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Comment by eightysixfour | Hacker News Reader

Interesting framing - why is this a bad thing for Dell or the employees? It isn’t like a BS hybrid environment where everyone knows, but it isn’t written anywhere, that being in-office is an important part of career growth.

There are benefits for employees working at home, there are benefits to companies for employees coming to work. Letting people self-select seems like a great way to have a culture that acknowledges the benefits and weaknesses of both modalities.

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Unless you notice that all your WFH are actually the good employees, and the in-office end up being lack luster sycophants that you do not want to promote. From the POV of executive this is a nightmare.

I have WFH a lot and never really had any issues with it and generally preferred it over commuting. But I did miss the in-office connection. Having taken a 100% remote leadership role, it hit me why all these executives are freaking out and mandating RTO. If your job is to communicate in the course of creating and changing processes to drive the company forward, then your job is easily twice as hard when everyone is remote. Sprinkle in a handful of offshore teams and...

No one ever gets on camera. I and other leaders set an example and get on camera for every meeting, but most employees and contractors do not follow suit. So, I lose any body language communication from them, and if they can see mine, I don't get the feedback from that since I can't see them. Very subtle loss of information but it adds up to be huge. You end up having to pull everything out of ICs to get them to engage. It is fucking exhausting. Not only that, when you multiply this across the organization it obviously compounds and can spiral into a lot of uncertainty.

Additionally, you are in meetings constantly where you are fixed in position in front of your station. For those of us on camera it seems to take a lot more energy than being in person, like you have to stage yourself since you can always see your image and you are subconsciously paying attention to it and adjusting. Contrasted with being in a meeting where you are in the room with nearly everyone at once where a matrix of (again) body language is constantly feeding information to everyone. All of that is lost. Even if we are all on camera I cannot focus on every tile and we certainly not making adhoc one-on-one body language connections as the meeting progresses.

To the average employee, they don't care about losing all that if they can skip the commute and spend more time with their family. I totally get it, but for leadership it is soul crushing.

I don't think anyone believes leadership have souls anymore.

Don't have time.

I suspect this is bad for dell because employees called their bluff, Dell would probably be negatively affected by only promoting from half of their talent pool. It's unclear how this is bad for workers, since they didn't "defect" (in a game theorhetic sense)

I’m not sure it is bad to filter out people from the potential leadership pool that aren’t invested in the culture and style Dell wants. They get the best of both worlds - strong ICs who weren’t bought in and are going to job hop anyways, and self-selected people who want to rise in the company.

I’d prefer this as a filter to the old school “first in, last to leave” bullshit.

So you value passion for the company culture and style over, say, effectiveness, ingenuity, and performance? The idea that you would not just promote the best people because they work at home is just absurd and bad for business.

To add, the best people will almost certainly pick the work from home option, leaving behind those who would have difficulty finding another job if they lost the current one. Hence this means you’d actively have worse employees, just for some company culture.

> To add, the best people will almost certainly pick the work from home option

Citation needed.

Do you think only ineffective, low performance people will go into the office? This is a "yes and" situation, not a binary one.

There will be high performers who choose to stay at home and there will be high performers who choose to go in. Between the two, they're going to choose the ones that go in. They clearly place some sort of value on having people in office, whether that is to help grow new employees, build a specific in-office culture, or because they want their leads and leaders to have physical, face to face interactions.

I just don't believe it is bad for them to be transparent about what they want, to use it as a filter for who they're going to promote, and set expectations accordingly. If you don't like it, you can choose not to work there.

There's two possible interpretations here.

One is that Dell wanted to use stay at home as a filter for promoting people that believe in it, the other is that Dell was using promotion as a stick (as in carrot and stick) to get people to come into the office.

We can't really say which of these they're doing, but my vote would be the former.

It depends on what it means for the workers. I can see Dell being the place that wants everyone grinding hard (whether they actually do is another matter).

So Dell may view these employees as those disengaged and just there for a paycheck.

WFH employees are interchangeable with employees in other countries (India, Poland come to mind). As a manager, I don't care where you work if you are not in the office, so I'll find the best employee at the lowest possible price.

False. I need you on my timezone or really close to it. I have been dealing with software development teams that are 12 hours off and they have settled into a pattern of ill-communication because it is simply too difficult to sync up properly. They dig in on analysis for stories on their time and have to ask questions of us. The following day they get an answer and have to reply again for more clarification. All this after having groomed with the business and having standups together early mornings. I could go on and on, but it royally sucks. I'm trying to fix it, but the end goal is to switch the teams to ones in my timezone. Not to mention how discriminatory and hateful US devs are to India devs...it is just constant bullshit.

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