Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

What about founders - they don’t just get stuck and give up on random technical things. There are many incompetent people who will sit around and twiddle their thumbs if nobody is actively communicating with them.

respectfully, you completely misread my comment.

"make software development purely transactional and performance/pay would be directly tied to metrics."

That's what doesn't work to make good products. A focus on individual metrics to the exclusion of team dynamics doesn't work that well.

"What I'm seeing is a lazy, conservative mindset of people who feel scared and threatened by a reform shaking up the very core of a system they feel benefits them personally. "

I mean that's kinda what I was talking about with a bunch of managers not being able to hack it. I don't think you get what I was saying; if HR doesn't change, you get the same people trying the same model and applying it to a new framework, which will fail. You need a better focus on the people individually and on the systems you build for them to work well together and that requires a "people" or "HR" department that actually functions well and has investment.

A feedback loop can be tight, or high–bandwidth, without having low latency. You just have to increase the sending window. Either that, or delegate more. If your designer tells you to implement X, and after that is done tells you to do Y, have them increase the sending window by telling you to do X, Y, Z and W up front. Then, when you implement W and it doesn’t feel quite right to you, you can implement W’ instead; that’s delegation.

> I think async is the next thing that will happen.

Async or a few hours of common hour overlaps are really going to be a big contributor to work / life balance even though it sounds counter-intuitive. It's counter-intuitive because it could mean working outside of "normal business hours", but this is often exactly what you need to do if you want to do things on a whim (aka. having some type of work / life balance).

Right now a lot of remote companies expect working hours between 9am to 6pm, that doesn't really leave any room for much of a work / life balance. By the time you get a chance to relax, prepare dinner, etc. it's already 7pm or even 8pm if you need to run errands. Even if you wake up at 6:30am it very quickly becomes 9am after doing a bit of exercise, breakfast, shower, etc.. If you're up at 6:30am you're probably pretty drained by 10pm. After dinner that leaves you like 2 hours to live your life and maybe fall asleep to a movie or book.

Basecamp seems to have a very good policy on this. I forgot where I read it but I'm sure I once saw DHH mention that you can work any hours you want as long as you overlap 3-4 hours with CST and put in ~40 hours a week (~32 from May to September since every Friday is off). This is IMO a great first step towards async.

It means you can on a whim decide to leave at 2pm EST because you worked from 10am to 2pm EST (9am to 1pm CST) so that you can go swimming on a nice day but you make up the hours later in the evening, or maybe you shift your working hours so you always finish by 2-3pm EST because your best working hours are really early in the morning and occasionally deviate from that for special circumstances from the business as needed.

The hard 9-6 rule means pre-scheduling PTO with a lot of notice for things that often require little to no notice. I know some companies will let you occasionally take a couple of hours off without officially filing for PTO through HR but these often need a decent amount of prior notice unless it's an emergency. Basically it puts you into a position where you always need to ask permission instead of just doing it and be trusted to make up the hours.