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Unless you believe managers don’t do useful work, that doesn’t even strike me as a very cynical take. I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team an

Unless you believe managers don’t do useful work, that doesn’t even strike me as a very cynical take. I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office. I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona lockdowns. The serendipity thing is real. We have less of it. We have many other benefits and we think it’s worth it, but to think remote doesn’t have downsides is a bit short sighted IMO.

tluyben2 4y ago
Many managers are not very good and mostly believe managing means flogging the herd to work harder; that’s not really possible remotely.
- senttoschool 4y ago
  Many individual contributors are not very good and mostly overrate their own ability to be productive while working from home.
  - Agentlien 4y ago
    I'm sceptical towards this. I know my own productivity has measurably improved since I started working from home - mainly from the calmer work environment and lack of distractions. When performing recent post-mortems it also became clear that when the whole studio was unexpectedly forced to work remotely, productivity overall slightly increased despite some initial concerns about adapting our workflows and communication channels.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      > I'm sceptical towards this. I know my own productivity has measurably improved since I started working from home - mainly from the calmer work environment and lack of distractions. Also, no need to sit there staring at the screen trying to look like you’re doing something useful after your brain has hit its limit on contiguous productive hours. You can instead get up and go do chores or go on a walk or something, give your head some breathing room, and then come back with something of a second wind in your sails which carries you through the end of the work day.
  - gardenhedge 4y ago
    The feedback loop is a lot quicker for an IC than a manager. It could take several quarters or longer to uncover that a manager is not performing.
    - jen20 4y ago
      I typically find it takes about 3 minutes of sitting in a meeting with them to discover that.
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    True, but the last 4 words of your statement are irrelevant.
  - caskstrength 4y ago
    > Many individual contributors are not very good and mostly overrate their own ability to be productive while working from home. So go ahead and fire them. What is the issue exactly?
ludovicianul 4y ago
Exactly. Saying remote works best it's a bold statement. You can give significant number of arguments for both "in the office" or "remote". Remote work has benefits, but also downsides. There is a different dynamic between people when they sit together vs when they talk remotely. Each of these interactions will foster different outputs. Also, each of these cases start from extreme premises. "Bad managers" want workers within the office because they want to micromanage. While all employees are fully responsible, productive and albe to do their work without issues. Again, both of these are extremes and there are a lot of nuances.
sdiacom 4y ago
By saying "serendipity" here, we abstract it into its own unique cutesy concept, preventing proper analysis of its actual tangible benefits. This leads people to talk about it as if it's some magical emergent property of water coolers. When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up: - Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product - Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product - Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management. That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management. All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way. Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life: - Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods) - Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about. - Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.
- jamespo 4y ago
  IMO that Slack room would be a wasteland, if you've seen it work you're lucky
fwlr 4y ago
No, I believe managers do useful work. What I mean is that knowledge workers have discovered they have the capability to do their job just as effectively when remote, while managers have simultaneously discovered they don’t have the capability to do their job nearly as effectively when remote; i.e. a lot of managers are realizing they relied on face-to-face interpersonal skills to motivate, track, and manage their employees. Some managers (like yourself) have clearly adapted, while others have realized how much they relied on (benign!) shouldersurfing to figure out if work was being done.
- gcatalfamo 4y ago
  I know it's not very HN-y to say "I agree", but I think your comment encapsulates wonderfully the general topic, in a concise and very well put paragraph. edit: I am also commenting to retrieve it in the future.
- yoden 4y ago
  I think this is a very insightful comment. If you're an experienced individual contributor, the shift to remote work was great. You got less oversight at work and more free time in your personal life. This category is a lot of the hacker news audience, so remote work is popular here. It was less good if you were a new contributor. You might find yourself with less development and struggling to break into existing cliques within the organization. You may not have built good practices in personal time management. None of this is malicious, it is just failures that are easier to have happen when working remote and not being careful. Managers have an even harder time. Good managers work by building strong relationships with their team members, not with carrots or sticks. That's harder in a remote environment, due to the default-private nature of most remote communication. The lack of relationships hurts individual contributors too, who become even more like cogs in a machine. Overall, I think the ability to retain experienced employees and hire from a wide range of locations outweighs these costs of remote work, but they are real and significant. For Big Tech, where acquiring talent is relatively easier due to salaries and name recognition, you can see why they might prioritize in-office work.
- caskstrength 4y ago
  > Some managers (like yourself) have clearly adapted, while others have realized how much they relied on (benign!) shouldersurfing to figure out if work was being done. So you are saying that those "other managers" will have to actually become competent in projects they are managing instead of measuring the time butts spent in the seats and trying to sneak on employees who are reading reddit at work? Good!
theknocker 4y ago
[dead]

tluyben2 4y ago

Many managers are not very good and mostly believe managing means flogging the herd to work harder; that’s not really possible remotely.

