‘Return to the office’ rhetoric needs to end(thebluejester.medium.com)
thebluejester.medium.com
‘Return to the office’ rhetoric needs to end
https://thebluejester.medium.com/this-return-to-the-office-rhetoric-needs-to-end-f48580c78d05
311 comments
Let's face it: The economic, time and energy cost of the commute is WAY too much for the return to office to be justified.
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.
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.
My wife works for the state. Her team’s productivity soared during the 8 months they spent working from home.
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.
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.
I'll Return To Office when local employers learn how to compete with remote employers.
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.
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.
In my view, none of the "return to office" rhetoric has anything to do with actually doing the jobs. It's a problem with new hires. Without at least meeting someone face to face, and talking to them from time to time, there's no context for any of your other interactions. There's no chance to build any camaraderie or rapport. That's fine for one-off calls with IT support, but it's not for a team of people centered on doing a particular thing. I'm one of the more introverted people around, but even I see the need for at least some in-person interaction. Our group has hemorrhaged people over the past 2 years (and the software I write has greatly helped to at least partially make up for this), but it's not a situation that can last forever.
I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later. Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being temperature controlled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself. The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
A stark truth about working from home is that the useless layers of middle management are exposed as not being needed. When everyone is both on and active on Slack/Teams/etc then high level decision makers can interact with low-level leads and front-line managers who are actually getting things done and shape strategic direction more easily -- and the lower lever folks can access leadership more easily and quickly when problems arise. No running it through seven layers of management, no weeks of delays to have meeting to plan meetings to think about having a meeting to discuss the issue: just get straight to the point with the people who matter. If I was a useless middle manager I would want an immediate return to the office as well.
There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education.
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.
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.
Every situation is different, but for sure there are a group of people like me who have decided that we will only consider jobs where the work is fully remote. Once in a great while an on-site event or meeting is ok, but a "hybrid" of some days in and some days remote each week is not acceptible to me. This is not just because I prefer working at home (or very much dislike working in a typical office), but also because I like to be free to work from anywhere.
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.
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.
Let's be real - a lot of tech companies over-hired from late 2020 to early 2022. Many need to cut staff now that the capital markets have dried up. The easiest way to do that without an actual layoff is to reneg on the promise of being able to work from home. A lot of people will just deal with it, but a small amount won't, and will quit. This is the easiest way to go if you're the executive team, since a lot of this 'soft layoff' will happen voluntarily and will save a lot of the expenses (not to mention the negative signals sent to the market) that come with a real layoff.
What needs to end is the "hybrid work" rhetoric.
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.
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.
> Those who cannot manage their time correctly and have to work past five to get things done and those who feel corporate pressure to work past five because others are doing it.
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?).
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?).
We have people working remotely and they are supposed to be available and online and I find that many are not available.
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.
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.
I can't say there's anything wrong with what the author states. It all rings true. But when I read these articles I constantly detect a theme of "one size fits all" or "this works for me". For some companies, remote works fine, for some, its a partial failure (or even worse).
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.
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.
A handful of observations:
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
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
I barely come in to the office any more, and this has been fine for me, I know all the senior folks in my org, I have a big meaty project that I am driving that has appropriate staffing, and it's largely not from the city I live in, so I don't really benefit a lot from showing up to the office anyway.
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.
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.
I've been working remotely for 4 years and will likely never go back to the office if I can help it. That being said let me be the devil's advocate and say that if I owned a large company I would likely fight against remote work.
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.
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.
The office model that the likes of Google et. al. have is also a means of doing age discrimination on the sly. These offices are in places that it's vastly difficult for cost and other reasons to have a family, so folks that get to that stage in their lives end up leaving or finding some way to do distance based arbitrage. Remote work short circuits that so of course they don't like it.
It seems like the return to the office call is really about multiple issues. First, there's the sunk cost fallacy that some companies have with regard to their office leases or buildings which keeps them trapped in the idea that they must have said offices or buildings or they're not a real company (as if the cost of existing as a firm should incur a dead weight such as unused or underutilized office space). Second, there's some companies that are perpetually in the panopticon mindset. They think if they measure, spy, and constantly monitor their employees then those employees won't slack off. The problem is that often the process adds more dead time than it removes. So many meetings, so many reports or email summaries to write. So much paperwork that is fundamentally unnecessary to the process. Third, there's just some people in charge that don't want to acknowledge that everyone is a little different in significant ways. Some folks thrive on just being given their duties and producing output that helps the process with little interaction with other employees. Some really need that watercooler talk time to get going for the day. And some just are a mix. In any case, this is something that all companies will have to face in the future since it can't be just all or nothing. The old ways aren't going to work for you and the new ways are yet to be understood. Ultimately, I'm going to say that work from home is going to be a permanent aspect of work and attempts to stifle it rather than figuring out how to integrate it is just delaying the inevitable.
I've gone back and forth from being in management and just a straight up IC. As an IC, I love "work wherever you want and we also have an office and we trust you." But that said:
People that judge managers that want a return to the office as "incompetent" in my opinion misunderstand competence. Competence isn't a spectrum. It's a function that depends on inputs and is matched to some selection of innate traits and acquired skills.
