Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only? We all have our ideal way of working and it is quite individual, by forcing one over the other we may get consistency but not best performance. In any case, this is in my view a power game. Now that market is soft let’s take advantage of it. Would love to see what happens when the wheel turns the other way around. Suddenly remote will be making sense again. On my end, I am only considering explicitly remote positions from now on. For what it’s worth, what confuses me is not the way of working itself but the expectation that I can switch from one to the other and change all the rest of my life, at the whim of strategy of the month.

> Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only?

It's not one brain making any decision here. There is strong consensus in our organization that remote workers are extremely difficult to manage relative to in-office employees. "Not best performance" is amazing if you are getting anything at all.

You're absolutely right that it's about power/control/domination. For better or worse, you have to force many humans into an office context before any productivity is possible. I know we like to believe every human is capable of completely unfettered WFH in the tech industry, but the world simply doesn't work this way.

This doesn't make any sense. From a management perspective, it should be easy to understand the scope of work from a high level. You should be able to track progress. If employees aren't delivering then try to understand why. If they can't deliver without someone breathing down their neck then the answer is to get rid of them, not create an environment where you can breathe down their neck more effectively.

> If they can't deliver without someone breathing down their neck then the answer is to get rid of them

Welcome back to my first point. It's hard to find people to replace this person who won't wind up in the exact same scenario. The trustworthy remote workers are in the minority. Until we all accept this it's going to be a really rough ride.

Perhaps the wide spectrum of takes on this boils down to the complexity of the underlying business. If you are running the equivalent of a B2B McD restaurant, I can understand how the bottom-barrel WFH employee & management techniques are viable.

It is surprising though that when power was the other way around, and remote was The way, productivity was still humming along. Something does not add up. I know how the world works, let’s not rationalise “domination”. I think I would not willingly work for anyone seeing himself as dominating me… even if they define it as just the way the world works and everyone does it.

I think the major difference here is that there are 2 flavors of WFH employee: Pre and post covid. Covid-era WFH was conducted with reckless abandon (out of necessity). Anyone and everyone was 100% qualified to work remotely because that was the only possible way.

Pre-covid WFH employees were hired among a backdrop of "most people still work in an office", so there were a lot of extra special precautions taken throughout. Those hiring remote employees wanted to hire remote employees. They weren't forced to.

Taken together, you now have a marketplace of workers where you get a radically different outcome depending on their "initial conditions".

That still does not address my point. Regardless initial conditions, during Covid, productivity was not impacted. So the “unqualified” remote workers still did fine. The question is what has changed since Covid, and what has changed is the clarity of employers direction with regards to working arrangements. That domination will come at a cost when it is measured by physical presence rather than delivery. In a sense it is also easier to just show up and do less. Let alone the confusion out of the fact that remote enabled geographic spread which now means that you start getting wrong way risk on enforcement and assertion of dominance. My argument is that in reality the world works in more mysterious ways than at face value.

> productivity was not impacted

This is a general statement about the economy that is plausibly true, but doesn't apply to all companies because different companies have access to different parts of the labor pool depending on pay, industry, and working conditions.

The kind of talent available to Facebook is very different from what's available to a mid-size insurance agency in Nebraska. I know for a fact that some of those companies in drawing from the low end of the talent pool saw their productivity fall into the dumpster during the mandated WFH period.

>The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.

We did this forever! If you were ever on-call or had to remote in from home, you were hybrid. WFH has always been supported by employers - as long as it was free.