Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
"Efficiency".
>can't have f2f meetings all day
i have zoom 1:1 meetings all day with managers. going remote doesn't obviate the need for team planning and management. bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this. if a behemoth like dell, amazon, etc can go fully remote and still be profitable, then what does that say for any smaller company? and then what does that do to all of the CRE holdings of said behemoths?
tough situation and it may not resolve in our favor
I suspect that alongside the obvious reasons (inflexible management styles, micromanagement, etc.) always discussed, this is a major driver: ongoing spend on office buildings needs to be justified, and is probably very difficult to get out of - e.g. long-term building projects, or ownership of buildings which would be difficult (or a big loss) to resell, or long-term leases signed when obviously the offices would be needed for decades, or senior leaders feeling personally invested in particular building projects, etc.
About the only bit of this I buy to some extent is very senior managers who've been closely involved in building out new office space only to find it's empty.
If they sell it and take a massive loss, they'll take a big hit on the balance sheet. So, they want to hang on to it until times are better. But, people will criticize the company for hanging onto unused real estate if nobody shows up. So now the company wants to show people in the office.
I'm not sure that this is true, but it's the only realistic way I can see CRE holdings driving returns to the office
Literally news from yesterday: Three compies conpired to impersonate millions of voters to influence federal policy
How many times do companies have to conspire to commit fraud before people stop claiming conspiracy and corporate fraud never happens??
There's no need for a "conspiracy theory" to explain it. The better way to look at it is:
Some VP at Dell leased X million sqft of office space on a long term lease that does not expire until the year 2030 (thereby getting a good deal and locking in a lower rent until that time) sometime before the pandemic flipped things to "WFH".
Now, post pandemic, with most employees in WFH status, Dell, the company, is paying $Y million/month for X million sqft of office space, which is going unused -- and they can't get out of their 2030 leases early without taking an even bigger loss. So from Dell executive's viewpoint's, this is office rent going to waste, so if it is going to be paid for anyway, we might as well force employees back to the office so we don't have to report the rental costs as pure losses on our quarterly reports to the SEC.
While we seem to be on a backswing a bit from it, eventually supporting WFH will be a matter of competitive survival. Office mandates will be the next hallmark of legacy firms who have become inefficient and wasteful in their spending.
The question is whether that competitive advantage will outweigh the incumbency advantage of the massive current players in various industries.
Sure, the small fry ABC IT Consultings of the world might get their lunch eaten by sharp new outfits that don't have to foot the cost of a floor full of downtown offices, but a behemoth like Dell, particularly one that has already been paying those costs as long as they've existed and has them built right into their structures, isn't going to be nearly so easy to dislodge.
This is one of the huge downsides of allowing so much consolidation across the board for decades. The incumbent players become much more resistant to disruption through changes like this—it will take a huge percentage of us, the tech workers, firmly saying "no, we will not accept on-site-only jobs anymore," to make a real difference.
this is not limited to tech
Tech just happens to be a place where almost every job can, with appropriate management and support, be done fully remotely with no meaningful loss of productivity.
This only applies to companies with large real estate portfolios that play real estate as a side hustle. If you mostly rent, just don't renew your lease. If you're an office space REIT, it's gonna be brutal.
No surprise JPM leading the charge on draconian RTO measures, given their CRE exposure..
I suspect that JPM is telling the truth about their internal productivity numbers being better in the RTO scenario, but I also suspect that these numbers are based on "doing things the way they were always done" and don't take into account scenarios with a JPM that is structured differently for WFH scenarios (e.g. reducing middle management and its proclivity for in-person meetings).
JPM is a huge lender in the space.
If CRE falls, JPM has a tougher time than the average big bank. They are also building a huge tower on Park Ave that was started pre-COVID and still not done.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deutsche-bank-goldman-and-...
as a former business owner (good exit, so no bitterness here) all i can say is good riddance, and i hope they take a massive haircut as an industry.
they're the biggest pricks i've ever dealt with in running my business. 'arrogant' doesn't even begin to describe the attitude they had in the 2015-2020 time period. and they are literally no fun at parties.
example in another industry - think of all the restaurants you've ever loved that have had to close their doors because of asshole corporate landlords, for no other reason than to avoid setting a precedent for lower rents even when it wasn't financially necessary.
I agree with your virtiol, but this isn't quite correct.
You can tack "missing" rent onto the end of your financial agreement without penalty. "Lower" rent causes a reevaluation of the financial agreement basis which will almost always require a cash outlay. This is what is causing commercial real estate to be empty for 5+ years rather than lower the damn rent.
Municipalities need to implement an (in?)occupancy tax to stomp this crap out. If real estate isn't generating rent for 12+ months, tax needs to start going up on the space.
