One way to mask that incompetence and lack of domain level knowledge, in my experience is to come by the workers and look over their shoulders and ask questions.

This is not a problem managers who are experts in what their workers are doing have. But those people in my experience are a minority. They are hired by high performing companies, everything in the middle and down get the cruft.

High performing managers don’t need this, because they know what’s going on even if everyone is at home. They can see who’s slow, who’s fast, who’s delivering what they need. And they know why and how to fix things very quickly.

Poor performing low domain level knowledge managers struggle with this, because they can’t “look over the shoulder”, and ask questions until they have some understand of what’s going on that allows them to (attempt to) fix things.

Thus low to mid performing managers do poorly at WFH while high performing managers are fine with it (in my experience). Having the “over the shoulder” view does indeed allow for lower performance managers to get a grip on a project so I understand why they want to keep it.

Nothing wrong with asking questions. I'll take a manager that asks questions 100x over a paper pusher that is not curious about what I do and makes dumb decisions due to lack of information. The difference is more nuanced. How you ask and what you ask is what makes a difference. As a manager with a long dev career before, I know better than asking random questions at random times without context. I need to provide context about why I am asking and what I'm hoping to achieve and why sometimes educating me is good for everyone in the team. You also not need to ask "over the shoulder" when you have source control, tickets, design docs and presumably other artifacts to track progress of what's being done.

Domain knowledge is a big advantage, but if you're a good manager eventually you'll find yourself leading teams in domains you had not worked on before. Unless you're talking about the domain here being "sw engineering", it is almost inevitable you end up leading teams in an area where you're not the expert. It requires a more skilled manager to be successful at leading a team where you cannot rely on your domain expertise.

In my 3rd year of computer science degree, I took a management course on a lark. Scariest sentence I heard at the time was "a good manager need not be subject matter expert". And first decade of my career I believed that was a horrible idea.

Now I don't. A team lead needs to be domain expert. I want a manager to be good at management - risk analysis, planning, stakeholder communication, etc - and willing to ask questions, seek input and learn. I don't need my manager to know how to create new indexes in db2 or troubleshoot Weblogic or set up integration broker. I need them to ask questions, interact with and listen to the team, keep us informed, fix as much politics crap as possible, ensure we are well integrated with other teams and projects, etc.

(note that this is orthogonal from office vs wfh. You can ask questions and engage team remotely easily enough if you choose to, and you can do it tactfully and productively if you try).

My (F500 size, but private, Fintech / banking / insurance company) company has 2 "tracks". Individual Contributor (labeled P1-5) and Manager (labeled M1-5). HR does not have any room or space for a "Senior Engineer who is also a Manager." I am currently a P5, If I wanted to move over to management, I would have to take a large pay cut (down to a M2, maybe M3). To keep an equivalent pay and move into a M4 role, I would have to be a manager of managers (aka director or 2nd VP I suppose).

This company desperately needs a Tech Lead type role, but there is no space within their HR playbook.

I suspect at a lot of older companies (outside of FAANG), you will find a similar breakdown or "wall" between ICs and Managers.

Many big companies also have an interesting differentiation between what I'll call a "project manager" (who has authority over potentially transient project team members), and "career manager", who permanently supports team members (and then possibly also a "functional manager").

I also cknowledge that "team lead vs manager" is a distinction I use that does not seem to have a formal definition in e.g. PMBook, but I find most people intuitively grok.

A good manager doesn't need to be an expert on the matter, but he needs to understand it. Otherwise, he can not do risk analysis, planning, or stakeholder communication.

Yeah… OP wasn’t talking about questions like those. The managers being discussed are ones that rely on those questions, and don’t build up knowledge, to do /all/ of their job.

Also, I’ve yet to meet a manager who was actually good at “risk analysis & planning”. I guess most of them are good at communicating, that’s usually how they got the job in the first place.

Competent managers are few and far between, Steve Jobs said/did a lot of stupid crap but one cogent point he made was that the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers.

But, my secrets:

1. I didn't want to be the boss, I just absolutely HATE being told what to do. The only way to not be told what to do, then, is be in charge.

2. Be open and honest in everything. If you don't know what they're saying to you, say that out loud. If you can't get any traction for whatever the thing they need at the institution, tell them and troubleshoot what comes next. If you really, genuinely understand the individual's complaints, but know that it won't go anywhere, be up front about that, and the reasons for it if you are able.

3. Let the experts be experts, support them, believe them, but also ask questions and do your research so you can (a) call out their bullshit if necessary and (b) not sound and act like a complete moron. In other words, trust, but verify.

4. Do not ignore inter-personal conflict. It will only fester, it will never get better. Your job is to manage the people, including their relationships. Nobody says you have to be friends, but you better f**ing believe you have to work together.

5. Buy drinks if the office does an after-hours, and then leave so they can shit talk you if they want. Even if you're great, they'll shit talk something about you; it's human nature.

Again, I'm not perfect, but these things are 99% of successful managing. I see my job as insulating my staff from the bullshit that flows down from on-high, that way they can actually do the important work.

I loved WFH. My staff were happy, they were productive, and they were productive in FAR less time. But, alas, the executive team here is stuck in a 1950's factory mindset of 'presence is productivity'. It's infuriating.

My personal favorite. You buy the first round and then you leave.

I think it’s similar to good parenting for sleepovers. Pop in, let them know that you’re there and glad they’re there and that you want them to have a good time, then give them space / go to sleep. Ideally, they won’t even be aware that you went to sleep, but do think that you’re willing to give them space.

This might be my most rambly comment on this site, but genuinely appreciate this comment.

And this is why I was a bad manager. I'm bad enough at managing my own relationships let alone other peoples.

I wanted the position. I thought it would be a very different experience than it ended up. I had no idea how much of my time was going to be taken up by people complaining about other people's seemingly minor actions. I am not the right person to deal with that.

Most stressful year of my life, I hope to never have to go back to management.

I would also ask that you not rule it out. Honestly, if managing relationships was the only part that you had a hard time with, you can learn that. Overcoming the stress and anxiety of managing conflict and confrontation is all about exposure to it.