As a manager, if I'm supposed to be managing remote, I absolutely need frequent one-on-ones. I have ADHD that I can't take meds for, and the inattentivety is real. Not to be confused with a lack of conscientiousness, I am much better at managing people in person because I can pick up on social cues in a way that remote just can't. And yes, many workers don't go straight to management when they're stuck. They quietly twiddle their thumbs, and if you dear reader are being honest with yourself, you know this is true at least for a sizeable portion of the workforce.
So my advice here if you're a manager: Daily one-on-ones in the morning with defined goals and blockers. For the most dedicated, weekly is fine. Don't force in office if you don't need it for real work to be done. But make work success clear.
If you're an employee getting pressured to come in: Ask your manager for a daily one-on-one for two weeks to see if they get the sense that things improve first. They can always say "no" and you can always leave.
People that judge managers that want a return to the office as "incompetent" in my opinion misunderstand competence. Competence isn't a spectrum. It's a function that depends on inputs and is matched to some selection of innate traits and acquired skills.
As a manager, if I'm supposed to be managing remote, I absolutely need frequent one-on-ones. I have ADHD that I can't take meds for, and the inattentivety is real. Not to be confused with a lack of conscientiousness, I am much better at managing people in person because I can pick up on social cues in a way that remote just can't. And yes, many workers don't go straight to management when they're stuck. They quietly twiddle their thumbs, and if you dear reader are being honest with yourself, you know this is true at least for a sizeable portion of the workforce.
So my advice here if you're a manager: Daily one-on-ones in the morning with defined goals and blockers. For the most dedicated, weekly is fine. Don't force in office if you don't need it for real work to be done. But make work success clear.
If you're an employee getting pressured to come in: Ask your manager for a daily one-on-one for two weeks to see if they get the sense that things improve first. They can always say "no" and you can always leave.
My mother-in-law works an office job and is easily able to do her job from home with no impact on productivity. She also has had a heart transplant so is immunocompromised. Recently her bosses have started pushing her to come back 100% to work even though she has a note from a doctor saying she shouldn't be going into the office.
I think hybrid is best for new teams. People need time to bond and actually trust each other. People are wired to be friendly with people they are physically close to and spend lots of time around. I think it'd take far longer to do this remotely and would lose spontaneity, camaraderie, etc. I think initially 3-days a week in-office would help during these forming & norming stages, perhaps for the first 6-8 weeks or so. Once teams have formed and normed, they could go remote and I think be quite effective if there's a good dynamic.
Also, for team meetings I think it's easier to get peoples' attention in the office. Large video calls just don't work well IME. They're so unengaging, so it's more difficult for leaders to be inspiring and charismatic on video calls.
Also, for team meetings I think it's easier to get peoples' attention in the office. Large video calls just don't work well IME. They're so unengaging, so it's more difficult for leaders to be inspiring and charismatic on video calls.
I am curious how the leanest of "cutting-edge" startups will adapt to these new employee expectations. In the short-term, designing a company as "remote first" is a huge boon, but I could foresee a bounce-back to close collaboration in the coming years.
Innovation is rarely harvested in a vacuum; the best ideas emerge when experts hang out "at the water cooler". I think the volatility of the past two years has reduced the demand for innovation, as no one knows what the "new normal" is actually going to look like. Once this stabilizes, I can foresee passionate, lean teams that work in close proximity outperforming pre-2020 firms.
Or maybe my contrarian views are unfounded and the "Garage Startup" has truly been killed by the "Discord Startup"
Innovation is rarely harvested in a vacuum; the best ideas emerge when experts hang out "at the water cooler". I think the volatility of the past two years has reduced the demand for innovation, as no one knows what the "new normal" is actually going to look like. Once this stabilizes, I can foresee passionate, lean teams that work in close proximity outperforming pre-2020 firms.
Or maybe my contrarian views are unfounded and the "Garage Startup" has truly been killed by the "Discord Startup"
At this point the return to office articles are just click/flame bait. The boston globe publishes one probably once a month and of course it leads to hundreds of furious comments like "I will quit before I go back! Never going back!".
The thing that worries me is that WFH could bring back offshoring in a big way. WFH may come to be Work from Hyderabad. Lots of brilliant minds in other parts of the world.
A vast subset of our economy depends on parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work.
If you think they and the government institutions and their politicians who rely on their tax revenues are going to politely shut up, you're mistaken.
If you think they and the government institutions and their politicians who rely on their tax revenues are going to politely shut up, you're mistaken.
The article doesn't touch on what I believe to be a bigger issue with RTO - the huge carbon footprint of human travel for work. If there were a "carbon credit" for WFH, I think many more companies would embrace it. But that would mean first creating carbon penalties, which society is unwilling or unable to do.
They should just make the CEO stay at the office and not travel if the rest of the workers can't work from home.
In academia we've lost multiple great programmers to the private sector because of the "Return to the Office" nonsense and even when the rule requires being at the office ~40% of the work week. The replacements being low paid foreigners on work permits and they're needing to be taught but we no longer have enough experienced programmers for the task. My impression is productivity lost isn't valuable enough unlike the political reason of why people need to drive into work everyday.
Climate change is an “existential threat”, but hey let’s all get back in our cars and commute each work day when we don’t have to!
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.