job wasn't advertised as fully remote and the employer never formally told them they were not expected to return the office. I do agree that people who are doing a good job working remotely have every right to continue working remotely though. I just also agree with the GP that remote work enables slackers and can make getting shit done hard/frustrating.

fartcannon 4y ago
They'll just slack at work. They'll watch tiktok on their phones, hang out at the coffee machine, chat with their coworkers. It's worse because their activities will waste other peoples time, not just their own.
- dfcowell 4y ago
  Some people find it genuinely motivating working alongside other people working hard. It’s not so simple as someone being a slacker or not.
mbrodersen 4y ago
Middle managers who are slackers or simply incompetent will be busy all the time arranging having plenty of pointless demoralising meetings in the office with people who would otherwise be productive.

pojzon 4y ago

Issue for manages is that: - Slackers are a pretty big % of corpo workforce. They are not as useless in the office. - You cannot pressure hard-workers to do even more and more on remote. So the balance is broken. Slackers do fkall and hardworkers do only whats needed. If you fire slackers -> hiring process costs a lot and you have no guarantee you get a hardworker. So for employer its a lose-lose situation. The other comment explains in more details why firing is hard.

ChrisRR 4y ago

In my engineering career everyone has always had a list of tasks as long as their arm. The assumption is that if one of your tasks hits a blocker or you finish it, you work on one of your many other tasks. If everyone else is working to fill in their full hours even if they finish ahead of schedule, it seems unfair that one person who finishes early then just puts their feet up. The opposite is true of course, some tasks naturally take longer than expected and you borrow time from the tasks you finished early

nowherebeen 4y ago
> If everyone else is working to fill in their full hours even if they finish ahead of schedule, it seems unfair that one person who finishes early then just puts their feet up. So you rather they pretend to work or drag their feet getting work done? That's usually what happens when managers think this way because there is no incentive to finish faster. In fact, I remember there was a term for it: Sandbagging. That's the type of behavior you are incentivizing.

closeparen 4y ago

Delivery of coding tasks is a proxy for your effectiveness as an employee in at most the first 2-4 years of your career. Past entry level, your work is the effect you have on the team's collective functioning (or if more senior, the org’s collective functioning), via the effect you have on its meetings. People dialing in remotely have a steeply negative effect on meetings by default. It takes an extremely brilliant remote worker to add as much value to a collaboration as an average-skilled worker who is in the room. Most people aren't that brilliant.