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Comment by mrdonbrown | Hacker News Reader

This bugged me about Atlassian when I worked there as well. On one hand, one of the key marketing messages was about working from home, and additionally, they had an evangelist talking about the "future of work" being remote. On the other hand, only a couple teams out of probably 50 allowed remote work. Signs are showing the pandemic is changing attitudes, hopefully permanently.

I guess the saying "the future is here, just not evenly distributed" can apply to companies as well as society as whole.

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> Signs are showing the pandemic is changing attitudes, hopefully permanently.

I wouldn't bet on it. Big corporate middle management is not about productivity or success but about control.

Don't underestimate how much inertia will be established after a year plus of perma-WFH. That's a lot to try to come back from. After a whole year, most people who are renting will have had their leases expire, and may have moved farther out where they can get more value for their money.

Yes, but you rarely can put it in the open this way. It's one thing to say "I think remote teams are hard to make work efficiently, let's not risk that" and another is "I crave control so I won't allow remote teams even if it were easy to make it work". And you could get away with the former easily as top management is happy with "don't mess with a thing that works" approach. But now when we'll have an example of remote teams working, the former argument is dead. Now if your real argument is the latter, you won't be able to lay it bare for everybody to see, so insisting on banning remote work would be way harder.

do we really know it's really working tho ?

We'll know soon.

How

Corporate middle management is starting to learn how to control workers in a distributed environment. It's catching on in corporate America, but people probably won't like the results.

Inertia is a terrible thing to lose.

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