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Is it possible for someone to 1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real t

• LiquidSky 3y ago
  Theoretically, sure, but in reality it's just that most managers are bad at their job. Knowing what your team is doing, knowing how to set priorities, knowing how to organize projects, making sure targets are being effectively met, etc. requires actual work. It's much, much easier to count butts in seats and glance at badge swipe times and pretend like you're managing your team that way.
  • MattGaiser 3y ago
    > Knowing what your team is doing, This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      Which is silly. I have worked in infra my whole career and just one of my job duties is to know what every single team is working on and shipping to provide operations guidance/support and to anticipate and be ready for risky changes. It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and read the transcript after if I miss it.
      • ebiester 3y ago
        Most of the RTO conversation is happening outside of tech. While some is (e.g. Amazon, Zoom), we all started off in IRC or email in college or before. This isn't true for all areas of the business.
• zwieback 3y ago
  Sure, why not. People can have multiple skills and I'm sure there are bad eggs in the office and bad remote eggs that will chew up the majority of that manager's time and energy.
• s0rce 3y ago
  Yes, similarly some people are less effective in remote teams compared to being part of an in person team.
• alberth 3y ago
  100% Also, the tools a manager needs for 'remote management' is very different than what's needed for in-person. It's also very possible managers are not given the tools needed to manage a remote workforce.
  • melenaboija 3y ago
    What tools are needed for better remote management?
    • datadrivenangel 3y ago
      More formal communications and explicit cultural norms around communication. People in office do tend to communicate organically with the humans around them, but online it's much harder.
      • sanderjd 3y ago
        Sometimes I wonder if those of us who prefer remote work are just the same set of people who found "communicate organically with the humans around them" to be a major hindrance to their productivity. Increasingly more over time, I have come to really miss the office I went to every day before I worked remotely. I miss having coffee and lunch with people, saying hi on the way in and out, and I really miss having team meetings and 1:1s and brainstorming sessions in person. But I don't miss my desk even a little bit. I spent as much of my time as possible working from private cubbies. When I'm working, I don't want people around, and I don't want to be pulled into "organic" communication. In practice, the best process (for me) in an office setting was to ping people asynchronously - "hey let me know when you have a moment, I want to brainstorm about xyz" - and then get together when it works for both of you. But this is the same process used in remote work! The downside is you can't walk-and-talk or get a coffee together or find a spot with a whiteboard, everything is soul-sucking video calls. But for me, losing the "organic"-ness of communication, specifically, is a pro, not a con.
        • clocot 3y ago
• MattGaiser 3y ago
  Really good manager is highly context dependent. I had a manager early in the pandemic who was reasonably effective, but only because he was everywhere and picking up stuff via overhearing convos in our corner. It worked because he was omnipresent. As soon as communication and the flow of information needed to be deliberate, he was more challenged. In person, anything he wasn't present for never got considered or failed.
• hackernewds 3y ago
  perhaps the answer is not necessary, since either way the solution there is to hire managers that fit the company's design and IC's strengths vs accommodating managers with weaknesses such as being a "bad remote" managers
  • nlitened 3y ago
    I think the analogy could be as follows: arguably most software companies could be powered by a dozen of really talented senior Common Lisp programmers. However when choosing a software stack for a company you have to consider how easy it is to hire and retain such developers vs hiring hundreds of average Java or Python or Rust programmers.
  • crowcroft 3y ago
    Does this logic work in reverse, should we accommodate ICs with weak working from the office skills? I do agree though, the most important thing is to build a team and hire people that compliment the context the business operates in, instead of trying to mold the business around the people they happen to have working at the given time.
• the_gastropod 3y ago
  It's absolutely possible. But if you're a really great "in-person" manager managing a remote team, calling that "poor management" is totally fair game, as far as I see it. That they're good at a completely different set of skills is pretty much irrelevant. I don't think there's much more nuance needed here.
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  I’ve experienced this. Someone who fixated on back to office and hiring local devs because the only way he knew how to manage was coming to your desk and harassing you. He had trust issues.
• datadrivenangel 3y ago
  There are different skills that are needed around structuring communications. Good remote work requires significantly more formal communications, while good in-person work merely benefits immensely from the same level of formality.