My guess is that it is not well-defined and therefore generates minimal revenue. I also can't tell if this applies to office buildings or is more for street level commercial real estate.
I've seen several people point to this narrative on HN and it just doesn't make any sense. There's three possibilities as I see it:
1) There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason. So these overlords go to their puppets running major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Dell and tell them they must make their workers return to the office in the name of propping up commercial real estate. Apparently some people on HN think this is likely?
2) The managers at Dell/Amazon/etc. feel the need to prop up commercial real estate as an act of charity. Rather than focusing on their own businesses, they are worried about their friends in commercial real estate. This seems even less likely than 1.
3) Managers at major companies believe that there are benefits to working together in person.
Why are people so reluctant to accept option 3? You don't even need to accept the premise that working from the office is better. You just need to accept that premise that management believes it's better to be a proponent of this option.
4) Some companies have a significant amount of capital tied up in CRE. Preventing its value from going to from $X to $0 is valuable to the tune of $X. There is no apparent cost to the C-suite in enforcing RTO. So for no cost, you can save $X. It's simple, non-complex, and tied to obvious incentives.
I'm as much of a WFH proponent as the next guy but blaming CRE on the latest return-to-office movement is some crazy conspiracy theory stuff.
However, who are Dell's the main shareholders? Do they have any vested interest in commercial real estate? Are they associated in other ventures with people who have a vested interest in commercial real estate?
You would think...
Dell is a subsidiary to "Dell Capital" who's portfolio also boasts at least a 10B stake in real estate. (Primarily CRE) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bdt--company-and-ms...
The reason is easy to figure out: "Holding a lot of Commercial Real Estate assets". There's literally trillions of dollars at stake here. I would personally propose that the alternative that the people holding this trillions of dollars of assets are just sitting back and watching their entire market collapse placidly, with it never occurring to them to call in favors, use political power, buy lobbyists, buy PR, and literally everything else possible to save that money, is the crazy idea.
It requires me to believe that the 0.001% are just so amazingly honest and fair-minded that they will calmly accept the judgment of the market that their assets are no longer required. This is not a position I see a lot of evidence for.
The only thing that surprises me is that we haven't seen a lot of call for some sort of regulation that accidentally whoopsydoopsy can only be conformed to by workers in offices whoknew what a surprise and shocking unexpected consequence. Keep an ear out for it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this tried in the next year or two. Their situation is pretty dire.
It hasn't even been all that secret either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/17/new-york-c... I'm not citing that as proof, just evidence. There's plenty of money at stake in this matter.
In Dell's case, I can only speculate, but they need to justify office space, and managers need to manage people, and most of leadership get promoted from middle management (or sales).
Worthless levity injection attack: my client supplied Dell windows machine still hiccups on cold boots sometimes (this ticket has been open for decades), while all my personal linux machines just keep chugging away. Find a company that is automating away management layers and uses linux.
This is not something I've ever heard of. Some websearching produced this article. - is it describing the concept?
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
I don't know about that. In my admittedly limited experience as an EM of 4 ICs, I'm drowning in work, mostly because they all do great work and are now double and sometimes triple booked on projects because we haven't been allowed to hire anyone. It's more than a full time job to keep a small team supported and I don't remotely feel like I'm obsolete because the company could chose to WFH.
I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. This is great for me, because simply being a conduit of information between other people isn't the most efficient use of my time, so I don't really feel threatened by that. All of them have told me they've actually appreciated the hybrid schedule and the time in office for some of the week, and some of them told me that when I was a peer IC (before being their manager).
Our work is definitely more experimental/R&D/unproven though. Frequent communication, collaboration, and brainstorming is critical for success. If you're doing the kind of work where you can sit down today and create a year's worth of feature tickets then maybe it skews in favor of the office being more of a distraction.
> Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
I don't get the impression anyone at the executive level of a BigCo is collecting feedback from low level managers about whether they should RTO or not. And even in the Bay Area, 2 hours a day of commuting is on the extreme end. Everyone on my team has a total of a 1 hour commute or less, and in my case that includes a day care drop off and pick up. Personally speaking, my commute wouldn't change even if we were 100% WFH because my home and the office are equidistant from day care.
We do have a peer IC who has a long commute though and it's not great for him. I do wish there was more flexibility on a case-by-case basis to tweak the number of days he's in the office.
Most communication norms aren't tied to the physical location, it's just easier to communicate communication norms when conversations are visible to the people not involved.
I was on two projects during covid WFH. The digital collaboration styles were night and day. One's mattermost team still has less than 50 messages total across all channels. The other team's mattermost was and remains a major collaboration point now that we're back on site. One team always had cameras on during calls, the other didn't. And wasn't just chat, just calls or just emails. The communication was different on every medium.