My work life, in managing all of the (in my opinion) petty nonsense, helped my home life. It certainly prepared me for having open and honest conversations with my children about playground nonsense.

There's a kind of person that is good on those three things. I am not that kind of person; I imagine I can learn it, but it will never be easy.

I'm surprised you say that this is the #1 secret to your success - in my experience, the worst managers I've ever had were people who became managers just because they wanted to be in charge and "make hard decisions". The best managers have been the ones who leave product decisions to product specialists and engineering decisions to engineers.

I didn't want to be in charge. I didn't want to be the boss. I didn't want to 'make hard decisions'. I love the front-line work.

But I also hate, hate, HATE being told what to do. I hated having shitty managers who had no idea what life was like for me, professionally or personally. I hated getting mandates from the company with no context.

So, the only way I saw to fix that for myself, and the people I work with, was to be the guy in charge.

I hope that clarifies. Because, I'm 100% with you. The worst managers I've ever had have been the people who absolutely, no question, wanted to be nothing but a manager for the title or responsibility and ability to be in charge.

There's some truth to it. In the sense that I think best managers are not seeking power or "being a leader" for the sake of it. However, there are also a lot of managers that did not want to be managers and are miserable because they'd rather be doing sw engineering and as a result they're shit at their management jobs. Many do not realize it until years into the role and some cannot let go of the 'status' of being the manager and are trapped in a job they do not like, mistakenly afraid of "stepping back" on their careers.

I wonder if he read Plato's Republic, because that's the same idea behind the philosopher kings.

Reluctant managers don't do it because "wooo, no more managers - I'm free!"

Reluctant managers do it so that they can fix some of those things that everyone was complaining about before. They do it because they want people to stop suffering so much and they see ways to make that happen.

I don't think that could possibly describe a terrible manager.

No, I just think it's a quote that (if true) is easy to misinterpret, e.g.:

1. The best managers may have been reluctant managers, but that doesn't mean all reluctant managers are the best or even good.

2. The changes that reluctant manager may want to implement may not actually be good ones, because of concerns outside of their previous lower-level scope.

3. A reluctant manager may not actually have the personality for being a manager, and may become mediocre to terrible because what they have to do to be a manager is a heavier burden on them than it would be on other people.

You're more or less right, but I don't think this is exactly the case. A good manager shouldn't need to be an expert in what their staff is doing. The manager should be there to help them let them do their jobs and stay out of the way. I always say the same thing around this, "If you have to constantly watch your employees either, why do they still work for you, or why are you the manager?"

It's not an either/or, it should be both. A good manager must be at least good at anything their staff is doing and a good manager should be there to help them, let staff do their jobs, and stay out of the way.

If the manager isn't really good at (or an expert in) the role under them, then by definition they can't be a good manager, because they couldn't actually help their staff. But a manager shouldn't be doing their staff's job (they shouldn't be micromanaging), they should have trust in their staff to do good work, and only get involved when explicitly asked, or when something has gone too far off the rails.

---

It should be a "trust but verify" situation. You should trust your team to do work, and stay out of their way to let them do it, but also know enough of the specifics to be able to verify any of it and correct when necessary.

Completely disagree. I've never had a manager who was as good as me at doing my particular job, even when I was the most junior of developers and that has not once been a problem. Even the bad managers I've had weren't bad because they could help me with my day to day job. If I needed help with those aspects of my job I spoke to the project lead or one of the senior developer.

Ok sure, but a "Project Lead" is just another title for a manager. Calling your managers something else, doesn't make them not-a-manager.

You can delegate the task, but if you do it, the responsibility is now shared. It never leaves you.

I do find it incredibly frustrating when I need to explain repeatedly what it is that I do, or when I tell them what I need and they don't make it happen. Or, try to sidestep it by repeatedly asking for "just one more meeting" on the topic.

The worst is when I raise a concern, they raise a counter, and I have a series of counter-counter points to support my concern, but it is still ultimately dropped because they "don't agree". This predictably leads to issues months later, which leads into the very same people asking, "Why didn't anyone bring this up?" where I can then either mention it and humiliate them, or pretend that it never happened and make myself look like a fool.

Basically, the way I see a good manager is someone who doesn't necessarily need to know the in's and out's of how my job works, but is able to trust my assessments and support my requests, when it comes to getting things done. A manager who is an expert in that subject might be able to draw the same conclusion, but if that trust and support are fulfilled, their level of personal expertise on the subject is largely irrelevant from my perspective. As long as they can fight to get that thing supported, and don't do so in a way that undermines or ignores professional assessment, I don't care what they do or do not know about the topic.

P.S. Someone has to say this.

Some employees ARE more productive. Some are just as a productive but are happier because they have no commute. Some are LESS productive because they need the team structure. Some are less productive because they can get away with goofing off.

All of these things are true and they might all be true within a single team.

Might even be true for a single person at different times of the week.

Here I am, sitting in the office, getting nothing done because I had a stressful weekend.

Should have stayed at home, cooked something nice for lunch and slept an hour.

Would probably have been better for my productivity, but corporate thinks it's better when people are present.

Who does that well? What should be a good starting point researching this?

I have informal 1-1s to go over problems and promote jumping on a call with another dev if things are going sideways. Often our daily scrums end with some developer telling another: "Ok, I'll call you in 5 to go over that" which is a good sign.

As a manager it's more work, I can't just drop in on someone I know is struggling and ask how things are going and get them to show what that thing they are working on and then just let that conversation evolve ... I need to be more explicit and often more confrontational.

If someone is underdelivering, get rid of them. It’s that simple. The “are they goofing off” part is just speculation in your part.

- Some kind of work is measurable. It can be measured in person as well as from remote.

- With around 12 years of experience working in an office, I can guarantee you that 100% of the staff is not working 100% of the time. Maybe 60-70% ish. Why loom around in the office doing nothing when you can be at home and take care of yourself, your pets, your loved ones or cook a healthy meal, and so on?

