I also get the impression some folks here just kinda… aren’t comfortable with written language. Reading or writing it.
It’s so weird to see, but some of the folks who’ve been living this kind of job-life 10+ years, now I get how they think remote can’t possibly be as productive as in-person—but it’s mostly due to dumb mistakes that are also harming collaboration in the office. Most of them have no idea the place is doing things so entirely wrong, or how much better it can be with some simple tweaks.
They will win this fight if the Remote or Die crew doesn't get loud.
It also, separately, masks it—people working in-person, but hobbled by bad communication patterns, at least look productive.
I’m not claiming this is good, mind you, but that it’s made me understand at least one (I suspect large) segment of the “remote can’t be as good as in-person” side of the argument. If this is how they think “serious business” should or must function, no wonder they’re skeptical of remote work. Meanwhile they’re actually just organizationally bad at communication, in general.
In-office had a long time to evolve (half a century I'd say). Remote work kind of only had the COVID years. It's a baby in an incubator. The RTO stuff is kind of like infanticide. So while I understand your perspective, from a war point of view, we have no choice but to protect this baby. They want to cut this experiment off asap. Every little anecdote, every little corporate RTO plan, every little CEO saying shit, is just chipping away at such an infant life.
Give it the same chance the office bullshit had, which was decades. I kind of have to be militant about this. Thanks for the other side, but this baby gotta be kept alive.
If your team sucks, your team sucks. Doesn't matter if you're in office, or out of office.
Covid is over, so unless we start fighting better about this, they are absolutely going to chip away at this.
I cannot tell you how many meetings I've had where someone told me I "wasn't communicating clearly" and I asked them to read the unclear message back to me so I could understand what would make it clearer for them.
And then I find out they can't read, at least not fluently. They either skip key words altogether or mistake them for other words.
I'm convinced fewer than half of American adults could read a random book out loud, fluidly, without preparation.
Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill.
I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns.
The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention (OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5."
The PIAAC definitions of each level are here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_... and I would estimate that extremely few daily tasks would require (or even be aided by) level 5 literacy proficiency.
You often end up with multiple documents (several emails, pictures, logs). There's often competing information (customers are speculating about what's wrong, but they likely include lots of other information because they don't actually know). And you definitely need background knowledge about the product.
Add in translating that into a bug report for the engineering team? A successful high-level customer support agent needs level 5 reading ability.
But my experience asking questions of my teammates in the company Slack channels tells me very few of them are even actually at level 3.
This is exactly my observation on zoom/meeting heavy cultures
A lot of people cannot put their wants & desires into the written word.
With a lot of these people I end up taking contemporaneous notes in a slack message to then send back to them.
In-office work will realistically be seen as a niche when it's all said and done imho. Similar to LAN parties. It's not the way most people want to do things.
Time will tell I guess. But thanks for your anecdote, I hope as time goes on, we begin to see what a niche anecdote it will become.