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I don't expect this view to do well here, but my theory on WFH is it's very effective for focus time, so for the first year, people could effectively work throu

I don't expect this view to do well here, but my theory on WFH is it's very effective for focus time, so for the first year, people could effectively work through solo work backlogs. Where WFH falls short is building alignment on larger initiatives, and that's what we're seeing. There's a popular thing you read here from ICs (I'm also an IC) about being more productive at home, but what they never bring up (and probably don't know) is if they're working on the right things.

nostrademons 3y ago
That's my impression as well, as an IC that transitioned to management soon after the pandemic. If you're already aligned on what you're doing, WFH is a good way to get there faster. But getting that alignment has become very difficult in the WFH world. You don't have high-bandwidth communication to lay out complex trade-offs between different people, and you lose a lot of trust that makes it possible to compromise, disagree, and commit.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  You’re probably also bad at being a manager, given that you just started in odd circumstances and, if your company is like any software company I’ve ever heard of, you likely weren’t trained into your new role. Not a personal sleight against you, just there are many features of the system around you that should at least cast doubt on your interpretation. This is in general a good argument against WFH but one that managers are (for obvious reasons) reluctant to make: they’re just shitty managers and WFH makes it extra hard to get by with shitty management.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    It's entirely possible - I usually feel like I'm routinely failing at management. My organization seems to disagree though, as they continue to give me the highest possible performance ratings, pay me absurd amounts of money, my team's gotten public commendations on its work from 7 levels up the management chain, the anonymous 360 surveys from reports/peers/etc. say that I'm better than 90% of other managers, etc. That alone may tell you something about the incentive structures in large corporations (and the economy at large). I usually like to think of it as winning at a fucked up system. But then, that might be pretty illustrative of the title and article here.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Nice! It is totally possible you really are a great manager, but that description also comports with my feeling that this industry is just absolutely riddled with terrible managers. In any case, it’s good to be relatively good, so I’m really happy for your success so far! It’s not an easy job at all.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      If there are 7 levels above you in the management chain, take any feedback with a huge grain of salt because companies like that don’t operate much on merit.
      - nostrademons 3y ago
        That's another lesson from my first couple years of management, but then what does "merit" even mean? Within the context of my organization I'm doing fine. By market norms? Pretty sure I make more than a "good" manager at a small or medium-size company. By the happiness of those around me? I think my employer is generally a pretty miserable place to work, but my team seems generally happier than many of the other peer teams within the company, so within my sphere of control I seem to be doing okay there too. Besides, I care about the happiness of my family more than my company, and doing well at the arbitrary-and-kinda-pointless metrics set for me lets us afford a house in a nice area, a good education for the kids in a healthy social environment, and hopefully soon more time with them.
BadCookie 3y ago
Maybe you are correct. But ICs do not decide what to work on, the PMs and other leadership do. So why can’t ICs continue working from home while the “deciders” go back to the office?
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Maybe entry-level ICs and ICs in bad orgs, but good PMs know that the ICs building the product will have some amount of insight into its usage and pain points.
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    That's what scheduled meetings and Slack is for. I have scheduled meetings with the PM to discuss business requirements for upcoming features once every couple of weeks on average, and sometimes she pings me to ask questions outside of it or have an impromptu Slack call with screen sharing. It's not worth me driving an hour and a half to the office (and her flying from many states away) just so we can discuss these things in person. And the product is coming along very well. We just had a successful demo that impressed a lot of people and secured another year of funding. And this is the third major product I've worked on entirely remote, all have done very well. That's not including the video games I developed along with artists that I never met in person that also did well back in the day, where we only communicated with text via AOL Instant Messenger and sending files to each other via email.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    You literally can't be an effective IC without deeply learning the domain. Leadership and managers that don't take advantage of this and instead "listen to their gut" are gambling.
- fooster 3y ago
  If you work for a shitty organization sure. In a well functioning org, that isn't the case. Leadership/PM should help set direction, but not specifics.
- nostrademons 3y ago
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