- WFH is just taking back the time we devoted to work which is not work related such as commuting.

If someone can remain productive while having a good time during working hours, that's probably because they use that time to recharge and maintain their productivity. One of the biggest sins of managers is to try to over-optimize the team performance by having more control.

P.S. Someone has to say this.

We’ve evolved into brain work, not hand labour, and we’ve kept the same hours. My impression is that at the end of a week at the office in london I was beyond exhausted, and I could just barely recover before coming back Monday.

Now I work shorter hours, yes, and some might consider it slacking off (if they could watch it over a webcam). But I eat much better, feel much better, and don’t feel the need to get trashed over the weekend to recover.

Even in the office I would often take breaks to breathe again because I often felt the environment was a pressure cooker, I would go to the bathroom, go to the shop, find some excuse to eat. In my industry (advertising) overwork and burnout is incredibly common unfortunately.

So I personally don’t see it as slacking off. I know a lot of IT folk who don’t work as hard as most people in my industry and they get paid much better.

You don't need to be WFH to slack off. People have been slacking off in offices since the office was invented.

Whether and how much employees should be given the leniency to slack off is a different question.

Taking regular short breaks during the day to do these things takes about as much time as taking regular short break in the office to go get a snack or take a lap around the building or going to lunch.

"Slacking off" is anything other than being tied to the computer for 8 hours a day?

When I’m at home I find it much easier to create a distraction free environment without the noise and uneasiness of someone looking over my shoulder.

Even when I worked in an office I would take long walks or leave early, because a rested and happy mind is a productive mind.

Then turn all of it into housing! If you argue it won't be suitable because of a lack of sufficient windows per room etc, I guarantee you that at a low enough price, it will find a buyer or a renter.

I love working in an office, but having 2 physical spaces, each empty for about half of the time (office at night, home in the daytime) strikes me as stupid.

Let's be honest: there is no genuine physical limitation. We've just decided to be wasteful with our land use to milk more money out of it, and to force the hand of people who might object to that with laws like single family zoning.

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2022/01/14/d...

Some of us don't want to live in an urban filing cabinet.

Having lived in Atlanta about 8 years ago I can't imagine it being worse; the perimeter was always at a standstill. How bad is it now?

Speaking as a Wisconsinite, you can't just turn off the heat in your home in the winter when you leave.

Also, most homes tend to have more windows and natural lighting than office buildings. And even if you need light at home, you can just turn on the lights in the room you're working in, whereas in an office building the lights are generally on everywhere all the time during office hours.

> cooking their own lunch

Probably more environmentally friendly and healthy than the junk food that office workers would have to buy at chains.

The energy to move 50kg to 100kg+ many kilometers dwarfs any difference in energy usage due to efficiency and transporting the fuel to a home.

Operational awareness can be low if you have a lot of trust in your team. You only need some control checkpoints, at which you can interfere if something goes wrong, but the team can deliver autonomously the rest of the time. In fact, very high OA can be a sign of micromanagement or of a too high cognitive load on the manager.

Domain knowledge can be low if you have domain experts in the team and/or good documentation, so you could delegate sharing and accumulating the knowledge.

Professional expertise can be low if you have senior people in the team and you gained authority by other means, so team can trust your decisions.

The only skill that a good manager must demonstrate is the leadership, which I define as a collection skills to organize collaboration, build trust, optimize processes, enable, motivate and grow people. That skill is indeed often missing, especially in startups, where promotions to management positions often happen based on ownership, not on leadership.

In my experience many startup founders also get defensive if someone else shows more leadership than they do. And since often startup founders aren't great leaders that's not a high bar.

Bad manager asks questions, but then discard the part that is not important to them, even though the team needs the manager to understand it.

Good manager asks questions and understand (at least try to) if this is important for the team, for the project, and for the company. When they ask about deadlines and estimate, they ask why, and they try to deduct, and they remember. Good manager that works in the business selling technical product attempt to understand the technical part of the product instead of blindly "delegating" it and demanding things done.

Good manager tries to improve all aspect in the team. The process efficiency. The communication blockers.

I've seen first hand a manager, having no technical background, getting capable of reading C++ code over time to help the struggling team, and yet does not realize to have been so technical. Kind of having an impostor syndrome. Because they care so much.

I've also seen first hand a manager that only cares about deadlines and presenting good stuff upwards. They don't care about details unless asked by their superior. And once asked for details, they act like messenger owls and echo servers.

I've experienced corporate cultures in a few places, and Americans do love their hierarchies! If that bothers you, you could consider a job in a place where this is less so.

edit: Which is why you've got sales engineers, solutions engineers and so on at most competent companies that do external sales. Internally you've got product and project managers with technical backgrounds.

MBWA is an actual management style taught in business school, and before the pandemic, was considered highly effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kczJJXk-dw

The above YT video is about the Checkers/Rally's CEO masquerading as a worker and being yelled at and watching abuse by a shift supervisor to workers. The Shift supervisor then makes the above justification, that workers wouldn't do anything if they weren't abused.

Naturally, this video has instant karma happen. But in the real world, you put up with it, you get fired, or you leave. The saying "Go to work because you believe in the company, but leave because of the manager." is precisely because of this abusive school of thought.

And this applies in tech as much as it doesn't. In tech, this is how you get return-to-work, massive spyware on devices (sometimes even your own devices if the company refuses to provide equipment), and other abhorrent and illegal-in-not-USA policies.

Quite honestly, in more professional positions, being told the strategic plan is more than enough for us to realize what needs done, how to do it, and execute it. Then again, I also argue for more democratic workplaces, rather than the top-down authoritarian method.

- for remote workers: connectivity issues, home issues (secondary homes with bad heating since they was designed to be used only in summer, badly equipped, ...), mobility issues "hey roads here are damn small for the new-present amount of people!", "holy crap! Where I can get pizza at 4am here?";

- for workers around city offices: well, they simply need another job...

- for food delivery: they need to design a new logistic network, something that can't happen fast nor easily

- property values change who will benefit some much but also ruins others.

