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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

#201

Post by coffeebeqn »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #112
dpflan wrote: post #63

"Offices across the U.S. are at an all-time occupancy low, and commercial real estate is starting to see an all-time high of almost 20% of unleased space, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reduction in real estate spend has enabled companies to reduce their operating expenses, thereby positively impacting their financial health. This poses the question: Are return-to-work mandates better for the workforce or…

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

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

#202

Post by sanderjd »

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…

I these, I think (1) and (2) are "you're doing it wrong", but (3) is a real and important issue that remains unsolved.

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

#203

Post by ryanSrich »

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…

Sounds like a PR-friendly way to do layoffs. Force people back into the office knowing 30%+ are going to quit.

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

#204

Post by karaterobot »

abadpoli wrote: post #156
smrtinsert wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any value is worth it. On your death bed you will never say I'm glad I spent those years of my life commuting for Amazon instead of everything else I could have been doing.

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.

Good on you if that's how it works, and I would say that's worth it, if all goes according to plan. But be aware that a lot of people have tried that strategy, and just end up working until age 65 and remembering how much of their 20s and 30s they wasted. Family, health, industry shakeups, change of priorities, and on and on. There are so many variables involved in trying to predict your distant future that sometimes it makes more sense to take care of the present, with an eye on the near-term.

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

#205

Post by eschneider »

throwway120385 wrote: post #41
bolvyk wrote: post #6

People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.

I run a team of embedded systems developers writing software for a kiosk system, and our productivity is about the same as it would be in-office. We've had to make technology decisions at times to avoid doing low-level bring-up but almost all of the work we do doesn't require a shared lab space. My team is very effective at meeting organizational goals. We're more effective than many of the higher-paid "flagship" tea…

I'm also doing embedded systems work, these days focusing on a lot of low level board bring up that requires a fair bit of hardware test and instrumentation. I ended up fitting out a home HW lab this year because I just couldn't afford to get blocked on hardware issues and I was absolutely shocked at how inexpensive it was. I'm old enough to remember when an oscilloscope weight 50lbs and was a five finger investment. Now, you can get something nicer than I ever had in an office for $350. Complete no brainer if it saves me half a day a year (and oh, man, has it...) Same thing with logic analyzers. You can spend next to nothing for basic functionality or, if you're willing to spend $1K, you have access to very nice kit. Same thing with soldering stations.

I _might_ have a bit more space working at an office, but rarely have I had better access to tools.

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

#206

Post by sanderjd »

ExpendableGuy wrote: post #190
alberth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thank you. I will fight this new trend of 100% Slack/Teams/Etc. as long as I possibly can. Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a real time form of communication. Chats, meanwhile, imply immediate response. Hell, these apps even show when you're active -- I've gotten passive-aggressive messages like, "I know that you have DND on, but can you confirm you're seeing these messages?" chats out…

This is just culture / familiarity. Absolutely nothing about chat implies immediacy by necessity. But I agree that expectations are often set badly, and that's an important cultural problem to solve.

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

#207

Post by DiggyJohnson »

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.

What if you don't find commuting (I have a 12 minutes commute against the flow of traffic, I kind of like getting out and seeing the city and I enjoy driving), and aren't too worried about "all kinds of diseases at work" (i.e. Covid, Flu, and colds)? To be honest, you seem very paranoid about the risk of impairment by disease caught from coworker at your presumably white-collar tech job. This is minuscule. Does it surprise you that other's might not find your example to "just think" about not compelling at all?

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

#208

Post by gnicholas »

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.

> people infecting you with all kinds of diseases at work that lower your quality of life

Someone who retires at 40 probably goes to watch movies, eats in restaurants, and travels on airplanes.

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

#209

Post by Amigo5862 »

fooster wrote: post #122
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-Suite is a cost center. Only a small portion of established companies (not startups) have executives that make a clear revenue difference. First thing AI should replace is most of the C-Suite.

I understand the snark, but it is really unhelpful. I guarantee that your company would ceases to function without these roles.

LOL

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

#210

Post by w4 »

monknomo wrote: post #146
spacemadness wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blind, and to a lesser degree HN, seem to actively dislike IC-type workers, if not the work itself. I feel like this is a cultural shift for hn, and I'm curious about where it comes from

> I feel like this is a cultural shift for hn, and I'm curious about where it comes from

My gut feeling - without data to back it up - is that HN has shifted from a forum mostly for founders and hackers to a forum mostly for FAANG employees who would have gone into finance or consulting in the 2000s. This mirrors the shift in the tech industry at large.

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