31–40 of 481 posts
Work from home makes me LOYAL to a company, and makes me work my arse off! If you want to keep good employees, give them agency. I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done. I think the op…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations. They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, a…
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get prom…
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH. Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far fro…
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
But I can't deny that when a coworker needs help, rolling my chair next to theirs in office allows for a much larger bandwidth of knowledge sharing.
On the other hand my production skyrockets at home.
> is highly dependent on how well it’s managed. That's the kicker, right there. I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH. Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far fro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get prom…
Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
I despair a little at this. If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts. Client-facing stuff gets centralised to a smaller team of specialists, and the ship gets much tighter. How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are st…
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
Companies that require RTO, if they actually want their employees to return to office, should prioritize in their messaging the objective benefits/cost to working in the office. No vague-speak, no shaming people claiming that workers "don't work" at home, but rather objective analysis on what exact benefits they seek to accrue by mandating that work that could be done anywhere in the world must be done in separate ro…
It’s an open secret that there is no data that supports RTO. If there was, at even one company, it would be screamed from the rooftops. (I don’t believe it’s all covert layoffs either - it’s imho the more banal reason of c-level personal feelings and groupthink)
My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.