231–240 of 345 posts
Is it possible for someone to 1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time). 2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager. Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.
Managing a remote team is much harder than managing an in-person team.
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> 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?
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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.
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?
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> 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.
Yeah, that tracks. Wonder where the founders and hackers are hanging out these days
Anecdotally many are on Twitter, though that may have more to do with the curation of my follows than anything else.
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. I'm confused. If you cant figure out people aren't working remotely then how do you figure out they aren't working in the office? Randomly check their screens? Check the check-in/out time?
Is it possible for someone to 1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time). 2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager. Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.
If you're a poor manager of your organization's current style of work, is that still poor management, even if you're a good manager in a different setting? To use a sports metaphor, if I'm a really good manager of a team in the German Bundesliga, but then I switch to manage a team in the English Premier League and I'm terrible at that, then that's still bad management, even if I'm not a "bad manager" in some universa…
can we stop making excuses for people?
management is about people, unless you're literally moving to a different culture (and I don't mean company culture), your failures as a manager are yours.
I can tell you that my current manager is ruthless in that he has no issues getting rid of someone if they're not pulling their weight. I appreciate that about him. He also always has our back.
Put him in an organization in which it's more challenging for him to influence our work and I'm confident I would still enjoy him as a manager. The work might not be as successful but I'm smart enough to recognize the walls my manager runs into as well.
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> > 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 thi…
They have a tool at Amazon called "connections" which is a super annoying mandatory survey you must interact with every day . It measures a lot of things like whether our teams have certain internal processes in place, job satisfaction, tools satisfaction, etc. The surveys provide a list of fixed answers you can choose or if you rank something "negatively", you can select an option to describe why you ranked somethin…
But what about productivity/output?
Obviously this is partially a function of job satisfaction, or a correlation. But wouldn’t it be interesting if job satisfaction went down but productivity stayed the same?
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.
If you do a traditional layoff you get to decide who stays and who goes and have at least the chance to try and retain your top players.
If you do a soft-layoff someone else does the choosing, and the more employable the employee is on the outside the more likely they are to leave.
Just ass-backwards decision-making no matter how one slices it.
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> Knowing what your team is doing, This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.
Which is silly. I have worked in infra my whole career and just one of my job duties is to know what every single team is working on and shipping to provide operations guidance/support and to anticipate and be ready for risky changes. It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and re…