Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

For example, when I was setting up my local environment I needed a token. What token? Not specified. So I had to ask someone else and wait for a reply. It turns out I could have gotten the token myself.

In a prior job, I needed at least 10 instructions from senior developers on setting up my local environment as the readme was very out of date. It caused a lot of problems for the next guy coming on board.

That said, I have worked for many different companies, and rarely felt like working relationships were ‘foisted’ upon me.

I generally enjoyed interacting with colleagues because we were working towards a common goal - i.e. we had something meaningful which we cared about in common.

The one company where this wasn’t true had a cultural separation between product and infrastructure engineering, with a lack of mutual respect that flowed from the top of the organization.

My point is that if people don’t feel common purpose with their coworker that enables them to find satisfaction in their working relationships, that points to a company culture problem.

Yes, I did enjoy this a lot. Off topic, but when I retired (again) after this gig, I re-started offering my free mentoring service (1 hour talk on the phone or Zoom, some people just want to exchange emails) again, and have enjoyed helping people.

This seems naive, disingenuous, or just lazy reporting. In my experience, neither "management" nor "workers" are monolithic blocks. Some are in favor of more WFH, some not.

Most people I work with want to return to the office or are indifferent. Reasons cited include, too many distractions at home (kids/family), work/life structure (more below), team social interaction, improved face to face collaboration & mentoring (new hires), office perks, and so on.

Not everyone has the discipline, independence, and communication skills necessary to be successful at WFH. In my experience, WFH is especially challenging for many early career individuals.

We should be realistic about human nature and organizational dynamics. There are significant down sides to teams if some people are in person and some are remote. The remote people will inevitably miss out on many in person / adhoc conversations. Having less information than peers can hurt job performance. This leads to people feeling like second class employees in the long run. We saw the same thing with remote employees pre COVID.

I say all this as someone who is generally in favor of WFH.

Remote teams need to work & communicate differently from in person teams to be successful. For example, we spend a lot more time on written communication (docs, emails, chat, etc) compared to in-person adhoc desk/whiteboard conversations.

I think the more reasonable organizational approach is to have fully remote teams and fully in person teams. This enables everyone to get roughly what they want/need. Team processes and expectations can be tailored to the team's situation.

The big question then becomes, how do companies refactor large orgs into remote and in person teams? My guess is that it's going to involve a lot of team changes and disruption to the org. This is likely why sr. managers are trying to make the transition in a slow, controlled way.

I’ve been working with a company that have done studies on remote work, at the beginning 4% of employees wanted to work from the office 100% of the time. 6 months later it was 2%."

Source: @dade_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27992011