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> Microsoft announced a report indicating that workers were indeed productive at home (and sometimes more so), just that managers were failing to have confidenc

by hooby 3y ago

> Microsoft announced a report indicating that workers were indeed productive at home (and sometimes more so), just that managers were failing to have confidence in workers. Maybe it's down to management style. It's long known that (at least in somewhat creative and self-directed jobs) workers who are motivated and happy with their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Managers then have to work hard, to keep motivation up and people happy. Let's call this the "supportive" management style. It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with, and do only as much as they are forced/required to do. Managers than have to work hard to control and monitor everyone, to keep the slack to a minimum. Let's call this the "adversarial" management style. In one of those styles, WFH employees can be more productive, more happy, and more efficient. In the other, WFH employees can't be monitored closely enough to keep them from slacking. Some managers prefer one style over the other, and not many are able to switch styles.

kubb 3y ago
It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company. Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job. "Efficiency".
- lozenge 3y ago
  I feel this, as I get to make decisions on my own at home. In the office I need to discuss and explain all the options, only to have my manager make the same decision I would come to.
  - globalise83 3y ago
    Decision-making processes shouldn't really be affected - if someone's manager has a psychological need to rubber-stamp their decisions, then that is just as necessary with them working from home as in the office, and failure to do so will ultimately lead to conflict and probably looking for a new job in the end.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  i don't understand why it's not needed? >can't have f2f meetings all day i have zoom 1:1 meetings all day with managers. going remote doesn't obviate the need for team planning and management. bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this. if a behemoth like dell, amazon, etc can go fully remote and still be profitable, then what does that say for any smaller company? and then what does that do to all of the CRE holdings of said behemoths? tough situation and it may not resolve in our favor
  - mft_ 3y ago
    > bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this I suspect that alongside the obvious reasons (inflexible management styles, micromanagement, etc.) always discussed, this is a major driver: ongoing spend on office buildings needs to be justified, and is probably very difficult to get out of - e.g. long-term building projects, or ownership of buildings which would be difficult (or a big loss) to resell, or long-term leases signed when obviously the offices would be needed for decades, or senior leaders feeling personally invested in particular building projects, etc.
    - jon-wood 3y ago
      I'm not sold on this one, although I see it pretty regularly. Its got the whiff of conspiracy theory to me in that it provides a simple answer to a complex question by having two faceless entities colluding with each other for unknown reasons. Dell has no incentive to support the real estate industry, and while I'm sure facilities departments are feeling pretty unsettled by the move to offices being unneeded I know of very few companies who don't consider facilities to be a liability they'd like to reduce the need for. About the only bit of this I buy to some extent is very senior managers who've been closely involved in building out new office space only to find it's empty.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - medvezhenok 3y ago
- reaperman 3y ago
  Often 100 hours per week, an hour each way.
- xchip 3y ago
  Thanks for this great explanation, I hope companies take your comment into consideration.
- jksmith 3y ago
  Cynical but true in my experience coaching multiple F250s. More competitive companies will move to a model based on managing the flow of value, while legacy companies will be stuck with a model based on managing people. The two models are very different, with the first one often eliminating whole layers of management through automation. Companies think they can save management jobs by going to a matrixed model and flattening the org, but that's just an accommodation to save managers most of the time. In Dell's case, I can only speculate, but they need to justify office space, and managers need to manage people, and most of leadership get promoted from middle management (or sales). Worthless levity injection attack: my client supplied Dell windows machine still hiccups on cold boots sometimes (this ticket has been open for decades), while all my personal linux machines just keep chugging away. Find a company that is automating away management layers and uses linux.
