CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

Re:CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Man... by LiquidSky on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @11:48AM (#39192307)

Theoretically, sure, but in reality it's just that most managers are bad at their job. Knowing what your team is doing, knowing how to set priorities, knowing how to organize projects, making sure targets are being effectively met, etc. requires actual work.

It's much, much easier to count butts in seats and glance at badge swipe times and pretend like you're managing your team that way.

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Re:CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Man... by MattGaiser on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @12:00PM (#39192504)

> Knowing what your team is doing,

This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.

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Re:CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Man... by Spivak on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @12:07PM (#39192610)

Which is silly. I have worked in infra my whole career and just one of my job duties is to know what every single team is working on and shipping to provide operations guidance/support and to anticipate and be ready for risky changes.

It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and read the transcript after if I miss it.

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Re:CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Man... by ebiester on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @01:49PM (#39194015)

Most of the RTO conversation is happening outside of tech. While some is (e.g. Amazon, Zoom), we all started off in IRC or email in college or before. This isn't true for all areas of the business.

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