Oh, let me say: I'm a remote worker who flee a big city years ago and very happy of my choice. Back than some many have told me I'll lost many opportunities (true, to a certain extent, in person meetings/conference put different people with something in common together, something absent in a remote scenario) and I'll face so many issue that I'll not last more than few months... Now they regret to have not done the same back then. And that's not really positive in general: simply too many are not ready for a significant "life change" and in a society in deep crisis for many reasons adding another one is not that good. It can be if done well, with a bit of organization and planning, something I still not see.

I see partisans of both sides stating all the good of their side, ignoring the issues or their side, ferociously classify "opponents" as the worst crazy cancer of the humanity etc. Something sometimes nice to see with a bag of popcorn but not really positive for the society.

But we were all very senior people in the group

So I have a hard time believing this is the main motivating factor behind the push to return to the office.

Average one-way commute in the US is ~30 minutes. An hour lost every day. 20 hours every month. Literally we are losing ONE DAY at the road every month. 12 days every year.

And its much worse than it looks: When you commute, you don't only incur a time cost. You spend cognitive energy - you have to navigate transportation, cars, people, you have to avoid hitting another car or getting hit by a car, catch the tram at a certain time, do various things just to be able to get to the office.

All of these have a cognitive cost. They burn energy and especially cost concentration.

Then you have to enter the office, say hi to peopl around, settle in your desk, and start getting into the work mindset... only to be interrupted by the stand-up or whatever other practice your place has. Or maybe you will just wander around and not do much until that stand-up or meeting.

ALL of these cost immensely for both people and organizations. Economic cost. Energy cost. Burnout cost.

...

Compare this to the situation when working from home:

You get up. Get something to eat and a cup of coffee. You sit in front of the computer. You are ready to work without all that cognitive and time cost.

Personal experience matters a lot, too. I did WFH for two years in 2009-2011 and it was mostly fine. Now, although not optimal by any means, I endure my 1h 15 min commute daily. After being locked down in my house for more than 70 days in 2020 while having a very stressful work experience I could not escape from, I don't want to WFH ever again.

Others may have different experience and goals.

You seem to have made a positive outcome happen out of a negative situation. If there wasn't the commute, you would have built that moat through different ways without losing time every day. And the cognitive cost.

But to me it is neither negative nor positive. Just a "transition".

If you can make a positive thing out of commute, you will be better without commute.

At worst, you can easily go take a bus to somewhere if commute is so important.

Do you really need to take a bus to work to reap that benefit?

This is of course a joke. My point being that wasting resources to clear your mind sounds crazy when it hasn't been normalized for decades.

Find another way to build that moat.

It is miles better for my mind (and for me: everyone is different) rather than having lingering thoughts about work (after having a breakdown in 2004 due to burnout). And it would remind me of the lockdown, too.

So, for my own personal work life balance commute is better than WFH.

I think you would understand waste more if you had to directly work to generate the goods being wasted.

Gasoline, electricity, heat, water, wear and tear on parts... It's all effort, and spending it needlessly is wasteful

I used to live a fifteen minute walk from my previous job. It was something I relished, and on days with poor weather, I just worked remotely. Now I take a subway and I can read for 20 minutes.

I wonder if employers might start setting up smaller, “hybrid-first” offices in less expensive, more residential areas (eg, in the outer boroughs in Manhattan). I enjoy working from an office, but if no one comes in, the appeal is diminished.

You mean iff you can afford to live that close to your work that you can just walk in 15-20 minutes? Yeah, then it might not be bad. I still lose almost 3 hours per commute twice a week because I can only afford to live 60 km away from the capital in which I work.

My last company naively went "hybrid-first" and a lot of people who weren't married to other high income earners left because they're getting financially squeezed in these metropolises.

Yes, at this point the economic value that the real estate sector extracts from the economy looks outrageous compared to the benefit it provides. They are literally crippling tech sector in places like San Francisco. Forcing them out, crippling synergy in between the organizations that happen when organizations are in close proximity to similar ones.

Nope. Consider the BEST case:

You live NEXT DOOR to your office. You get up in the morning. You quickly grab a bite. Then prepare for ~10 minutes for going to the office. Getting out of your house, going into the next building, settling down etc all take another 10-15 minutes. And that's for people who prepare in the morning fast, walk fast, settle down fast.

So its still ~1 hour lost every day.

> Now I take a subway and I can read for 20 minutes.

Would you sit and read for 20 minutes if you didnt have to commute? That sounds more like pulling something good out of an undesirable situation through discipline and personal talent than any benefit. Not to mention that if you actually sat and read in your own house, that 20 minutes of reading would also be totally different than reading in the subway.

My previous employers were completely fine for us to work from home (bad weather, repairs, or just simple sickness) if we ever needed to, but in-office environment was fun. Not everything needs to be over-optimized to the T when you have plenty of free time in the morning.

I had to work from home consistently during the pandemic and I despised it. Once a week or so is ok, all the time is hell—I can’t bounce ideas off my colleagues or have serendipitous conversations. In fact I’ve made some not-insubstantial personal sacrifices to avoid working from home. Everyone is different.

The challenge to getting more remote is that commuting is NOT the most wasteful aspect of most companies (even if companies bore the full cost of it).

Pre-standup is for running git-log to try to remember WTF you did yesterday so you can say it in the meeting.

It's all about what's knowing what's best for you. If you need to get in the car and sit in traffic to decompress, you still have that option if you WFH. But just like commuting takes energy, so does getting up and decompressing in a way that is beneficial for yourself.

They were implying that separating home from work is what is best for them. Some people like to work from the office - you do not need to keep pushing WFH on everyone.

Once they were forced back to the office, 6 of her peers quickly left.

She and one other person are the only ones who remain. Productivity fell greatly even before her peers left.

She only continues to work because she needs ~18 more months to be fully vested in their retirement system. Then she is leaving as well and she will probably just remain at home until she finds something she enjoys.

Her managers know that they are capable of being far more productive while at home, but they don’t seem to care.

