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CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

forbes.com

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

#191

Post by hosteur »

spacemadness wrote: post #38
2c2c2c wrote: post #13

does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons

I only hear about this on HN and Blind and have never seen it. HN and Blind really want to prove that people working at home don’t work for whatever reason, probably as we have the managerial class performing their own PR.

What is Blind?

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

#192

Post by zdragnar »

hshsh667 wrote: post #185
abadpoli wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not so clear cut. If I stay at my RTO job for a few more years, I can probably retire at 35-40, versus taking a pay cut and retiring sometime in my late 50s. I’d say that’s worth the commute.

No, it's not. Just think about your stress levels commuting, people infecting you with all kinds of diseases at work that lower your quality of life and have the chance to impair you to a great extend.

There are plenty of stressful jobs you can find yourself in, and having kids exposes you to far more diseases than working in an office.

Nothing is guaranteed, and if you're young having a few stressful years now then retiring is certainly easier than working dead end jobs for another 20.

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

#193

Post by j4yav »

Ray20 wrote: post #116
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality. Is this actually a fact that you can prove, or simply a belief?

[flagged]

I’ve done remote work for years and never done this, and worked with many many people who didn’t either. So I guess maybe some people just want to do a good job and build something successful. I’m sure there are many people who do not but probably they don’t magically become successful if you can wrestle them into a desk chair in an office, either. They probably steal office supplies.

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

#194

Post by throwaway2990 »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #108
melenaboija wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tools are needed for better remote management?

I read an advice column in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago [1] in which the person writing in was asking for advice about implementing RTO mandates. They work for a non-profit and found it hard to manage people remotely. Their complaints were: > 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office > 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in…

> 1

daily checkin, in person can happen in a minute. It’s helpful. Teams succeed together, not at the direction of 1 person coordinating. Removing them is just dumb.

> 2

lol no. That’s a dumb suggestion. It makes people less productive. Trying to replace a 30 second conversation with slack/teams etc is really just dumb.

> 3

Teams that socialise work better together. Period. You remove any socialising factor and you end up with silos, lost knowledge, depression. Etc.

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

#196

Post by DiggyJohnson »

jedberg wrote: post #183
programmertote wrote: post #81

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to th…

I used to work at Amazon too. I also refused to go in (even though the office was only a 15 minute drive) because I signed up for a remote role and I wanted to keep that flexibility. > I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, des…

> > I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate.

> They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah.

Respectfully, do you know this because you yourself have seen the data, because a person you know saw this data and told you about it, or are you speculating that this is probably the case?

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

#197

Post by coffeebeqn »

eschneider wrote: post #171
2c2c2c wrote: post #13

does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons

How does that work for ICs? I'm genuinely asking. I've always been in a position where at some point I'm going to have to produce working software and it would be pretty obvious if I wasn't getting anything done. Are people just shuffling JIRA tickets around and hoping nobody notices?

Some companies are so deeply unproductive that yes you can pretty much shuffle JIRA tickets and then once a week do a visible fix that took you 30 minutes of actual work. Or say you looked into these three tickets and found that they need X or Y which you’ll get to next week

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

#198

Post by sanderjd »

alberth wrote: post #120
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read an advice column in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago [1] in which the person writing in was asking for advice about implementing RTO mandates. They work for a non-profit and found it hard to manage people remotely. Their complaints were: > 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office > 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in…

> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.

Yeah, in my experience, chat is way more useful for collaborating than email. But we also haven't built up as much tolerance to its distractions. I think this is in part the notification / filtering / snoozing tooling is still maturing, and in part it's just familiarity.

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

#199

Post by Joeboy »

hosteur wrote: post #182
Joeboy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How specifically would I know that? Last time I gave somebody the benefit of the doubt I ended up doing their work myself over Christmas. I'm interested to know what I should've done to avoid that.

Well, impossible to say without context. But maybe it is more interesting what you should do afterwards. What did you do afterward?

The project came to an end (hence me having to wrap up their work), so I didn't do much. I'm on a new project now, but I have the same question. If someone keeps insisting their work is coming along great and they'll be checking it in real soon, how do I know if it's true?

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

#200

Post by DiggyJohnson »

godelski wrote: post #159
programmertote wrote: post #81

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to th…

> started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Isn't this 7-7.5 hrs? Are you not required to take at least a 30 minute break within that period? Or does Amazon pay for lunch? I thought 9-5 was a myth/thing of the past.

I work 9-5 almost exactly (sometimes a little less) but I think that's just because we have a relaxed team when it comes to this. I usually end up making up some hours one or two evenings per week at my choosing. It's a really nice situation, but most of y'all would laugh at my TC. Everything in life's a tradeoff.
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