There was a lot of the same people on both projects, too. We all adapted to different collaboration styles depending on the project. The only difference was that project management made a few gentile pushes to enable fluid communication at the beginning of one project, and the other team didin't.
And I've noticed something similar with younger people. They're much more interactive in discord chat/calls than the slack/mattermost/zoom/chime equivalents. Not that this is necessarily unique to young people, just that older people tend not to lurk discord as much. What might be unique to that age group is they've been taught corporate tools mean bifurcated groups (e.g. teacher/pupil) where they're not equal participants.
The success of WFH is the demonstration that if you treat adults as such, they are going to do their job anyway thus rendering an entire horde of middle managers completely useless.
My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.
Most of them are content to simply pile on new functionality, without any concept of polish, refinement, or how allocating time for technical work can speed up the delivery of that functionality.
understanding importance of code quality/testing
&& willingness to allocate dedicated time to achieve code quality
&& having ability/position/power to withstand management's pressure on just deliveries
I've seen "senior" developers that are very happy to skip writing tests (or write useless tests that basically just return true) even though their management was happy to allocate the time to do decent testing.
The whole leadership chain from CEO down needs to make sure everyone understands and works towards the company's goals. If someone isn't that's just the normal course of productivity issue resolved in the normal way. Sometimes it's because someone isn't as good and engineer as you thought and is resistant to training, sometimes it's as you say they're unfocused on the mission, either way having a layer of people whose entire job is juggling these folks feels like putting fingers in holes in the dam.
That's who I mean by managers, btw. Just because someone has "manager" in their title doesn't mean they're this thing. Plenty of critical product managers I've worked with.
If people aren't doing their jobs they should be fired - not have someone babysit them and the whole team so everyone just suffers.
All that ends up happening is introduce things like broken scrum and push to show cards getting down rather than real value.
Congrats. You've gone from 1 extreme to the other. No difference.
It sounds like your hiring pipeline is broken if that's the behavior you observe. That's not how real Software Engineers work.
It's a shame too because it has a seemingly interesting premise. Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
Now roughly the same percentage believe in lizard people, bigfoot, etc. so we should maybe take self-reporting with a grain of salt but it does seem to ring true to us right? It feels like we've all seen people in jobs that don't need to exist.
And by the way that's exactly what modern economic models would predict. When we say the market is efficient we don't mean that's it's 100% completely and instantly efficient. In fact innovation relies on people recognizing areas where there are marketplace inefficiencies and exploiting them.
The propagation of new technologies through a market takes time and in that time there will by definition be useless jobs in places that technology has not propagated to yet.
What's more the main objective of a job is not always clear. That government employee who feels like he's doing nothing might actually be doing nothing but the purpose of their job might not be to accomplish anything, it might be to make them financially dependent on the government (or maybe the government would say it's a means of economic stimulus).
This is a really interesting topic and there's plenty to explore and lots of existing science to mine from economics to sociology, etc.
David of course ignores all of this and uses the premise to set up a rant about anti-capitalism (without making a cogent argument for an alternative). He includes such amazing insights as, "The only reason countries have armies is because other countries have armies. If we all agreed to stop waging war we could spend that money on better things." Brilliant! Why hasn't a great philosopher thought of this before?
He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics and that he doesn't consider that a valid argument. The problem is twofold. First, much like someone claiming they've found a perpetual motion machine, I don't need to debunk your specific version of it, I can just say, "That violates every observed law of physics, you'd better have extraordinary proof for me to consider your claim." Secondly, David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory. You can't 'disprove' his claim because he doesn't make any (or more specifically he doesn't have a central theory that can be disproven - he has an observation that broadly consistent with what we know about the world and would expect already, if surprising to some people).
And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths that it would take a book of greater length or a youtube video on par with the classic "debunking ancient aliens" to get through them all.
It's nonsense political drivel and it's disappointing that so many people here seem to consider the book profound in some way.
It shouldn't be surprising that David graeber, one of the most famous modern anarchist philosophers, is an anti capitalist lol. I also find it strange that this burden of designing a perfect society falls on anyone that dares criticize the current one. Like when abolitionists criticized slavery, they were expected to come up with a solution for all the money cotton plantations would lose if slavery was abolished. So odd.
By the way, he did propose two possibilities to alleviating the degradation of bullshit jobs: unionization, and universal basic income.
> Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
In the book, he argues that 50% of jobs are bullshit, not 15%.
> He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics
You may also be interested in his book Debt, an extensively cited book where he challenges the unscientific nature of modern economics. You'll find there a very rigorous critique of modern economics.
> David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory.
