The work-from-home future is destroying bosses' brains | Hacker News Reader

The work-from-home future is destroying bosses' brains

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560 pointszikduruqe492 comments

One of the interesting things that happened at my company is that productivity instantly doubled when we started working remotely. The reality at my company is that people are only getting 20 hours or so of work done in the office - the rest is socialization, pointless meetings, lunches, or trying to look busy. When we went home for lockdown and kept working 40 hour weeks, not only did productive output double, but everyone burned out in a few weeks.

In my opinion, the reality of working from home is that 20-30 hour work weeks need to be acceptable and we should use the rest of our time on non-working things, just like we did in the office, but now that time can be more meaningful to us.

Pointless meetings have multiplied for me in the remote world as they are no longer constrained by conference rooms. Also since it’s so much easier to get away with multitasking, you have engineers who are ostensibly in meetings all day still checking in code like everything’s fine.

I think the ability to maintain a convincing presence in all-day Zoom while still getting your work done is the new meta-game for engineering. And I hate it.

I’ve been doing fully remote teams for years and one thing that took about 2 years to get used to is how to utilize meetings differently than in person.

Some of the biggest disadvantages of remote work is that it is harder to “just grab someone”, social isolation, and communication isolation (ie- people not talking to each other.) Meetings can partially solve all those issues and get used as such. However, because they are such a useful tool they get over used and I had to figure out how to say no to meetings, how to end meetings early if they’ve accomplished their purpose, encourage people to leave meetings if it turns out they aren’t needed and how get better at ad hoc remote communication without pulling together a meeting.

It took a while but I think I’m actually spending less time in BS meetings then before because there is much less pressure to stay or preserve a meeting no one had to walk to or book a conference room for.

Many meetings only require a low level of attention. 90% is 1 or a few stakeholders discussing things, and the rest are there for occasional input. In a good chunk of my meetings I find myself actually tuning out too much, where I miss some important nuances because it was buried in the rest of the shit.

In an office you are forced to pay attention (laptops away…). It’s a new skill to balance between paying attention to irrelevant shit and missing the important details

Urban Airship meeting rules. Don’t just mention them or be inspired by them. Just… use them as you see fit. Walk out on meetings, or decline them, if they don’t benefit you or your work. Don’t tolerate meetings that could have been an email (or equivalent communication). Don’t fill the time. Don’t repeat things that were already communicated.

Spread this in your org, it's amazingly pragmatic and eye opening:

https://codahale.com/work-is-work/

>I think the ability to maintain a convincing presence in all-day Zoom while still getting your work done is the new meta-game for engineering. And I hate it.

The other side of this is just doing minimal work but being "available" which I've heard from plenty of friends & acquaintences

My first few months WFH was like this so I hear you. Since then however I've been more proactive about declining attending meetings or dropping off if I am required, which has made a massive difference.

Did it really double, or did boundaries erode? My company has been very clear in that they are measuring our productivity and also our working hours. Managers are being instructed to be very clear about establishing work/life boundaries (with the specifics being based on individual need). We similarly saw an increase in productivity, but the increase was far smaller once normalized for hours worked.

I'm surprised this perspective is not made more often. It's now much easier to work past 5 or 6pm or whenever you would normally end. Needing to return home to your family is no longer an excuse to stop working because you can be with your family while at work. All it takes is one developer on your team working evenings or weekends for the other developers to feel like they need to be working late too. There's also the fact that managers right now are more concerned about whether their team is working enough, rather than being concerned about their team working too much.

I find myself doing the opposite. It's much easier for me to step away at 6pm sharp knowing that if anything happens I can jump back in an instant, vs the worry of being the first to leave the office, and being stuck in a train for a half hour.

As someone who has done full time WFH for more than 5 years one skill you need to pick up is the ability to shut down around 5-6pm and avoid work on the weekends, which actually takes some self-discipline.

Your family must be very different to mine, because when mine are around my productivity is strictly zero.

> It's now much easier to work past 5 or 6pm or whenever you would normally end

It is much easier but I also believe it's something people will get out of the habit of (or at least I hope). It really isn't a difficult habit to break.

Since working from home I do exactly the same as I would in the office: At the same time every day I close the laptop and put it away.

It's actually easier for me to get away because no one is stopping me on the way out to ask me some questions or to just have a quick chat.

"Needing to return home to your family is no longer an excuse to stop working because you can be with your family while at work."

If you have young children or infants you can spend your time caring for them and worrying that those with older kids (or no kids!) will judge you.

Productivity at my workplace went significantly up (and stayed up), but management has been clear that personal time is sacred, and I hardly ever see anyone on slack after work hours.

Honestly, the biggest impediments to productivity at my workplace have nothing to do with where we work and everything to do with management style (heavy-handed Agile/Scrum, micromanagement, the works).

Well then the flip side is that we're also no worse off working remote.

Would anyone like to expound on how productivity is being measured? What metrics are used? What unintended consequences come up from the metrics? Can they be gamed?

It's pretty easy to game "working hours" when you're remote. Even an always on camera probably isn't enough and I wouldn't want my team to work under those conditions.

I'm also curious what productivity measures are being watched, especially for developers.

> 20-30 hour work weeks need to be acceptable

Yes, yes, yes. I am totally convinced that we can all start working 20 hours per week starting next Monday and the world will just keep going as normal. Only we will be healthier, happier and richer.

This is a very HN comment, because it ignores that a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

I love the idea of a 20 hour workweek, but I also understand that the harsh reality is that it would make things like construction, building security, janitorial services, etc. 2x more expensive.

I personally think that would be a boon for society, but given how much everyone is worried about (largely transitory) inflation today, IDK how willing they would be to accept that inflationary pressure.

> a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

Right. A FireFighter or an on-call IT Tech are excellent examples of how we can have 40 hours of presence while only requiring 20 hours of work. Making it acceptable for people to read a book if working 40 hours makes things better.

> love the idea of a 20 hour workweek, but I also understand that the harsh reality is that it would make things like construction, building security, janitorial services, etc. 2x more expensive

I'm not sure that's true. As I understand it, a lot of construction time is spent dealing with looking busy because of blocking tasks. But if we transition those jobs from hourly to piece-rate it solves a lot of problems.

Even building security only doing rounds/checking tapes 1/2 the time seems sufficient.

Nurses, firefighters, and military already work unusually bad hours but they don’t seem to be especially well-paid.

>This is a very HN comment, because it ignores that a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

Are you saying you think most people on HN do piecework? Because I sort of took for granted they were salaried.

At any rate, different companies within an industry area can be quite different.

I have had jobs involving programming that were:

  - salaried
  - hourly, with overtime
  - required time entry of billable/nonbillable projects worked on in 15 or 6 minute increments
  - required using a time clock (but not intraday time entry)
  - union
  - non-union

Only the time clock one (salaried, non-union) was primarily focused on "butts in seats". They also had something in the orientation about sleeping at your desk not being allowed.

Exactly. Like fire fighters. They spend most of there time doing nothing.

Or secretaries. Or HR.

I think it came with an implied /sarc tag

A Big Mac doesn't cost any more in Denmark than in the US, but the workers make twice as much.

Yes, yes, yes, yes! I've been doing 20 hour weeks (on average) for the past 1-2 years and I can say with great confidence that I finally seem to have achieved a sustainable work/life balance. And of those hours worked there has practically been zero waste.

20 hours at 100% efficiency is so much better than 40 hours at 60%, for all parties involved. Even if the latter has slightly higher overall output, when you look at it long term (health/happiness) the former wins hands down.

This is probably true - the problem with modern post-industrial economies is weak demand, not supply. We've juiced supply to the absolute hilt, but people are too busy spending their time at jobs and not consuming. We could easily scale down to 20 hour workweeks and the economy would keep on growing.

It's a prisoner's dilemma situation though, as others point out. Some people are going to insist on wasting their new extra free time at another job. The solution would be to put a hard cap on labor hours per person, mandating an overtime pay requirement that follows the worker from job to job.

> people are too busy spending their time at jobs and not consuming.

You are sitting on a trillion dollar marketing opportunity here.

The problem is that our culture does not strongly encourage consumerism during work hours. Beyond a couple of decorative trinkets on the cubible walls, people don't spend much on or at their workplace.

Capitalism teaches us we must fix that glitch.

The right solution is to create a culture of "office bling". You don't want to be the only person in your office without a gold throne, do you? Are you really writing on the whiteboard with a fucking Expo marker from Office Depot when you could show your worth by using the new $17,000 Montblanc Whiteboard Excelsior? Oh, you had a Starbucks latte on your break? Plebian. I had a flat white made with kopi luwak and gold flakes.

Why should we only burn cash distracting ourselves from our miserable home lives, when we could also burn cash distracting ourselves from our miserable work lives too?

How about..a salary based on the resources you need/want to survive...so that those who work less (indirectly contributing more to society by sharing their job, childcare, volunteering or just being mentally healthy enough to think of the"next big thing" and directly by ecologically diminishing consumption) get paid more ...? Tax the higher earners and subsidise the "work less" ...then suddenly wages and automation go up as businesses have to compete for a diminishing work pool...

>> Yes, yes, yes. I am totally convinced that we can all start working 20 hours per week starting next Monday and the world will just keep going as normal. Only we will be healthier, happier and richer.

Well no. Because some people will use that to work 2 jobs and make twice as much money. Then inflation will take that into account, prices will rise, and everyone will end up working 2 20-hour jobs. If you ever want to work significantly less hours I suspect it will require laws forbidding people to work more than X, and even then people will take that second job under the table.

I used to work 60-80 hours a week in the summers and 60+ between a full credit load and a couple of part time jobs. I went to bed twice a day for a couple of years because I was working swing shift and going to school.

I now have a 9-5 office job. I am apparently capable of working at least twice as many hours but I choose not to because I don't have to.

There are already people making twice as much (and more) than I do in as much or less time.

I don't think a 20 hour week for knowledge workers would have the effect you claim.

Problem is that if one company works 20 hours a week, and another works 40 hours a week.

The 40 hour/week company will get more done.

Also, imagine if your doctor only worked 20 hours a week.

I can't convince myself that would work. What if it isn't that people hit a peak of productivity at 20 hours of work per week, it's the minimum they try to do and still be acceptable to their boss. This could happen if bosses just assume that people work close to 90-100% of the time during working hours. I am sure no one is honest about it.

If 20 hours were the new weekly target instead of 40 it could negatively impact people if productivity declines on crucial things. That could happen if the new minimum acceptable amount of work to management were, say, 10 hours. So people would similarly spend 50% of their 20 hour working week avoiding work. So there could be a temporary shock throughout the economy as supply of things decreased until things adjusted.