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    > model based on managing the flow of value This is not something I've ever heard of. Some websearching produced this article. - is it describing the concept? https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/what-is-value-based-management https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
    - jksmith 3y ago
      Simpler and more executable than that, actually. 1) Basic premise of waste: People need to be told what to do, people wait to be told what to do. 2) Eliminate the waiting by standing up a value stream where everyone is part of the value stream team. Sections of the stream can be activated in a parallel fashion through autonomy of action. 3) Managers quit telling people what to do, and instead become value stream engineers - focusing on efficient flow of value like it's the company's inventory, from creation to delivery to the customer. 4) This move has different demands on remote work, but since it promotes autonomy of action, the more ham-fisted demands of legacy management are deprecated.
      - Kerrick 3y ago
- bobsomers 3y ago
  > It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company. I don't know about that. In my admittedly limited experience as an EM of 4 ICs, I'm drowning in work, mostly because they all do great work and are now double and sometimes triple booked on projects because we haven't been allowed to hire anyone. It's more than a full time job to keep a small team supported and I don't remotely feel like I'm obsolete because the company could chose to WFH. I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. This is great for me, because simply being a conduit of information between other people isn't the most efficient use of my time, so I don't really feel threatened by that. All of them have told me they've actually appreciated the hybrid schedule and the time in office for some of the week, and some of them told me that when I was a peer IC (before being their manager). Our work is definitely more experimental/R&D/unproven though. Frequent communication, collaboration, and brainstorming is critical for success. If you're doing the kind of work where you can sit down today and create a year's worth of feature tickets then maybe it skews in favor of the office being more of a distraction. > Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job. I don't get the impression anyone at the executive level of a BigCo is collecting feedback from low level managers about whether they should RTO or not. And even in the Bay Area, 2 hours a day of commuting is on the extreme end. Everyone on my team has a total of a 1 hour commute or less, and in my case that includes a day care drop off and pick up. Personally speaking, my commute wouldn't change even if we were 100% WFH because my home and the office are equidistant from day care. We do have a peer IC who has a long commute though and it's not great for him. I do wish there was more flexibility on a case-by-case basis to tweak the number of days he's in the office.
  - dogleash 3y ago
    > I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. Most communication norms aren't tied to the physical location, it's just easier to communicate communication norms when conversations are visible to the people not involved. I was on two projects during covid WFH. The digital collaboration styles were night and day. One's mattermost team still has less than 50 messages total across all channels. The other team's mattermost was and remains a major collaboration point now that we're back on site. One team always had cameras on during calls, the other didn't. And wasn't just chat, just calls or just emails. The communication was different on every medium. There was a lot of the same people on both projects, too. We all adapted to different collaboration styles depending on the project. The only difference was that project management made a few gentile pushes to enable fluid communication at the beginning of one project, and the other team didin't. And I've noticed something similar with younger people. They're much more interactive in discord chat/calls than the slack/mattermost/zoom/chime equivalents. Not that this is necessarily unique to young people, just that older people tend not to lurk discord as much. What might be unique to that age group is they've been taught corporate tools mean bifurcated groups (e.g. teacher/pupil) where they're not equal participants.
thefz 3y ago
> Maybe it's down to management style. The success of WFH is the demonstration that if you treat adults as such, they are going to do their job anyway thus rendering an entire horde of middle managers completely useless.
- komali2 3y ago
  David graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" finally actualized in a way I thought people would be forced to acknowledge, but nope, the bullshit jobs were continued to be allowed to exist.
  - newaccount74 3y ago