Perhaps the book was too steep an introduction to theories of labor and philosophy that are perpendicular to those commonly taught in public programs and held in general by a large part of society? The theories seemed quite coherent to me, but maybe that's because I had already read Marx and Kropotkin before reading Graeber. What did you think about some of these ideas from the book:
1. It's very strange that our society rewards hedge fund managers with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and teachers with 50k a year, considering by any measurement a teacher is far more valuable to society than a hedge fund manager. It seems capitalism is not good at allocating resources in a way conducive to a healthy society.
2. The general application of Marx's concept of capitalist modes of production being highly alienating for workers, but applied to modern careers like middle management for insurance companies or whatever.
3. Puritan-capitalist work ethic has turned professionalism and capitalism into a religion
4. Bullshit jobs are keeping the population too busy to protest or revolt
> And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths
Really? I wish you had some time to list some, this is interesting to me, and a huge brush to paint across the entire book. None of his critiques of capitalism itself seemed all that surprising or even really new, it was mostly more arguments against the mythological invisible hand of the market and the fabled efficiency of the market so far as I read it.
I see similar complaints about works like Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (nb I wrote that Principia reference before thinking to include this part). "There's too much of his opinion in it!" framed not as a caution against treating it as a straight unbiased "take" throughout, but as a flaw in the book. But... it lays out right up front that his intention is to first lay out each philosopher's positions as he understands them—and only a subset of those positions, explicitly avoiding some whole categories of philosophy—and then to provide his take on their position in the broader story of philosophy, which parts have been enduring and influential, which have fallen off, et c. And then then the book does that thing it said it was going to do. What do readers expect? Do people skip introductions and prefaces or something?
Bullshit Jobs goes out of its way to call out the limitations and scope of what it's attempting, it's not like it's trying to trick people.
(another thing I've noticed is people having trouble with the "concisely and confidently assert in a paragraph, then back up the position and directly address obvious criticisms in the following paragraphs" style that Graeber uses in, especially, Debt. I've read upset reviews that complain that Graeber ignored X, where X is some obvious problem with something he claimed, but he didn't ignore it, he explicitly covers that problem and attempts to address it, but it seems some readers check out the second they think of a problem in some argument and just go "ah ha, caught you you fraud, you didn't fool me!" and then, I dunno, skim-read until the next assertion, I guess?)
I can give it a shot just as example.
I grabbed my copy off the shelf and opened up to the middle (page 157 to be specific, but if you want to give me another page number between 1 and 326 I'm happy to do the same thing for that page).
The first thing I see on that page is a quote from Barack Obama and some commentary on it:
> "I don't think in ideological terms. I never have," Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.' That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
> I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he's also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.
> So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement--and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature [sic] took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
> To those who accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for suggesting that government plays any conscious role in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs, I hereby rest my case. Unless you think Obama was lying about his true motives (in which case, who exactly is the conspiracy theorist?), we must allow that those governing us are, in fact, aware that "market solutions" create inefficiencies, and unnecessary jobs in particular...
Okay, lots to digest there. Let's ignore the grammatical mistake (it should say legislation instead of legislature).
If we follow the citation for that Obama quote we discover that it's not a primary source but rather an article from The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mr-obama-goes-wash...
...published June 26, 2006.
Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect. Graeber says:
> here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement
That quote isn't only taken out of context, it's given a new context that's an outright lie.
Obama was not president in 2006 and in that quote he wasn't "reflecting on his signature legislative achievement".
In fact, the next line in the article he cites starts, "Shifting back to how he sees himself in the Senate..."
This is senator Obama, more than a year before he announced he was running for president, answering a specific question about why there needs to be a provision in healthcare legislation for job training for workers who would be displaced if the US moves to a single payer system.
Given the proper context that quote reads very differently and doesn't at all support David's argument.
And even if the context of the quote was what he fabricates it to be (reminder - it's not), the argument still doesn't make sense to me.
Even if a different system would eliminate those jobs it doesn't mean that in the context of the current system those jobs are "bullshit".
If we allow technology to progress far enough almost every job will change or manifest enough to be markedly different from the jobs we have today. People used to get paid to deliver ice door to door. We invented freezers and now there are fewer ice delivery jobs. It doesn't mean those jobs were "bullshit" when the people were doing them, it just means that technology progressed and made them obsolete ... like it eventually will with every job. Of course a bunch of new jobs were created in the process. And those jobs, along with every job, will change and disappear over a long enough time horizon.
So are you arguing that all jobs are bullshit? Well don't we still need people to do stuff? Hmm well we'll need a system to decide who does what. Some kind of distributed system where we vote with our dollars perhaps...
