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A comment on Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever. Parent comment

Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by dumbfoundded on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @01:38PM (#23156941)
I actually think the ranks of middle managers will increase as more people work from home. Especially on the engineering side. The whole point of managers is to facilitate communication between people and teams. WFH certainly doesn't help communication problems. HR should pretty much drop to 0 though.
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by ranci on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @08:38PM (#23162019)
How exactly does it help to pass communications through a person (the manager) that, for the most part, does not understand the technical details of which they are speaking? We literally pay for slack for communication. No one needs an arbitrary human to act as a gatekeeping communication conduit.
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by dumbfoundded on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:19PM (#23162330)
Maybe at tiny companies. At larger companies, you can't scale communication as a fully connected graph.
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by ranci on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:42PM (#23162499)
I guess that's why you have multiple slack channels instead of one. You're trying to justify paying someone over 100 grand a year to be a worse form of communication than the software you're already paying for to communicate.
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by dumbfoundded on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @10:02PM (#23162627)
I don't think I'm trying to justify any San Francisco salaries, lol. The point I'm trying to make is that a single person can only have so much organizational knowledge overhead. Facilitating communication between the right people without spamming the wrong people is tough.

The github corporate move from a flat structure to a hierarchical is probably a good case study to read if you're interested: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/800

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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by ryanwaggoner on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @02:16PM (#23157555)
What are the functions of HR that you imagine them doing such that they’ll all be made obsolete by WFH?
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by dumbfoundded on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @04:22PM (#23159207)
Pretty much anything related to the work environment. This can include maintaining a safe work environment, accommodations for specific employee needs, handling employee disputes.
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by ryanwaggoner on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @04:52AM (#23164900)
That's a fraction of what HR does. Compensation, benefits, hiring, wellness, training, performance reviews, etc, etc. I doubt that even 10% of what HR does is tightly related to a physical space.
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by Joof on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:17PM (#23162321)
I don't see how this isn't still necessary.
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by dumbfoundded on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:49PM (#23162545)
Do you see how these problems greatly diminish if people cannot interact physically?
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by ranci on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:45PM (#23162519)
You don't see why maintaining a work environment wouldn't be necessary if the entire company were allowed to work from home?
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Re:Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever by umbos on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @05:31AM (#23165095)
The work environment remains, it just shifts location.
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