    If you think management jobs are "bullshit jobs", then I envy you: You must be working with remarkably well organised coworkers. My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      In my experience, managers are the ones pushing developers to skip tests, bug reports, etc. Most of them are content to simply pile on new functionality, without any concept of polish, refinement, or how allocating time for technical work can speed up the delivery of that functionality.
      - noisy_boy 3y ago
        Most of the time, this short-circuits: understanding importance of code quality/testing && willingness to allocate dedicated time to achieve code quality && having ability/position/power to withstand management's pressure on just deliveries In over twenty years of my career, the value was "true" only twice.
jorlow 3y ago
In your example I'd say it's more down to the team. If you have a solid team then you're set, but if you have low performers (which is sometimes the fault of the manager but certainly not always) then I imagine it could be more difficult to manage someone out remotely.
newaccount74 3y ago
I don't think it's just about management style. It's also about the preferences of the employees. Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work. But this only works if everyone goes to the office. My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  > But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win? How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers. Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.
  - yulaow 3y ago
    I personally only consider full remote position because even policies like "one day in the office every two weeks" would force me to live quite close to the city in which the office is and I absolutely want to avoid that if I can (and the market says I can) To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
  - hellweaver666 3y ago
diob 3y ago
I'd argue that regardless of WFH versus office, managers can't force folks to work. It's just that in the office they can pretend that they're forcing them to work, even when X employee is simply sitting in a chair. It basically ends up just punishing the employees who do work, and the slackers still slack.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > managers can't force folks to work It's easier to abuse someone when in-person. I've seen managers shout and reprimand others in-person. Try doing it remote and they just mute you :)
friendzis 3y ago
I would not distinguish supportive/adversarial management styles as much as the workload chunking, responsibility for delivery and management of it. Suppose your team consists of individual independent contractors or for example the team members are all spread across multiple offices. Such an arrangement is effectively indistinguishable from WFH arrangement as you do not really have the aforementioned face to face contact anyway. Can management make it work? WFH may mean slacking in hackernews, office will mean slacking at the water cooler. Do you really need multiple a day face to face conversations "how are WE doing this"? Maybe the workload actually requires intimate contact for efficiency/quality. Maybe you can chunk workload into 40 hour chunks, have workers independently arrive at solutions and just sync once in a while. On one hand yes, this is management lacking control. On the other hand this is about trust in workers and workload chunking.
bombolo 3y ago
People do nothing in the office as well.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
Nit: They're called "Autocratic" (specifically Authoritarian) or "Democratic" styles. [0] Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity. I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them. It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_style
- tpxl 3y ago
  > Replace the manager with a more effective one. Or the developers. I've seen highly productive devs despite the managements worst efforts and unproductive devs despite managements best efforts.
- dawnbreez 3y ago
  Unfortunately, that would get in the way of the office-work tradition of using middle management as a reward. If you expect people to actually be good at managing things, that means you can't give out management positions as a reward to anybody who plays the office game well.
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    This so much. We need to accept that management is a skill not a status, and pay managers according to their ability, education & experience same as we do for everyone else. A good manager is not ego-driven and is perfectly able to function when being paid less than the people they manage. And then we can just give people more money and keep them in the role they work best at instead of having to Peter Principle them up to their level of incompetence or lose them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
steveBK123 3y ago