And there's 3 or 4 other ways to cut down the argument there. And that's just a random half-page of the book. The whole thing is like that.
Looks like a miss for him on Obama's take on jobs in healthcare (I even a tweet from what looks like Graeber's account musing about this Obama quote). I wish he was alive so we could email him about it.
Anyway, what we're looking for is logical fallacies in his critique of capitalism. You certainly found a mistaken attribution and thus incorrect assumption about the mindset of someone in power but as you indicate it kind of doesn't matter, because the core argument is that one argument against single payer healthcare (or just fixing America's objectively broken healthcare system) is that people will lose jobs as a result. Here's an article from Politico pointing this out: https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for... . People do make this argument, about the healthcare industry and others.
So for his underlying point, that the American healthcare system is propping up a lot of bullshit jobs, you seem to disagree, but I don't think that counts for a logical fallacy. Having myself interacted with the American healthcare industry, I have to agree with Graeber. Each interaction involved a rat's nest of bureaucratic nonsense and tens of people. The hospital I went to had a person whose entire job was middle-manning the insurance companies and the patients. So we could start with Graeber's general argument that probably a lot of those jobs aren't really necessary. These companies seem to agree when they do waves of layoffs. It's not even really an anticapitalist argument.
The anti-capitalist critique part of the argument is that the jobs are bullshit because they don't help, or in fact harm, society. This is the "single payer would be better" argument. Again I don't find any logical fallacy here, just perhaps an argument you disagree with. It's a similar critique he applies in the mutual fund investor vs teacher argument: why does the mutual fund investor get paid more when teachers are more valuable? Why do Americans spend so much on healthcare when universal or socialized systems can give more healthcare to more people for less money? Whatever the Americans are doing simply isn't efficient, but it's propped up as a star of capitalist resource allocation: even here you seem to imply that simply critiquing the American healthcare system is somehow anticapitalist. Now that I think about it, actually, it's not anti capitalist to argue that the American healthcare system is inefficient, it's simply objectively true: Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else, including countries with socialized healthcare.
However he is obviously anticapitalist and also takes the position that the jobs are bullshit because healthcare should be universal and thus insurance company jobs shouldn't exist (my interpretation). What's logically fallacious about this?
As for the argument that part of the reason the American government (not just pressure from think tanks or whatever) maintain this healthcare system because doing so props up a lot of jobs, which Graeber does incorrectly make based off a misquoted statement by Obama, yes, the chain of thought doesn't work, but it's not the only thing America props up for a jobs reason alone. The TSA, which fails the majority of its audits, is a rather famous example of an institution maintained by the USA simply as a jobs program. https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
Anyway, you did find a bad quote that I haven't seen anyone else point out, you may have some other pretty interesting insights to Graeber's book. I'd personally read a collection of "random half-page point by point" breakdown by you, it would interesting, and rigorous critique is important to me.
One other thing:
> Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect
I don't understand why this makes anything suspect? Nor do I see much to indicate The Nation is a leftist paper. I found this article as a good measuring stick: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-taiwan-war-mil... So certainly the paper is not a Tankie one, which would definitely make the whole thing suspect as simply a mouthpiece of the CPC, but it's clearly not, so I'm not sure what your concerns are, other than that it might lean different politically than you.
Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work.
But this only works if everyone goes to the office.
My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.
And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win?
How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers.
Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.
To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those company all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
This has been every place I've worked for the last decade, honestly. Even before WFH was a thing, all meetings took place over videoconferencing and most discussions took place over email and chat even with the people in the cube next to yours.
Working from home didn't seem like a major shift to me because no work or communications flows changed with it.
It is only now that I am restarting my normal body cycle again. I should not have to put up with that bs.
If you have never worked in that way, let me tell you it's the absolute worst situation.
I'd rather go back to the office instead of having it work like that.
People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
If a company has remote workers, the company ought to be remote first otherwise it's horrible for everybody and resentment is the only thing you reap from it.
That happened a lot even during the in-office days as well. People with more seniority and influence would whiteboard new ideas and then bring you up to speed on the next daily standup on what they decided.
If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day.
And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You just can't win.
Not who you are replying to but sure - I am actually in such a position where I get the summary of what I need to do second-hand; it is great - mainly because the person I get it from is another senior developer so he knows the pitfalls; that also means he is able to lay the roadmap of what I need to do which makes things so much more easier.
Another time, it was a manager who was originally a developer and was quite hands-on - same experience.
> And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
100% agree.
> Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
> Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
When you have decision makers that neither have the technical chops nor consult those that have them, things usually get complicated. Because then they miss the technical perspective, don't know what is feasible and what is not, commit things that are technically not prudent, forget to take into account the potential pitfalls etc etc - all of those things have a significant impact on the hands-on person down the line i.e. the developer. All decision makers are obviously not like that - those with the awareness and humility about not having the technical insights, include developers in the meetings to cover such aspects and that solves many issues upfront for both the project and the developers.