Part of me believes it’s “cruelty is the point” but I’m also aware that the director of her state agency is a conservative who has been trying to “starve the beast” once he took over. He has found the most effective way to starve it as all of the young people are leaving to go to the private sector.

Once my wife leaves, the entire state will have exactly one employee to handle her workload.

Edit: The worst part is the fact that the other side of her hallway is nothing but empty offices because those people are allowed to work from home. However, she works under a different director and he refuses to allow it. So it’s quite literally one man ruining it for the rest of them.

And thats fine. Everyone should have the option of whichever way works for them. The only issue is that many of those who prefer on site want it imposed on everyone else.

When she’s at the office she has to deal with her lower morale in addition to the random coworker stopping by to chat or her manager interrupting her in various ways.

During her WFH time, she alway completed her work by 10am each morning. Now she struggles to complete it by 5pm while being in the office.

The folks that left had many years to go until they were vested. Since she only has a short time remaining, she decided to stick it out.

There needs to be better management of management.

Someone going from a 8 hour workday in the office to a 1 hour workday at home is sandbagging it. There's no two ways around it. Let them WFH and off come the sandbags because they can get that time back. Put them back in the office and the sandbags come back because there's no incentive for them to work any faster. They're stuck in the office for 8 hours no matter how much work they do.

She starts work at 7am. Normal hours are 7 to 4 but lately she’s been staying until 5pm to try to catch up.

During WFH, she logged in at 7am and was usually done by 10am.

I guess I’m going to have to start spelling everything out and including every single detail because some of you like to assume whatever you must in order to fit your narrative.

That's the unfortunately thing with some folks' responses. They question every interpretation. As to why they exceed the bounds of reasonable discussion and make everything a dissection because they are missing some key detail they have trouble clarifying seems to be besides the point.

I appreciated your story, and have seen similar experiences.

I suppose that is unavoidable these days.

But if it makes you feel better to place the blame on her, please go right ahead.

Many other people have shared similar observations.

Is it a bandwagon to hop on? Perhaps. But better than making the OP subject of dissection and study without an IRB approval or defined survey methodology.

If so she's doing what 4 people were doing before and that explains most of the increased time to complete work. A few office interruptions and a tiring commute will easily push that past 5pm. I hope it doesn't get worse for her before the vesting.

If anyone has a technical question they go to her. If the lab manager has a question about equipment, they go to my wife.

She’s a microbiologist. There aren’t any private sector jobs for her around this area unfortunately. It’s either the state or the university (also the state).

She applied and went through the interview process just like anyone else. There was no “political appointment.”

She isn’t allowed to work from home simply because one individual doesn’t like it. Her director refuses to allow it while the director in charge of the other side of the hallway does allow it.

It’s the result of one man imposing his will on others.

This comment almost sounds like the kind of thing one sees in non-gov corporate america! :-)

This tells me you haven't met or worked with very many people in state or federal jobs. I feel like this needs reasonable pushback.

SOME of the leadership positions are political appointments. The majority of employees are a highly skilled workforce supporting a specific mission of that particular state agency.

And "can't fire or terminate anyone, ever, in the state" is a bit off as well.

I've said it before, I don't like working from home. But I dislike working for underpaying petty feudal overlords with garbage tech stacks and mediocre management even more.

I know what my local market is like, and there's plenty of remote companies happy to outcompete them. So that's what I'll do.

That said:

Apparently showing that you can continue to deliver at a high standard, remotely, for two years is not an indicator that you will be able to work like that always.

In reality, I know that Google's own metrics showed marked decline in productivity during that period. I witnessed it first hand and saw all sorts of deadlines slip and things get cancelled.

Whether that was due to WFH or people dealing also with having kids and spouses at home -- and the fact that the whole world was seemingly falling apart around them -- I don't know. I know I didn't cope well with it.

But also, I think those kinds of Big Companies proved themselves absolutely woefully incompetent in adapting. They didn't handle it well. At least my team didn't.

At this point, companies that are “office first” tend to be of the poorly managed, tech-debt riddled, low trust variety, while remote first companies tend not to be, but also tend to have an actively hostile culture towards in-person work.

I believe there is a slowly growing cohort of people who do their best work when regular or semi-regular, in-person collaboration is involved. In time, I think well-managed organizations with proper tech practices will emerge that recognize this, and will attract the right people for it.

Until then, and for as long as each side in this straw man debate views the other as a mutually exclusive, almost existential threat, then this “rhetoric” from both sides most certainly won’t end and we will all continue to be subject to articles filled with lists of value judgements and personal projection on “the one true way everyone must work”.

While places like apple or Amazon are trying to get everyone back.

Seems to fly in the face of your analogy.

I can’t really comment on whether Oracle’s culture is more or less repressive than Apple or Amazon. I mean, we all probably know the reputation for each of the above companies, but given your findings on who’s remote friendly and who isn’t, it could be just as likely that those reputations are backwards today.

Regardless, to clarify, my post was very much based on my own anecdotal job hunting in my own state of Michigan. I was also trying to bring attention (albeit poorly) to the dichotomy of wfh vs office, and the missing (and still-being-defined) middle ground.

I’m sure there are exceptions, and as someone who is looking for where I can fit in and contribute in a post-pandemic world as a software engineer who enjoys working from home but also greatly values the work I was able to do in an in-person, collaborative environment, I would welcome anything that proves me wrong. :)

Being a new hire and you're just sitting in your room/home office with Teams open on a laptop and trying to just hop into work is difficult. You're gonna have a lot of questions, and instead of leaning over to the person sitting next to you, where they can point to your monitor and it'll take 5 seconds now becomes finding someone to message and typing out your question to them, and if they can't answer it over text then you start a call and go through the "can you see my screen" rigamarole where they can now help you but they can't point or use your keyboard. And if you're having a lot of questions, it's daunting to ask a person you just met if you can repeatedly pull them into calls. I've noticed it happening several times with new hires where they'll just be sitting around struggling with a task they're given and not asking for help because they don't want to pull people away from their work.

