> Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office

Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize).

I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever.

This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.

Reading this made me wonder if I have an alt account that I forgot about, because this is exactly how I think about our current state.

Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).

But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.

Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.

Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.

Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.

> Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.

You want to actually compete for fast iteration? We'll happily take you on over at ardour.org ...

Yes, there are some FLOSS projects which may take a long time to approve PRs. Even in our case, that happens sometimes when someone proposes something we're not convinced by but also cannot reject immediately.

Meanwhile, it's not unusual for comments in our discourse server to lead to direct changes in the main branch within hours.

So while FLOSS may contain examples against distributed teams, it also contains very strong, and very numerous examples that argue in favor of it.

Most open source projects I’ve worked on could move faster than any of the large companies I’ve been at.

To be fair though. There was an AWS service that didn’t have Cloudformation support. It was faster for an SA at AWS to build out Terraform support for it and get it merged into the Terraform than it was for us to just wait on CD support.

I literally had a customer decline a meeting today with this as the reason:

"Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"

Literally doesn’t matter to the people making these decisions. It’s unfortunate.

Why would it even matter to him? This fucking clown will be gone in a couple of years after collecting a fat check.

I work in a post Covid office and even with about 1 to 6 ratio of desks to rooms, along just as many fart pods, it can be a struggle to find space during peak hours.

Do you really have one desk per six rooms? That's pretty sparse 8)

Now the real issue is: what on earth is a fart pod?

Anyway, my (quite literally mine as in I'm the MD) tiddly company still clings to the notion that remote working is a good thing, in general. Pre-pandemic I was a sceptic and post-pandemic: I'm happy that a lot more remote working happens.

There do need to be additional controls but not of the intrusive, automated variety. I deliberately ring people up and encourage using the dog and bone and frown on email for immediate requirements.

It is a fact of modern corporate life that people will use email as it was intended: a reliable store and forward communication mechanism. A side effect is that what should be sorted out now can be ... legitimately ... punted off into tomorrow.

Not the OP but I think they mean those little phone booth pods. For if you want to join a call but you're the only one from that office so taking up a meeting room makes no sense. In our place they're tiny and stuffy (probably to prevent people hoarding them all day!). And if you fart in them it will probably hang around a long time :)

I thought the stairwells were the designated fart location

>along just as many fart pods

You mean phone coffins?

Fart pods seem like a more accurate nomenclature to me.

You mean rack mounts for humans?

None of these executives are using data driven decisions. It’s said as much in the memo. It’s vibes based.

I suspect there’s more at play with this. Maybe they’re expecting attrition from this and that’s their actual goal. They never reveal their core intentions.

This. The actual numbers show that remote workers are more productive and that fully remote companies generate outsized returns when compared to companies that RTO. Executives know this and chose to ignore it.

This is about the appearance of doing something, not actually doing something.

> They never reveal their core intentions.

Is it so hard for them to say, FU, office time now because I like it, or because we want to force attrition, or we bought all this RE and by god we are going to use it?

I mean, if they give the honest non vibe reasons, it would be the same, but at least honest.

Wall Street doesn't care as long as the stock goes up.

Customers don't care as long as they get the product.

And employees can't do anything other than vote with their feet.

So what's the downside of being honest?

Many executive jobs are little more than “being in the office” - they have to “go to work”. This leads them to think presence = work being done - they don’t know what actual work or productivity is. If they don’t have people present to lord over then their job starts to be seen for what it really is… a suit and tie in an office and nodding while saying “hmm” at meetings.

My company's CEO comes from the sales world, and I imagine that's the case in many companies making these RTO decisions. His idea of getting work done is getting everyone in a room together, having some handshakes, sitting down, and talking something out. This is not what getting work done looks like to software engineers, and many other IC positions. The blanket RTO policies come from a lack of understanding how other people & roles work best.

The real underlying reason is easy. You know how to really excel as a developer, you pretty much have to be in for love of the craft? Management's the same way, but instead of a focus on building software, it's a focus on fulfilling a sense of power. People who are motivated by the pursuit of power put more effort into achieving positions of power, until basically any position of power is filled by the power hungry. It's a fundamental failure of every hierarchy. Sometimes there are temporary exceptions, but over time everything reverts to the mean.

In office, managers get to look out over their little fiefdoms. It's a physical space, with physical people, and it's theirs. And their competitors (other managers) can see their domain, and understand where they stand in the pecking order. In WFH settings, the whole thing becomes far more abstract. The manager's desire for elevated position isn't met, and they become paranoid that their competition can't see their status.

A lot of us have worked remote for a long time - I did it 2004 - 2007, and 2015-present. Sometimes across many time zones. The issue is with (lack of) leadership, and specifically lack of accountability for leadership.

My personal experience has been that teams were not in close physical contact since about 1994. Basically since the internet became ubiquitous. In 1999 I was working in an office in Silicon Valley and realized that I never sat across the table from any of the people I was working with. Some were in other buildings around the campus. Some were in France. Some were in the field. Some were down the hall on the same floor, but if you wandered over to talk to them chances were they weren't in their cube. So I decided to move to Montana. COVID occurred 21 years later.

> Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.

Any productivity increases come from the fact that some employees would rather quit than come back to the office. Which makes it seem like less people do the same amount of work. Until they get overworked and output plumments. But that will land outside of the measurement window.