Speaking for myself, I don't love being in those meetings but sure appreciate that being present provides the opportunity of handling things at design stage so that they don't come back and bite me closer to delivery. Are there power-hungry limelight-seeking developers who do it for visibility/building image? Sure, but I haven't seen as many of them as I have seen managers with such tendencies. And if we say that there is nothing wrong with vying for visibility and image building etc and all those things are just signs of healthy competition/ambition - well, then that applies as much to developers as it does to managers.
> > Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
Why aren't your developers empowered to say "I don't need to be there" to a meeting?
Why aren't your developers in the loop enough to know about upcoming conversations so they can ask if their presence would be useful?
Every job where I've grown responsibility, I find that not only did those interactions become possible, they've became expected of me.
But then again, my experience was built at mission-focused companies. I know a lot of "tech" these days is stay-in-your-lane companies.
That's incredibly condescending and reductionist, and it says a lot more about you than it does about "developers", either any individuals or in the aggregate.
Maybe try thinking of people as individuals, rather than lumping all "developers" together as one unreasonable bundle of pointless complainers...?
I think you might be a bit overly sensitive and overreactive (the Mary Sue I was talking about).
I also think you might need to look up what a Mary Sue actually is[0]. Hint: It's not "someone who reacts poorly to criticism," nor even "someone who wants unrealistic things for themselves." (It also has an extremely loaded and sexist history.)
Er, they've been doing that even pre-pandemic, and even when I'm in the same room.
But having half the team in one office and the other half remote seemed to be the worst of both. When I was remote I felt relief when everyone else in the discussion turned out to be remote as well, and when I was in-person it was similarly nice when we realized that everyone in the meeting was physically present.
So it's not surprising to me that companies would gravitate one way or the other.
It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.”
Some people prefer working at companies that are 100% in person. Some prefer 100% remote. Some are OK with some type of hybrid arrangement.
If a person is working at a company with policies they don’t like, either they work to get the policies changed, they find a job with policies they do like, or they live with the policies they dislike and keep the current job.
Just like people who prefer in-person work aren’t going to get their way at all companies, people who prefer remote work aren’t going to get their way at all companies.
If only it was that simple. There's pressure everywhere. Even governments try to push people back to the office with some mantra about e.g. saving the city.
If only it was just a choice.
At the end of the day most management never come into the office all the time. They do what they like. They have 0 implications so if they have dinner with a government official and was told it's best to ask the staff back then they do it. That's all.
Post-pandemic I worked with a few project managers who hated this, and would constantly complain about people not coming into the office for meetings because now they had to actually plan things, rather than just finding a random corner and talking things over. I even kind of get it, semi-remote meetings are the worst of both worlds, with the people in a meeting room wanting to draw on a whiteboard, and the people who are remote often struggling with audio from whatever crap microphones are in the room.
I suspect, after another few years of having this same discussion every few weeks, things will eventually settle down with some companies choosing to be co-located companies, and others choosing to be fully remote. Similarly to how you might select which company you work for based on what they do, or the personality of the people you interviewed with, people will also take into consideration how they want to work. I very much doubt there'll be many companies which routinely have both remote and co-located employees.
If the problem as you say is that managers are too lazy to plan then they should do their job instead of making it worse for everyone.
Unplanned meetings are the worst because you get forced into decisions no 1 has thought over. The managers assume we’re good because they don’t understand the implications.
Previously I could dig the ground and find gold too. And previously people would come out with a leaf around their private parts. If the manager can come into the offices with just leaves I'd be happy to accept that it's not their issue.
Startup founders originally don't have to manage. Do they get the blame when things go wrong when the company gets bigger? Hint: yes. i.e. we're all forced to adapt. It's not only the managers.
> At least in the case I'm thinking of this was more a corporate failure to adjust to remote work
That's correct - the corporate includes the managers though - as many chains up as needed.
Just get a Surface Hub.
With a Hub, everyone else can just collaborate on the shared whiteboard using their iPads.
Well, sure. We're asking that our reasonable desire to work remotely be accommodated.
Some are perfectly willing to be flexible.
Others are absolutely livid that you would dare to ask them to change how they do things to accommodate anyone else in any way.
I honestly have very little sympathy for that type of person. The "everything was just fine before, just shut up and go back to how it always was" attitude completely ignores the fact that for many, many people, things were not fine before, and WFH has been a godsend for so many.
If someone’s preference is to work in a company where 100% of the employees are in office, then someone at that same company who pushes for remote work or hybrid work is pushing their preference on someone else.