In office, this would be highly disruptive to whoever was sitting next to you, unless they were tasked to being your mentor. I used to work next to some coworkers who were very intimidating and used every question I had as an opportunity to "demonstrate" their superior intelligence or experience. Luckily, I was assigned both someone to onboard me to the company and to my role. This person was trained, had been with the company a long time, and was well suited to introducing new hires to a large corporation. This could have easily been done remotely.

I've heard this a lot. It seems a point of contention. I don't see how people don't depend on work for some level of social interaction. How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with? How can someone want to sit at a computer banging out useless shit for faceless corporations and not have the conciliation of suffering through it with people you know and like?

At my last pre-covid job, once covid hit, my team of 10 or so would do voluntary virtual happy hour (VHH) and we would, for several months, be on zoom for hours and hours after work on Thursdays, drinking, playing music over Zoom, Among Us, and so on. And work was about 10x more enjoyable than whatever it is I do now, in large part due to that comradarie.

Even before that, part of the success of my job was through socialization. I don't mean climbing the ladder or kissing ass. I mean getting to know people on different teams through running into them, working in the same area, and spontaneously chatting about their work and how our teams affect each other. That kind of communication and collaboration is much more difficult to scaffold on Slack.

I know that a lot of movement into IT and within IT was through this kind of spontaneous meeting of people when walking through the halls or running into each other at the coffee shop. Work was a community of diverse roles and individuals, a microcosm of society where people could see how others work and be part of something bigger than our team. It sounds cliche, but that's how it felt.

Now, we have #team-chat and #diversity-and-inclusion and @manager.

TLDR: Social interaction at work is healthy; social interaction at work helps people enjoy work, learn about other roles and have job flexibility and helps them do their own job better; The thing you spend 1/3 of your life doing should have a human component.

This seems to be setting up a false dichotomy.

On the one hand, you have someone saying people "don't depend entirely on work for their social life".

On the other hand, you are saying, "how can you manage if you care nothing for your coworkers".

There's quite a lot of room between those.

I think there's also a big difference between expecting people to get all or most of their social interaction from work, and making sure that any remote members of the team have a good digital social environment with their coworkers—a strong presence on some kind of real-time text chat system (Discord, Slack, IRC, etc), regular not-entirely-serious email exchanges, whatever works for your groups.

The problem comes when you've got an organization that's been 100% in-person for its entire existence and neither knows nor cares how to actually support people when things go remote.

I have enough social connections with family, my girlfriend and friends made in university, other activities, school, etc. I don't need to make friends at work tbh, I understand if others do, and that is one motivation to return to the office but please for the love of god, don't make me waste 3hs of my daily life because you need that.

It seems people need to bridge/gap that loneliness by having/creating their social structure outside of work. I think it's more painful because it requires you to deal with social anxiety, social planning, rejection, etc. but it's much more rewarding.

I work for a tech company based out of a cornfield (only a slight exaggeration). I've seen too many co-workers who burned out during quarantine because their entire social circle was based around the office and their colleagues. After hours sports were played in the office gym. Two out of the three daily meals were eaten in the office cafeteria. Multiplayer gaming sessions were done in the office game rooms.

I see 'mandatory back to the office' talk as a demand by extraverts that their introverted co-workers subsidize their need for social interaction, and I feel resentment at the imposition on my limited social energy. To support a position touting the benefits of workplace socialization I'd need to see it presented with an attitude of 'the option of meeting your co-workers face to face is a costly perk I hope many employers will continue to offer', not an entitlement to my friendship.

It's pretty easy, I just can't connect with anyone at work. This was the case for me when I was in-office pre pandemic too. At 5pm the people I work with cease to exist and at 9am the following day they're back again.

I can't understand how people make friends with their colleagues, the environment in the workplace could not be worse for getting close to people imo. I cannot relate at all because everyone's essentially masking all day long, who wants to make friends with some else's work-sona?

I didn't miss face-to-face in the slightest, nor did i feel like i didn't belong, or that I was lacking support. We have plenty of online trainings as well.

Face to face being needed for new hires is another myth that needs to go.

Not my experience at all. There is no "slack" or anything comparable. There is no communications that skip levels. Why would a manager allow that? They would lose their power.

This dream was killed by COVID, and likely it'll be another generation before it is even considered seriously again.

The epitaph is not yet written for remote work and work-from-home, but I think we need to wait a couple of years before we can consider a success or a failure. There are troubling signs of its failure that I see at the larger tech companies; their culture has been ripped apart and reassembled into a Frankenstein imitation of its previous state. For better, for worse, who can tell, but subjectively, the change mostly seems for the worse.

Management is completely unable to adapt and has moved even further in the direction of only pursuing work that can be accurately scheduled and whose execution is therefore trivial if laborious, and the only people who can get anything novel done are those that can execute while simultaneously snowballing their management with fairy tales about work estimates and milestones.

We'll have to keep an eye out in ten years for the companies that emerge out of the fertile ground left by the workers at these companies that find they have built up a repertoire of skills that they are no longer allowed to use.

Realistically the dream was always that large hall, largely broadcast, lectures could be replaced with video of world-class lecturers. And while there are obstacles--most schools don't want to replace half their course content with videos--it's eminently doable. The key point though is that the other half of the content and in-person assistance can't be replaced in the same manner nor can courses requiring equipment, hand-on work, etc.

> This dream was killed by COVID, and likely it'll be another generation before it is even considered seriously again.

I think the future is that rich countries are gonna Baumol's Cost Disease their way out of being able to pay in-person teachers. I think we're trending that way already, in fact, and Covid wage-hikes in much of the rest of the economy, plus the most recent anti-educator (don't think that's what it is? Ask some teachers how they've perceived and experienced it) political movements (anti-anti-Covid-measure movements, shitty, ambiguous anti-LGBTQ and anti-teaching-about-slavery legislation) have pushed us right to the edge of that cliff.