My company’s core philosophy is that there are only 20 productive “creative” hours of coding in the average week. We employ our devs and ask that they aim for 17 hours of billed time to our clients; the remaining 3 hours is spent on our internal sync and calls with clients. The rest of the week is theirs: if they want to keep coding, do it; if they want to mow the lawn, that’s great too.

After almost 8 years with this model, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we maintain somewhere between 85 and 90% of the productive output of our 40+ hour/week counterparts.

I’m excited at the prospect of a positive shift in work/life balance coming out of the massive WFH experiment that’s happened over the past 18 months.

This sounds like a fantastic place to work.

Is your company hiring?

I worked in similar company, I could do all my weekly work in 10 hours. But company did not like my side projects.

I worked at a company where the support team was moved temporarily next to the HR team.

Someone in HR somehow found a way to complain that "they're not very social and they're always at their desks working".

I was kind of blown away that somehow that could be a thing to complain about.

The opposite happened in mine: people missed socialization so much that the number of pointless meetings exploded.

I just checked and I've been on the phone for 19 hours last week (out of a 35h work week), and I'm only attending like half of them that are actually related to work, i.e. skipping meetings that are just for coffee and talk, lunch break videogames, and whatever they do in the discord (yes, they created a discord to "keep in touch").

The best was last summer when we had a 2/3 office/home split, which left people happy in terms of social contact and at least I could work from home without nonsense for 3 days.

Remote work productivity mid-pandemic won’t necessarily translate post-pandemic because in the pandemic the other ways we could spend our time were so limited. In contrast, right mow I could be at the gym, having a long lunch with a friend, doing errands… The new freedom and temptation to do those things will gradually undermine the remote option, until bosses finally tire of the cat and mouse and everyone must go back to their cubicles.

>>Remote work productivity mid-pandemic won’t necessarily translate post-pandemic

None of the 'problems' you mention will necessarily come to pass either. Unless you have a crystal ball, you're future is no more likely then any other...

Having worked from home for 20 years now, I can tell you that hasn't been my experience.

Don't forget commute times, which can be bad especially in high cost of living cities where you have to live really far from things to afford a decent place.

For us it saved everyone an average of 1-2 hours per day.

Also consider the energy savings. Commuting by car every day uses tons of energy. Of course this is somewhat offset by more HVAC being consumed by houses, but I highly doubt that totally erases the savings from not driving so much. Cars are very energy intensive.

What percentage of your company had parents of infants/toddlers at your company? Is it very diverse?

Childcare was practically nonexistent during early phase of the pandemic.

And it's crushingly expensive even in better times.

> One of the interesting things that happened at my company is that productivity instantly doubled when we started working remotely.

It is well established in literature on workplace studies that any major change to a workplace results in short-term productivity boosts.

Some changes result in long-term productivity boosts.

I don't think this is well established at all, despite what Peopleware said about the Hawthorne Effect - see the criticism section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#Interpretatio...

That’s interesting, I’d never heard that before. Where could I read more about that?

> the reality of working from home is that 20-30 hour work weeks need to be acceptable and we should use the rest of our time on non-working things

Privately this is what I end up doing anyway, and it works out pretty well

This is a refreshing perspective that takes into the reality of what humans are able to do, over time. Quite a good idea as well, why not spend some time taking walks, doing housework, and being in nature rather than standing and chatting by the watercooler/coffe machine, having meetings with no benefit or trying to surf the web without anyone noticing.

I've worked remotely for years on and off from the past two decades and I understand that you can't just work remotely. You have to socialize as well. Many companies think 'remote work' is about work, and that is far from true. Every aspect of 'work' needs to be done remotely. If you're not socialising and doing fun things remotely then people will grow increasingly isolated and eventually quit.

How does your company measure productivity?

Probably with their guts.

At my previous company this was only true for a week or two. Then some VP discovered how to use MS Teams and the daily two hour meeting started.

You can have pointless meetings remotely. Actual socialization seems to be the more difficult (and desirable) thing to reproduce.

>productivity instantly doubled

Looks like the 'science' of in-the-office productivity needs some new theories.

This sounds like complete bullshit. There is no way this is true. What are you measuring??

I would love to be proven wrong.

Not the person you asked, but work has objective measures of the organization (bugs closed, number of commits, etc), and those doubled.

Then management said they thought planning and roadmap would implode, but those also (subjectively) went much better than usual this year, with written down decisions, and discrete decision points instead of useless repeated verbal syncs.

Also, it seems as though fewer high profile things slipped than usual, but that’s hard to measure year-to-year.

Finally, surveys say a large majority of the employees strongly prefer indefinite part or full time work from home.

> the rest is socialization, pointless meetings, lunches, or trying to look busy.

The parts that for me made the job bearable. The rest is legacy support for CRUD apps. The office is a perk for people with few other outlets.

So yes, as a "boss", the work-from-home future is definitely and absolutely destroying my brain, but I think the whole discussion around control in the article completely misses my point. I couldn't care less about control and never cared about seat-in-the-ass time before.

But as an engineer become manager, I can absolutely feel both sides here:

While everything development is massively more chill remote (no interruptions and hey, just go fill your dishwasher while stuff compiles), everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me.

Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog.

Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me.

I'm pretty curious on how all of this will turn out.

Hopefully leaders can learn some empathy from this pandemic.

> everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me.

As an engineer, everything about working in-person completely sucks for me. I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face, I hate sitting in office chairs and desks, and I hate commuting.

> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people.

Again, these all completely suck for me in-person. I'm an introvert and I hate having to put on a happy face for the manager (my resting face looks anywhere from tired to murderous), I hate "sitting in a war room" pretending to focus while my time is just wasted by people talking, I hate traveling and waiting in a lobby for interviews when I'm already nervous, and I hate having to mime the emotions and interactions that leaders think are meaningful but that I just do because it's part of office politics.

Maybe you're an exception, and it would be great if you are. But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager. I think in 2021 it's fair to raise the bar and expect managers/leaders to learn basic online communication to the level that teenagers were doing like 10-20 years ago, rather than shackle everyone to the office and commutes because leaders can't learn how to use slack/zoom

I understand most of your point, but the end of your comment shows a real lack of interest in and understanding of what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.

All of that requires tremendous amounts of communication, and communication over Slack and even Zoom is very low bandwidth compared to communication in person.

Consider this: if your home had only a 56k dialup modem and your office had gigabit fiber, would you still prefer to work from home? Because that’s kind of what covid-remote had been like as a people manager in a larger org.

To make remote management work you need to not just “learn how to use Slack and Zoom,” you need to fundamentally redesign your entire org for extremely low social cohesion and low bandwidth communication. It can be done, as evidenced by many successful remote-only companies, but it’s not simple or easy, and it’s brutal to be a people manager in an org that was designed around office work and leading through the conversion to remote-only.

> what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.

And if WFH improves output and morale at the cost of more difficult management, isn't that absolutely worth it for managers? Their entire effort is dedicated to enabling contributors, if a policy does just that then they should push for it.

I do mechanical engineering, we design stuff for our manufacturing operators and our customer's operators. Whenever some amount of effort on my side may reduce the operator's burden over the life of the product, it's absolutely worth it. I'm not going to make a subpar design just to save myself an analysis, that's the job.

So if WFH requires more management effort, and results in better output for the team, it should be pushed by management. Managers shouldn't compromise their team's output and morale just to save themselves some remote meetings.

> Consider this: if your home had only a 56k dialup modem and your office had gigabit fiber, would you still prefer to work from home?

Perhaps you underestimate how much I hate being outside of my home. If given a realistic choice, there is no situation where I would ever prefer or enjoy the office. Nothing is worth it, and most of it is an active detriment to my quality of life, especially the people. I'm not asking for everyone to be remote, unlike the many people who want to force everyone to be in-office, I just want the option for myself and others to be remote based on preference.

> it’s brutal to be a people manager in an org that was designed around office work and leading through the conversion to remote-only.

It's brutal to be an introvert/misanthrope forced to sit in a chair 8h a day, and the point is that it's not necessary. Let people who want to be in-office do so, and let the rest stay home. I still haven't heard a convincing or legitimate reason why things should be otherwise except for people who are stuck in the 1940s office mindset.

I appreciate this insight

As an engineer who transitioned to p eople management pre-covid, then back to engineering during covid (after burning out HARD), I gained a ton of empathy for my managers.

It's really shocking just how complex and demoralizing mid-level management can be, especially-so in the remote world.

After seeing just how hard it can be to simply know what your team is doing on a given day (let alone to align them to some vague OKR passed from on-high)... Let's just say it's made me want to adopt some practices that make me easier to manage.

At the very least, I'm putting more effort into keeping my tickets & PRs up-to-date and easy to understand at a glance.

And so instead of the managers adapting, the engineers have to adapt to the 56k equivalent by being in the office?

Funny my managers often wanted me to be more "flexible" to meet absolutely non-flexible deadlines.

I certainly won't mind if my manager has to adapt for once (and don't tell me they adapt to each of us and all situations and that's already taxing)

I'll happily turn the tables.

> and keeping morale high.

My morale has never been lower than when they moved us into an open office where I had to hear everyone jabbering away (plus it was in another state which more than doubled my commute).

> I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face

It's a reasonable way to feel, but I don't think the majority of people are like this. People who feel this way should definitely seek remote work.

Hate is a strong word, but if you phrased it as "would prefer not having to be near people, listen to people while trying to focus, or be forced into unwanted face-to-face social interactions" the percentage would be fairly high, especially among developers.

The more extroverted among us get emotionally charged by parties and social interaction.

The more introverted among us get emotionally drained by parties and social interactions.

For the introverts, the draining effect is much less pronounced if the party is among a tight-knit group where being conscious of social norms is not needed.

After a large gathering of people I am not emotionally close to, I need a couple hours alone, without human contact just to decompress.

Majority I would say is anecdotal. People have other lives and priorities. I would rather see my family 40 hours and work.

> Maybe you're an exception, and it would be great if you are. But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager. I think in 2021 it's fair to raise the bar and expect managers/leaders to learn basic online communication to the level that teenagers were doing like 10-20 years ago, rather than shackle everyone to the office and commutes because leaders can't learn how to use slack/zoom

With all due respect, I‘ve been chatting on IRC since the birth of Undernet, but some people I thought I had meaningful connections with I should have better not have met IRL. These days I prefer to make my connections in meatspace.

I introduced Slack to our company and am fully able to use Zoom, but there‘s a difference between four Zoom calls a week and four a day (yes, you do need to manage up and to the sides as well).

You might hate your manager, but so far companies don‘t work without leadership and coordination either.

I hope we can find something better going forward together.