> It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with I wouldn't be surprised if that's a LOT of Dell employees. I recently dealt with their service department and it was the worst warranty service I've had on any product. Reiterates my prior position of never buying Dell products again. Took two, multi-hour iMessage conversations including taking 5 videos of my product each time, to prove warranty was triggered. Was at the point of asking "should I take a video of putting your product in the garbage as well?" The craziest part was once that was done, they immediately shipped me a brand new replacement with overnight delivery. Product was already on the way before I realized they actually had granted me service. Eizo on the other hand was a 5 minute process, but then the monitor was gone for a month being serviced. Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. I've never had service denied or had to battle for hours. So the dumbest possible outcome - they are out a new replacement monitor, and I am unhappy enough to never be a customer again.
- bombolo 3y ago
  > Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. Not my experience at all.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Update - I regret to report my Dell warranty replacement monitor has died on its second day of use, lol.
    - throwwwaway69 3y ago
      You should do what everyone else does. Buy the same monitor on Amazon and return your broken one to Amazon. Mostly joking but I wouldn’t fault anyone they did bc Amazon is awful
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        It just astonishes me that in the year 2023 I got caught out on the old "well the specs look good" scam. I know Dell makes a lot of dreck, and have been thoroughly unimpressed with the kit that our office bought in bulk. On paper this should have been a great monitor - 27", 4K, USB-C data & power, nice height/tilt/rotation adjustable stand, multiple inputs, USB hub integrated, etc. Probably worst tech purchase of the decade for me.
dartharva 3y ago
This is correct, except that the two "management styles" presented are the two extremes of a spectrum. Apart from that, WFH does make management a lot more painful and tedious from a practical perspective. Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications, and their resolution is at the mercy of how long each person in the chain takes to receive each message, acknowledge it, follow up on feedback, make changes, clarify, finalize... Maybe instead of setting arbitrary broad-brush WFH policies, just divide every role within WHF-able and non-WFH-able baskets under each business head.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications Maybe that's a good thing? If the team can solve it informally why can't it be done over other mediums? Most of the time this happens because there's a lack of documentation or other issue. WFH is a symptom. Fix the real problems.
  - dartharva 3y ago
    Doesn't have to just apply to SD. In fact I think SD is probably the least affected. But Commercial, HR, Marketing - all face the problem of spiraling communication loops. Physical presence does make a difference in planning and implementation, believe it or not.
Draiken 3y ago
The "adversarial style" is just an excuse for bad managers/companies. If you can't tell that a worker is not producing because they are WFH then you are plain and simply incompetent. It's actually much easier to pretend to work in an office than it is at home in my experience. Another very common excuse to use this "style" (I don't agree it's a stylistic choice at all) is to cover up the real cause that employees are not productive. These can be a ton of reasons including: - hiring incompetent people - not paying your employees what they're worth (often the cause for the first one) - not letting them actually do their job (micromanagement, unnecessary bureaucracy, etc) - not giving them challenging work - inability to listen and change (employee's concerns are ignored) It's not a style choice at all.
sammywater 3y ago
[dead]
908B64B197 3y ago
> Maybe it's down to management style. It's down to the caliber of employees and managers that a company employs (that's the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about). In my experience, remote just doesn't work for cheaper (or "best cost" whatever the current term is). A lot of firms tried "cheaping out" on coders over the years, hiring employees from bootcamps and doing internal coaching. In my experience that breaks down completely when going remote because of the amount of hand-holding required. While they could drop-in and check-in on the coders almost once per hour in office, it's more like once per day when working from home. Firms that paid more and hired proper Software Engineers don't have the same experience at all, mostly because ICs now have several hours extra per week to concentrate and focus.
ac26 3y ago
You make an interesting point on managerial styles potentially biasing the decision making process for a WFH policy. It definitely is a situation where there are managers/directors/VPs who only know the adversarial style of management and imposes policies based on that perception. At the end of the day, it is a high level leader making these decisions and it is likely a high level leader with experience/conditioning within an industry PRIOR to the pandemic so I would guess that they are more conservative or "old-school" with their perspective on company/workplace policies.

