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does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quanti
by 2c2c2c 3y ago
does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories
the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
- cdchn 3y agoI know plenty of people who go into offices and blatantly don't work.
- baq 3y agoI guess the point is to not work only one job at a time
- Spivak 3y agoYeah being in office doesn't make it any less difficult to scroll through Reddit.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoYes it does. Working in the office necessarily forces you to structure your work in time and space.
- Spivak 3y agoYou do know you're just parroting RTO thought leadership propaganda, right? The phrasing of structuring your work "in time and space" is rather unique and comes most recently from business thinkfluencers trying sell RTO as "new paradigm at the workplace." The real point underpinning the CEO ball fondling is strategies for creating structure for people that need it originally assembled for students working async and remote. Moving between spaces can create structure, putting on a "uniform" creates structure, having blocks of time planned out ahead creates structure, having small incremental goals creates structure, having blocks of work with regular check-ins (cards/standup) creates structure. Like it's just your standard ADHD time/focus management but pretending that these two specific things are best for everyone.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoSorry, I've never read a "business thinkfluencer" in my life. Wouldn't even know where to find one. The undeniable fact is that people want "work from home" because they have serious issues following schedules and making plans. (Of course working from home only sweeps the problem under the carpet and creates bigger problems down the road.) Yes, these cats need to be herded. They can't self-organize. Also, the methods of herding cats are well-known since time immemorial, just ask any kindergarten teacher. P.S. You, of course, are a Cool Cat and different from all the other cats. Don't need to reply.
- cdchn 3y ago>The undeniable fact is that people want "work from home" because they have serious issues following schedules and making plans. Of course it has nothing to do with avoiding potentially multi-hour long commutes.
- bitcharmer 3y agoCongratulations, this is the most confidently incorrect set of statements I've read on the internet this week. I pity people who'd have to work under you. Sheesh.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoThis person has recently said that "solar panels are an ecological disaster", that "breathing is detrimental to health" because "oxygen is toxic and literal poison" and that "world war 3 started in 2010" so this is actually pretty tame in relative terms.
- Kiro 3y agoIt definitely does. The only thing that can prevent me from slacking off is knowing my screen is visible to other people.
- radiator 3y agoIn your office, don't you have any desks where your back is covered?
- thepasswordis 3y agoIn fact, they spent a lot of their time on ~~slash dot~~ ~~Reddit~~ hacker news!
- sdwr 3y ago:o those lazy slackers
- cajuncosier 3y agoYeah... CEOs. Most of them don't work.
- fellowniusmonk 3y agoC-Suite is a cost center. Only a small portion of established companies (not startups) have executives that make a clear revenue difference. First thing AI should replace is most of the C-Suite.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoThis is unhelpful and low-effort and not in alignment with out guidelines. There's almost never a reason to submit a one line snark comment.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoIt's obviously an issue of ratio and degree. You're just saying anything that comes to mind to support your position instead of recognizing any nuance.
- jimbob45 3y agothe alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut The SWE industry almost universally practices Scrum which is already pretty great for metricizing and tracking work.
- obscene 3y agoDo you have stats on scrum prevalence, or just anecdotal?
- cratermoon 3y agoIt's also pretty easy for management to turn into a useless exercise of checking boxes and moving cards around. That is to say, it doesn't track actual work done in a useful way.
- smoothjazz 3y agoMy experience has been that people who work from home are a lot more productive than people who "work" in an office.
- consp 3y ago> it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable. So management can go to the office and pretend to work, leave the engineers with very much quantifiable metrics alone.
- cebert 3y ago> does anyone really find RTO surprising? I do. I haven’t seen any clear evidence that RTO results in higher productivity or profitability for firms. Forcing knowledge workers to be in an office X days per week without given them flexibility and discretion indicates poor management culture and lack of trust to me.
- LiquidSky 3y agoExcept every study done since the pandemic has shown no effect on productivity from remote work, yet somehow every thread on this is filled with totally real stories about someone they know who doesn't work.
- MattGaiser 3y agoThey are real. What they are missing is that said person wasn't working much before. They only noticed their lack of output when working remotely, as busyness was no longer visible.