But that is 100% fine. Just as it’s fine for someone to advocate against remote or hybrid work. Neither are right or wrong.
Some subset of people who want to work in an office want to do so only with people who only work in an office as well. For these people, “everyone do your own thing” is not a satisfying solution. And it doesn’t have to be! Work doesn’t have to satisfy everyone.
If you work with people like this and say, “just do your own thing, it works for me” then you are trying to control other people because it pleases you better.
And again, there is nothing wrong with this. You are looking out for yourself, which is fine. It’s then up to your employer to make a decision on policy and then the employees decide if that’s a policy they want to work under.
Again, you're ignoring that the office workers preference isn't simply to work in an office. It's often to work in an office (only or primarily) with other people also in that office.
> I am questioning why the office workers try to make other people return to office with bad faith arguments (water cooler talk and synergies), when remote workers seem just happy to be working from home, without pressuring office workers to come and join them.
You're making the bad-faith argument that a person in the office and a person working at home is a win-win situation. The remote workers may be just as happy, but those in the office are not just as happy.
I get it. People like remote work. People want to protect their right to work remotely. But at least acknowledge that some people are negatively affected by the push for remote work.
The situation doesn't need to be a win-win! Somebody can lose out on what they think is best for them. That's 100% fine. It's up to the company to make a decision and then up to the employees to decide how they'll react to that decision.
It can be a large win-small loss situation too. Remote workers gain two hours of commute back and forty hours of focused work. Office workers lose the open office plan vibe and ability to push around their colleagues, or whichever the actual reason is. I don't understand it fully. It doesn't seem morally justifiable to me, and they encroach more on the professional autonomy on the remote worker than the remote worker does to them.
Here's the thing: they don't need a better argument. They don't need an argument at all. It's their preference.
> I don't understand it fully. It doesn't seem morally justifiable to me, and they encroach more on the professional autonomy on the remote worker than the remote worker does to them.
Here's the thing: it doesn't need to be morally justifiable to you or anyone else. It's a preference for working in-office with other people in-office.
I think you do understand this it's just that you don't like it because you have your own preference.
No. It's possible my stock options would be worth more if the office workers adopted the more efficient form of work from home. Maybe the hybrid meetings would be more enjoyable fully remote. I still wouldn't think about trying to coerce them into that with talk about synergy or the online version of water coolers. That's a bad thing to do. Let them enjoy the office, and others remote.
You may think you're more likely to get your way if you have a compelling argument but history has proven that's not always true.
The argument is, "I would like this better."
> For reason, the RTO arguments are very bad. Is there some part the proponents can't say out loud?
No, I believe the part being said out loud is, "We prefer to work at a company where all employees are in office." That's all you need to say. The only people I've ever heard talk about water coolers are the dismissive WFH people.
That's a bad argument. Sounds like we should not work from the office then. What comes after the "I like making others work in the office, because"? That's the quiet part not being said out loud. I'm interested.
That's not what I'm hearing or what you would read in an announcement for one the partial RTOs that have happened at some tech companies.
No you explicitly aren't. Not bending to someone else's preference is not "controlling" them.
Control in and of itself is not a bad thing, the employer/employee relationship is about exchanging money for control of ones time, but it's still control.
But refusing to return to the office because your co-worker prefers to work in a full office? That's only control in the same sense that my refusing to let someone stab me in the chest is a limitation of their freedom of movement. Sure, if you want to really twist your perspective you can get there, but it's not a useful definition.
Then they should get along great with the people whose preference is any number of other ways that they dictate terms to the rest of society.
Fortunately, those people are losing, and this is good.
You many not feel like this is a substantial imposition, but many people feel that it is easier to have discussions in a physical room with things like physical whiteboards and eye contact. Using digital analogues can be nearly as effective, but it requires everyone adopt new processes.
That sounds decently full actually? Just treat it as an office with a generous square footage per employee.
Why? Half full office sounds like she should have plenty of other people who prefer to chit-chat near the water-cooler whole day to socialize with...
So make the office smaller. Although many people going to office probably prefer to have a bit more space and quiet, given how widespread criticism of open offices etc is.
If they halved the office space so that the office is full, would that make her experience better?
I know it sounds like a flip question, but I am asking it earnestly. That could be the compromise position.
It basically ends up just punishing the employees who do work, and the slackers still slack.
It's easier to abuse someone when in-person. I've seen managers shout and reprimand others in-person. Try doing it remote and they just mute you :)
Suppose your team consists of individual independent contractors or for example the team members are all spread across multiple offices. Such an arrangement is effectively indistinguishable from WFH arrangement as you do not really have the aforementioned face to face contact anyway.