by hooby 3y ago

kubb 3y ago

It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company. Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job. "Efficiency".

lozenge 3y ago
I feel this, as I get to make decisions on my own at home. In the office I need to discuss and explain all the options, only to have my manager make the same decision I would come to.
- globalise83 3y ago
  Decision-making processes shouldn't really be affected - if someone's manager has a psychological need to rubber-stamp their decisions, then that is just as necessary with them working from home as in the office, and failure to do so will ultimately lead to conflict and probably looking for a new job in the end.
grepfru_it 3y ago
i don't understand why it's not needed? >can't have f2f meetings all day i have zoom 1:1 meetings all day with managers. going remote doesn't obviate the need for team planning and management. bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this. if a behemoth like dell, amazon, etc can go fully remote and still be profitable, then what does that say for any smaller company? and then what does that do to all of the CRE holdings of said behemoths? tough situation and it may not resolve in our favor
- mft_ 3y ago
  > bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this I suspect that alongside the obvious reasons (inflexible management styles, micromanagement, etc.) always discussed, this is a major driver: ongoing spend on office buildings needs to be justified, and is probably very difficult to get out of - e.g. long-term building projects, or ownership of buildings which would be difficult (or a big loss) to resell, or long-term leases signed when obviously the offices would be needed for decades, or senior leaders feeling personally invested in particular building projects, etc.
  - jon-wood 3y ago
    I'm not sold on this one, although I see it pretty regularly. Its got the whiff of conspiracy theory to me in that it provides a simple answer to a complex question by having two faceless entities colluding with each other for unknown reasons. Dell has no incentive to support the real estate industry, and while I'm sure facilities departments are feeling pretty unsettled by the move to offices being unneeded I know of very few companies who don't consider facilities to be a liability they'd like to reduce the need for. About the only bit of this I buy to some extent is very senior managers who've been closely involved in building out new office space only to find it's empty.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - medvezhenok 3y ago
reaperman 3y ago
Often 100 hours per week, an hour each way.
xchip 3y ago
Thanks for this great explanation, I hope companies take your comment into consideration.
jksmith 3y ago
Cynical but true in my experience coaching multiple F250s. More competitive companies will move to a model based on managing the flow of value, while legacy companies will be stuck with a model based on managing people. The two models are very different, with the first one often eliminating whole layers of management through automation. Companies think they can save management jobs by going to a matrixed model and flattening the org, but that's just an accommodation to save managers most of the time. In Dell's case, I can only speculate, but they need to justify office space, and managers need to manage people, and most of leadership get promoted from middle management (or sales). Worthless levity injection attack: my client supplied Dell windows machine still hiccups on cold boots sometimes (this ticket has been open for decades), while all my personal linux machines just keep chugging away. Find a company that is automating away management layers and uses linux.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  > model based on managing the flow of value This is not something I've ever heard of. Some websearching produced this article. - is it describing the concept? https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/what-is-value-based-management https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
  - jksmith 3y ago
    Simpler and more executable than that, actually. 1) Basic premise of waste: People need to be told what to do, people wait to be told what to do. 2) Eliminate the waiting by standing up a value stream where everyone is part of the value stream team. Sections of the stream can be activated in a parallel fashion through autonomy of action. 3) Managers quit telling people what to do, and instead become value stream engineers - focusing on efficient flow of value like it's the company's inventory, from creation to delivery to the customer. 4) This move has different demands on remote work, but since it promotes autonomy of action, the more ham-fisted demands of legacy management are deprecated.
    - Kerrick 3y ago
bobsomers 3y ago
> It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company. I don't know about that. In my admittedly limited experience as an EM of 4 ICs, I'm drowning in work, mostly because they all do great work and are now double and sometimes triple booked on projects because we haven't been allowed to hire anyone. It's more than a full time job to keep a small team supported and I don't remotely feel like I'm obsolete because the company could chose to WFH. I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. This is great for me, because simply being a conduit of information between other people isn't the most efficient use of my time, so I don't really feel threatened by that. All of them have told me they've actually appreciated the hybrid schedule and the time in office for some of the week, and some of them told me that when I was a peer IC (before being their manager). Our work is definitely more experimental/R&D/unproven though. Frequent communication, collaboration, and brainstorming is critical for success. If you're doing the kind of work where you can sit down today and create a year's worth of feature tickets then maybe it skews in favor of the office being more of a distraction. > Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job. I don't get the impression anyone at the executive level of a BigCo is collecting feedback from low level managers about whether they should RTO or not. And even in the Bay Area, 2 hours a day of commuting is on the extreme end. Everyone on my team has a total of a 1 hour commute or less, and in my case that includes a day care drop off and pick up. Personally speaking, my commute wouldn't change even if we were 100% WFH because my home and the office are equidistant from day care. We do have a peer IC who has a long commute though and it's not great for him. I do wish there was more flexibility on a case-by-case basis to tweak the number of days he's in the office.
- dogleash 3y ago
  > I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. Most communication norms aren't tied to the physical location, it's just easier to communicate communication norms when conversations are visible to the people not involved. I was on two projects during covid WFH. The digital collaboration styles were night and day. One's mattermost team still has less than 50 messages total across all channels. The other team's mattermost was and remains a major collaboration point now that we're back on site. One team always had cameras on during calls, the other didn't. And wasn't just chat, just calls or just emails. The communication was different on every medium. There was a lot of the same people on both projects, too. We all adapted to different collaboration styles depending on the project. The only difference was that project management made a few gentile pushes to enable fluid communication at the beginning of one project, and the other team didin't. And I've noticed something similar with younger people. They're much more interactive in discord chat/calls than the slack/mattermost/zoom/chime equivalents. Not that this is necessarily unique to young people, just that older people tend not to lurk discord as much. What might be unique to that age group is they've been taught corporate tools mean bifurcated groups (e.g. teacher/pupil) where they're not equal participants.