As someone who's been fully remote for going on 5 years and is responsible for managing my own fully remote team at this point: It is a challenge, for sure, but I think it's incredibly defeatist to call it a failure. Your team not knowing your larger initiatives and how they contribute to them is an organizational failure, not a work from home failure, and is also fully able to happen in an office too. We have biweekly meetings where we arrange our goals and strategies, and share what we've been working on. We call each other constantly when we're struggling with a problem, and I have 1 on 1 meetings with everyone at a frequency of their choosing to talk out potential problems, bitch about engineering challenges, or just shoot the shit for a little bit. This is possible to be done and the fact that it's kind of vaguely easier to do it in an office, IMO, is a shitty trade-off to offer for all the costs, both financial and personal, of RTO.
fipar 3y ago
I think that’s probably true for companies that were forced into WFH due to the pandemic, but I’ve been working remotely for more than 14 years now and companies that are already doing it don’t have problems building alignment on larger initiatives. Worst case, there’s an in person meeting every year or so, but otherwise, if they company is already used to planning in a distributed way, it can execute larger initiatives without problems.
abbadadda 3y ago
Does Scrum help with this WFH predicament?
- jordinl 3y ago
  Don't know if you're joking or not. But scrum does not help with anything
Negitivefrags 3y ago
In many companies people are working on the wrong thing most of the time. It's so endemic that many people don't even see it. When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason. If this was already the case at your company before the WFH, then yes, WFH didn't change anything, or even maybe let your emloyees work on the wrong thing even faster. The other thing people don't appreciate is that it's significantly harder to find good managers than good individual contributers. I believe that management is about 300% more efficient in an in-person environment. As in, I can effectively make sure that 3x the number of people are working on the correct things in an in-office environment. I find it nearly impossible to find people with the ability to do this correctly right now, let alone somehow needing to find 3x this number. Even if people worked at half speed at the office (which I don't really believe), that is still worthwhile.
- johndhi 3y ago
  This is the first writing I've seen in a while that posits something specific that works better in office than remote. It doesn't match my experience though. The person I hired during WFH consistently works on the right things and has great judgment, while the other team members who predate it are either neutral or struggling in the same way they did before the pandemic. Why do you believe seeing a person live makes it easier for you to instruct them on what is worth spending time on? What's your evidence?
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    WFH separates good and bad performers but management is too lazy to take the signal.
    - johndhi 3y ago
      I'm a manager. What should I be doing to help elevate my under performing team member? (There is of course a lot of nuance in my specific situation but would love to hear general thoughts on what makes a manager good.)
tomohawk 3y ago
It seems like you're describing a common situation where orgs that didn't function well before WFH, continued not to work well. The sign was that suddenly people were able to be productive on certain things when WFH. The org was out of balance before WFH, and is now out of balance after. That's an org thing, not a WFH thing. Our experience with software development team was WFH actually helped with the larger picture. It allowed people to be more strategic and intentional about decisions, instead of trying to do that in the daily tilt-a-whirl that is the office.
MrDresden 3y ago
As a technical platform lead the flexibility is great when needed. But chat is no replacement for face to face discussion with the team. I don't think I would ever want to do a full WFH/remote arrangement, rather one that allows for flexibility without judgement and mistrust.
kyle_grove 3y ago
I think your and nostrademon's comments are both insightful. What I would add as someone who has been managing collaborative science teams embedded in large companies remotely, pre- and post-pandemic, is that some forms of alignment translate to the remote setting, but other forms of alignment are more challenged. I think the boundary is probably: if the teams were aligned pre-remote, you can sustain the alignment, even with new collaborative initiatives, but gaining new alignment with new teams is way more challenging. Which is fine when what you are doing is Business as Usual, but falls apart when there are crises or disruptions that require net new collaborative relationships.
sologoub 3y ago
Most large enough orgs have teams distributed between offices. I routinely work with people in New York, multiple locations (far enough to not be able to walk over for a meeting) in SF Bay Area and Seattle. When everyone is in their assigned office location we are still on video conference. SF office is close to an hour away from Mountain View for example. The alignment is just fine and things get done. Whether a given person is in the specific room or not makes little difference, but whether the rooms are truly engaged does. I’ve been in plenty of in person meetings where laptops open and attention goes elsewhere.
dahart 3y ago
I found WFH terrible for onboarding new hires. They don’t have the work network and miss out on conversations, both work and water-cooler social stuff. It’s taking much longer to get them up to speed and as productive as their co-workers than it did when we were all in the office. And yeah completely agree on working on the right things. Programmers (me included) pine for “focus time”, but we need a lot of talking to know if we’re overengineering or underengineering. I’ve watched a lot of people get their way with too much focus time and implement the wrong things, wasting weeks or months at a time.