Can management make it work? WFH may mean slacking in hackernews, office will mean slacking at the water cooler. Do you really need multiple a day face to face conversations "how are WE doing this"? Maybe the workload actually requires intimate contact for efficiency/quality. Maybe you can chunk workload into 40 hour chunks, have workers independently arrive at solutions and just sync once in a while.
On one hand yes, this is management lacking control. On the other hand this is about trust in workers and workload chunking.
Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity.
I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them.
It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one.
Or the developers. I've seen highly productive devs despite the managements worst efforts and unproductive devs despite managements best efforts.
A good manager is not ego-driven and is perfectly able to function when being paid less than the people they manage.
And then we can just give people more money and keep them in the role they work best at instead of having to Peter Principle them up to their level of incompetence or lose them.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's a LOT of Dell employees. I recently dealt with their service department and it was the worst warranty service I've had on any product. Reiterates my prior position of never buying Dell products again.
Took two, multi-hour iMessage conversations including taking 5 videos of my product each time, to prove warranty was triggered. Was at the point of asking "should I take a video of putting your product in the garbage as well?"
The craziest part was once that was done, they immediately shipped me a brand new replacement with overnight delivery. Product was already on the way before I realized they actually had granted me service.
Eizo on the other hand was a 5 minute process, but then the monitor was gone for a month being serviced.
Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. I've never had service denied or had to battle for hours.
So the dumbest possible outcome - they are out a new replacement monitor, and I am unhappy enough to never be a customer again.
Not my experience at all.
On paper this should have been a great monitor - 27", 4K, USB-C data & power, nice height/tilt/rotation adjustable stand, multiple inputs, USB hub integrated, etc.
Probably worst tech purchase of the decade for me.
They once sent a tech to drive to my university which was 3 hours from the tech's home base to replace a laptop screen.
They also came to my office to do the same to replace another screen that developed a dead pixel 3.5 years into the life of the laptop.
I don't have experience with any standard warranty/support though.
I also will never buy dell in my lifetime, and have encouraged all family/friends not to as well.
Apart from that, WFH does make management a lot more painful and tedious from a practical perspective. Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications, and their resolution is at the mercy of how long each person in the chain takes to receive each message, acknowledge it, follow up on feedback, make changes, clarify, finalize...
Maybe instead of setting arbitrary broad-brush WFH policies, just divide every role within WHF-able and non-WFH-able baskets under each business head.
Maybe that's a good thing? If the team can solve it informally why can't it be done over other mediums? Most of the time this happens because there's a lack of documentation or other issue.
WFH is a symptom. Fix the real problems.
But Commercial, HR, Marketing - all face the problem of spiraling communication loops. Physical presence does make a difference in planning and implementation, believe it or not.
If you can't tell that a worker is not producing because they are WFH then you are plain and simply incompetent. It's actually much easier to pretend to work in an office than it is at home in my experience.
Another very common excuse to use this "style" (I don't agree it's a stylistic choice at all) is to cover up the real cause that employees are not productive. These can be a ton of reasons including:
- hiring incompetent people
- not paying your employees what they're worth (often the cause for the first one)
- not letting them actually do their job (micromanagement, unnecessary bureaucracy, etc)
- not giving them challenging work
- inability to listen and change (employee's concerns are ignored)
It's not a style choice at all.
It's down to the caliber of employees and managers that a company employs (that's the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about).
In my experience, remote just doesn't work for cheaper (or "best cost" whatever the current term is).
A lot of firms tried "cheaping out" on coders over the years, hiring employees from bootcamps and doing internal coaching. In my experience that breaks down completely when going remote because of the amount of hand-holding required. While they could drop-in and check-in on the coders almost once per hour in office, it's more like once per day when working from home.
Firms that paid more and hired proper Software Engineers don't have the same experience at all, mostly because ICs now have several hours extra per week to concentrate and focus.
At the end of the day, it is a high level leader making these decisions and it is likely a high level leader with experience/conditioning within an industry PRIOR to the pandemic so I would guess that they are more conservative or "old-school" with their perspective on company/workplace policies.
Maybe it's down to management style.
It's long known that (at least in somewhat creative and self-directed jobs) workers who are motivated and happy with their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Managers then have to work hard, to keep motivation up and people happy. Let's call this the "supportive" management style.
It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with, and do only as much as they are forced/required to do. Managers than have to work hard to control and monitor everyone, to keep the slack to a minimum. Let's call this the "adversarial" management style.
In one of those styles, WFH employees can be more productive, more happy, and more efficient. In the other, WFH employees can't be monitored closely enough to keep them from slacking.
Some managers prefer one style over the other, and not many are able to switch styles.