The real point underpinning the CEO ball fondling is strategies for creating structure for people that need it originally assembled for students working async and remote. Moving between spaces can create structure, putting on a "uniform" creates structure, having blocks of time planned out ahead creates structure, having small incremental goals creates structure, having blocks of work with regular check-ins (cards/standup) creates structure. Like it's just your standard ADHD time/focus management but pretending that these two specific things are best for everyone.

The undeniable fact is that people want "work from home" because they have serious issues following schedules and making plans. (Of course working from home only sweeps the problem under the carpet and creates bigger problems down the road.)

Yes, these cats need to be herded. They can't self-organize. Also, the methods of herding cats are well-known since time immemorial, just ask any kindergarten teacher.

P.S. You, of course, are a Cool Cat and different from all the other cats. Don't need to reply.

Of course it has nothing to do with avoiding potentially multi-hour long commutes.

I pity people who'd have to work under you. Sheesh.

Is that surprising or unexpected somehow?

Now, CEOs following fashion trends, OTOH...

The older I get, the more often I see cargo cults.

Have they always been there and I just didn't notice?

Sometimes we just start to lose blinkers, sometimes they get sticker, and even both but in different areas :/

If there were actual concrete data on RTO being empirically better, the Corporate Real Estate world wouldn't have anything to worry about in the next 5 years.

"Can you push your work-in-progress branch so I can take a look?"

If they are consistently under-performing you need to structure them. Split larger tasks into smaller sub-tasks that are more tractable over shorter time periods. If a large task is expected to take 3 weeks, split it into chunks of 1-2 days.

That way if a code review isn't sent out you get a quick signal that progress isn't being made.

Remember that as the manager you have authority. They may chafe at being asked to do intermediate checkins and splitting the work into smaller quanta - that's fine, they can grouse about it with their friends, but they still have to do it.

If they are underperforming even within this structure, have them keep a work log - which is basically a 1:1 asynchronous standup with just you and them. Read this work log daily and, in combination with smaller quanta of work, it should be fairly obvious progress isn't made.

At all points don't hide the ball from them that they are underperforming. Tell them that they are underperforming but give them the resources necessary to improve. Solicit their ideas on how to improve and consider implementing them.

Some employees can be structured to improve this ways. Others cannot - you work with HR on that latter group.

But again: as the manager you do not need to see butts-in-seats to gauge productivity. More importantly, it is on you to set a benchmark for productivity and communicate to your team your expectation that everyone hits it, and alert them in your (frequent!) 1:1s when they are falling short.

This is the process problem in my mind. Why are they working on something that goes weeks without checking in code? They should have smaller actionable chunks that can be checked in at least once a week.

More importantly, take that same employee and put them in an office and do you really think things are going to be different? Alt tab is a thing, looking busy is a thing, and if you're entirely relying on their word that things are going well then you're going to get yourself in trouble regardless of whether you're in an office or remote.

I think it was a couple of days' worth of work, which they told me was nearly finished for a couple of weeks. All I was saying was there was no way for me to know whether that was the true or not. Unless they pushed the code, which they were always supposedly on the cusp of doing. On the last day before the holidays I was very explicit that they needed to push their code by the end of the day, which they said they would but didn't.

Perhaps I need to be more assertive about it, or insist they pushed it live while I watched or something. I do think I'd have found the situation easier if we had a face-to-face relationship, although that's not really what I was trying to argue.

Indeed. I suspect a lot of people here work in situations where there's slack in the system and nothing particularly bad happens if the work doesn't get done.

Remote != Completely unstructured

Have I at any point said that?

Working from home, really does IMO require a Home Office, a space dedicated for work.

I know many people that are more productive at home, all of them have a home office. I know many people that are not productive at home, none of them have a home office, instead are using some Shared Space, like a corner of the living room, the kitchen table, etc.

If you do not have a dedicated home office then likely your home will be filled with distractions,

Living situations impacts this as well, if you lived a alone with no pets vs having a house full of roommates, children, spouses, pets, etc.

