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CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

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Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#201
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ethically aligned company goes to reasonable lengths to allow employees to become shareholders.

Never at a level that would influence company direction, though, even if all the employees banded together. Which just sounds like a union, anyway. So why not just unionize instead...

It sounds just like a co-op or an employee-owned business.

Now, I love me a good union - and there’s something to be said about a healthy tension between management and labour in terms of keeping management a bit more honest, just like management and capital - but in smaller orgs, a co-op will probably do the job.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that it can be annoying to see C-levels jetting around the globe while you're sitting in front of the same computer every day, likely feeling underpaid - what is the "asymmetry"? Or the remedy? Do you think that if they tighten their budget of perks, or reduce their compensation, some of that money will somehow flow to you? Because no, it won't.

Mostly I feel sorry for people whose lives are so empty that they feel the need to fly across the world to have a conversation about work. Stay home! Zoom works great and you can go for a walk with your spouse after you log off instead of drinking alone in a hotel bar.

The crucial conversations occur between human beings who have met or worked often enough to have created a social connection.

Think about how absurd it is to argue that Zoom is enough to sustain family or intimate relationships over the long haul.

Zoom isn’t enough. Having that walk with a potential client, that colleague or that supplier might well be.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#203

What I don't understand is why tech companies don't believe that they can enforce a high-performance culture without return-to-office. With or without remote work, the way we evaluate one's performance has not changed, right? Then, why can't we enforce the same expectation of engineers and teams? We break down a project into milestones, and we hold teams accountable to delivering the milestones on time and on budget.…

The breakdown of a project into milestones of predictable difficulty generally has high error bars. If something has been built before then you can predict it but why are you building it again?

The only way I've found of doing this accurately is to reassign a task, IE if something is taking dev1 what you perceive as too long, assign it to less experienced dev2 and see if they can complete it from scratch in less time. If so, you know dev1 is subpar or slacking and should be RIF'd.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't have the capital to create a company and become a CEO.

You can create a software company with 0 capital. Stop making excuses.

Give me some examples of people doing this without friends/family giving them loans, or the founders spending thousands of their own money.

Not arguing, just want to see how it's done so I have examples for myself.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are directors and above immune to the RTO directives in most companies, they are also immune to location specific pay ranges in most companies. And for the few times they do require to go to the office, they can expense the entire trip, including airfare, dinners, hotels and more. The class asymmetry is ridiculous, but unfortunately most workers don’t know this fact. Edit: In case it wasn’t clear, this is no…

While I agree that it can be annoying to see C-levels jetting around the globe while you're sitting in front of the same computer every day, likely feeling underpaid - what is the "asymmetry"? Or the remedy? Do you think that if they tighten their budget of perks, or reduce their compensation, some of that money will somehow flow to you? Because no, it won't.

Well it has to go somewhere. I’m personally against hoarding in general. Less concentration means more equality.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#206
post #101

Workers should not return to the office. WFH or remote work should be permanent for all -- CEOs and low level staffers.

Should workers also not return to the farm, the factory, the mine, the hospital? Flexible work arrangements are great but it's only a tiny fraction of the privileged laptop class who even potentially have the option of remote work.

In my country all those workers regularly strike or protest to defend their interests.

Only in IT are we supposed to just accept our fate, because some guy on HN called us "the laptop class" or something.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I see no reason why the "privileged laptop class" cannot have their quality of life improved still further. We don't stop at trying to help the "privileged potable-water-having class" or the "privileged sheltered class". If it's not hurting anyone else, why call it out?

All lives matter, what about hungry kids with cancer, First World problems, etc.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#208
post #185
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yea, when I go on a work trip I tend to work a lot more those weeks because I’m not home. That doesn’t mean productivity during those two weeks are representative of normal.

It’s the local team, not the traveling team lead, that’s being spoken of here.

It’s the same root cause. If there are foreign workers in town for a week then the whole team will often work around the visitors schedule.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#209
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is fairly ideologically diverse. There is a lot of the stuff you're complaining about but there's plenty of the opposite too. Where I work, the people higher than me (remote or not) work constantly, around the clock, to the point where I worry about their health. I also like going into the office 3 days a week. It's a nice space, I like the separation between work and home, and there's good food nearby. As long as…

I'd love to shadow a CxO one day and see for myself how much hard work it is. I have a (likely flawed) picture in my mind of someone who's jetting around the world, constantly on their cell phone all day from Paris in the morning and Tokyo in the evening, saying yes and no to people but not really doing any actual hard labor or much complex cognitive thought-work. But who knows, they live in this parallel universe, p…

You can't shadow a CEO but you can read books written by those who have. Try reading the biographies of Jobs or Musk by Walter Isaacson. He had long term access to them and shadows them throughout their day for years.

You can argue that these two aren't representative and put in more effort than the average CEO, but you can't argue that their experience of being CEO isn't extremely intense.

Good CEOs are constantly juggling all kinds of complex thought-work, to a much greater extent than the average line worker would be happy doing. Programmers in particular get stressed and unhappy if you ask them to context switch between unrelated tasks, deal with interruptions and regularly make decisions that are completely ambiguous. They also probably won't be happy if they have to spend a lot of time on relationship building, performance evaluations or managing the performance of people under them.

A good CEO's typical day will easily switch between a dozen different things - a product review in the morning where they're expected to give immediate and ideally insightful feedback to a team that's been preparing for months (remembering to manage their own expectations and happyness, you wouldn't want your star designer quitting on you), then immediately after a meeting with the finance team about some complicated tax issue, and then a recruiting call with someone to replace the head of sales who you just had to fire because they {missed their targets, leaked confidential info to the press, insulted a key customer, got targeted by a woke mob} and then you move on to lunch, briefly, which you probably eat alone because none of your immediate reports particularly want to hang out with the boss and anyway you need to read a report on your competitor's new product launch. Oh and then it's time to go to the airport because {a key customer the other side of the country is upset, the government is demanding to question you, your PR team set up a speaking event at a conference and only told you yesterday}, so hopefully your spouse isn't too upset that you won't be home for dinner tonight. On the way to the airport you'll have to be on the phone with a lawyer because your company is getting sued, again, and so you need to know the status of the case but couldn't find time to fit an in-person meeting (which you'd have much preferred). You'll probably also need to plan for how to pay if you lose that case, which realistically means who you'll have to lay off or break comp promises to.

And then dawn breaks, and it all begins again. That's a good day, when you didn't have to do layoffs or explain to the board why the new product you'd hoped would turn things around is now subject to a recall.

I've seen how this stuff affects people up close. You do need to be very tough, and even then it can grind people down pretty catastrophically. There's nobody to blame at that level and you can't just quit because you don't like it anymore. If it starts going wrong you're sort of trapped.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#210

What I don't understand is why tech companies don't believe that they can enforce a high-performance culture without return-to-office. With or without remote work, the way we evaluate one's performance has not changed, right? Then, why can't we enforce the same expectation of engineers and teams? We break down a project into milestones, and we hold teams accountable to delivering the milestones on time and on budget.…

The breakdown of a project into milestones of predictable difficulty generally has high error bars. If something has been built before then you can predict it but why are you building it again? The only way I've found of doing this accurately is to reassign a task, IE if something is taking dev1 what you perceive as too long, assign it to less experienced dev2 and see if they can complete it from scratch in less time…

The milestones can iteratively evolve, so can the timeline. Breaking a project into milestones is a highly simplified example. The idea is that each step of the way we should be able to hold engineers to the same bar with or without return-to-office.
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