Manager's Handbook (2020)

This is fine advice, but the topic is the "manager's handbook" not other, better, management practices, so the advice is off-topic.

Did you read the section in question?

Advice about avoiding zero sum games isn't relevant to a discussion of a specific zero sum game prescribed by the manual we're discussing.

yes you are right. For most of us that's the only career path out of daily drudgery of coding and learning a million js frameworks on the weekends.

Its just the unfortunate reality that people are put into this desperate position. And desperate people do desperate things. For many people Being a sycophant yesman beats having to code another crud app millionth time being bossed around by someone who is a decade younger than them. I don't blame people choosing the way out.

'helping people' :)

> So, just because it’s not perfect we don’t do it at all?

Just because is so far from perfection to a point of being just waste of bandwidth resources, a security risk [1] and an annoyance who force people a certain dress code, others with shows of decorated background and animations, others shows misery of their homes while some show their wealth status as a way to impress etc.

> telling people that it will never be a replacement for physical presence, would actually quite support the crowd asking for a 100% return to office fearing that innovation and team cohesion will suffer

Honestly, without much data but hearing climate in my circles and reading the press, those who want back in office are just middle managers and some old people who will retire in few years. So the crowd will be a very small one against a far bigger one who just say, as happen right now in various part of the world "if you want me back in the office I resign, go look for someone else"... You can't made soft paradigm changes, you can only change softly witch means for instance start pushing 99% remote work just to a series of jobs where people have enough money, interests and willingness to live cities and going full remote instead of pushing it worldwide "for the pandemic" and for all possibly remote jobs. For instance instead of pushing crappy proprietary platforms like Meet, Teams, Zoom developing a company infra on company iron, negotiating seriously with workers: "if you want full remote you need to offer us a spare room in your house at a given little monthly fee, like the same you get in office to eat, with possible sufficient connectivity to work, electricity and a closed door. We gives you all the needed furniture and gears, we pay the connection or we negotiate a compensation for them if you provide them and what you offer meet our demand" instead of giving craptops and craphones etc. When a first batch of humans, skilled, educated and wealthy enough to test the new model will finally arrive to a good stability than offering a similar paths to other workers also a bit at a time to make the migration possible, the softer possible, with enough experience already made to avoid making full-society-scale or full-company-scale disasters. You can't switch paradigm in small steps though, hybrid work does not work, mixed work in the same workforce does not work. It's a classic error common in countless situations, from the military where a general want a strategy another an almost totally different one and the chief finally choose a middle ground between the two making both a failure to the classic IT horror stories and anything in between.

Consider a thing: there is no success without risk, you can mitigate the risk reducing the risk surface, like "hey we build masonry houses only, we want to try new materials like wood, so instead of change all houses a big risk surface, we build just some few houses to see how they work" but you can't get anything from "we start with a wood based floor and one masonry".

[1] you know deepfakes need much data to be trained, the more you face/body is shown on-line the more data some model get to produce a realistic video of you stating terrorist intention or perhaps confessing a love betrayal etc realistic enough to be believed. In real life no one can hold good cam and grab data without you noticing, with modern platforms like Zoom, Teams, Meet, their owners harvest gazillions of data, and deepfakes aside what you think about holding a talk in a public place discussing works stuff? You normally want a private room, isn't it?

Quite like this argument - ie it brings up some new points for me that I haven’t considered yet.

To just provide a counterpoint to your anecdote (obviously, also nothing but another anecdote): of our team of 30 almost all came back to the office several days a week (despite it being fully optional and also management choosing various models). I think it is very much driven by the fact that the team just had a really enjoyable team spirit prior to WFH plus it is a pretty diverse team (esp. age and gender wise) which also brings up a wide variety of reasons for people opting for / against WFH

This stood out to me as well. In principle, the three strikes rule is good theoretically. In practice, it is harder than most management gurus realize. The issue is that most managers know less than the people they direct. So when an employee says this isn't technically feasible or that they don't have the knowledge or skills to implement said request. The manager doesn't have any rational basis to believe or not believe their employee. It's all based on past creditability.

I would argue most employees want to do a good job. The problem is similar to the "Peter Principle." In many cases, clueless managers demand their employees to sculpt the next Pieta or paint the next Mona Lisa with sticks and crayons and no prior training. When the employees push back against hard estimates, the clueless managers double down and say they are insubordinate. I am including Product Owners and Scrum Masters in clueless managers category. In many cases, they took on these titles but have not changed their behavior according to the Agile Manifesto. They see themselves as the order givers and the developers as the order takers.

The only people problem here is the management idea that managers/product owners/scrum masters don't need to know anything about the technology they are implementing.