- johndhi 3y ago
  My strategy in WFH onboarding is a ton of 1:1 meetings
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    Agreed I’ve also started combining this with pairing exercises with trusted team members, and a fairly small, easy project for them to apply the information they are learning.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I generally agree with you on that, but my partner started a new job (as a technical lead for an engineering team) about 6 months ago, and her onboarding was actually pretty good -- not perfect, there were some snags, but the overall experience was positive. Was it as good as in-person onboarding? Maybe not as good as if she were in-person at this same company, but IMO it was still better than the in-person onboarding I've seen at other companies. She started getting solidly productive after two months or so, which I think is comparable to most in-person jobs, especially when you're not joining in a more junior position. But social connections with the members of her team were definitely slower to form, and I think there are still (after 6 months) some holes there. But... that's kinda ok? A company might be upset at any negative effects that might have, but I personally think it's a completely acceptable (fantastic, even) trade off for the ability to eliminate a commute, work in comfort, and have a more flexible schedule. Obviously not all companies are going to do remote onboarding well. Just as many companies don't do a great job of in-person onboarding either. But that doesn't mean throw up your hands, give up, and make people go back to the office. It means... do better. I do think remote onboarding is especially hard for people starting their first job in the industry. But I'm not convinced these problems don't have solutions. Maybe not perfect solutions, but good-enough solutions.
kelnos 3y ago
I've never really had an issue with that last point when working remotely. Ultimately there isn't that much difference between 8 people sitting in a conference room together and 8 people on a video call. Sure, communication isn't as fluid, and you lose some context cues, but we're not talking about things that need intense physical interaction. I did enjoy going into the office from time to time for group meetings (I lived close enough to the office for that to be easy to do), but never felt like the meeting was significantly more productive in-person.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I also find that communication/sync overhead is less efficient in remote teams (I have been working in globally distributed teams, since the early 1990s). It's been my experience, that everyone (from the lowliest IC to the CEO) fails to understand the cost of team synchronization. That's a [set of] topic[s] that would fill an entire bookshelf, and anyone that gets it right, could live in opulence. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be planned for, by managers and architects. Architects need to design systems that allow ICs to have more personal agency, while encouraging synchronization (an approach that I use, is blackbox implementations, and whitebox APIs). The more an IC can work on their own, the better, but we still need that transparency. Managers need to know when it's OK to send work to remote agents, and when work is required in-office. They need to know their teams well enough to be able to choose wisely. Human nature is a big deal. Until the entire workforce is AI, you'll always have those pesky humans in the mix, with their annoying emotions and personal lives. Also, and this is almost never talked about, is that different people work differently. Some folks are almost superhuman, when left alone, while others just screw the pooch. They may both be incredible employees, but they need to be handled differently. Unfortunately, modern HR practice, is to treat every employee exactly the same as every other one (and there are actually valid reasons for this). TL;DR, it's not simple, there's no "one policy to rule them all," and good managers are hard to find.
Mikushi 3y ago
> Where WFH falls short is building alignment on larger initiatives, and that's what we're seeing. Where are we seeing this? I'm a manager at a mostly WFH company and we don't fall short on this. Big thing is this was never an office based company, WFH is in the DNA from the co-founders and while we regroup occasionally, remoteness has not affected our ability to grow and build meaningful things. One could argue that we might do better if we were an office based company but as far as I know there's no data out there showing that this would be the case.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  I saw exactly this for companies that made the transition in 2020. At the native WFH companies I’ve worked at it wasn’t a problem IMO companies should embrace what they truly are and not force it.
lumost 3y ago
Meh, my experience returning in person is that we’ve returned to a culture where the inputs of decision makers are bound by conference room size. The winning decision has returned to the one of the loudest voice, or most conventionally attractive. Meeting from time to time is great, but the RTO push has been problematic across multiple dimensions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
happytoexplain 3y ago
>I don't expect this view to do well here No need for this antagonism, regardless of whether it's true. Anyway, yes, I think your theory is based on something true on average about RTO vs WFH. However, improving collaboration under WFH is simply an easier problem than improving focus/efficiency/work-life-balance/happiness/etc under RTO, for most people.