I don't feel the WFH pros/cons align perfectly with engineer/managers either. I know many managers who are very comfortable with managing a geo-distributed remote team. Mine in particular is quite good at it.

I sometimes wonder if software developers who share these sentiments are often disappointed by the way things work in the industry because they expected to be coding/interacting with machines and toys the whole working time but in reality there is a lot more to building software that solves business problems than just coding.

I can only speak from personal experience, but yes, it was pretty crushing. I knew interacting with people would be required, but I did not foresee the full on panic attacks in the bathroom, trying to calm down so I wouldn't just run out the front door and never come back.

> But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager.

Me too, but I think perhaps that you and I are several standard deviations above the median in terms of reading comprehension and ability to write clearly.

Not everyone is capable of this, as I learned when I tried to run a whole-ass engineering org like I previously ran more informal teams on irc.

Most people are bad at reading comprehension. It's why they tell people to repeat and rephrase their points when communicating, to give their readers a second chance at getting it.

Perhaps, but how is this different from any other soft-skill? A manager with poor reading comprehension who can't do their job unless they require every single person they manage to be physically available seems to be just as ill-suited for their job as an engineer who is incapable of working on a team, or data scientist unable to present their results in a comprehensible way to stake-holders.

Seems to me that remote-work has been a bit of a reckoning for managers, in the sense that our societal work environments have been tailored in a way that unnecessarily hampers employee well-being and productivity, all to cover up the fact that many managers are lacking in some soft-skills that are critical to actual management.

There is also the aspect of being on the record in corporate chat. There is way more on the line when everything is recorded than informal in person talking. People also 'have to be there' with their jobs, doing something they necessarily do not enjoy. On IRC in the 90s when everyone was anonymous and nothing was on the line, you had the social freedom to be more open, and the people who wanted to be there didn't have to be paid to be there.

I would humbly agree, and you make good points. I never thought about why repeating points is so important. I have often wished to some extent that the bar for communication were higher, but I guess that's something most workplaces would rather just plow through than try to really improve.

You really think your peers are going to appreciate your attitude?

Don't take this the wrong way but I think you need to think about Therapy.

It’s not clear what exactly you’re referring to by “attitude” or how you think “Therapy” will affect it.

On the other hand, I can easily see how the sort of non-constructive verbal lashing-out demonstrated in your comment could be a problem in the workplace, and a behavior that one can learn to avoid through Therapy.

He plays the game in office. But it’s exhausting and pointless. The only benefit I see of being in office is not having to compete with others around the world for jobs.

Maybe you missed the parts where I mentioned acting/miming. I'm not so oblivious as to be a grouch at work lol. That's y whole point: I _have_ to exert effort to be friendly and likable and get along with my coworkers. It takes effort because it's not something I enjoy or want, but is essentially necessitated by any job. I don't like working or coding that much either, but I still put in the effort to do a good job because that's what working is: work. It would just be easier for me and people like me if I could take out the unnecessary stuff like being in an office, just like employers generally pay for air conditioning so you don't have to try working through heat stroke during hot summers.

> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done

As a person who at a previous job was often pulled into said "war rooms", we almost never "got that hard problem done", but we did always make management feel good about not being able to fully solve hard problems. Mostly these "huddle-work" scenarios created more problems (long term) than they solved, because people weren't motivated to solve the problem, they were motivated to leave the war room. I do my best work when I'm not constantly distracted by others, but many managers simply can't understand this and instead hamstring their employees by having "war rooms" and white-boarding sessions and stand-ups and deep-dives and all the other nonsensical ways of preventing people from actually focusing and accomplishing a task. Good riddance to the on-location office and all the hot garbo that comes with it; the rest of us will be quietly humming away, getting tasks done and solving major problems without such managerial hindrances.

There are entire classes of problems where a group of n persons working effectively together will produce a much better solution than 1 single person on an island (where n > 1).

In those situations, white boarding and deep dive are useful activities.

Business owners would absolutely love it if you could just run a complex (high value-add, high margin) business by only getting a bunch of commodity developers just pulling JIRA tickets from a heap, quietly humming away.

Reality is that, collaboration is important and is required in order to create non trivial products, and thus the margin to pay for the “people doing real work”.

I agree collaboration is very important. What's interesting to me though is that very early in my career (pre ubiquitous video conferencing), I worked for a large multi-site corp. Me and another developer were the only developers in the local office, yet somehow we were able to collaborate using phone calls and email to build some pretty cool software with other team members in various offices around the US.

I'm not saying that digital tools are always perfect replacements, but there is a large gradient between a single person on an island and sitting shoulder to shoulder at a fold out table (which I have also done).

This claim is commonly made anecdotally by extroverts, but I've never seen real evidence that it is true.

I'm at least 50% convinced that there is a natural selection where managers are the people who like that stuff but people who stay developers hate it. I totally agree with you, from the moment I step into one of these rooms with my laptop in hand I just want to get out of there and back to my chair, my monitors and time to think things through.

"war rooms" are excellent in three cases:

1) creative brainstorming (ux, ui, branding, early architectural decisions) to ensure everyone can present and validate their ideas, and people are more on board with decisions as they saw democratic backing (or, at the very least, feel that objections they raise were heard!)

2) bringing staff that would normally be spread across multiple buildings and units together - the bigger the org and the more stakeholders involved, the more important a common space for (at least) the leadership team is, especially to cut through red tape and organizational barriers.

3) when you have an immediate problem (outages, GDPR incidents) to solve and secrecy is involved - no need to take care about people not in the loop, seeing stuff they are not supposed to etc.

What "war rooms" often enough end at, unfortunately, is cramped chicken coops. Not enough space, sales/PM people directly sitting and blathering in their phones next to developers, ... for months. That's a farce.

Oh, never think that you can get away just because you are remote. Now we just have multi-hour ‘this is a war room’ meetings, where the entire team is trying to get work done while connected to a permanent zoom session.

Arg. Screw that noise. I refuse to join these "co working zoom hours" where everybody is on the same zoom call. Or zoom happy hour. Or any of that. That stuff is dystopian as hell.

Remote work is great if you are a contractor with well defined scope. In fact it is ideal. You can set firm boundries with your client.

But being an employee who isn't just a cog in a machine, remote is rife with pitfalls. You lose connection with the greater company. People you used to work with on other teams. New hires. There is no doubt a huge chunk of people within my own little org that were hired over the last 1.5 years that I don't even know existed. I've lost complete track over the greater org.

Naw. A year from now it's gonna be almost exactly like what it was like in 2019. There is a reason why we didn't do this pre-lockdown and it wasn't just because of "micro managers" or "the suits justifying their work". FAANG companies pour huge amount of "HR marketing dollars" into their office environments. It literally helps them attract new talent.

I really just don't see these "hybrid" things panning out long run. We'll revert right back to 2019 before anybody knows it.

I agree with "war rooms" not being as effective...but whiteboards, standups and deep dives personally can be helpful.

I think the key thing for me is that I never force people to sit in on these.

When an employee starts a large piece of work they don't understand that I feel have some knowledge on. I ask if they would like to whiteboard a solution with me...or deep dive something in the code, or do daily standups just to talk about w/e is on their mind

Doing these remotely is totally fine, but I do feel these activities...or atleast whiteboarding and deep diving is nicer in person for me

Agreed. I think people don't realize how much WFH sucks for people who are not ICs (or don't care). Pre-pandemic, I was pointing my career in a management direction. I enjoyed both development work and managing and they both took advantage of different skill sets. However, in my mind, management had more upside in the long run, and if I was going to be going into an office every day anyway, might as well keep at it. So at the start of the pandemic I was doing remote management of a technical team. And all those negatives you mention started to add up. In the last few months I got a different job as a senior developer to take advantage of the unbelievable W/L balance of permanent WFH. I decided "being a developer remotely" >> "being a manager in the office" >> "being a developer in the office" >> "being a manager remotely".

On the other hand for my partner who is non-technical and squarely in management, WFH is an endless nightmare of virtual meetings with no breaks. Hard to read people, hard to get people engaged, nonstop pings preventing what little focus time she has left. She wants to get back to an office ASAP, and I don't blame her.

> I think people don't realize how much WFH sucks for people who are not ICs (or don't care).

yeah it probably sucks for managers to see huge parts of their jobs & supposed value-add automated away or otherwise proven unnecessary

I think this kind of attitude says more about the person expressing it than it does about the value good management brings.

Why would those pings stop in office?

They don't necessarily stop but they're...different, I would say. For one thing, if someone is grabbing your attention in the office for a "quick question", it's easy to make a clean break from that interaction and move on. Verbal communication is just more efficient, and it's obvious when you have a legitimate conflict and need to move on from the conversation (On my way out the door, to lunch, to a meeting, etc).

It's also harder to get multiple "quick questions" at the same time, because in office people see when you're physically occupied. And it could be just me, but WFH I've noticed there is more psychological pressure to respond quickly to chats. Don't want people to think you're lounging off! A red "busy" indicator can mean a lot of things, in contrast to someone physically seeing you in conversation with your laptop closed in a meeting room.

In theory you should enforce boundaries "I'll respond to all questions after this virtual meeting is over" or "I have a firm cut off at 5PM and will not respond after that". But that becomes tough when leadership, who should be setting expectations on this stuff, breaks it's own rules and multi-tasks during meetings or has unrealistic availability. Definitely a cultural thing that heavily depends on your exact role and the organization norms.

TL;DR For "Zoom calls and text messaging" are not a drop in replacement for physically talking to someone, especially for people who spend a lot of their day having many small, ad-hoc conversations.

> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, you're doing it wrong. As a leader you should be adjusting to the dynamic that ensures meetings respect your teams' time, have clear outputs and follow-ups, etc. As someone who has been, and will continue to be, remote for many years in a leadership capacity, it's not the attendees of a meeting's fault if the person putting it on doesn't respect their time.

The reality of remote work being forced in the office crowd that I see is a reckoning of where mere presence was taken for value. I would never expect to get the best work out of someone by sticking them in a dungeon for a week. Let them walk in the sunshine with a headset, sit in the shade with their laptop, or take a breather to enjoy their own safe space while exploring new ideas.

> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done

What would you say exactly, you "do" here?

Sorry to hear that.

This was a real jolt to read though. I've been really bullish about WFH or hybrid work for the future, since as an IC I've seen nothing but the benefits as you mention. I never thought of the stress of remote work in a management role though, so thanks for sharing!

Don't forget interns. Those poor souls are absolutely screwed by all this. In no circumstance can I see mentoring an intern working remotely. At least not nearly as effectively as in person.

There's entire class of remote internships like Google Summer of Code, ESA Summer of Code, etc. Everyone doing just fine - mentors and interns.