- LiquidSky 3y agoExcept no one can actually measure or confirm these apparent hordes of lazy slackers that are totally out there. Just legions of secret non-working people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ahtihn 3y agoHow do you know that no one can measure ? Maybe all the big companies have measured and all concluded that on average WFH is less productive. Individual productivity of office workers is nearly impossible to properly measure but aggregate productivity is easier though certainly far from perfect.
- MattGaiser 3y ago> Maybe all the big companies have measured and all concluded that on average WFH is less productive. They say they don't have it, but tell people to do it anyway. https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-office-return/ https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
- LiquidSky 3y ago>How do you know that no one can measure ? Because they haven't. Again, every study on this issue hasn't shown a drop in productivity. >Maybe all the big companies have measured and all concluded that on average WFH is less productive. And yet curiously neither the companies themselves nor any outside actor has been able to produce any of those measurements supporting such conclusion after years of trying. I guess every company, government agency, and private entity in the world are all colluding to hide the evidence of lower WFH productivity despite desperately, desperately wanting to show that that's the case to support their RTO demands. Who can stop this nefarious conspiracy?
- lolinder 3y agoIf it takes being in person for your management to tell that someone is not doing anything and PIP/fire them, then I'd certainly call that poor management. You shouldn't have to look over my shoulder to know that I'm doing my job.
- phpisthebest 3y agoI think it is more the environment for some people. Working from home, really does IMO require a Home Office, a space dedicated for work. I know many people that are more productive at home, all of them have a home office. I know many people that are not productive at home, none of them have a home office, instead are using some Shared Space, like a corner of the living room, the kitchen table, etc. If you do not have a dedicated home office then likely your home will be filled with distractions, Living situations impacts this as well, if you lived a alone with no pets vs having a house full of roommates, children, spouses, pets, etc. So from a Management perspective do they fire all the people that cant work from home, or require everyone to return to office? Or do they have different policies for different people then open themselves up to Workplace legal liability from either discrimination or hostile work place charges
- para_parolu 3y agoMy office is filled with distractions. I sit in open space with tens of people around me. They talk, drink coffee, eat food. Some of them also have pets.
- gardenhedge 3y agoI used to sit near a printer which brought footfall, conversation noise and printer noise all day long. Good riddance to being stuck in an office.
- joquarky 3y agoI can't imagine anything that smells like toner is healthy to breathe.
- MattGaiser 3y agoThose people just hide their lack of work in the office. Walking around with a clipboard and attending random meetings isn't achieving any more than napping. And it depends on the company, but software is already heavy on metrics. Scrum is basically one giant dev productivity tracker hilariously sold as being for the benefit of the team.
- everdrive 3y agoWhy not just fire them rather than force RTO?
- spacemadness 3y agoI only hear about this on HN and Blind and have never seen it. HN and Blind really want to prove that people working at home don’t work for whatever reason, probably as we have the managerial class performing their own PR.
- monknomo 3y agoBlind, and to a lesser degree HN, seem to actively dislike IC-type workers, if not the work itself. I feel like this is a cultural shift for hn, and I'm curious about where it comes from
- w4 3y ago> I feel like this is a cultural shift for hn, and I'm curious about where it comes from My gut feeling - without data to back it up - is that HN has shifted from a forum mostly for founders and hackers to a forum mostly for FAANG employees who would have gone into finance or consulting in the 2000s. This mirrors the shift in the tech industry at large.
- monknomo 3y agoYeah, that tracks. Wonder where the founders and hackers are hanging out these days
- w4 3y agoI suspect many are still here. They're just a much lower percentage of the userbase than they once were. Anecdotally many are on Twitter, though that may have more to do with the curation of my follows than anything else.
- mardifoufs 3y agoWhy do you think founders would prefer WFH? All the data seems to point to even small start ups pushing for rto
- AlotOfReading 3y agoIt sounds like a textbook case of bad management if no one in the management chain or peer groups for those people can tell whether they're absent. I don't think that's a common situation though. Rather, tech companies have gotten paranoid about information flow regarding layoffs and don't meaningfully incorporate that data into executive decisionmaking. To escape their information vacuum, they instead look to outwardly visible signals like RTO/badge swipes as a substitute for the individualized performance metrics they've firewalled out.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoIsn't this just bad management? Hire people who can WFH effectively.