senttoschool 4y ago
Many individual contributors are not very good and mostly overrate their own ability to be productive while working from home.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  I'm sceptical towards this. I know my own productivity has measurably improved since I started working from home - mainly from the calmer work environment and lack of distractions. When performing recent post-mortems it also became clear that when the whole studio was unexpectedly forced to work remotely, productivity overall slightly increased despite some initial concerns about adapting our workflows and communication channels.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    > I'm sceptical towards this. I know my own productivity has measurably improved since I started working from home - mainly from the calmer work environment and lack of distractions. Also, no need to sit there staring at the screen trying to look like you’re doing something useful after your brain has hit its limit on contiguous productive hours. You can instead get up and go do chores or go on a walk or something, give your head some breathing room, and then come back with something of a second wind in your sails which carries you through the end of the work day.
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  The feedback loop is a lot quicker for an IC than a manager. It could take several quarters or longer to uncover that a manager is not performing.
  - jen20 4y ago
    I typically find it takes about 3 minutes of sitting in a meeting with them to discover that.
- antisthenes 4y ago
  True, but the last 4 words of your statement are irrelevant.
- caskstrength 4y ago
  > Many individual contributors are not very good and mostly overrate their own ability to be productive while working from home. So go ahead and fire them. What is the issue exactly?

ludovicianul 4y ago

Exactly. Saying remote works best it's a bold statement. You can give significant number of arguments for both "in the office" or "remote". Remote work has benefits, but also downsides. There is a different dynamic between people when they sit together vs when they talk remotely. Each of these interactions will foster different outputs. Also, each of these cases start from extreme premises. "Bad managers" want workers within the office because they want to micromanage. While all employees are fully responsible, productive and albe to do their work without issues. Again, both of these are extremes and there are a lot of nuances.

sdiacom 4y ago

By saying "serendipity" here, we abstract it into its own unique cutesy concept, preventing proper analysis of its actual tangible benefits. This leads people to talk about it as if it's some magical emergent property of water coolers. When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up: - Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product - Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product - Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management. That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management. All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way. Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life: - Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods) - Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about. - Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.

jamespo 4y ago
IMO that Slack room would be a wasteland, if you've seen it work you're lucky

fwlr 4y ago

No, I believe managers do useful work. What I mean is that knowledge workers have discovered they have the capability to do their job just as effectively when remote, while managers have simultaneously discovered they don’t have the capability to do their job nearly as effectively when remote; i.e. a lot of managers are realizing they relied on face-to-face interpersonal skills to motivate, track, and manage their employees. Some managers (like yourself) have clearly adapted, while others have realized how much they relied on (benign!) shouldersurfing to figure out if work was being done.

gcatalfamo 4y ago
I know it's not very HN-y to say "I agree", but I think your comment encapsulates wonderfully the general topic, in a concise and very well put paragraph. edit: I am also commenting to retrieve it in the future.
yoden 4y ago
I think this is a very insightful comment. If you're an experienced individual contributor, the shift to remote work was great. You got less oversight at work and more free time in your personal life. This category is a lot of the hacker news audience, so remote work is popular here. It was less good if you were a new contributor. You might find yourself with less development and struggling to break into existing cliques within the organization. You may not have built good practices in personal time management. None of this is malicious, it is just failures that are easier to have happen when working remote and not being careful. Managers have an even harder time. Good managers work by building strong relationships with their team members, not with carrots or sticks. That's harder in a remote environment, due to the default-private nature of most remote communication. The lack of relationships hurts individual contributors too, who become even more like cogs in a machine. Overall, I think the ability to retain experienced employees and hire from a wide range of locations outweighs these costs of remote work, but they are real and significant. For Big Tech, where acquiring talent is relatively easier due to salaries and name recognition, you can see why they might prioritize in-office work.
caskstrength 4y ago
> Some managers (like yourself) have clearly adapted, while others have realized how much they relied on (benign!) shouldersurfing to figure out if work was being done. So you are saying that those "other managers" will have to actually become competent in projects they are managing instead of measuring the time butts spent in the seats and trying to sneak on employees who are reading reddit at work? Good!

theknocker 4y ago

[dead]