• spandrew 3y ago
  Being a good manager starts with a desire to experiment and constantly change processes to improve your team's happiness and productivity. So the 'good' manager should be able to make both work? With RTO, however, there is A LOT more wasted time. With all that extra time walking to meetings, water cooler conversations, and the busywork of running an office I can definitely see how bad managers and employees can hide more.
  • maerF0x0 3y ago
    Why experiment when other experts have literally done the experimentation for you? I'm thinking things like HBR, Happy@Work[1], or other academic/academic options.... [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/101125187 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/101125187
  • candiddevmike 3y ago
    > Being a good manager starts with a desire to experiment and constantly change processes to improve your team's happiness and productivity Constantly changing processes does little to improve your team's happiness or productivity...
  • notanormalnerd 3y ago
    I honestly don't know why anyone sees watercooler time or coffee kitchen time as wasted time. At least not from the first minute. This is where basically the micromeetings happen, where social rituals and where team culture is made and lived. There is a point of diminishing returns, but watercooler time is valuable time and what I miss most about the office.
• xoac 3y ago
  Not only is it possible but it's very often the case in my experience. A manager without any remote experience is going to have a hard time managing a remote organization or team.
• soamv 3y ago
  I think you'll get a different distribution of answers to this question from managers and ICs :)
• j4yav 3y ago
  If someone is a really good chef at a French restaurant, but you send them to a Thai place and they do poorly, is it lacking nuance to say the chef is doing a bad job?
• PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  not only that, but they're making claims about research papers. What does that even mean? It might even be true that some/most companies are doing it for this reason (I'm sure they wouldn't articulate it to themselves like that), but what the hell did they research exactly that came to such a qualitative conclusion? It smacks of a biased soft sciences approach to this as a means of fighting for the perception someone with money wants.
• sanderjd 3y ago
  If you're a poor manager of your organization's current style of work, is that still poor management, even if you're a good manager in a different setting? To use a sports metaphor, if I'm a really good manager of a team in the German Bundesliga, but then I switch to manage a team in the English Premier League and I'm terrible at that, then that's still bad management, even if I'm not a "bad manager" in some universal sense. And it would be weird for the organization to try to fix that problem by moving the team I'm managing to Germany. They would expect me to figure out how to be a good manager in the new setting, or they would find someone to replace me.
  • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    > If you're a poor manager of your organization's current style of work, is that still poor management, even if you're a good manager in a different setting? can we stop making excuses for people? management is about people, unless you're literally moving to a different culture (and I don't mean company culture), your failures as a manager are yours. I can tell you that my current manager is ruthless in that he has no issues getting rid of someone if they're not pulling their weight. I appreciate that about him. He also always has our back. Put him in an organization in which it's more challenging for him to influence our work and I'm confident I would still enjoy him as a manager. The work might not be as successful but I'm smart enough to recognize the walls my manager runs into as well.
• zooq_ai 3y ago
  That article was based on the dumbest study in the history of dumb studies. Stock Market returns during WFH vs Stock Market returns during RTO. (free money, zero-interest rates, meme-stock mania had nothing to do with it apparently) It's a click-bait article to attract gen-zers and HNers and it has worked like a charm
  • q1w2 3y ago
    bingo. It's like measuring the effectiveness of my gardening by seeing how many vegetables I produce in the summer vs winter, and then blaming Santa Claus for poor performance.
• theptip 3y ago
  Exactly. Going further, it's the default for there to be a gap. Managing a remote team is much harder than managing an in-person team.
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  Based on my experience teaching, yes. It is entirely possible for someone to be great in-person amd horrible remote. Skills do not automatically transfer. It takes work and guidance to have your skills transfer.
• raydev 3y ago
  Sure. Time to train them to be better managers if they are falling behind in a remote context.
• ac26 3y ago
  But isn't it management's inability to adapt to remote work signal that management's experience is poor? I get that we love to categorize argue about RTO vs no RTO but I think the real topic is how companies/organizations are deciding on which model to commit to and why -- the "why" helps with communicating and convincing adults to do something like commuting (management is hard work, right?). I get that a contrarian stance can come up with an example to contradict what the article is trying to convey. However, I think the article more so tries to draw situations in which CEO/Management is failing generally (with WebMD) and is hoping that a forced in office environment would solve their management woes. I do believe that a majority of organizations are in this bucket rather than the one you claimed.
• deleted 3y ago
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