nostrademons 3y ago

That's my impression as well, as an IC that transitioned to management soon after the pandemic. If you're already aligned on what you're doing, WFH is a good way to get there faster. But getting that alignment has become very difficult in the WFH world. You don't have high-bandwidth communication to lay out complex trade-offs between different people, and you lose a lot of trust that makes it possible to compromise, disagree, and commit.

ethanbond 3y ago
You’re probably also bad at being a manager, given that you just started in odd circumstances and, if your company is like any software company I’ve ever heard of, you likely weren’t trained into your new role. Not a personal sleight against you, just there are many features of the system around you that should at least cast doubt on your interpretation. This is in general a good argument against WFH but one that managers are (for obvious reasons) reluctant to make: they’re just shitty managers and WFH makes it extra hard to get by with shitty management.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  It's entirely possible - I usually feel like I'm routinely failing at management. My organization seems to disagree though, as they continue to give me the highest possible performance ratings, pay me absurd amounts of money, my team's gotten public commendations on its work from 7 levels up the management chain, the anonymous 360 surveys from reports/peers/etc. say that I'm better than 90% of other managers, etc. That alone may tell you something about the incentive structures in large corporations (and the economy at large). I usually like to think of it as winning at a fucked up system. But then, that might be pretty illustrative of the title and article here.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Nice! It is totally possible you really are a great manager, but that description also comports with my feeling that this industry is just absolutely riddled with terrible managers. In any case, it’s good to be relatively good, so I’m really happy for your success so far! It’s not an easy job at all.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    If there are 7 levels above you in the management chain, take any feedback with a huge grain of salt because companies like that don’t operate much on merit.
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      That's another lesson from my first couple years of management, but then what does "merit" even mean? Within the context of my organization I'm doing fine. By market norms? Pretty sure I make more than a "good" manager at a small or medium-size company. By the happiness of those around me? I think my employer is generally a pretty miserable place to work, but my team seems generally happier than many of the other peer teams within the company, so within my sphere of control I seem to be doing okay there too. Besides, I care about the happiness of my family more than my company, and doing well at the arbitrary-and-kinda-pointless metrics set for me lets us afford a house in a nice area, a good education for the kids in a healthy social environment, and hopefully soon more time with them.

BadCookie 3y ago

Maybe you are correct. But ICs do not decide what to work on, the PMs and other leadership do. So why can’t ICs continue working from home while the “deciders” go back to the office?

dehrmann 3y ago
Maybe entry-level ICs and ICs in bad orgs, but good PMs know that the ICs building the product will have some amount of insight into its usage and pain points.
- cableshaft 3y ago
  That's what scheduled meetings and Slack is for. I have scheduled meetings with the PM to discuss business requirements for upcoming features once every couple of weeks on average, and sometimes she pings me to ask questions outside of it or have an impromptu Slack call with screen sharing. It's not worth me driving an hour and a half to the office (and her flying from many states away) just so we can discuss these things in person. And the product is coming along very well. We just had a successful demo that impressed a lot of people and secured another year of funding. And this is the third major product I've worked on entirely remote, all have done very well. That's not including the video games I developed along with artists that I never met in person that also did well back in the day, where we only communicated with text via AOL Instant Messenger and sending files to each other via email.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  You literally can't be an effective IC without deeply learning the domain. Leadership and managers that don't take advantage of this and instead "listen to their gut" are gambling.
fooster 3y ago
If you work for a shitty organization sure. In a well functioning org, that isn't the case. Leadership/PM should help set direction, but not specifics.
nostrademons 3y ago

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

As someone who's been fully remote for going on 5 years and is responsible for managing my own fully remote team at this point: It is a challenge, for sure, but I think it's incredibly defeatist to call it a failure. Your team not knowing your larger initiatives and how they contribute to them is an organizational failure, not a work from home failure, and is also fully able to happen in an office too. We have biweekly meetings where we arrange our goals and strategies, and share what we've been working on. We call each other constantly when we're struggling with a problem, and I have 1 on 1 meetings with everyone at a frequency of their choosing to talk out potential problems, bitch about engineering challenges, or just shoot the shit for a little bit. This is possible to be done and the fact that it's kind of vaguely easier to do it in an office, IMO, is a shitty trade-off to offer for all the costs, both financial and personal, of RTO.