For the US, at least, I expect:

1) We'll see falling teacher quality over the next few years, due to declining relative wages and deteriorating work conditions. We won't spend enough to reverse this trend—we already need an ~20% wage hike just to stop the bleeding, let alone reverse damage already done, I'd guess.

2) Rich people will continue to use tutors or private schools and get excellent small-class-size in-person education for their kids. Mid-priced private schools may become more common as this expands down-market to cater to people who can't afford $45k+/yr, but can afford maybe $15k or $20k per year, and are now motivated, by declining quality even in "good" public school districts, to pay it.

3) There will likely be some remote learning experiments to try to counter #1. I expect we're going to see the phrase "online charter school" a lot more in the coming couple decades. But the education will still be worse than what we had before, and way worse than what the folks in #2 are getting—though, maybe, better than the hollowed-out in-person schools.

4) We may start to aggressively import teachers from poor countries to try to cover the gap. This may even work—I think it's got a better chance than other options, at least. If it's not a Federal initiative, it'll likely mostly happen mainly in blue states and exacerbate the education gap between "blue" and "red".

IOW I do expect we will see fairly extensive online education experiments in the near future—but not for the reasons one might hope.

These issues are largely hidden from parents so far, but that's not gonna last as it keeps getting worse, and they'll demand a fix. They could fix it with a large wage hike, but I don't think they'll do it, and they'd need to be doing that now not to still have a significant gap in coverage for at least a couple years. I do expect many or most of these online experiments will happen in physical school buildings, not at home, though, because parents want the daycare aspect—two teachers monitoring & assisting 100 online-learning students in a big room, or whatever, or 30 students in a room looking at screens with some kind of low-wage paraprofessional, or something.

I think we're in for more online learning efforts because I don't think we can afford enough decent-or-better in-person teachers anymore to support the old model. But maybe I'll be surprised and we'll pass far-larger school budgets instead.

[EDIT] Though, I guess it's also possible we'll just accept public schools taking a permanent nose-dive in quality post-Covid and not do anything to try to fix it. I'd say that's more likely than significantly increasing teacher wages, in fact.

I don't think any actual parent shared this "dream". People don't realize that the school system is primarily a daycare. Education is a secondary concern for most.

It's funny too when people use the argument about how much better collaboration is in the office. Except for certain stages of product development, collaboration is rarely needed because planning and designing is usually straightforward or the work is just routine.

Most jobs ultimately suck, so I don't have much FOMO when I tell a recruiter that I am not interested in any opportunity which requires specific on-site time.

You don’t need 10x experts to keep legacy systems running for 6 months. Good people leaving is a calculate risk that managers probably considered.

There is no such thing as hybrid. Either I live in proximity to the office or not. Either I buy a car/figure out public transit or not. Either I set up a home office and buy WFH equipment or not. If I am forced to go into the office for >0 days a week then I have an office job, period.

"Oh but you can work a day or two from home!" Pretty much every tech employee was already doing this well before the pandemic, and "hybrid" wasn't touted as some big perk then.

Your experiences are not universal.

This is definitely not true of most "tech employees" I have known personally or heard from—at least if your "day or two" is intended to mean "day or two a week" or even "day or two a month".

Maybe it's true in Silicon Valley, but please try to remember that Silicon Valley does not employ even close to all the "tech employees" in the country (let alone the world).

Doesn't it depend on how much work you have to do? Whatever amount of work you can get done while managing your time correctly and working 9-5, isn't there some larger amount of work that your employer could expect/demand of you?

Yes, the amount of work you can get done while managing your time correctly between 9 and 5 is different for different people (also different for the same person different weeks, for sure). But this is why I've had trouble understanding "oh, it doesn't matter how many hours I work as long as I get my work done, the work they expect of me." What is the "work they expect of me"? For me, putting in (roughly, on average) the time my employer expects me to work is the work they expect of me, it's what allows me to push back if they try to assign more work than fits in, if they try to just keep adding more "priorities". I can, agile-style, work on whatever you say are your top priorities, for the X hours a week you expect me to work -- what I get done in that time is what I get done, it is unreasonable of you to expect more. This only works if I'm really working that time though, my end of things.

This seems relevant to me because, from the worker's perspective, it is one of the the things people suggest as advantages to working from home, in these forums -- hey, I can work half days every day, as long as I "get my work done". (There is even someone in this thread suggesting someone could "get their work done" working an hour every day. Presumably if their bosses knew that they would assign more work, and be right to do so?).

I'm one of those "half days" people, and it's not about doing less. It's about realization, that you are productive for less than 8h daily and that difference + commute time is simply wasted. Even if you plug some optimistic numbers, like 6h of productive work vs 8h office + 1h commute, its 30% of time spend on "work" just lost. Daily.

How do they determine what is the "expected body of work"? What keeps them from making it too high to actually get done in 8 hours? If it's not knowing that it would take you more than 8 hours to complete, if you expect how much time you actually take is private information and can be less than 8 hours and it's none of their business.

Well, a lot of it is very subtle, and I guess vary from place to place, person to person. Point is, your "body of work" can be the same, but time spend is certainly higher with office work, simply because you _HAVE_ to spend this time, regardless of the amount of work you do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_secret

Maybe I had unusually tolerant bosses or different than yours. But those very same bosses, who certainly did not expect productivity 100%, if they knew I was only working 4-hour days routinely and spending the other 4 hours on personal matters, would think, hm, it sounds like you don't have enough work to do.

It doesn't seem the same to me, cause if I'm only working 4-hour days, and riding my bike the remainer of the 4 hours -- I'm probably not 100% productive those 4 hours I'm working either!

I mean, I don't begrudge anyone what they do to survive. But it makes me deeply uncomfortable to mislead my bosses like that (like, I have to make sure to keep my personal life entirely secret to make sure I don't slip up and let them know I didn't work at all on Tuesday but went on a hike instead), and I also would feel weird about pushing back when they give me too much work. If they give me so much work that I can't do it in my ordinary work week, I push back -- we can only get so much done in a week. But I'm going to push back because they're assigning so much work that it eats into my daily 4-hour bike ride?

