I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and what's it matter what they're doing with their time?

For the first time in my career I feel able to actually perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on another team, I can just go do laundry.

If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-office.

On a long enough time horizon, someone will pick up on this and perceive the engineer as "slow." If multiple people are doing this in the team - then the org is probably in trouble.

If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... why would you hire extra people outside of contingency coverage?

If my workload is such that I can work four "full time" jobs and every one of my employers is happy with my work product, then that's nothing but great for everyone.

Again, high trust environment.

If they're performing okay during the ramp-up period, it stands to reason that they'd continue to do fine after the ramp-up period.

But again, if the employee isn't meeting standards, you fire them and find another. Turning the employment into a "jealous and paranoid lover" situation where despite the fact that the employee is meeting performance expectations, you're constantly questioning whether or not they're *GASP* doing work on the side for Another Company(!!!) does noone any favors.

If the work does produce a viable business and management just wants to squeeze more out of people then I think it is a different problem.

I agree a good business operates on trust. I also agree with other posters that the current business norms of mass layoffs during record profits, PIPs, "managing out", clawbacks, and all the other abuses have clearly shown the trust isn't there the way folks claim "the good old days" used to be.

I dont think lying about your employment, intentionally sandbagging, or cheating your employer are ethical behavior but I sure see why folks feel like being the nice guy is a surefire path to exploitation.

I personally would like to see a normalization of very different employment contracts that do a better job of balancing the two sides. I assume this means a return to strong unions (although plenty of issues there as well; certainly no silver bullet).

tl;dr With "make us enough profit and we'll probably fire you tomorrow" always looming over your shoulder I understand why loyalty to a company has dried up.

Everything in software engineering is like this. You never know when you're going to stumble into a rat's nest of unexpected complexity. Should I be on the hook to pull 100 hours this week in order to maintain a normal pace on my tickets despite the snafu? Of course not, that's ridiculous. At the same time, there is no way for my skip to verify these types of stories across 100 reports.

Replace "reasonable" with "trusting" and this is literally a restatement of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.

It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.

Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.

It was in a sense, although this is changing. Rising costs of education started to ensure that degrees are just another tool of class warfare, in the sense that you can only make money if you have money. Any well-paying and non military job category that bypasses this, caring more about talent than certification is probably getting us closer to a utopian meritocracy.

But of course, this was never a credit to the management class or the industry leadership, just an accident of timing during a growth phase plus some peculiar aspects of computing itself vs domains like say, medicine or structural engineering. Maybe it does come down to scale.

Anyway, even if the world hasn’t overproduced SWEs and info workers, the AI we’re all building works for management. So eventually AI engineers won’t be able to find AI jobs not because the AI is doing their job, but because AI filtered them out of the applicant funnel early for ranking high as mercenary, or low on conformity, dependability, or desperation, without even looking at certification count. Imagine how easy it is to flag applicants as not-desperate-enough yet to be lowballed on the offer, especially after there are only a few ways to apply for anything, and after indeed and linked in etc all decide they work for employers more than job seekers. Everyone who is talking about whether they can be replaced in their job should be much more worried about being filtered, because from the employers perspective, there’s always some reason you’re not the best hire.

There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and managerial oversight in companies at scale.

Not at all, most of big tech literally has firing quotas... which combined with the typical incompetent/parasitic management means good engineers are fired and terrible ones stay on/get promoted.

In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.

They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.

So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.

And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.

At least in the orgs I've been in, it seems to me that everyone is always aware at any given time who the "coasters" are. We have to constantly work around them / isolate them from causing damage. Hell, even Forte should give some signals.

If they can't do that, they will grasp at any reason outside their control as an excuse for why their team is underperforming, WFH is the perfect fall guy, and I can guarantee you that Amazon has no real data to back up the claim that WFH decreases productivity - in fact they published data to the opposite.

It may be the primary responsibility by plurality but it almost is never the MAJORITY of the time you spend, ESPECIALLY in big tech.

I'd say the most likely breakdown is:

* 40% managing reports and judging their performance * 30% managing upwards * 20% recruiting/hiring * 10% team vision/strategy + cross-org initiatives

This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most people who work less than expected don’t work elsewhere and have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing that in the office: if their manager didn’t notice low productivity in remote setting, very likely this won’t happen in the office too.

Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?

Real person, but absolutely not representative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor

He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great description of what was going on even in this exemplar case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew about from a single case because the woman was caught and charged with crimes. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean—well, her too, I suppose).

Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was still committing fraud)

Because they report to the person who says they can't.

If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get a bonus for cost savings.

>Labor costs have risen

Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative levels they were even 10 years ago.

Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with the money.

Massive wealth gaps can't end soon enough.

Why doubly care if they perform well enough? Some sense of misguided justice?

If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there is a vehicle available for that, it’s called “consulting”.

I don’t think anyone should have loyalty towards their employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple full time jobs is wrong, imo.

Maybe look at output? My experience is in call center/helpdesk. Either someone takes calls and tickets or they do not, very noticeable.

If the company really wants, there is software like Teramind and Aktivtrak that screenrecords and keylogs.

I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the git repos and I’m at the standups. Some people are straight up negative value but cannot be fired. It’s impossible to fire anyone.

Yeah... that feels like it should be true - obviously they're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I think if you really think about it it isn't.

I think the number of people actually working more than one job is very small. So you're really talking about people slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office. Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.

I used to read Reddit all the time at work.

The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not catching up to them then that's on management for not paying attention.