thefz 3y ago

> Maybe it's down to management style. The success of WFH is the demonstration that if you treat adults as such, they are going to do their job anyway thus rendering an entire horde of middle managers completely useless.

komali2 3y ago
David graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" finally actualized in a way I thought people would be forced to acknowledge, but nope, the bullshit jobs were continued to be allowed to exist.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  If you think management jobs are "bullshit jobs", then I envy you: You must be working with remarkably well organised coworkers. My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    In my experience, managers are the ones pushing developers to skip tests, bug reports, etc. Most of them are content to simply pile on new functionality, without any concept of polish, refinement, or how allocating time for technical work can speed up the delivery of that functionality.
    - noisy_boy 3y ago
      Most of the time, this short-circuits: understanding importance of code quality/testing && willingness to allocate dedicated time to achieve code quality && having ability/position/power to withstand management's pressure on just deliveries In over twenty years of my career, the value was "true" only twice.

jorlow 3y ago

In your example I'd say it's more down to the team. If you have a solid team then you're set, but if you have low performers (which is sometimes the fault of the manager but certainly not always) then I imagine it could be more difficult to manage someone out remotely.

newaccount74 3y ago

I don't think it's just about management style. It's also about the preferences of the employees. Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work. But this only works if everyone goes to the office. My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.

noisy_boy 3y ago
> But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it. And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win? How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers. Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.
- yulaow 3y ago
  I personally only consider full remote position because even policies like "one day in the office every two weeks" would force me to live quite close to the city in which the office is and I absolutely want to avoid that if I can (and the market says I can) To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
- hellweaver666 3y ago

diob 3y ago

I'd argue that regardless of WFH versus office, managers can't force folks to work. It's just that in the office they can pretend that they're forcing them to work, even when X employee is simply sitting in a chair. It basically ends up just punishing the employees who do work, and the slackers still slack.

re-thc 3y ago
> managers can't force folks to work It's easier to abuse someone when in-person. I've seen managers shout and reprimand others in-person. Try doing it remote and they just mute you :)

friendzis 3y ago

I would not distinguish supportive/adversarial management styles as much as the workload chunking, responsibility for delivery and management of it. Suppose your team consists of individual independent contractors or for example the team members are all spread across multiple offices. Such an arrangement is effectively indistinguishable from WFH arrangement as you do not really have the aforementioned face to face contact anyway. Can management make it work? WFH may mean slacking in hackernews, office will mean slacking at the water cooler. Do you really need multiple a day face to face conversations "how are WE doing this"? Maybe the workload actually requires intimate contact for efficiency/quality. Maybe you can chunk workload into 40 hour chunks, have workers independently arrive at solutions and just sync once in a while. On one hand yes, this is management lacking control. On the other hand this is about trust in workers and workload chunking.

bombolo 3y ago

People do nothing in the office as well.

marcus_holmes 3y ago

Nit: They're called "Autocratic" (specifically Authoritarian) or "Democratic" styles. [0] Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity. I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them. It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_style

tpxl 3y ago
> Replace the manager with a more effective one. Or the developers. I've seen highly productive devs despite the managements worst efforts and unproductive devs despite managements best efforts.
dawnbreez 3y ago
Unfortunately, that would get in the way of the office-work tradition of using middle management as a reward. If you expect people to actually be good at managing things, that means you can't give out management positions as a reward to anybody who plays the office game well.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  This so much. We need to accept that management is a skill not a status, and pay managers according to their ability, education & experience same as we do for everyone else. A good manager is not ego-driven and is perfectly able to function when being paid less than the people they manage. And then we can just give people more money and keep them in the role they work best at instead of having to Peter Principle them up to their level of incompetence or lose them.

