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The cynical answer to that question is ”you don’t need to be in the office to do your work, but your manager does need you in the office to do his work”.
Me sitting in the office, because ordered to be there, while all my managers are remote, wondering slightly what is going on..
I find it kind of amusing (and annoying) that employers like to play the salaray game as it fits their needs. I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that…
This is so foreign to me, living in Europe. The salary here is in my experience based on where the company is located. Big city, big salary.
The cynical answer to that question is ”you don’t need to be in the office to do your work, but your manager does need you in the office to do his work”.
Unless you believe managers don’t do useful work, that doesn’t even strike me as a very cynical take. I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office. I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona…
When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up:
- Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements
These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management.
That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management.
All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way.
Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life:
- Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods)
- Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about.
- Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.
Before Corona I travelled a lot and now I live so remotely that a office job is out of the question without moving. The actual remote jobs I've seen in that time all had weird issues like fixed (early) meeting times, more often than not even daily. Or performance tracking that went as far as installing third party monitoring Software while not even getting a dedicated work computer. Or being available at slack the wh…
It's hard to believe that there's IT companies that would trust you to work on your own personal PC. It's a glaring security issue that sounds like a company problem, not a general difficulty for remote work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The opposite position could just as well be said to rest on the opposite assumption.
The burden of proof is much higher on remote work. The entire history of civilization from hunter-gatherers to 2019 was built largely with in-person work. If companies are going to make a permanent change to the way work is done, they will need affirmative proof that the new way works better than the old way, otherwise the much more tried-and-true old way is a much safer bet.
Again, I want to reiterate: if it really made workers worth less, it could be factored into salary. It's not about that. It's about something else that has to do with management and control.
Don't get me wrong, I am not doubting for a minute that remote work has challenges, but that's the thing. We had to work those out. Security, compliance, VPNs, beyond corp, whatever... We already HAD to do it. The only reason now to discard that would be sabotage.
I find it kind of amusing (and annoying) that employers like to play the salaray game as it fits their needs. I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that…
A good indicator is the finances of the company. If you are going to be another cog contributing marginal value, for whatever reason that is, then it's going to be difficult to argue for better salary (thought they MIGHT give a higher salary, to everyone, like e.g. Google). If you can however have a big impact and they have good revenue or funding, then it's a lot easier to argue for higher salaries: "so you are making $300k MRR or just raised $5M of VC money with 4 employees? And you have more tickets and bug fixes to improve growth and reduce churn that you can feasibly do? Great, let's talk how I can effectively help to slash those tickets and then we can discuss my compensation*".
Classic: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
* though if the company is crushing it so much, and specially because your marginal tax rate might be already at 50%, evaluate asking for some Stock Options/RSUs/etc.
The cynical answer to that question is ”you don’t need to be in the office to do your work, but your manager does need you in the office to do his work”.
Me sitting in the office, because ordered to be there, while all my managers are remote, wondering slightly what is going on..
It's framed as a gift in order to manipulate the negotiating position. The fact is both employer and employee benefit from it, but if the employer can emphasize the benefits to the employee they can extract a bit of value from the relationship.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you believe managers don’t do useful work, that doesn’t even strike me as a very cynical take. I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office. I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona…
By saying "serendipity" here, we abstract it into its own unique cutesy concept, preventing proper analysis of its actual tangible benefits. This leads people to talk about it as if it's some magical emergent property of water coolers. When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up: - Spontaneously detecting and addres…
I find it kind of amusing (and annoying) that employers like to play the salaray game as it fits their needs. I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that…
There are perfectly valid reasons why that's not the case, see here:
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...