- jorblumesea 3y agoDo you think rto solves that? Your manager isn't going to be following your around physically. They're in meetings 6 hours a day. Everyone knows that one person who takes the 1 hour lunch break, leaves early, talks about this super hard bug that somehow takes them 3 weeks but no one has time to look into it.
- DanAtC 3y ago1 hour lunch is excessive now? Americans, I swear
- youerbt 3y ago> the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut This is, for me, the funny part about it. If all those metrics, meetings, tickets and what have you, pushed mostly by the management btw, can't help them, then I'm afraid nothing can. ROT is as much of an excuse as the above.
- tock 3y ago> I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. I'm confused. If you cant figure out people aren't working remotely then how do you figure out they aren't working in the office? Randomly check their screens? Check the check-in/out time?
- DanAtC 3y ago> I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. Good for them. If this upsets you, then it sounds like you're working too hard.
- 2c2c2c 3y agoI don't personally care lol
- avg_dev 3y agoa lot of people have been working remotely since long before covid, and many of them were very effective. there are some skillsets that an effective remote team has and many teams that suddenly went from in-office to remote still don't have those skills (and often they aren't even aware of that and just think that remote development is not going to work).
- un1xl0ser 3y agoI love to work from the office, I prefer it. I hate working from my desk at home, next to my bed. We have two desks in the bedroom. I'm in MGMT. Today I'm working from home as I can't afford the commute time, last week was pre-pandemic 4 days in office. What I don't like is changing what WFO looked like. If someone had to WFH for personal reasons (e.g. repair, packages, child issues, doctors appt), they just did it. Four days a week was normal, five was never normal. If we are trying to do 3 days and go to four, then everyone needs a dedicated desk. If you aren't willing to put a dedicated desk for people, you don't have a mandate for WFO, you have a mandate for hybrid. I sit next to an officer who is not ranked highly enough to have a desk. A first year associate should have a dedicated desk. It took the pandemic and a world in panic to swing the pendulum in this direction. It's going to take as much to get it back, and it may not go back to exactly the same thing.
- mrweasel 3y ago> does anyone really find RTO surprising? Yes, because if you can avoid it, it makes a lot of financial sense to not have office space, cafeteria, coffee, parking space, electric bills, water, cleaning and heating. You can save ton of money by asking everyone to stay at home. Then there's the flexibility. Our customers got a lot more flexibility when we where all at home everyday. If we had some afternoon migration, install or upgrade and it ran a little long, then no problem, I'm already home, so an additional 30 minutes doesn't matter much.
- declan_roberts 3y agoI knew plenty of these people when I was in the office full-time.
- Clubber 3y ago>does anyone really find RTO surprising? I see RTO for all in the same light as when IBM required all their technical staff to wear full suits all day, even the ones crawling under desks. It's a relic of the past that will eventually die and everyone will be better for it.
- alemanek 3y agoIt is a bad manager that can’t just deal directly with those people. They should warn, then PIP, and then fire those people. You don’t need to punish the people that can work remotely because some people have no self control. So, yes I do find it surprising that instead of managers just doing their job they think it is better to force RTO. They are catering to their lowest performers rather than cutting those people and supporting their good employees.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diob 3y agoThis is a management issue though. If they aren't willing to address folks who aren't working (blatantly in your words) when remote, they won't when in office. It's just now everyone gets collectively punished.
- eschneider 3y agoHow does that work for ICs? I'm genuinely asking. I've always been in a position where at some point I'm going to have to produce working software and it would be pretty obvious if I wasn't getting anything done. Are people just shuffling JIRA tickets around and hoping nobody notices?
- coffeebeqn 3y agoSome companies are so deeply unproductive that yes you can pretty much shuffle JIRA tickets and then once a week do a visible fix that took you 30 minutes of actual work. Or say you looked into these three tickets and found that they need X or Y which you’ll get to next week
- 2c2c2c 3y agoat large orgs the play is to bloat simple problems
- ac26 3y agoThat sounds like a problem with the engineering team's roadmap/work: if an individual who doesn't do work and doesn't impact the team's goals, then how is that a problem with the individual? Maybe there needs to be a more concrete or interesting (non BS work) roadmap.