Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 345 posts

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#311

Post by teachinghacker »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #302
raydev wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you live in a region with poor internet, or do your coworkers? I've been fully immersed in Meet and Zoom calls for 6-7 years now, and all the issues that used to come up are now mostly gone as they were rooted in people not having the correct habits and setups.

lol. No amount of good internet fixes remote calls.

Most people working for organizations with multiple offices have to videoconferencing all the time anyways. If video calls were really that big of an issue, having offices around the country/world would’ve stopped being a thing by now.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#312

Post by tonystubblebine »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #201
tonystubblebine wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is something to this. We have a long term lease for what is now an empty floor at 799 Market in SF and our landlord will not let us buy our way out of the lease, even at 100% of remaining rent. There are about 120 seats on our floor and about 1000 in the building. I’ve heard only sixty people use the building in a given day. So the usage rate is much much lower than the occupancy rate, i.e. we count as…

Give the homeless on market st company hoodies and let them squat there till the end of the lease then

The whole building should be converted to housing. It's not easy but also nobody is ever coming back.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#313

Post by throwaway2990 »

teachinghacker wrote: post #311
throwaway2990 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. No amount of good internet fixes remote calls.

Most people working for organizations with multiple offices have to videoconferencing all the time anyways. If video calls were really that big of an issue, having offices around the country/world would’ve stopped being a thing by now.

So what you’re saying is that if video conferencing works, regardless of it works well or poorly, it works therefore it’s not an issue. Even if a team worked faster, more efficiently, in person. It’s ok to be remote because it worked even tho they are less efficient and it doesn’t work as well.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#314

Post by tock »

2c2c2c wrote: post #236
tock wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. I'm confused. If you cant figure out people aren't working remotely then how do you figure out they aren't working in the office? Randomly check their screens? Check the check-in/out time?

It is significantly more likely your direct manager notices you being afk for 4 hours in an office vs at home. not complicated

So the point is how long you have your editor open?

I can easily notice if someone is not working because their commits would reflect that. Not complicated.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#315

Post by shortrounddev2 »

danaris wrote: post #283
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with email is the amount of spam makes it unusable, and I don't just mean unsolicited advertisements. I get spam from work in the form of notifications and unnecessary CC's, so I'm accustomed to ignoring all emails. I think it may also be generational: at my previous job, I get chewed out by my manager for not responding to some question another coworker had sent me. I was confused because I don't remember…

Sounds like you need to learn to manage your email inbox. I have dozens of filters set up to direct emails to particular folders before I ever see them. This is precisely the way to deal with automated notifications. They're always coming from the same source; in some cases, they're not going to your email directly, but to a group address that you can easily filter on. If you're getting unnecessary CCs from particula…

The rest of the team didn't use emails, only the older team members did. Honestly, none of the companies I worked for used email for communication, I think it's abnormal to be the one using it on the team.

Slack doesn't require as much configuration as you described. I don't get the point of email when we have slack

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#316

Post by johnnyanmac »

symfoniq wrote: post #71
potatolicious wrote: post #3

In a lot of ways RTO has put working conditions in a worse spot than they were pre-pandemic. In the Before Times occasional remoting was informal and casual - if you had a doctor's appointment at an odd time, you'd remote for the day, with no formal approval nor teeth-gnashing. Now even small everyday things like this are fraught. There are often formal approval chains now for what used to be entirely between you and…

Wish I could give this more upvotes. I was fully remote for more than a decade before COVID, but now I’m seeing all the same things you’ve written about here. It’s a huge regression.

Depends on the industry. In games you had to fight tooth and nail to be remote. Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft really, really did not want devkits to be in private residences.

Pandemic comes and a lot more of that relaxes. Like the rest of tech, some studios are trying to revert but there's a lot less doctor's notes needed to justify remote now.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#317

Post by [deleted] »

crowcroft wrote: post #26

Is it possible for someone to 1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time). 2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager. Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.

[deleted]

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#318

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Spivak wrote: post #246
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does. Working in the office necessarily forces you to structure your work in time and space.

You do know you're just parroting RTO thought leadership propaganda, right? The phrasing of structuring your work "in time and space" is rather unique and comes most recently from business thinkfluencers trying sell RTO as "new paradigm at the workplace." The real point underpinning the CEO ball fondling is strategies for creating structure for people that need it originally assembled for students working async and r…

Sorry, I've never read a "business thinkfluencer" in my life. Wouldn't even know where to find one.

The undeniable fact is that people want "work from home" because they have serious issues following schedules and making plans. (Of course working from home only sweeps the problem under the carpet and creates bigger problems down the road.)

Yes, these cats need to be herded. They can't self-organize. Also, the methods of herding cats are well-known since time immemorial, just ask any kindergarten teacher.

P.S. You, of course, are a Cool Cat and different from all the other cats. Don't need to reply.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#319

Post by luch »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #215
luch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally. Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based…

Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.

That's not what I wanted to say. With remote teams, you need to establish a way to organize the work using written communications which are either mail/slack/sharepoint/whatever and within this framework management needs to have a "view" into what the team is doing.

It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead".

I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#320

Post by luch »

akkad33 wrote: post #213
luch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally. Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based…

> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in So tools to spy on your employees?

Obviously no what I mean that is ok if your superior and his boss are invited in your team's slack channel even if they only lurks, and you don't create a "shadow channel" with your teammates to talk on the project without being read by your hierarchy.

Same thing with corporate internet, you accept to use the corp proxy DNS and firewall (which all logs infos) to browse the internet instead of using a separate GSM endpoint to circumvent the company's surveillance.

Post reply on HN