Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar to how the solution to work/life imbalance is never less work.
What else is it?
Pizza parties of course /s
Tragedy of return to hostile offices
171–180 of 306 posts
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
RTO has benefits, just not for employees. Commercial real estate, businesses downtown, municipalities, they all benefit from this slow moving trainwreck.
I don't see how those relate to a company's revenue or bottom line, which is usually what we imagine company's to care about above all else.
1) Investors in the company are also investors in CRE. So they pressure the company into this BS
2) Municipalities give all sorts of tax breaks and incentives to companies, but only if people are in person helping the local economy.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#173I see this tragedy every day I wake up and from my living room window I see hundreds of cars waiting at the traffic light(s).
This wasn't the case during covid, of course, and also during the beginning of post-covid.
It seems all is behind us. Not sure what the value of all this is, except for some people telling others how they have to live life.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha this is like a really poor attempt at PowerTalk and sociopathy from a wannabe executive.
"Have you considered the increased opportunities for synergies in the office? We should punt on this until next quarter's all hands when we can utilize our increased office presence to actualize our OKRs."
Even more “this is a problem with your perception of reality not mine”
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#175I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company. The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple wit…
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors
> The return to office has nothing to do with productivity
I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side.
I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig.
A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time.
1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin).
2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers.
3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#176In some ways, OP’s suggestions are a recipe for building hostile teams! Why would I be entitled to interrupt someone to review my code, just because they are sitting next to me? Always on zoom? No, thanks. It invariably devolves into micromanaging. Constant KPI awareness? Most companies cannot even agree on how a valuable KPI looks like. Remote pair programming? Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing…
Pair programming isn't widely practiced for obvious reasons: It looks like you just made your code twice as expensive. There are studies justifying the cost by showing it can be recovered with less testing, code review, and bug hunting. But that evidently hasn't been persuasive. Also, anyone familiar with statistical quality control (SQC or SQA) would look at pair programming and see 100% inspection. Very suboptimal…
Yes indeed. I remember a full team of old mainframers going together in a room with printed code and review it together. 500% inspections. Many pieces of code would hold for decades without major refactoring. A lot of the code being produced today is quite garbage IMO, and you can see that in the infrastructure requirements it brings with it, growing faster than our bandwidth.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#177> Most of all I get sad when I see ineffective teams with no ability or motivation to improve—whether remote or co-located.
This. I get that remote isn't always practical or effective, I do. But it's the staunch insistence on one way of working, and the denial that it needs improvement, that pisses me off so god damn much.
If I could actually get more work done in an office, of course I would go back. I have a huge backlog of shit to get through! But an hour commute isn't making that easier. And we all have been in the office where half the team is spread out just because they want to get away from noise, or to find a more comfy place, or they need heads-down time without interruptions. We've all been in meetings where 3 people are remote just because they needed to let a repair man in at noon, or their daughter's sick, or something's going on. And that is fine. So what's wrong with keeping that the same, and just not requiring people go in?
Then there's all the other dysfunctional shit that has nothing to do with an office, where the office is the excuse to never fix it. We can't figure out our online communications? No problem, just buy a big room and shove people in it and they can just walk up to each other all the time. We can't properly organize our documentation? Big room, shove people in it, walk up and ask where something is. No documentation? Big room, shove people, interrupt, ask how it works. Need to decide something but don't want to have a meeting? No problem, just interrupt 5 people at once and have an impromptu meeting. Who needs to improve their business process when they can just have people interrupt each other all day and never write a single thing down?
Remote doesn't magically work well either. You have to do specific things to make remote successful. I'm pretty sure the reason for mandatory return is just that they don't want to try. Even if half the workforce wanted to work in an office, they could buy a smaller office and let workers do what they need to do. But that would still require improvements to get the remote half to work well with the in-office half, so let's just avoid that extra work and force everyone into the office. That's easy for management, but sucks for the workforce, and the business.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked under a C-level person who was otherwise a pretty sensible guy, but he had participated in a workshop about this, in a 1000 person company. After the workshop he instituted a RTO policy. The policy was more lenient than the company policy, but still needlessly strict. In personal discussions he stated that in the workshop they discussed that all people would slack away from work given the opportunity. He see…
Interesting. Though, to be fair, C-levels are C-levels because they are the best at doing what they're told to do. So I feel like a CEO just has to say, "obviously WFH is bad" and then the sycophants will parrot that as if it was their own idea.
Well, yes. I cannot get into details, but I am pretty confident that the CEO was pressured in a similar fashion as well.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are in a positive office space, you need to understand that you are incredibly lucky and part of a tiny minority.
> you are incredibly lucky Says who? There's no more reason for an office space to be bad rather than good. And there's no reason to think that having a good one is based on luck. If office space dynamics and setup are important to you, then put it in your job search mental list and find a job that matches that.
This isn't restricted to "offices." It's also why it's difficult to live with other people and housemates often end up in conflict. The more people you need to share a space with, the more contention each shared resource gets, and fewer individuals get what they actually want when they want it most of the time. There's tradeoffs to make, of course. We have societies and communities precisely because groups tend to accomplish more than individuals thanks to specialization and division of labor, but there's a reason humans tend to live in roughly family-sized units when given the choice, not open dorms with hundreds of other people.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#180So, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the pop…
Nearly anything can be bucketed up into some kind of "this is an N-class issue, think of the non-N class!", so I am not sure this is a great approach to problem solving. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, investors, CEOs, world leaders all have problems and they all want solutions. My doctor who exists in the top 0.1% is still entitled to say, demand working less than 80 hour weeks and whatever else their "class" problems entail.