11–20 of 298 posts
> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
> taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. Why?
(I've been managed distributed teams for 25yrs)
Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out the percentage of people who responded positively was significantly higher than the percentage of people who ultimately chose to pay for the option in actual sales.
I wonder if a similar effect will be seen regarding people returning to work.
> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
It seems strange that Google management would push so hard on this. Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. What possible upside could there be that justifies forcing the issue and hurting morale by pissing so many people off? Sure, maybe there's an argument that a fully remote company has a hard time propagating a coherent corporate culture.…
Certainly not the case for everyone. Many people are struggling to be productive at home, alone. Jobs that require more coordination are also at risk of slowing down.
WFH is great for some, but it’s not a panacea.
What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things. Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out…
What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things. Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out…
> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
> taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. Why?
Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours.
Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.