Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 345 posts

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

#221

Post by Keegs »

timmg wrote: post #170
mrweasel wrote: post #59

So research is finally coming to the same conclusion that a lot of people, myself included came to over a year ago. Well managed companies don't care where you work, it simply doesn't matter. The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around. We're not solving th…

> The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around. I feel like this is true for so many jobs these days. Like I think that a lot of people (in high skill jobs) are really not good enough for their jobs. But we simply don't have enough good people for all the jo…

Product management is tricky because the skills PM applicants are evaluated for are not necessarily the skills that make a good product manager. But I think this supports your point. Where it's hard to judge performance, actual talent will vary.

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

#222

Post by Amigo5862 »

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…

> Also they over-hired in the pandemic and need people to leave because their attrition numbers were too low for 2022 and 2023.

That's the real reason. Making people quit is cheaper than layoffs.

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

#223

Post by 2c2c2c »

DanAtC wrote: post #58
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 know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. Good for them. If this upsets you, then it sounds like you're working too hard.

I don't personally care lol

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

#224

Post by infamouscow »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #188
datadrivenangel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.

wave . I've been doing this for the last two years, but really dialed it in to the extreme over the last year. I don't give a shit if I get PIP'd at this point. If a company is willing to screw me over at every turn with no remorse and not an ounce of compassion, then this is how I'll fight back. Fuck em!

This applies to every company, without exception.

Even at the best run companies, if the financial situation changes, you'll be gone through no fault of your own.

People that get emotionally and psychologically invested in someone else's company do themselves a disservice, typically only learned the hard way.

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

#225

Post by radiator »

Kiro wrote: post #121
Spivak wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah being in office doesn't make it any less difficult to scroll through Reddit.

It definitely does. The only thing that can prevent me from slacking off is knowing my screen is visible to other people.

In your office, don't you have any desks where your back is covered?

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

#226

Post by ary »

I'll go one step further. RTO mandates are being used to mask how shockingly bad most manager's written communication and critical thinking skills are. When their ability to "manage by walking around" is taken away you very quickly notice how terrible their writing (and thus thinking) is.

I've experienced this first hand at multiple companies and it's fairly cringe-inducing to hear the excuses made for simple asks like having a written meeting agenda, project specification, or high level feature descriptions. Work breakdown meetings with these types over video calls amount to them trying to tell other people what to write down and ending the meeting as quickly as possible (perhaps the only upside).

Ascension to management appears to be a more extreme, self selecting version of the Peter principle for many. They can't make a living, or their desired income, in a role that has a well defined output and thus search for hiding places within organizations. Remote work puts them back into a role with expected outputs, and that's basically panic-inducing for someone who opted out of such things long ago.

My verdict: too much pride to admit that whatever communication skills they ever had have atrophied in the cauldron of management-level in-office politics. More energy than is required to learn to write coherently will be expended protecting identity and status. Companies will have to die and be replaced by those with more sensible policies and hiring discernment.

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

#227

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

infamouscow wrote: post #224
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wave . I've been doing this for the last two years, but really dialed it in to the extreme over the last year. I don't give a shit if I get PIP'd at this point. If a company is willing to screw me over at every turn with no remorse and not an ounce of compassion, then this is how I'll fight back. Fuck em!

This applies to every company, without exception. Even at the best run companies, if the financial situation changes, you'll be gone through no fault of your own. People that get emotionally and psychologically invested in someone else's company do themselves a disservice, typically only learned the hard way.

I don't think I agree. There are small shops (When you work at a FAANG, you know you'll be sacrificing some of those benefits and taking on more stress for much higher pay. The current climate is much worse than that though. It's a complete no-empathy/give-no-fucks environment, and that's not ok. Garbage in, garbage out.

I'm not looking for a hand-out, I just want to be treated as a human being. In return, you'll have a productive employee.

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

#228

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

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.

I would also argue that email is superior in that it's searchable and captures context.

by all means, use teams/slack/etc for discussions, but understand that they don't replace email, they enhance it.

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

#229

Post by coffeebeqn »

potatolicious wrote: post #3

In a lot of ways RTO has put working conditions in a worse spot than they were pre-pandemic. In the Before Times occasional remoting was informal and casual - if you had a doctor's appointment at an odd time, you'd remote for the day, with no formal approval nor teeth-gnashing. Now even small everyday things like this are fraught. There are often formal approval chains now for what used to be entirely between you and…

It’s a pendulum - management is still traumatized by COVID and are reacting to that. I hope in a few years we’ll start heading back towards more freedom for workers

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

#230

Post by alberth »

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…

Glad to hear I'm not alone.

Question: do you think this would still be a problem if only 1:1 chat was allowed (no group chat existed).

I've often wondered if the real problem is group chat / channels, and not per se the 1:1 type of chat messages.

Post reply on HN