Google measures intern productivity each year and this year remote has been within the amount of typical variation.

When the pandemic started, I was working as a manager. It was my 6th year in that company. I thought, working remote is the best that ever happened to me.

Now I changed my job three months ago and remote work is killing me.

I realized that managing remotely it’s easy if you already have build strong relationships while in the office. You know how to approach each team member, who you can trust. It also takes much more time for people to trust you.

People will trust you if you demonstrate leadership.

Ah, depends on the audience.

A good portion of the workplace population seem, to managers, to be unmanageable. Another good portion seem, to workers, to be unable to manage. It will take real skill to ameliorate that remotely.

Perhaps "remote leadership" is a new skill, a growth area to be exploited by the talented?

Being in any meeting or war room is also an energy hog. I do understand what you're saying though. What worked before, doesn't work anymore. Remote means management has to change. IC work for the most part was easy to move remote. Work that involved coordinating people and communication is going to take longer to figure out. It can be done, as many pre-COVID remote companies showed. But, it takes work to adapt.

"six people in a war room for week"

This sounds like hell, stop doing this to your employees.

I think some of the reason that so many workers welcome this change is that they have had bad managers (which it sounds like you are not). For my self I had a on-site manager managing a team of 6-7 people out at a customer, however he failed to pick up on my detoriating mental health which lead to a severe case of burnout and me leaving the company. The signs was there, and I am still baffled what on earth he spent 8 hours on each day since the didn't do anything to stop that (at least for the sake of the company - I was not productive to say the least). Given that experience there is nothing gained in having a manager that I physically meet. Interesting to know if the different feelings people have regarding this is due to their experience with different managers.

I hope that you find some way to adjust for the new way of working, if it is having regular workshops, having workers come in regularly, or if it all blows over and thing go back to normal.

This is an organizational problem. You should not have that many meetings. People need to learn how to write. I manage people and we work fully asynchronously by using gitlab to its full potential. I have close to zero meeting a week. Everything is in writing. We write epics for new features and discuss there. A

> Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me.

Managing people in-person requires you to develop certain skills. Managing people remotely requires an overlapping but different set of skills. It is not harder or easier, just different, and like any skill, it can be learned with practice.

I'm curious if/how this could be addressed with better collaboration systems.

E.g., suppose everyone's WFH office had a Google Jamboard and high-quality videoconferencing system.

If it addressed your concerns and per-employee cost was $10k initial + $5k/year, I would think it's still a win given the typical total-comp cost of a U.S.-based software developer.

As a manager, how would you feel about a hybrid setup with people in the office say two days a week?

Would it recapture a substantial portion of the benefits, or do you think you find that the manager utility of each extra day in the office doesn't diminish much?

Thanks for asking.

Honestly I would like to be in the office as little as possible. I get knowing a person face to face has value, but having a fixed schedule of this would feel artificial and more draining.

I've worked in organizations that were from ~20% remote to ~90% remote (for the teams I worked with), and while I've never been the boss - never had more than a couple of people reporting to me - I observed that somehow the bosses' work was getting done, and the organization has not descended into chaos any more than usual. I have to conclude from that that there are ways to run a remote engineering org, with results no worse than for a meatspace-local one. Maybe you're just about to discover them.

> Reading emotions and connecting to people.

Literally every day of my life with autism.

> I couldn't care less about control

...

> just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done

Sure, it is not about control, yeah yeah.

Good riddance.

no you don't get it

if they don't get those 6 people in a room, then they'll just solve the same problem in the same time remotely and mr manager won't get any credit!

This is a great point. For the most part, I love working from home, and will never go back to an office if I can help it. But I completely agree that these aspects of the job are much harder, and the perspective of someone who has never had to do them is going to miss some important things.

> is an energy hog.

Now you know how introverts feel about in-person meetings

> Now, someone insufferable will read this and say “NOT ALL MIDDLE MANAGERS,” and let me tell you, if you’re thinking that, you are probably part of the problem.

Clever. Take the obvious objection--that this is all based on stereotyping of the role and, frankly, cynical assumptions about the way management is or can be structured--and then just turn it into another symptom of management dysfunction!

How very tautological: Before you tell me I'm wrong, let me tell you you're wrong for telling me I'm wrong.

And yes, I'm a manager. And no, I never spent time '[walking] the floors, “[keeping] an eye on people” and, in meetings, “[speaking] for the group.”'' because I have far far more important things to do, like helping my staff understand the corporate vision so they can make good, independent decisions; helping solve problems for my staff when they come to me with issues; working with our sales team to manage customer expectations and negotiate on projects and solutions; managing the expectations of senior management based on the information I'm getting from my staff. And the list goes on and on.

But, who am I to say. I'm just a middle manager who is, I'm sure, just part of the problem...

"I have far far more important things to do"

And your employees have far far more important things to do than commute 5-20 hours every week so they can sit at a desk and stare at a screen and occasionally be physically present in meetings where everyone stares at a screen. We have screens at home.

I agree with you completely.

What makes you think otherwise?

...your tone?

Do you think it's possible that in this article, what was meant by "all middle managers" was actually all of the ones that insist on things like working in person?

(If so, of course that's not all of them but maybe it was a mistake, not an attack towards people like you.)

The article goes out of its way to specifically say there are no exceptions. Like, it literally says "if you think some managers aren't like this, you're wrong and part of the problem".

This makes sense in the mind of the author because their core thesis is that middle management as a concept is broken. According to him, "middle managers are rewarded when they can take work from those who are good at their work but aren’t paid a manager’s salary".

Fundamentally, their view of middle management is the workplace equivalent of economic rent seeking; "In my profession, middle managers usually worked the longest hours but contributed the least, but were somehow graded based on _my_ performance". Rent seeking that requires being physically in the office to be visible: "so many people have gone so far in their careers through the nebulousness of 'management' that has basically no value in a remote setting". And so remote work breaks this model: "Remote work mostly destroys the ability to appear busy, other than having a full calendar."

There's no equivocation or qualification, here. No attempt at nuance. The second last sentence in the article goes so far as to claim "They [middle managers] don’t want to make the office a place where things actually get done, because that’s not the point to them - the point is that they own you."

Had they not gone out of their way to flat out state 'someone insufferable will read this and say “NOT ALL MIDDLE MANAGERS,” and let me tell you, if you’re thinking that, you are probably part of the problem' I suspect I would've found the article a bit narrow-minded and extreme, probably the byproduct of someone who'd been in too many toxic workplace cultures, but I might've understood.

As written? Sorry, but I see no reason to give this a charitable reading. The author is clear on their intent, and their intent is to impugn the work of people like me who are honestly just out here doing our best for the people we work with during some of the toughest circumstances imaginable.

You seem to consider yourself a good middle manager, and I'm sure many people like you exist. There is however a bigger problem in that many managers are not good at the job of being a manager, but they are great at taking credit for the work of others and rising up the ranks of corporations/organizations. Rather they were born with the psychological makeup that directs their actions towards taking credit, as well as other "leadership" roles, but because that specific psychological makeup requires a greedy algorithm, it is actually not very good at orchestration of its subsystems because to be good at orchestrating all the subsystems require being less greedy and understanding each subsystem and their issues well, rather than manipulating, extorting, deceiving, and self promoting (of the work of others as ones work).

I don't want you in your defense of yourself to defend the existence of this coporation/organizational sub-entity because in reality they cost corporations(and governments) an absurdly unjustifiable amount of capital for on average negative result.

Realize that most people if treated like adults know how to work towards a common goal, we are socially adapted creatures by genetic design, and have dominated earth because of it. We actually do not need cult leaders to get to the moon, actually they are more of a hindrance.

Clever. Completely avoid the question.

As an excellent middle manager, is having your staff working from home a problem for you? If so, why?

Not at all. Why would it be?

I have a regular weekly 1:1 with each staff member (a while back I proposed making them bi-weekly but alas they insisted on maintaining this cadence... it's a lot more work for me, but it's what they need) to see how they're individually doing and to make sure they have what they need.

We also have a regular team checkin to update on overall company status, discuss issues, etc.

Through those mechanisms plus regular communication over Slack, email, ad hoc calls, etc, we stay connected and aligned.

Meanwhile, I stay in contact with my management colleagues so we're in sync laterally and all pulling in the same direction.

This isn't rocket science. It's not even that difficult. You just have to be a bit more intentional about staying in touch and connected with folks.

If anything it reinforces for me how important effective middle management is, as done well, it serves as vital glue to keep a remote workforce connected.

Now, I'm not gonna lie, when we first went full remote I was concerned that the 1:1's would be less effective, simply due to lack of body language, etc. But I'll freely admit I was wrong on that point. In fact, we hired and onboarded a new senior staff member during the pandemic and it went as well as any previous onboarding we've done. Though it's a bit strange realizing I've never actually spoken to him in person...

At this point I think I'd be comfortable going full remote, maybe with the odd in-person get-together just to celebrate successes and so forth. I suspect the only thing stopping us is some older school senior management who aren't yet comfortable with that idea.

Off-topic but weekly 1:1s are nuts. I would’ve gladly taken you up on biweekly. I think for me every 3 weeks would be ideal because I do biweekly and it always feels like just a liiiitle too much.

I consider myself an excellent middle manager. Having some of my staff work from home is a problem for me because they’ve specifically told me “I hate working from home. It crushes my productivity and happiness.” So I am working to find a future where they can get back to a state they like without sabotaging my reports who prefer working from anywhere.

Yeah, this is my big challenge as well. Hybrid remote is really difficult--if you're not careful it can end up as the worst of both worlds--but not everyone wants a remote work setting and finding a way to be flexible and accommodating to people's preferences is going to be a real challenge going forward.

But, to me, the good news is we can have this conversation now; it's no longer assumed that remote work is inferior. It's just different. Now we get to figure out how to incorporate that into the way we work.

Throwaway to get this off my soul.

In the first week of the pandemic (March 16th to be precise) I was going to give my notice to start a new job. When everyone was quickly sent home in my city, the logistical problem of being in two places at once disappeared. I struggled with conflicting standups for the first week, but eventually I normalized my schedule and just appeared as a busy worker that was hard to book meeting times with.

I do enterprise UX design (focusing on regulated industries versus e-comm) so I typically need to be briefed on a problem, conceptualize a solution, then iterate with folks. I found I do about 5 hours of real, hard work per job per week. Attending a zoom meeting isn't hard work, and shouldn't be counted as such. In fact, I do most of my hard work at 10pm once kids are asleep and I can finally think clearly.