deleted 3y ago

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steveBK123 3y ago

> It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with I wouldn't be surprised if that's a LOT of Dell employees. I recently dealt with their service department and it was the worst warranty service I've had on any product. Reiterates my prior position of never buying Dell products again. Took two, multi-hour iMessage conversations including taking 5 videos of my product each time, to prove warranty was triggered. Was at the point of asking "should I take a video of putting your product in the garbage as well?" The craziest part was once that was done, they immediately shipped me a brand new replacement with overnight delivery. Product was already on the way before I realized they actually had granted me service. Eizo on the other hand was a 5 minute process, but then the monitor was gone for a month being serviced. Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. I've never had service denied or had to battle for hours. So the dumbest possible outcome - they are out a new replacement monitor, and I am unhappy enough to never be a customer again.

bombolo 3y ago
> Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. Not my experience at all.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Update - I regret to report my Dell warranty replacement monitor has died on its second day of use, lol.
  - throwwwaway69 3y ago
    You should do what everyone else does. Buy the same monitor on Amazon and return your broken one to Amazon. Mostly joking but I wouldn’t fault anyone they did bc Amazon is awful
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      It just astonishes me that in the year 2023 I got caught out on the old "well the specs look good" scam. I know Dell makes a lot of dreck, and have been thoroughly unimpressed with the kit that our office bought in bulk. On paper this should have been a great monitor - 27", 4K, USB-C data & power, nice height/tilt/rotation adjustable stand, multiple inputs, USB hub integrated, etc. Probably worst tech purchase of the decade for me.

dartharva 3y ago

This is correct, except that the two "management styles" presented are the two extremes of a spectrum. Apart from that, WFH does make management a lot more painful and tedious from a practical perspective. Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications, and their resolution is at the mercy of how long each person in the chain takes to receive each message, acknowledge it, follow up on feedback, make changes, clarify, finalize... Maybe instead of setting arbitrary broad-brush WFH policies, just divide every role within WHF-able and non-WFH-able baskets under each business head.

re-thc 3y ago
> Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications Maybe that's a good thing? If the team can solve it informally why can't it be done over other mediums? Most of the time this happens because there's a lack of documentation or other issue. WFH is a symptom. Fix the real problems.
- dartharva 3y ago
  Doesn't have to just apply to SD. In fact I think SD is probably the least affected. But Commercial, HR, Marketing - all face the problem of spiraling communication loops. Physical presence does make a difference in planning and implementation, believe it or not.

Draiken 3y ago

The "adversarial style" is just an excuse for bad managers/companies. If you can't tell that a worker is not producing because they are WFH then you are plain and simply incompetent. It's actually much easier to pretend to work in an office than it is at home in my experience. Another very common excuse to use this "style" (I don't agree it's a stylistic choice at all) is to cover up the real cause that employees are not productive. These can be a ton of reasons including: - hiring incompetent people - not paying your employees what they're worth (often the cause for the first one) - not letting them actually do their job (micromanagement, unnecessary bureaucracy, etc) - not giving them challenging work - inability to listen and change (employee's concerns are ignored) It's not a style choice at all.

sammywater 3y ago

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908B64B197 3y ago

> Maybe it's down to management style. It's down to the caliber of employees and managers that a company employs (that's the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about). In my experience, remote just doesn't work for cheaper (or "best cost" whatever the current term is). A lot of firms tried "cheaping out" on coders over the years, hiring employees from bootcamps and doing internal coaching. In my experience that breaks down completely when going remote because of the amount of hand-holding required. While they could drop-in and check-in on the coders almost once per hour in office, it's more like once per day when working from home. Firms that paid more and hired proper Software Engineers don't have the same experience at all, mostly because ICs now have several hours extra per week to concentrate and focus.

ac26 3y ago

You make an interesting point on managerial styles potentially biasing the decision making process for a WFH policy. It definitely is a situation where there are managers/directors/VPs who only know the adversarial style of management and imposes policies based on that perception. At the end of the day, it is a high level leader making these decisions and it is likely a high level leader with experience/conditioning within an industry PRIOR to the pandemic so I would guess that they are more conservative or "old-school" with their perspective on company/workplace policies.