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> I think we all have friends who work multiple roles or do nothing remotely. I have a hard time believing this take. I work at a fully remote company. Our cal
by oooyay 3y ago
> I think we all have friends who work multiple roles or do nothing remotely.
I have a hard time believing this take. I work at a fully remote company. Our calendars are public so everyone can see what everyone elses meeting schedule is. We have GitHub so you can certainly see the activity of others. We have CI systems so you can see deploys kick off. We have OKRs so you can see business objectives being met.
It would have to be a pretty extraordinary set of circumstances, maybe outright reckless laziness that would also provide cover for people in the office who do nothing, in order to cover for someone doing absolutely nothing. I think the idea that there are remote workers sitting around soaking up beaucoup bucks while doing nothing is a projection of incredible levels of insecurity.
In my own experience, companies that do RTO mandates fall into one of two categories:
- They have outstanding investments in real estate that act as collateral for other debts that they do not know how to cover yet.
- They have extreme dysfunction in their middle management arm, to the extent that peoples productivity is almost entirely based on presence rather than the merit of metrics.
- dilyevsky 3y ago> maybe outright reckless laziness that would also provide cover for people in the office who do nothing, in order to cover for someone doing absolutely nothing. Yep, we all know that would never happen. Not in tech. Never!
- oooyay 3y agoMy point was that the condition of not knowing how to grade performance will not change when you bring people back into an office. It will just reinforce the belief that butt-in-seat is productivity for the companies that already believe that.
- dilyevsky 3y agoLets just be real - it's way easier to coast on full remote and for management to hide that or maintain plausible deniability that they didn't know it was going on.
- bsdpufferfish 3y ago> They have outstanding investments in real estate This argument has never made sense to me. Businesses don't want offices and most lease them for the long-term. It's a cost of doing business they begrudgingly pay for so employees have a space for equipment, away from family, etc.
- oooyay 3y agoAside from the fact that everyone wants to be away from their family is fundamentally flawed, here's some articles specifically talking about the relationship between tech companies and real estate: https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-rto-hybrid-work-rea https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/atlassian-rto-hybrid-work-rea... https://fortune.com/2023/11/12/return-to-office-hybrid-work- https://fortune.com/2023/11/12/return-to-office-hybrid-work-... > The survey also found that 80% of companies have already downsized their office since the pandemic, and 82% are worried about being able to keep their current one, whether that’s due to a recession or an underutilization of space.
- bsdpufferfish 3y ago> everyone wants to be away from their family is fundamentally flawed, I didn't say that. Whether we want to be with our family or not, the business believes it's a distraction. How does downsizing contradict anything I said? The logic that they want to force people to the office to justify the payment doesn't make sense. Employees are the cost they they are trying to optimize by having the office in the first place.