The most I've hustled was doing three 'full-time' jobs (40/hr per week) concurrently. For 5 weeks I was making the equivalent of $650k per year (120 hours per week @ $100/hr), and honestly it was only hard because some folks wanted the precious 10am zoom slot. The hard work was manageable, and ironically I was more focused and thoughtful because the good habits of one job were brought over to correct the bad habits of another. Research on a UX pattern one week would give me the confidence to recommend a solution to another client that made me stand out as 'having my finger on the pulse of what users want'.

If I could be honest with all of the clients, I would have felt better emotionally and perhaps I could suggest some load balancing on user testing and UX patterns.

Only one manager wanted his 40 hours of flesh, but most have been happy judging me on my output and positive attitude since I no longer fear being fired... I will just take on another job.

> and honestly it was only hard because some folks wanted the precious 10am zoom slot

There is a solution for that: work with companies in different timezones. Everybody will get the 10AM slot, and everybody will be happy.

Is it feasible for you to contract?

I, as much or more than most, fervently agree that companies don't own us - we exchange work for pay and that is a relationship that works best if respect flows both ways which, recently, has been declining.

That all said - most of this article is just a rant about how terrible middle managers are and I feel where that's coming from but it's not an absolute. Management can be extremely strong at shielding you from unnecessary distractions and silliness when it's done well. There is real value in middle managers and, since transitioning to remote work, my manager and their manager have both been working hard to ensure that devs are able to stay as productive as they were while also striving to protect and defend personal time.

I totally sympathize with people that have worked under space-occupiers and from what I've seen it's utterly miserable - but staying full remote doesn't mean a flat company structure is suddenly optimal for every workplace.

I agree that even middling quality middle managers provide plenty of value, but there definitely is a class of manager that does not know how to engage with all of their employee charges and make them effective. Most of the egregious side hustle situations I've run into have come from particular employees that felt they were so close to the chopping block that it didn't matter anyway, as they felt abandoned by their management chain either perceived or in fact. Most others have at least been respectful that the full time salary = time priority and because of that and reasonable task management it became not a problem.

> Management can be extremely strong at shielding you from unnecessary distractions and silliness when it's done well.

It is unfortunate that a good manager, not unlike a good sysadmin, is invisible; you never realise how much of a shit umbrella they are.

This is why, one on ones are great but you should also occasionally meet your manager and talk with them in a less formal setting. If you're out at dinner celebrating a new project release (especially if the drinks are flowing) - then you'll hear about all the shit they're keeping off your back.

I don't want to discount this kind of reason for wanting to "return to the office", and I think it's definitely part of the cause.

However, speaking as an Individual Contributor, I want to be back in the office so badly. I miss feeling really, humanly connected to my teammates. There's just no positive sense of camaraderie. Sure, we can bitch together about things, but I just find myself unable to connect with my coworkers as fellow human beings in my monkey sphere.

Before we went WFH I legitimately loved my job. Now I hate it.

As an IC, I fully support extroverts going back to the office. I just want introverts like myself to have the option to never go back to the office. I don't understand why people think it's either one or the other

As an introvert myself, I think I totally get your take on this.

But I've also been the only remote member of an otherwise in-person team. It was a truly terrible experience (as many others have written). I fear that the policy you're suggesting would make everything better for those in the office (the extroverts) and worse for those working remotely (the introverts).

FWIW I'm definitely an introvert and I can't wait to get back in the office. I don't want to have to talk to people all day but I really want some actual meatspace interaction. Being locked up for a year with two small children and only my wife as the other adult to talk to has not been good for my mental health.

Because it is one or the other. If office-first people are allowed to regain preeminence in a company, then that company will be back to abusing engineers by sitting them in hot-desk open office situations next to shouting salespeople in short order.

As an IC and an extrovert, I also never want to return to the office. I crushed a ton of hard work this year that I would have been incredibly distracted from by in-office activities otherwise.

Because you’ll miss out on in person discussions, not be in sync as a result, then leave because of communication issues.

Mixed working is the hardest to get right I think

You're advocating for a position as "a guy in a room" [0], and we've all been taught how dangerous and harmful that person ends up being for an organization that's trying to ship good software on time.

What you're asking for is, frankly, not reasonable. You want to be left alone to code, and that is simply not how software development works anymore (and arguably it never worked that way).

    [0] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/dont-go-dark/

Imagine a non-pandemic environment where you could go to a buddy’s house and work. Or for many people, their closest relationships are with their spouse and family. You no longer have to be separate from them for most of your waking hours. Work picks your “friends” for you and in many cases you won’t get along. It seems like you were lucky to be in a good situation.

> Imagine a non-pandemic environment where you could go to a buddy’s house and work.

I'm imagining it and it sounds like the literal worst thing.

You could, not have to. You would have the option to, while for most people they simply do not.

I wouldn't want to mix friendships and work. I'd also be wary about alliances forming outside of the workplace.

I think they meant working at a non-colleagues house. At least, that's what I plan to do when it's possible, every now and then. I think the change of pace would be nice, back at university I'd do the same with people not on my course. Being genuinely fond of each other makes time go faster.

Of course, I'd also want to work outside of the office, with my colleagues too. A change of environment every now and then can't hurt.

Pre-pandemic I used to occasionally do this with my coworkers and my boss, it was nice. Of course now all my coworkers and many people I knew have left the city and moved out of state, so this won't be possible again.

Of course, you're depending on your coworkers feeling likewise.

Instead of 100% return to the office how about having (optional) get together offline meetup every once in a while, it can be about work or simple lunch.

How do you do that when everyone lives x,000 miles away now?

Why would I stay in <big city close enough to commute> and pay <outrageous> rent/mortgage if I'm remote?

(Honest truth: that's what remoter weeks are for.)

Just chiming in to say some of us live in the big expensive cities precisely because of the life we lead outside of work. Otherwise, agreed.

Could flying the remote staff to an in-person meeting every 1-2 months be a good balance? As long as the flights are reasonably short (e.g., within the continental U.S. or within the E.U.), it's probably still cheaper than maintaining office space for the remote workers.

Because there is more to life than work and cheap rent. Large cities are cultural hubs with thousands of interesting people and many wonderful things to experience.

The mistake is thinking about hours instead of output. The notion of full-time comes from the factory model, where your output is a function of the time you spend working.

For knowledge work, we have known this is not the case for a very long time.

Peter Drucker has written rivers of ink about the subject.

The most valuable knowledge work, many times happen in the unlikeliest of places: the shower, working out, on a walk, watching tv, etc.

Solutions to problems come when they do, not when you want them to. The main thing that happens at the office is the busy work.

Similar to value based billing in the consulting world

I wonder if we’ll see a future where everyone will be contractors paid by value delivered, and companies compete to keep different people on retainer for capacity. Fun to ponder about

It seems very unlikely that this would lead to value based pricing.

On the contrary: with async WFH + everyone-a-contrator, the supply of work will become much more homogeneous and undifferentiated, which will lead to commoditization.

Doesn’t mean prices will converge to minimum wage! But bargaining power will shift in favor of the buyer (i.e. the businesses)

My problem with value based pricing is that so much of my time is blocked from producing value by management actions. I would be peeved to be judged on one thing and then have my time spent on anything diverting from that.

The problem is trying to accurately quantify value. If there is a metric, it will be gamed.

The whole idea of a salary is relatively new, since the industrial revolution. There were examples from earlier, but for the most part, everyone was what would now be a contractor. You'd negotiate to do a project for a set fee, or you'd negotiate to do whatever the boss needs at an hourly or daily wage for however long the boss needed you.

The tradeoff was stability for flexibility. People at the low end of the wage spectrum accepted lower daily wages for the stability of employment, and then the trend moved upwards.

It looks like the trend is now reversing at the highest salary levels. Most people now realize that having a salaried job isn't all that much more stable than being a contractor (in the US) with at-will employment in 49 states.

I can definitely see a future where more software engineers are paid per project instead of a salary. And maybe some companies will continually hire certain people that they like over and over again.

That's an incredibly broad generalization to draw over several thousand years of human history. I'd argue since at least ancient Rome the predominant model for societies has been the clientela patronage model [1] and its feudal derivatives. The employment model is a formalization of that relationship that sets up basic "serf rights" that were otherwise open to horrendous abuse before. The contractors of yore were mercenaries - they were usually paid more than the soldiers in standing armies (sound familiar?).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_ancient_Rome

Like I said, there are examples that predate the Industrial Revolution, but the idea of an average worker having pay stability is pretty new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary

I agree that pay stability is new, but that doesn’t mean they were in a contracting relationship. For most of recorded history, most people were engaged in some form of subsistence food production. Many were enslaved. Generally speaking, neither of those economic models are that close to “contracting.”

Tenant farming gets closer (although not really). Itinerant labor probably the closest, but I don’t think they made up much of the population in societies I know about. Skilled craftsman could also count, although they look more like a generalized small business than a “contractor” as at least I think about it.

This doesn’t really aid your argument. The client patron relationship is a lot more like a master servant relationship than an employer employee one. You are not equals in any sense in a client patron relationship. And it’s a personal relationship, not a contractual one.

If you read employment law, they exactly say master and servant actually: https://newworkplace.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/master-and-ser...

If you're a consultant you have to be comfortable with "selling" yourself, building your brand / networking to bid and win new projects. All this stuff is a hassle if you're not a social person. Its not a scientific result, but most of the engineers I know just want to work long-term on something cool and stick with a known company.

Yeah, that's the downside, but there are lots of headhunters even today that will find and negotiate contracts and then take a piece of it.

As more people move towards that model, I can see a race to the bottom in fees that those companies take. It'll be similar to the way actors get hired -- you get into a relationship with an agency but they're just negotiating contracts for you.

the marketing for contractors becomes easier when companies are forced to buy labor on the market

"The whole idea of a salary is relatively new, since the industrial revolution"

Actually salaries are much more ancient than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_legion#Pay

Basic pay for a member of a Roman legion was 225 denarii per year, later increased to 300, and then again increased to 500 to adjust for inflation. Higher ranked officers received higher salaries.

Like I said, there are examples that predate the industrial revolution, but they were mostly limited to government and public service jobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary

I think that hinges so heavily on healthcare that it’s hard to predict whether gig employment will suffice for more people.

Yes, agreed. A public option would help.

But for example, I pay for my own insurance. There are programs now where you can pay for your own insurance with pretax dollars, so my contracting rate just accounts for this. Since it's likely that high pay software engineers will be the first to go, they are also the most likely to be able to absorb that cost and risk, even without a public option.

Reading the article, I agree with the Author's sentiment. But the battle is not only for the Management it seems. As as example, if you are stuck working from Home due to pandemic with toddlers at Home and you are unlucky not to have a large house where you can have your total privacy during work hours from the entire family, you will struggle a lot to focus.