fipar 3y ago

I think that’s probably true for companies that were forced into WFH due to the pandemic, but I’ve been working remotely for more than 14 years now and companies that are already doing it don’t have problems building alignment on larger initiatives. Worst case, there’s an in person meeting every year or so, but otherwise, if they company is already used to planning in a distributed way, it can execute larger initiatives without problems.

abbadadda 3y ago

Does Scrum help with this WFH predicament?

jordinl 3y ago
Don't know if you're joking or not. But scrum does not help with anything

Negitivefrags 3y ago

In many companies people are working on the wrong thing most of the time. It's so endemic that many people don't even see it. When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason. If this was already the case at your company before the WFH, then yes, WFH didn't change anything, or even maybe let your emloyees work on the wrong thing even faster. The other thing people don't appreciate is that it's significantly harder to find good managers than good individual contributers. I believe that management is about 300% more efficient in an in-person environment. As in, I can effectively make sure that 3x the number of people are working on the correct things in an in-office environment. I find it nearly impossible to find people with the ability to do this correctly right now, let alone somehow needing to find 3x this number. Even if people worked at half speed at the office (which I don't really believe), that is still worthwhile.

johndhi 3y ago
This is the first writing I've seen in a while that posits something specific that works better in office than remote. It doesn't match my experience though. The person I hired during WFH consistently works on the right things and has great judgment, while the other team members who predate it are either neutral or struggling in the same way they did before the pandemic. Why do you believe seeing a person live makes it easier for you to instruct them on what is worth spending time on? What's your evidence?
- steveBK123 3y ago
  WFH separates good and bad performers but management is too lazy to take the signal.
  - johndhi 3y ago
    I'm a manager. What should I be doing to help elevate my under performing team member? (There is of course a lot of nuance in my specific situation but would love to hear general thoughts on what makes a manager good.)

tomohawk 3y ago

It seems like you're describing a common situation where orgs that didn't function well before WFH, continued not to work well. The sign was that suddenly people were able to be productive on certain things when WFH. The org was out of balance before WFH, and is now out of balance after. That's an org thing, not a WFH thing. Our experience with software development team was WFH actually helped with the larger picture. It allowed people to be more strategic and intentional about decisions, instead of trying to do that in the daily tilt-a-whirl that is the office.

MrDresden 3y ago

As a technical platform lead the flexibility is great when needed. But chat is no replacement for face to face discussion with the team. I don't think I would ever want to do a full WFH/remote arrangement, rather one that allows for flexibility without judgement and mistrust.

kyle_grove 3y ago

I think your and nostrademon's comments are both insightful. What I would add as someone who has been managing collaborative science teams embedded in large companies remotely, pre- and post-pandemic, is that some forms of alignment translate to the remote setting, but other forms of alignment are more challenged. I think the boundary is probably: if the teams were aligned pre-remote, you can sustain the alignment, even with new collaborative initiatives, but gaining new alignment with new teams is way more challenging. Which is fine when what you are doing is Business as Usual, but falls apart when there are crises or disruptions that require net new collaborative relationships.

sologoub 3y ago

Most large enough orgs have teams distributed between offices. I routinely work with people in New York, multiple locations (far enough to not be able to walk over for a meeting) in SF Bay Area and Seattle. When everyone is in their assigned office location we are still on video conference. SF office is close to an hour away from Mountain View for example. The alignment is just fine and things get done. Whether a given person is in the specific room or not makes little difference, but whether the rooms are truly engaged does. I’ve been in plenty of in person meetings where laptops open and attention goes elsewhere.

dahart 3y ago

I found WFH terrible for onboarding new hires. They don’t have the work network and miss out on conversations, both work and water-cooler social stuff. It’s taking much longer to get them up to speed and as productive as their co-workers than it did when we were all in the office. And yeah completely agree on working on the right things. Programmers (me included) pine for “focus time”, but we need a lot of talking to know if we’re overengineering or underengineering. I’ve watched a lot of people get their way with too much focus time and implement the wrong things, wasting weeks or months at a time.