So from a Management perspective do they fire all the people that cant work from home, or require everyone to return to office? Or do they have different policies for different people then open themselves up to Workplace legal liability from either discrimination or hostile work place charges

I feel like this is a cultural shift for hn, and I'm curious about where it comes from

My gut feeling - without data to back it up - is that HN has shifted from a forum mostly for founders and hackers to a forum mostly for FAANG employees who would have gone into finance or consulting in the 2000s. This mirrors the shift in the tech industry at large.

Anecdotally many are on Twitter, though that may have more to do with the curation of my follows than anything else.

I do. I haven’t seen any clear evidence that RTO results in higher productivity or profitability for firms. Forcing knowledge worker to be in an office X days per week without given them flexibility and discretion indicates poor management culture and lack of trust to me.

I'm confused. If you cant figure out people aren't working remotely then how do you figure out they aren't working in the office? Randomly check their screens? Check the check-in/out time?

I can easily notice if someone is not working because their commits would reflect that. Not complicated.

Yes, because if you can avoid it, it makes a lot of financial sense to not have office space, cafeteria, coffee, parking space, electric bills, water, cleaning and heating. You can save ton of money by asking everyone to stay at home.

Then there's the flexibility. Our customers got a lot more flexibility when we where all at home everyday. If we had some afternoon migration, install or upgrade and it ran a little long, then no problem, I'm already home, so an additional 30 minutes doesn't matter much.

So management can go to the office and pretend to work, leave the engineers with very much quantifiable metrics alone.

This is, for me, the funny part about it. If all those metrics, meetings, tickets and what have you, pushed mostly by the management btw, can't help them, then I'm afraid nothing can. ROT is as much of an excuse as the above.

Are people just shuffling JIRA tickets around and hoping nobody notices?

What I don't like is changing what WFO looked like. If someone had to WFH for personal reasons (e.g. repair, packages, child issues, doctors appt), they just did it. Four days a week was normal, five was never normal. If we are trying to do 3 days and go to four, then everyone needs a dedicated desk. If you aren't willing to put a dedicated desk for people, you don't have a mandate for WFO, you have a mandate for hybrid.

I sit next to an officer who is not ranked highly enough to have a desk. A first year associate should have a dedicated desk.

It took the pandemic and a world in panic to swing the pendulum in this direction. It's going to take as much to get it back, and it may not go back to exactly the same thing.

Good for them. If this upsets you, then it sounds like you're working too hard.

So, yes I do find it surprising that instead of managers just doing their job they think it is better to force RTO. They are catering to their lowest performers rather than cutting those people and supporting their good employees.

I see RTO for all in the same light as when IBM required all their technical staff to wear full suits all day, even the ones crawling under desks. It's a relic of the past that will eventually die and everyone will be better for it.

Maybe all the big companies have measured and all concluded that on average WFH is less productive.

Individual productivity of office workers is nearly impossible to properly measure but aggregate productivity is easier though certainly far from perfect.

They say they don't have it, but tell people to do it anyway.

https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...

Because they haven't. Again, every study on this issue hasn't shown a drop in productivity.

>Maybe all the big companies have measured and all concluded that on average WFH is less productive.

And yet curiously neither the companies themselves nor any outside actor has been able to produce any of those measurements supporting such conclusion after years of trying.

I guess every company, government agency, and private entity in the world are all colluding to hide the evidence of lower WFH productivity despite desperately, desperately wanting to show that that's the case to support their RTO demands. Who can stop this nefarious conspiracy?

Why is it so hard to believe that people like me exist? And no, it's not because I like to bug my coworkers or that I haven't considered improving my tooling or home office. At this point in my career, with my personality and demeanor, I get a lot of work done at the office, without the misery of trying to force myself to focus and be productive like I do when I'm at home.

I'm hoping these things self-select to a happy equilibrium. I'll fill in the folks that left due to RTO, and they can fill in for my company that has a hard time finding talent in a 2nd or 3rd tier city?

And it depends on the company, but software is already heavy on metrics. Scrum is basically one giant dev productivity tracker hilariously sold as being for the benefit of the team.

The SWE industry almost universally practices Scrum which is already pretty great for metricizing and tracking work.