Also, whether for better or worse, that commute time is often working adult's (who has family) only 'free' and 'personal' time during the weekdays. I took the train and that sweet, sweet hour of no interruption was a bliss - I could browse the internet, listen to music, read tech articles or just chill. Now, I close the laptop and boom - the family is right there...don't get me wrong, I love them but I also love to have my sanity and that healthy separation from my family which the work on site afforded.

Why don’t you sign up for a coworking space, or work from a library, cafe, or similar?

Or heck just tell your spouse you need some me time and get out of the house for an hour a day.

Yeah and heck just tell your infants it's daddy's time now.

So it’s better to put yourself in a position where you are forced to drive an hour to work each day and spend 10 hours away from your infant just to get an hour to yourself?

Also this isn’t about your infant, no one is getting work done while watching an infant.

Seems like your complaints are mostly due to being unprepared for working from home, which, given the situation being thrust onto most of us, is understandable, but also not particularly representative of remote work. Most people aren't going to be working from home with children at home all day, the same way they wouldn't be leaving their children at home alone while they went to the office. Many will have a daycare or school at which their kids will be all day. The ones that don't likely have young children with a stay at home spouse, and yes, not having a dedicated setup for WFH may cause issues, but that certainly isn't universal.

The commuting argument makes absolutely no sense to me. I'd personally much rather be spending time with family, or literally anything else, other than being stuck in the car for an hour or two. If you feel differently, that's fine but literally nothing is stopping you from doing the same thing when working from home. If you drive to and from work, and you miss the solitude so much, then take the same amount of time to take a drive. If you take the train to and from work, and you simply need it, then do it. Requiring working in person however forces those who don't want the commute to participate. That's a though-process I simply can't understand.

>I'd personally much rather be spending time with family, or literally anything else, other than being stuck in the car for an hour or two. If you feel differently, that's fine but literally nothing is stopping you from doing the same thing when working from home

i take it you don't have kids? the commute provided me with some time to unwind and transition from work mode to dad mode. im a lot more irritable if i just go immediately from closing my laptop to dealing with the kids, and telling them that dad needs to go sit somewhere by himself for an hour after i finish work isnt gonna work for them.

If you don’t have at least a small office where you can shut the door, I have no idea how you’re getting anything done with small kids running around.

But that’s really a requirement for WFH and companies should start offering some kind of stipend to support that.

Assuming you do though, why can’t you stop work and then spend 30 minutes reading something, or working on a side project? My wife would be fine with me doing that, and she doesn’t keep track of when I finish work that accurately anyway.

I don't get this. We have an arrangement with my wife that I take the kid for a few hours right after work (we usually go to the park) so she gets her uninterrupted free time, then I also get mine at night when she goes to sleep (I usually go 1-2 hours later). Why would I choose a commute instead of this?

I think this is the death-knell for old-school management. Which has been coming for a while.

Employment used to be a for-life thing. You worked for an organisation your whole life, and climbed the management ladder as your career progressed. The number of people you managed was a sign of your success, and the number of people that the organisation employed was a sign of its success. Management's role was to make everyone work hard, and "working hard" was usually measured by how long people stayed in the office.

Now, we work for maybe 2 years for each of a series of different employers. We stay long enough to get some ticks on our resume, then move onwards and upwards. Freelancing/consulting for periods of our careers is normal. But management hasn't really changed or adapted to this - there's still very much a sense that a manager is there to make everyone work hard, and most organisations have no idea how productive their employees (because they measured productivity by how long people were at their desks).

So management culture needs to change. For the better, I think. But it's going to be a shock for a lot of people.

When I worked for Intel 2005-2007, at the beginning they were extremely hybrid friendly.

It quickly became apparent that many employees were abusing the system, and not really doing their job. Sometimes, "telecommuting for a week" was codeword for a 2nd week of vacation. There were also rumors of employees running liquor stores while on the clock.

IMO, the hybrid model will work best when employers and employees can build mutual trust and quickly rectify when someone remote is slacking off. I suspect it means learning how to identify who needs to work in person, and who's most productive at home.

Slacking has nothing to do with your whereabouts. A person can slack while they are sitting next to you. What you need instead is a way to evaluate performance and take action based on that performance.

IME, if you get enough people together someone is going to abuse the system. If it's an exception, then making a rule is the wrong play.

Now again IME, if it's the culture across the board, then that's a leadership problem and likely an organization with no direction.

As an outsider looking in, I know Paul Otellini got a lot of good press for his time at Intel even though he passed on making chips for the iPhone and missed mobile completely.

So I can't say if Intel during that period fits with my statements above.

It's easy to deride middle management especially when they try to micromanage by requiring people to be in-office or via other forms of surveillance.

However measuring productivity / output is an really tough problem. If you're a manager, how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working on a problem that is twice as difficult as everyone thought? Especially with software, estimation is notoriously inaccurate.

I think one of the only methods is competition. Was another company or team able to deliver the same feature with less resource expenditure?

> If you're a manager, how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working on a problem that is twice as difficult as everyone thought?

I... talk to them? Ask them questions? Probe to see if they're running into issues? Offer help, support, possible solutions, or just be their rubber duck?

If I sense there might be issues, I probe into the team, solicit anonymous feedback, and otherwise discretely ask for other people's perspectives.

Is it a perfect science? No. Can you get fleeced by staff for a while? Absolutely. But the low performers eventually reveal themselves if you're paying any attention. And the reality is the vast majority of people genuinely want to do a good job. So my preference is to trust my staff to be honest and hard working, recognizing the rare possibility that I could end up the victim of a sociopath who deliberately tries to abuse that trust.

Sure, but then that really boils down to: be subjective, use your manager's intuition.

It's what most managers do, but I'd argue it is not very effective. People regularly overestimate their ability to judge others. Most rigorous studies have shown that judges make worse decisions when they see defendants in person vs. sentencing based on facts and history alone. Intelligence agencies are frequently tricked by moles despite intense training.

If judges and counter-intel agents regularly fail at this, isn't it foolish to think that eng. managers have some secret sauce?

I can't agree anough with this approach.

> If you're a manager, how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working on a problem that is twice as difficult as everyone thought?

Why not... Ask them directly? If you understand the type of work your team is doing it should be easy to figure that out. If you manage software engineers and have no idea how software is created no metric is going to save you.

> Was another company or team able to deliver the same feature with less resource expenditure?

How many corners did they cut do deliver faster? And how long will it take before they get crushed by technical debt? There is always a trade-off between quality and velocity. High velocity is immediate to see, but good quality takes time to be appreciated.

>There is always a trade-off between quality and velocity.

This is a common trope but is rarely the case in my experience. Components designed to be flexible and 'future-proof' are the ones that quickly become overengineered, resulting in late deliveries and costly maintenance.

Writing the minimum code required to solve the problem is often a winning strategy.

> If you're a manager, how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working....

It's sort of strange that we even take this point of view: that somehow human output is to be measured in the way a machine's output is measured or the efficiency of a light bulb.

But that opens up a whole can of worms....

Agreed, a team that spends 50% of the day staring out the window may actually be thinking and come up with a solution that beats another team. Output/results are ultimately what matter and since we all have finite lifetimes, results per unit time is also quite important.

But isn't competition ultimately the only yardstick by which we can measure this?

Well so the basic idea is this:

Either we can A) evaluate/measure engineers' output (e.g. commits/tickets), and promote/hire/fire based on whether they do enough of it per/day ("meritocratic"?)

B) Just plop engineers in chairs, and peer over their shoulder to make sure they aren't on reddit all day, and then trust that however long it took them to build the thing was reasonable.

A is really hard, it was the false-promise of agile. But in a remote culture, you either have to do A or install screen-monitoring software on your engineers to do B (or just hope/pray).

Of course perhaps there's another option, like a technical manager who reviews the volume/quantity of PRs and assesses based on that, but seems rare.

Agreed. I think the intent of the previous commenters was more along the lines of "How do we determine which employees are working earnestly and effectively vs working without motivation or ineffectively?"

Its important to take time out of the question, because time spent, after a very small minimum, isn't a strong indicator of performance.

While not fun to point out, there is such a thing as toxic people who intentionally under perform at their jobs.

> how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking

You don't! As long as they deliver what you ask of them, and do it well, it is none of your business if they used 40 hours a week or 1 hour a week doing it, if they played with their kid while doing it, loaded their dishwasher, or called their mother while doing it.

Who is doing the estimates of how long thing will take to deliver?

That's already a problem in the office culture. I may be able to tell if you are diligent, but I can't tell if you are productive. And as a manager, I would rather have three hours of effective work than 8 hours of ineffective work.

That means you have 5 more hours for meetings.

Is that a joke or meant seriously? I really can't tell.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/26/teleperform...

So you are saying is that the solution is to just cram people into an office. They are forced to work or something, some part of the time, right? It's not like there's much to do after gossipping and smalltalk. No need for you to do anything, really. Easy work, smart!

This person seems to have a really cynical take on management. The best answer I have to it is that management becomes a fundamental necessity to have productive teams and that applies regardless of remote work vs not.

As soon as work scales beyond what a single human can do in complexity and / or size you need multiple humans. Proceeding forward without anybody actually coordinating what those humans are doing turns out to be a disaster for multiple reasons, many of which if this person was subjected to the situation, they would immediately invent an equivalent of a "middle manager" or boss to solve.

I actually don't see the need for this decreasing with remote work, in fact I think it might increase.

My fear is that the author is 100% correct but that what will go away in the near future isn't the office itself, but full-time salaries.

I've always found it weird that working a salaried position means you've got to have your butt in a chair 9-5 regardless of anything else going on - but you also need to be on hand to fix problems at 10PM without any compensation earned. It might honestly be nice if we transitioned professional work to hourly compensation - I think that would strongly reinforce the bounds of what you, the employee, owe the company and what compensation you should earn in exchange.

If a shift to hourly happens, I suspect we're going to see reluctance from a lot of businesses to pay actually-equivalent hourly rates, which will give them sticker shock ("$200/hr!? I was only paying about $100/hr before with salaries!" Right, but your workers were only spending an average of half their time on stuff that will count as hourly-billable work—numbers exaggerated for ease of calculation, but that's the reaction I expect, in general), coupled with a lot of newbies willing to take those too-low rates because they haven't done the math, and think the rates look high, especially if we're talking (as we most likely are) contract-type work without any kind of benefits. IOW I expect a reduction in total effective comp for the sector, at least for the first few years, if that shift is widespread.

In my state (WA), we can't have all of our employees in the exempt status [1]. I'm guessing its the same for most companies in WA?

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/exempt-employee.asp

Exactly, showing up at 9:05am makes us late, but feel free to keep us late on some fire drill to 7pm, light up our slack/email after hours and occasionally call us in the dead of night. (How many people logged into HN after dinner are still logged into work on another window?)