johndhi 3y ago
My strategy in WFH onboarding is a ton of 1:1 meetings
- TheCleric 3y ago
  Agreed I’ve also started combining this with pairing exercises with trusted team members, and a fairly small, easy project for them to apply the information they are learning.
kelnos 3y ago
I generally agree with you on that, but my partner started a new job (as a technical lead for an engineering team) about 6 months ago, and her onboarding was actually pretty good -- not perfect, there were some snags, but the overall experience was positive. Was it as good as in-person onboarding? Maybe not as good as if she were in-person at this same company, but IMO it was still better than the in-person onboarding I've seen at other companies. She started getting solidly productive after two months or so, which I think is comparable to most in-person jobs, especially when you're not joining in a more junior position. But social connections with the members of her team were definitely slower to form, and I think there are still (after 6 months) some holes there. But... that's kinda ok? A company might be upset at any negative effects that might have, but I personally think it's a completely acceptable (fantastic, even) trade off for the ability to eliminate a commute, work in comfort, and have a more flexible schedule. Obviously not all companies are going to do remote onboarding well. Just as many companies don't do a great job of in-person onboarding either. But that doesn't mean throw up your hands, give up, and make people go back to the office. It means... do better. I do think remote onboarding is especially hard for people starting their first job in the industry. But I'm not convinced these problems don't have solutions. Maybe not perfect solutions, but good-enough solutions.

kelnos 3y ago

I've never really had an issue with that last point when working remotely. Ultimately there isn't that much difference between 8 people sitting in a conference room together and 8 people on a video call. Sure, communication isn't as fluid, and you lose some context cues, but we're not talking about things that need intense physical interaction. I did enjoy going into the office from time to time for group meetings (I lived close enough to the office for that to be easy to do), but never felt like the meeting was significantly more productive in-person.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I also find that communication/sync overhead is less efficient in remote teams (I have been working in globally distributed teams, since the early 1990s). It's been my experience, that everyone (from the lowliest IC to the CEO) fails to understand the cost of team synchronization. That's a [set of] topic[s] that would fill an entire bookshelf, and anyone that gets it right, could live in opulence. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be planned for, by managers and architects. Architects need to design systems that allow ICs to have more personal agency, while encouraging synchronization (an approach that I use, is blackbox implementations, and whitebox APIs). The more an IC can work on their own, the better, but we still need that transparency. Managers need to know when it's OK to send work to remote agents, and when work is required in-office. They need to know their teams well enough to be able to choose wisely. Human nature is a big deal. Until the entire workforce is AI, you'll always have those pesky humans in the mix, with their annoying emotions and personal lives. Also, and this is almost never talked about, is that different people work differently. Some folks are almost superhuman, when left alone, while others just screw the pooch. They may both be incredible employees, but they need to be handled differently. Unfortunately, modern HR practice, is to treat every employee exactly the same as every other one (and there are actually valid reasons for this). TL;DR, it's not simple, there's no "one policy to rule them all," and good managers are hard to find.

Mikushi 3y ago

> Where WFH falls short is building alignment on larger initiatives, and that's what we're seeing. Where are we seeing this? I'm a manager at a mostly WFH company and we don't fall short on this. Big thing is this was never an office based company, WFH is in the DNA from the co-founders and while we regroup occasionally, remoteness has not affected our ability to grow and build meaningful things. One could argue that we might do better if we were an office based company but as far as I know there's no data out there showing that this would be the case.

flappyeagle 3y ago
I saw exactly this for companies that made the transition in 2020. At the native WFH companies I’ve worked at it wasn’t a problem IMO companies should embrace what they truly are and not force it.

lumost 3y ago

Meh, my experience returning in person is that we’ve returned to a culture where the inputs of decision makers are bound by conference room size. The winning decision has returned to the one of the loudest voice, or most conventionally attractive. Meeting from time to time is great, but the RTO push has been problematic across multiple dimensions.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

happytoexplain 3y ago

>I don't expect this view to do well here No need for this antagonism, regardless of whether it's true. Anyway, yes, I think your theory is based on something true on average about RTO vs WFH. However, improving collaboration under WFH is simply an easier problem than improving focus/efficiency/work-life-balance/happiness/etc under RTO, for most people.