In my case small percentage of total time and making the 5% more effective to make the remaining 95% less effective doesn't seem like good tradeoff, just not having co-workers interrupt me because I'm near and know the answer is a blessing.
But from manager position I can see that, my 5-10% spent on meetings & related stuff is what they do maybe 80% of the time. Then again bringing 20 people to office just to keep one or two managers happy is also a waste.
> The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
Remote work does require shift of habits, training can help (maybe a niche here for company doing the training?) but it still takes time and effort if you did it in person for last 10-20 years
Role of a manager that will change significantly based on where the team is sitting - The ability to convey meaning and emotion over written comms and over video calls, to drive the team forward without being too mechanical about it.
Specifically I think the major disconnect is not so much between middle managers and IC's, it's between executives and the rest of the org.
Unfortunately I'm beginning to thing that this is truly a case of misaligned incentives that may prove hard to fix. What I mean is that executives are directly incentivized to be in the office. Almost all of their career capital is tied up in relationships and patterns of decision making with other executives.
Good day for a manager or IC - 'Wow, I really got a lot done today and I'm moving the team goals forward.'
Good day for an executive - 'That conversation with Dan and Steve went really well.'
Probably the only group made more productive are senior independent engineers.
How so? What prevents that? I don't believe it, but people like saying it without evidence.
It sucked. If the company doesn't shift and completely overhaul its entire culture from the ground up to full remote including junior mentoring, it's difficult to see, especially from the managers and senior perspective who already know everything to get their work done and be productive, how much knowledge I missed out on as a junior.
When I was in the office, I would pass by a coworkers and see some new development environment or tool on their monitor and I would ask them "Hey, sorry, what's that <thing> you use", "Oh yeah, it's a tool for doing X, it's very useful, you should try it.", "Oh neat, thanks". When we switched to remote I would have no way of seeing the tools others use that later help me also be more productive.
Or when two of the most senior colleagues would be discussing some very high level technical stuff together, I would sometimes listen in and learn something new and sometimes ask them questions later about it and even volunteer to work on that if they need help. With the switch to remote, I have no chance of hearing 1:1 technical discussion calls between the seniors and find out new things or challenges they face.
Basically, I was missing out on a lot of technical development and became this anonymous avatar that needs to takes Jira issues as input and produce Gitlab merge requests as output, pigeonholing myself and stagnating my growth both as an engineer and inside the organization.
I started my carrier as a remote employee before the pandemic. Pairing helped a lot to learn how others are working. Most of the technical discussions where public. Usually on slack or on GitHub (via RFC PRs). If somebody scheduled a meeting usually included the whole team as optional and encouraged juniors to listen even if they can't contribute. We planned our sprints together so everybody know what the team is working on.
On the other hand I joined a new company during the pandemic which had similar issues. I wanted to help solve it, but they didn't even acknowledged it.
Many things in life and in the world shouldn't be the way they are, but the reality in the field is very different and most of the time there's not much we can do about it.
Pairing was never a thing in any company I worked (in Europe).
One was hybrid remote / on-prem with on-prem menotring and sadly they turned up not to meet our standards. I don't think the work arrangement impacted them.
One was fully remote with their mentor fully remote as well and we hired them full-time.
One was fully on-prem as much as they could, with a mentor who was almost fully remote. They were also hired full-time.
So my experience is that there is no correlation between bringing junior developers up to speed and exactly where they work from. Communicating face to face and communicating remotely are different and require different skill sets, but that is down to the abilities of the individual mentors assigned to the individual juniors. Or put another way - every combination works best for some people
If this is a website supposedly for startups, the audience missed that mark by a wide margin.
1. Middle and senior management who don't want to lose control or be rendered less effective. 2. Engineers who are not trained in written communication and largely cannot autonomously move a group towards a goal without a lot of supervision.
If you solve for no 2, then that acts counter to no 1 - because middle management will be questioned - why do we need you ? If a group of engineers can function on their own towards a common goal, then the manager's role is more or less rendered redundant. Sure there may be a need for psychological support but you surely won't need the current ratio of engineers: managers.
There is a deep rooted old school interest in staying physically connected. This won't go away anytime soon. I am not debating whether that is right or wrong, but the general notion that 'we are better if we are physically together' still persists. I don't know if this is a genuine feel-good-together feeling or just a made up emotion to mask point no 1 above.
I am flummoxed by how executive leadership is simply blind to these facts in most companies. I mean the CEO can declare a fully remote constraint sort of like the exact opposite of what Musk did at Twitter and drive productivity higher. The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
No 1 won't get