I worked somewhere where we had a multi-week emergency with basically the entire team working 12-16 hours/day including the weekend.

They then ceremonially gave us some comp days to use, not even making up for the weekend days loss, let alone the double/triple weekday time.

The joke of course is our firm already had "unlimited" vacation time so... infinity+X = infinity. Also they were picky about how soon we could use the days, and that we couldn't use them consecutively, etc etc.

I push back on that and comp the time. I wish there was better regulation around comp time.

That's not really possible in an environment where you don't have piece work.

I'm currently spending an indeterminate amount of time crawling through an enterprise mess trying to identify where an issue is. What's my unit price for that?

I could care less about what happens to my bosses.

I’m never going back to an office unless they pay for my gas, mileage, time spent in traffic, office wardrobe, etc.

It’s unfortunate for these companies that they were so reluctant previously to allow anyone but a reverse-schedule off-short worker have the privilege of not having to be in the office. The cat is out of the bag.

> I’m never going back to an office unless they pay for my gas, mileage, time spent in traffic, office wardrobe, etc.

What's the difference between 150K job that additionally pays for those things and 170K job that doesn't pay for them?

The time wasted in traffic turns an 8 hour work day into 9 or 10 hours. I would work 8 hour days for $120k. But in order to get me to work 10 hours I would need more like 200. 12 hours I would be demanding 3-500k probably. Time is not fungible.

While the article is overly combative and goes off the rails at times I’m glad to see it on the front page of HN. Remote work changes the nature of first line/ middle management and the many of the players that were well suited to the in person way of doing things aren’t going to do as well in a remote forest environment.

The author hits one important difference- people who are energized by social interactions won’t get as many of them in a remote first world. Doubly so if they feel rewarded by power dynamics. So the things that pushed them toward management in the first place get taken away, no wonder so many of them want to get back in the office.

However, we are going to see more remote first companies and I think we’ll see different management models arise from that. One one hand, I could see a hellscape of technocrats trying to micromanage metrics on people emerging. On the other, I could see a more humane set of managers less interested in power dynamics than in team success. I’ve seen both and we’ll see what becomes a norm and where.

At the moment one big reason remote work looks very attractive because 9-5 is still seen as the norm.

I'm all for remote work and think its superior in pretty much every dimension you measure workers on.

Having said that in a world where remote working is seen as the norm I do wonder how I will feel. I can see more and more technology being introduced to monitor staff at home for example. And the competition for jobs might spike.

Personally I think I'll be ok. Here's hoping I can never go back to an office. But yeah I wonder if I'll still feel the same in a few years...

> And the competition for jobs might spike.

And salaries may drop precipitously if you are in one of the higher paid countries, because you are now competing with people who may be equally as qualified as you but can make WAY less and afford a very comfortable standard of living anywhere in the world.

Even within countries. Why may San Fran salaries when you just found someone in Fargo, SD that can do the same job and would prefer to stay there.

I realize companies are discussing keeping Silicon Valley salaries wherever their employees choose to live, but that can't last. You could pack up and move to another country and live like an absolute king.

I think observed only along the axis of the increase in remote work as a percentage of available software jobs this may true, but may not properly account for the continual geometric increase in demand for highly skilled software developers happening alongside the other shifts.

Or in other words, I suspect demand for developers is going up faster than remote is addressing supply.

Haven't we had basically this with outsourcing ("same" work for way less money)? Was it not, all things considered, nightmare fuel on average?

> I realize companies are discussing keeping Silicon Valley salaries wherever their employees choose to live, but that can't last.

1) Now that managers have realized that the programmers don't need to be in Silly Valley, the next realization is that they can hire outside Silly Valley and pay less. There are a whole lot of people in cities like Pittsburgh who will be happy to get 10% less than Silly Valley to get a remote job. And then 10% less than that to get a remote job. Lather, rinse, repeat until salraies are at the cost of living for the area.

2) Once they do that, they will realize that they can lay off almost everybody with a high salary for no net loss.

If you're just a programmer, life is about to get bad. Hope you banked money while you had it.

Honest question. How many people who can get jobs at SV companies are still sitting in crappy towns in the US? I'm sure there are some, but I'm not sure there as many as people think.

The world wide developer pool is certainly a bigger issue, but that's been around a long time. Remote is only part (and I would argue a small part) of the reason that outsourcing isn't used more often.

I think what we'll see is the super low salary areas rise and the super high areas come down a bit. I don't think it's about to 'get bad' for anyone with the skillset to work at a SV company though. In fact, it's more likely about to get much better for everyone else. I've already seen salaries in my locale go up since local companies are now competing with nearby big cities companies who are now comfortable with remote workers.

> There are a whole lot of people in cities like Pittsburgh who will be happy to get 10% less than Silly Valley to get a remote job.

Do you think people in Pittsburgh shouldn't have jobs?

Bosses love the idea that they capture your time and part of your soul with work - you are theirs, “full-time.” Their intention was not just to hire you for a task within an organization - it was to trap you and your production in the office, and on some level divorce you from your labor while extracting it, in exchange for the “protection” of full-time work that rarely if ever defends you from layoffs or firings, especially in at-will employment states. That’s why Shayne’s statement is so powerful - it is not about work, it is about ownership.

How many of y'all working full time signed a contract that says anything you make, on or off the clock, belongs to The Company? How many of y'all noticed that in the contract and tried to negotiate it out, how many who did succeeded in that?

My current gig were happy to take out that clause (I don't work in California). In general, before accepting an offer you have leverage to push back on this stuff (at least in tech).

This article presents such a dark take on the employer employee relationship that I can’t tell if I am truly blessed for the jobs I’ve had, or this person has a distorted view of incentives and motivations.

I really can’t tell.

I worked for a very large Telco, and Telcos are the definition of "1960s conservative management style". It was the most management heavy place I could have ever conceived.

This article is absolutely, 100% spot on the mark in every possible way.

Of course I left that place ASAP!

You're truly blessed!

The real issue at hand is that businesses do not like getting played the same way they've been playing employees for a long time. If I get my work done in 50% of the time I don't get to take any time off, and the "quota" moves up without moving up my pay (or at least not proportionately) .

However if I'm late on my work there certainly will be "overtime" ... So which is it? Is it that I am paid for a certain quantity of work however long it takes, or that I'm paid for however much i can accomplish in a certain amount of time? (and during certain hours I might add...)

They're contradictory so it cannot be both.

It’s neither. Unless you’re 1099/hourly or in sales you get paid to be available to work during a set period of time (generally not specific hours), regardless of how much you accomplish during that time. Keep in mind this works both ways - if you finish your work in 5 hours and spend the next 3 messing around on Reddit or whatever you still get paid for 8. Getting paid for actual hours worked isn’t as much fun as you probably think.

"if you finish your work in 5 hours and spend the next 3 messing around on Reddit or whatever you still get paid for 8"

You say that almost like it's a good thing when it sounds to me like a tragic waste of life that benefits no one.

messing around on Reddit for 3 hours is a lot less useful than what I'd be doing at home if I had 3 hours to spare

I've taken these spare time gaps to do work like things at work but that have lasting value beyond my work day/week/role.

For example I'll read books.

How to manage work-from-home will probably be figured out, but you won't like it.[1]

[1] https://www.teramind.co/

I'm quite confident this is what any kind of WFH arrangement is going to look like for most people, in the near future. Some segment of the Tech Elect will not have to suffer it, but most people will, including programmers (most of whom aren't in FAANG or fancy start-ups or finance, and hell, some of those might resort to this kind of thing, too).

Whose to say this is solely applicable to WFH? Given the numerous anecdotes about how much time is spent at work socializing, I don't see how companies use this to monitor remote employees, but don't start utilizing this for those coming into an office.

I think it’s inevitable. If the software naively measures keystrokes or idle time, there are obvious ways to trick it. Unfortunately less technologically adept employees might not be able to circumvent it

I think programmers need to unionize and reject this nonsense.

I've always thought it would be interesting to experiment with a 3 day work week where all work is done onsite, no remote access is possible and no after hours access is possible.

I bet productivity would double.

I've been working from home for the last nine years, running my own business. All of my contractors and employees work remotely. In one instance, I've yet to meet the person I hired physically (I knew them from a previous job of course -- they are not strangers.) I absolutely love remoote. So much less BS. My employees do their thing and I do mine and we're satisfied at the end of the day if we meet each others expectations. I don't care when, how and where they work or who else they are working for. It took a little bit of planning and setup.

We mostly communicate asynchronously. There is no expectation that a slack message will be answered in realtime. Before the pandemic, we used to meetup onece a month for lunch or a day out (no work) just to get to know each other.

I am also careful about sharing sensitive information that could hurt the business if misused. I assume that my employees have outside business interests and take the appropriate precautions. But for the most part these are precautions one should take anyway, remote or not.

It's a tiny business, so it really doesn't need a lot of control or supervision and I'm happy not to have to supervise if I don't have to. To me having to actively managec (and god forbid -- micromanage) an employee is a red flag -- I hired the wrong person.

The article is right the real reason people want their employees to work from the office is control -- ironically a misguided sense of control.

Statements like this:

"The reward system on the corporate ladder has become inextricably attached to a kind of professional abuse - that the only way to rise within a company is to be able to 'take control' of a department and its people."

without sources to back them up should not convince anybody. Just because the author is spouting social science of the workplace is no reason to give them carte blanche as far as sources go.

Man every time I think about leaving my company I read an article like this and realize how good I must have it. I mean I work in an industry that generally does help the world, but we just don't have to deal with the stuff in this article. Middle management is there to assist, not be cops. The CEO works his ass off because he believes in what he's doing and what he's built. He delegates because he has to. We're embracing remote work as the "new normal" and the bosses are working with those of us in the trenches to find solutions that work for everybody. It's not perfect but it certainly isn't the environment this article describes.

For people who have seen this, no citations are needed. It's like stating "water flows downhill."

No it's not. It's like looking at the cloudy sky and saying "all sky is gray."

I have seen it in other places, but not in the majority of places I've worked.

Just to add another opinion, I work at a large healthcare company and all layers of management have been kind and understanding. They are sending emails about how they go on walks after lunch and tips on separating work and the rest of life. Or how they deal with the kids at home.

As for my own work, I don't make the full 40 hours, sometimes I take a shower or quit early when the day is almost over and I can't squeeze any tasks into my last 30 (or 60 ;)) min. But I did the same in the office, I just can focus hard for 40 hrs a week. In office I'd goof off, take long coffee breaks, go on a solitary walk at 15:00 (3PM), promise myself I'd work on the train but read a book in stead... etc. But I have been finding it a lot more easy to call (MS Teams video) colleagues from around the world. It's more normal to do it and to have the cam on. It works great, I'm unifying parts of the company I didn't even know existed. And all that while sitting at home being barely able to walk because of a foot (both feet actually) condition.