We have even had emergencies where we reached out to people only to not get a response.

There are people actually working from home and they are people "working" from home.

You can't be on everyone's back all the time anyway and this do not really happen in a well managed company where everyone has a real purpose, goals and has to report on the job done.

I have coworkers on every continent and in most time zones, so I have no core hours to abide by. If I did, then some of our best developers would never see the sun.

When I did work in an office, many years ago, I was less productive because I was forced to work when I was tired, hungry, outer otherwise not mentally optimal for it.

I only have a small team under me and they have good work ethic, but I reach out to other staff and it’s a ghost town.

It’s a Wednesday at 1100, and I can’t get anyone from accounting, finance, HR, or marketing…

The truth is there was some truth to it when Musk very publicly said “you can pretend to work somewhere else”. That’s true on some cases, and it makes me more certain that when I see WFH brought up, one side of that “debate” refuses to ever admit it.

If someone can't be reached on a day they are supposed to be working, well their manager should be addressing the issue and ask them what the fuck they were doing at that time. WFH or not, those are bad employees.

The difference isn't me, but the organization. Too much "watching" sends me way toward the useless end of the spectrum, if anything, because it's stressful and I end up about half-depressed before long.

I think this is why famous developers tend to either stick with a place a long time, or bail really fast—in the latter case, because they realize they made a mistake and won't be as productive as usual, because the organization as it relates to them (key point: they may get special treatment many places, so their experience may not be everyone's) sucks. Lots of workers tough it out if it's not too bad, while people accustomed to being "10x" run the hell away if the management + team + project combo isn't just right for them.

I bet my personal productivity has varied by at least 10x the lowest level, depending on where I'm working and what I'm working on, even adjusted for experience level and such, entirely due to work environment and the kinds of projects I'm on. Though perhaps that lowest-level was "0.1x" or whatever, I dunno.

And if I’m contributing 10x I would hope to be recognized as such. Sadly I’ve only had one job that allowed for the 10x and the recognition (the pay sucked though). Still holding out hope.

Also, why is there only one employee able to fix the issue?

All members of the team are supposed to be available during their work hours.

We have determined the cause, it's called people were not doing their job.

I'm guessing that's not the case.

So even in the office, the team's availability is not absolute. Which raises the question of why would someone expect otherwise when working from home.

"on call": will respond on very short notice.

> it's called people were not doing their job.

Yep, those people were you, specifically. You set wrong expectations and it bit you in the butt. And then instead of owning up to your mistake you blamed everyone but yourself.

Our team knows their expectations and it will be nice to meet new people as some are replaced.

Just to let you know. I am not a manager, I am a worker just like them

And in my world, it seems rather childish to only do what you should if you are promised a treat afterwards. (And I certainly expect more of my own children.)

If there was a job which payed 80K per year but all it involved was putting together boxes and then taking them apart for no reason at all all day, I bet very few people would actually stay there for very long.

Most people have psychological needs related to their work. (Maybe you're not one of them. I'm not trying to assume here.)

It's not "childish" to feel a need for validation, for respect, for actually feeling like the work you do has value and is valued, or like you are valued as a person.

It's human. 100% normal and expected.

If you have teams that are mature, and have solid interpersonal relationships, remote can be a boon to productivity. But, you need to have defined workflows and protocols for getting things done. If you don't have that, being remote exacerbates the problem of bringing things to completion. I'd also say that if you're a manager and your team can't get stuff done remotely, you are failing as a manager.

Conversely, if you have younger (not in age but company tenure) teams, you may need that in-person time to build the relationships and workflows. There's nothing wrong with that, and as a manager you should codify them ASAP so they can be taught and learned by new hires.

When it comes to remote work YMMV. I'd actually like to see someone do an in-depth study of this and quantify the performance of many companies that WFH/Hybrid/Office and find out what the actual performance numbers are. I'd then like to see some research into best practices about how to create teams that thrive WFH and also what makes them fail at WFH.

It's a new world folks, it's probably going to take some time to suss this all out. And until that happens, I'm going to enjoy the 2 days per week I work from home.

1) the dispersion of outcomes is quite large, I know people at fully virtual startups that are having great success, I also know that some of the governmental organizations I’ve interacted with have literally accomplished nothing in the two years since they’ve “gone remote”

2)I’d posit that a team’s ability to work remotely is a function of 1) experience (few junior employees that are learning on the job), 2) caliber of employee (white shoe lawyers vs say the accounts payable department)

3) while I had a positive experience with remote work during the pandemic, if I were senior leadership I’d have real concerns around long term implications for employee development, company culture, and productivity

But I also haven't interacted with new folks my org has hired in my city unless I have directly worked with them, which isn't really a problem for me, but I have more experience with our technology/systems/processes that new hires would benefit from, and I am not interacting with them enough to share it.

Anyway, my eyes started glazing over when this post said there was no evidence, since all the big companies have done studies on the effect of the covid shock & WFH. Microsoft published theirs and found that it wasn't totally cost-less, even if primary productivity metrics were not impacted: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-eff...

You can argue that the evidence is being misinterpreted, that companies are trying to have their cake (increased task-specific productivity when WFH) and eat it (increased innovation) too, but to say there is no evidence is to not engage with it at all.

In general, I find it unsurprising that someone from an SRE background at a relatively small company is bullish on WFH, the job is largely not innovation focused and is probably one of the parts that is least impacted by the downsides of WFH.

I think we've all experienced too big a shock for things to go back to how they were before, but pretending there are no downsides is just dogma.

While a minority of workers thrive remotely and they have the results to show for it, this is clearly not the case in general. Lots of people can't focus from home and lots still simply take advantage to slack as much as possible. These things are from the horse's mouth.

In person social pressure pushes people to work more. It's too hard and too expensive to measure performance per person, I mean we have regular threads about that. And even if you could measure you can not act because you can't fire most people and neither can you discriminate who is allowed remote and who isn't.

Overall I think it is more honest to frame this as a conflict of interest (in a lot of cases) between employer and employee, and not as right vs wrong.