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The most interesting thing during COVID was seeing the switch from in-office to remote, followed by a round of redundancies, and the redundancies were fascinati

The most interesting thing during COVID was seeing the switch from in-office to remote, followed by a round of redundancies, and the redundancies were fascinating. It was full of people that when in-office seemed gave the impression of hard-working, largely by a combination of 'face time', and just talking to other employees, and not necessarily about work. >> [Why not build programmer performance measurement tooling?] I'm pretty sure there wasn't any employee monitoring software other than completion of Jira tickets within individual teams. The whole sneaky monitoring/measurement software is totally counter-productive, and counter-intuitive. If I'm in an office, no one is going to care if I read the docs or an ebook, possibly on my tablet, but if I'm remote and not jiggling my mouse every few seconds I'm slacking off.

ryandrake 2y ago
> It was full of people that when in-office seemed gave the impression of hard-working, largely by a combination of 'face time', and just talking to other employees, and not necessarily about work. Hahah, we all know these people! They walk around the office, sometimes carrying a clipboard or stack of paper, initiating business-y conversations, always making sure they look very serious and busy, deliberately walking past the boss's office frequently so he can see them visibly DoingSeriousBusiness. When promotion time comes around, these social butterflies are always at the top of the list, because naive managers see them buzzing around everywhere, and they at least think they know that these guys are constantly doing work. These people were panicking during COVID and WFH. Their entire self-promotion vector disappeared overnight. Now that most companies have returned to in-person work, these hall-walkers are back and once again getting promoted based entirely on their presence and visibility.

ryandrake 2y ago

> It was full of people that when in-office seemed gave the impression of hard-working, largely by a combination of 'face time', and just talking to other employees, and not necessarily about work. Hahah, we all know these people! They walk around the office, sometimes carrying a clipboard or stack of paper, initiating business-y conversations, always making sure they look very serious and busy, deliberately walking past the boss's office frequently so he can see them visibly DoingSeriousBusiness. When promotion time comes around, these social butterflies are always at the top of the list, because naive managers see them buzzing around everywhere, and they at least think they know that these guys are constantly doing work. These people were panicking during COVID and WFH. Their entire self-promotion vector disappeared overnight. Now that most companies have returned to in-person work, these hall-walkers are back and once again getting promoted based entirely on their presence and visibility.