After being told once, "As an executive we expect 100% mindshare," I changed my entire philosophy out of rebellion and it has worked extremely well.

1. NO ONE owns your time, especially your "mindshare". This goes for everyone in the organization.

2. The organization should view time as something they are borrowing you from your real life, your family, your recreation, your mental stability.

3. The organization should invest in your time so there is no arguments from your real life when the organization needs extra effort.

4. Invest interest in your employees external projects as the vast majority of your technical breakthroughs will be informed by those projects.

5. Presence does not equate to productivity. It only equates to physical presence.

6. Invest time in understanding the problems your team finds interesting or challenging.

7. Encourage an environment of collaboration where each employee is excited to help their team members even if it costs them extra hours.

8. Give them back the hours from 7 when you can.

9. Realize your job is to make their job fulfilling and challenging.

10. Don't be an A-hat.

"Now, someone insufferable will read this and say “NOT ALL MIDDLE MANAGERS,” and let me tell you, if you’re thinking that, you are probably part of the problem. "

The author's somewhat cynical take might be an issue here.

The 'employee' probably feels just fine at home.

But coordinating people across product, p. marketing, ops, dev, hr, finance, sales support, sales ... this is a lot of what makes a company tick.

Companies are not collections of automotons doing individual bits of work, the good ones are 'teams' and this dynamic is going to be hard remote.

The article is effectively a little too cynical.

That said, there are also some side benefits no doubt.

We've had some big issues with people basically disappearing during this remote work time. And since we are a union shop, we've been basically unable to hold them accountable for it.

Is the necessary work still getting done?

Yes, but the slack has to be picked up by others.

Of course not, almost by definition. Projects are scoped based on needs and based on the amount of employees available. I will not sign up to deliver Google Chrome with three employees.

I'm going to assume the article was in the context of software development.

Doesn't it ignore a large swat of people? What about all the other business partners, operators and users/customers?

Generally the managers job is to engage will all these other parties and identify their needs, evaluate if the team can help them with their problems or not, find out what possible solutions could be done and what the cost of it would be, justify if the team should grow or shrink based on what people would like the team to accomplish, and set expectations and priorities for what the team will deliver each quarter/year. At the same time, make sure the team can focus on delivering on those commitments, by both understanding well what the ask is, eliminating blockers they face, and keeping their distractions on tengential things to a minimum.

They also need to listen to each individual reports own career aspirations and desire, and see how they can support their growth, as well as evaluate their performance within the team and provide feedback on that regard, while also fighting for those that are exceeding to get promoted or receive raises within the organization.

It does mean they don't "do the work" of what is eventually delivered, but it doesn't mean their work wasn't impactful.

As a team lead, I'm exposed to that half of the world as I need to support the manager in this process, and I'm also involved in "doing the work". So I feel I can respect both sides, and you'll know when you have a bad manager, because more of that work will fall on the engineers and that'll take away from them "doing the work", and you'll start to feel like the team has no direction, no idea what it should do or where it wants to go, etc.

Edit: You'll also see that in companies where the lead engineer ends up doing this due to not having a dedicated manager, they can no longer contribute at what they are good at "design and implementation of software".

I agree with the article but I am nonetheless pessimistic. I do think remote work will stay, the relentless force of capital is now on its side, but I’m afraid that’s only because even in a remote work paradigm the “managers” will still discover new ways to control, abuse and enjoy their employees.

Ok some work can not be done remotely. There are also cases when the work can (and should be) remote but the laborer can't (kids, little room etc. etc.) So we set this aside.

Other than that finally there is the article that reflects my feelings about the subject. I always thought that this was a "plot" for bosses to "own" you soul and for a sizeable percentage of middle managers to be a parasites who get credits for the things that could and should be done without them.

I have my own company and when I need employees (contract workers actually) they always work from their own premises.

I've been WFH for almost 10 years, only going in the office for important meetings. Most of that time I didn't even have a desk. Nobody ever questioned if WFH affected my productivity. I just assumed everyone knew what I knew, that I could get more done from home and minimize stress. I don't remember a single awkward conversation about it.

Now it's a daily topic and it's getting tiresome. We'll see if the "back to office" pundits succeed in ruining a good thing.

Ctrl f promotion / bonus

- Once the world returns back to normal, people who have more “face time” will grow faster in organizations. (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-showing-your-face-at...)

Default brain drift will be exploited by career climbers. It will be one of the most powerful reasons WFH efforts will be weakened.

this comment thread makes it apparent that WFH, hybrid, in person will become part of recruitment. allow people of all types to self sort

Exactly this!!! So many truths in this article, for things that we’re going to see changing around us really soon. The software development related jobs are going to see a massive change the following months/years while we transition to a hybrid environment. Managers are afraid that WFH will make them obsolete, but they instead should find new ways to adapt.

The thing I love about this piece is that it almost gets at the core idea that so many organizational practices sacrifice the organization's nominal purpose (e.g. help the business get work done) in order to reinforce the social hierarchy/pecking order.

You see the same thing across many organizations large and small, including schools, hospitals, etc..

It amazed me while companies like bank of America has enforced working from home of all for the last ten years, when facing the "culture war" of office vs home, nobody seems to pay attention what BOA has done and how they did it for a prolonged period of time. Why? because BOA is not as "digital" as startups?

One thing I have disliked about remote work is that more and more meetings are being recorded, and just regular meetings, not presentations and such. I don't recall having my team meetings recorded ever before COVID. It feels like Big Brother is watching, and definitely changes the dynamic of a discussion in a bad way.

That's why the bosses should get familiar with remote working, too. They should experience it first before they feel. Currently they're scared from "nowhere". Instead if they look at the result delivered they will get to know how to improve the situation.

Please, remote managing, instead of getting scared.

The fundamental problem in my opinion is that people should not be paid for their time, they should be paid for their actual work output, that’s the secret of productivity —- if you simply pay someone on the clock, whether by the hour or by a salary, you’re inviting them to waste time.

I think this might be good for very small "prototype and forget" kind of jobs which are mostly filled by consultants anyway. But for everything else that requires expertise and skills which are not shared equally given the vastness of the tech world this is just not a good approach IMO.

I don’t understand why disparities in expertise would have an effect on this? Some people take longer to complete a task, others take less, the task is a value, you pay for the work output. I suppose it’s different situations where people have a stake in the company, like ownership, who are helping to actually steward its direction. But for most of us that’s not really the case.

I can't give any insight in my bosses' brain only my own:

Working from home opened my eyes. I already hated going to the office because of rude/loud coworkers, an open floor plan, nothing to do in my breaks than to sit at my desk (no nice parks near me) & a 15 mile (30min) drive to work.

During my time at home (during my breaks) I was able to do some gardening, visit my mother-in-law and walked our dog. I took me around 2 minutes to get ready to work. All of that on top of being able to concentrate. I actually liked my job and was looking forward to working again.

Now that I'm back in the office I just feel out of place. I can't concentrate, I have to talk to people who think they can interrupt me at any time even after politely telling them to get lost. I don't get much stuff done, my productivity dropped to pre-wfh levels.

So to all managers/bosses/whatever that insist on everyone being in the office: Fuck you!

It's a fundamental debate about the nature of pay and work.

Do you think you are paying $X/year to achieve Y goals? Or, do you think you are paying $x/hour to put an ass in a chair?

Which one you pick seems to decide how you feel about flex time, remote work, ... .

You're a pretty terrible manager if your metric for employee productivity/utility is butt-in-seat-time. In fact, you're so terrible that you're the problem, not any employee you might be "managing".

Productivity cargo cult will never die. Enterprise is predicated on this; but let's take the obverse of this cynicism: there are jobs, and people in them. This serves its own purpose.

> This is a dysfunctional view of work on three levels:

> 1. Management is not being good the same thing as being at your job.

I'm not sure what that sentence means - perhaps some words were deleted from it?

I worry that leadership will decide that, since lots of people are working remotely anyway, they can hire agencies for less than FTEs and cut costs even further.

As long as managers are called 10x employee or force multipliers and treated as a progression for an engineer, this discussion can never be on equal terms

I am pro-permanent wfh, but do we really need to have the exact same discussion 4 times a day on this?

It's because most managers are incapable. They want to make sure that employees are spending the time. They don't care about actual production value.

This makes no sense in a capitalist society. Of course, that's not the reason why companies hire so many people in the first place. It's all for politics.

So why bother to make them work at all in the first place? Why not hire people and give them free money? To be fair, they can hire using a random number generator.

If you don't come in to the office, your job can be outsourced to India.

Who cares? Outsourcing has been a big stick waved by management to scare employees for decades now, but its had pretty mixed results. The reality is, at least for programmers, there isn't enough local talent to go around. There's plenty to be found overseas, but companies are still clearly hesitant to go after it. There are cultural, language, governmental, and time-based issues that can't be ignored. Perhaps someday we get to a point where companies are willing to ignore all of that and ship everything overseas, but I doubt it, and in the mean time, there is absolutely no reason to not call their bluff.

> The reality is, at least for programmers, there isn't enough local talent to go around.

Exactly: local talent. Because they want their damn talent to come into the office. And if they refuse to do so, they might as well get non-local talent.

I could be wrong but I think that, once all the Indians who can do what I can do have been employed, there will still be someone left willing to pay me what I make now.

Capable software engineers are just that valuable and that few.

Hi, I started reading your article and then stopped because I didn't know what it was about. Consider leading with a more coherent argument in the first two paragraphs.

I really wish Hacker News would stop being the place for people to share this kind of feedback. There's a comment section on the article itself.

TLDR: Middle managers are scum. “If you disagree you are part of the problem”. Remote work makes it harder to satisfy their need to control you. And that’s why corporations want you back in the office.

Am I missing anything?

I agree. I read: "Middle managers are often graded on the work of their team, which means that they are actively incentivized to steal work and do little of their own."

Seems like they would be incentivized to help their team perform and keep them happy (so they don't quit).

I image this person would learn a lot from being a middle manager.

You mention a best case scenario for middle management, while the article discusses a more worst case one.

As always, reality is someone in between. Though in my experience, there’s usually more toxic middle managers.

The author is a business owner with employees.

We want leaders, not managers.

I don't get the feeling that people fully appreciate the gravity of 'my team is more productive now that we work at home'. That means your team does not need to be a team. The work is mostly commoditized and completely outsourceable, in whole or in part.

It sounds like you're saying a group of collaborating persons is only a "team" if they're physically colocated.

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