To add to that, a lot of engineering types are also very neurodivergent and just do not communicate on that level the same way as other people, leading to copious misunderstandings and miscommunications when it's not a "say what you mean, and mean what you say" sort of environment. That probably makes a certain other type of person uncomfortable, when their main skill is social hacking and not necessarily efficient management, planning, or collaboration.
It really doesn't for some people. I have coworkers who will never communicate through text; after the first 1-2 messages they always say "let's just have a quick conference call", and then it ends up endless as they talk. I personally mostly avoid them as much as I can.
My point is, there are different types of people, and some are more competent, some less. Organizing our work life, cities, traffic and everything around Joe the react dev, so he can have a structured way of working (like kindergarten, same time, same day, nice routine) where his manager can see in his body language that Joe is a tool, that's insane to me.
All the power to people who'd like to spend the workday with Joe the react dev physically, but I prefer having my distance from people like this, which remote is great for.
Before the "closure of the commons" in England, wage labor world-wide was virtually non existent. It took a series of very harsh and restrictive laws and concerted effort of capital and lords over many generations to force the peasants and independent craftspeople, to leave their fields and workshops and join wage labor in the mines, and later, the factories. Offices were really invented much later, but are an artifact of that same type of thinking, and so are managers, a new type of "work" all about managing how others do the work. With that said, all through and through and up to today, body language has been an important thing of how people perceive information and how they communicate. That's not something I dispute. I dispute that we need to be at a place for 8-10 hours a day so we can read each other's (and our leader's) facial expressions, in order to do good work. If people can't have the time or ability to clearly express their views in a written format, and instead I have to stare at their faces to guess what they mean, I don't want to be working with those people.
Programming is deep and creative work. You need to sit and think deeply, in that way it's NOT comparable to factory work (which is the field where most "modern" managerial techniques come from). You don't do the exact same thing all over, repetitively, without a thought, despite how Agile, Scrum, or any kind of managerial trash is trying to convince you.
The manager of today's office very often is nothing but a glorified taskmaster:
- daily checking if you are on time with this and that
- giving you this or that small piece of work that later needs to be pieced together to make a finished product
The same way, in factories, craft was lost because people were doing only a their small part before finishing the product, many modern office environments push for and think of programming as "factory work", thereby destroying the craft, producing cheap items, that were often lacking in quality.
I like to think and do programming work as the result of the craft of many independent professional craftsmen, who will organize in groups when needed, and work deeply independently or in self-organized groups, rather than a factory floor with a taskmaster looking for clues into other people's faces whether their daily quota is finished or not. So let the craftspeople organize however they want, they can read each other's faces and debate the merits of this and that on Zoom, and they can find a fit for their product and go to meet in person if they desire to do so. You don't need a manager for that or to force people to go to a specific location so you can observe them.
> In a startup, if you tell an engineer to do something and it turns out it's impossible
I see a problem with that approach. To me, it's not about you telling the engineer what to do, they are not a tool to execute your bidding, they are a colleague with ideas how to achieve the goal you are striving for.
What is great about remote is that it kind of forces you to write down your ideas in some format, in PRs, in proposals, in documents. That gives the space and time for others to chime in, at their own pace, without your "body language" or your "room presence" shutting them down. Granted, it's not the American way with a top-down approach to startups, but if your working model is you simply tell your engineers what to do and they execute it, then imo you are missing 90% of their value.
> you will see him grimace and cuss you out in person, and you can adjust the plan accordingly....you won't get that body-language feedback
I have never had anyone at work "cuss me out", whether that's been remote or in the office. That sounds like a very unhealthy culture to me.
Additionally, I stipulate that looking for inscrutable clues in people's faces can instead be replaced with building a culture where you reward people for speaking (or writing down) their mind and all contributing towards the common goal, and there is a healthy amount of discussion (preferably written). As a technical manager, your role is to provide a clear goal to your teammates, and work with them to a good solution, not analyze their body language and making decisions based on that...
> yes while looking for other jobs and posting about how incompetent his manager is on Hacker News.
I'd be doing the same if my manager's main job is observing my every facial expression and I am not allowed to say no or at least explain why I don't think the task that's been presented to me is possible to be achieved in the proposed way.