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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

#241

Post by munksbeer »

nox101 wrote: post #125
ern wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the introduction of WFH during the pandemic hurt a lot of IT workers in the long-run. In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the office post-Covid even when their work processes mean they can be done perfectly well remotely, and even if they have widely geographically-distributed teams. Anecdotal, but we had a team that was split with 50% working remotely before Covid, and we saw an imp…

I see the opposite. Conversations that used to happen in ear reach so I'd know what was going on with various team members and be able to contribute when I knew a solution are now conversation that happen in private chat or private VC. Productivity is way down. Even more interesting, a team lead lives in another country 6 times zones away. Some times they visit the main office for 1-2 weeks. Productivity shoots throu…

That's a shame. We're a mostly remote workplace with very high productivity. Hopefully you can figure out how to make it work, or move to a place that suits you better.

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

#242

Post by steveBK123 »

ern wrote: post #109
brandon272 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes that translates to aloofness for staff, but what more often happens is that when the CEO _does_ come in they expect other people to be there. Anecdotally, I have seen companies that have "oscillations" in their WFH policy and this, in my experience, has often been the driver of it. Instead of putting trust in the process or the data, you will simply have a situation where the CEO or (especially) where a g…

I think the introduction of WFH during the pandemic hurt a lot of IT workers in the long-run. In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the office post-Covid even when their work processes mean they can be done perfectly well remotely, and even if they have widely geographically-distributed teams. Anecdotal, but we had a team that was split with 50% working remotely before Covid, and we saw an imp…

Really depends on your org structure.

If you already had a global org, then it was already running poorly due to bad VC hardware and inability to book conference leading to lots of drive-by chats. Great for the office which has >40% of the staff in it, bad for the 3 other offices with 20%.

Hybrid/remote/zoom leveled the playing field so that our non-primary-HQ devs were able to fully contribute whereas in many cases they were bodies in seat for follow-the-sun coverage who would do rote Jiras assigned to them.

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

#243

Post by ElevenLathe »

listenallyall wrote: post #235
ElevenLathe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Zoom works great" - not for cultivating real relationships (friends, business, family, etc) it doesn't

How is this an argument for leaving your family behind to go work in an identical office across the country?

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

#244

Post by steveBK123 »

tayo42 wrote: post #168
borplk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and some people don't appreciate that some jobs really do require quiet focus for extended periods of time. Asking someone to be a programmer in a loud chaotic open office environment is not dissimilar to asking them to program while juggling two balls and sitting on a unicycle. Its just excess difficulty that doesn't need to be added on top of the jobs.

in hindsight its amazing anything actually ever got done

My team is very small remote-primary, but we will travel to each others cities / offices quarterly or so.

We have long since given up on getting any work done on our in-office days, but see them as collaborative / bonding / light planning only.

It's gotten to the point that even if we fly to each others city for a week, we might only go to the office 2~3 days, or by Wednesday/Thursday we might by physically collocated but go to different rooms in silence with headphones to actually get work done.

As a dev these days are actually pretty stressful as they have the feeling of creating work faster than doing any of it. It makes me remember how unproductive my dev teams used to be with the constant in-office interruptions. At prior jobs, I used to do most of my actual dev work after hours, and on unilaterally declared WFH days

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

#245

Post by eltoxo »

borplk wrote: post #161
brandon272 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes that translates to aloofness for staff, but what more often happens is that when the CEO _does_ come in they expect other people to be there. Anecdotally, I have seen companies that have "oscillations" in their WFH policy and this, in my experience, has often been the driver of it. Instead of putting trust in the process or the data, you will simply have a situation where the CEO or (especially) where a g…

Yes and some people don't appreciate that some jobs really do require quiet focus for extended periods of time. Asking someone to be a programmer in a loud chaotic open office environment is not dissimilar to asking them to program while juggling two balls and sitting on a unicycle. Its just excess difficulty that doesn't need to be added on top of the jobs.

I just always assumed an "open office", really meaning a non-office, an empty building, was what was available for startups after the dot com bust in SF.

Then after the fact we made up a bunch of bullshit as to why this is some brilliant idea. Then this idea spread as if it was some kind of technological advancement because it worked for small tech companies trying to not spend money on furniture and walls.

We just aren't very good at any of this at scale. The open "office" and battle against remote work are different flavors of the same type of stupidity.

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

#246

Post by ohthatsnotright »

codebje wrote: post #67
ljm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Commuting’ on a private plane or with all expenses paid. That is not commuting.

Guaranteed the time spent doing that is considered work.

They checked their email, after all.

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

#247

Post by ceejayoz »

nunez wrote: post #148
ceejayoz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Executives work insane hours. Often quite a bit less than it looks on-paper when you remove the "working lunch" and "client dinner" and "meeting (at the country club)" and "reading emails while lounging on the private jet" bits.

All of that is work!

Think next year’s performance review would agree if I decide to have all my stand ups from the golf course?

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

#248

Post by orwin »

jrs235 wrote: post #231
orwin wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they'll get hired, get taught really basic shit (chmod/chown) on the job, get a cisco/AWS certificate then leave 6 month later to join a better paying job.

But not before misapplying chmod/chown settings in your environment.

In my first job we loaned Hadoop clusters that we either managed ourselves or let the client manage the IT. One of our client decided to use a contractor instead (I might miss details, it was almost 10 year ago) .

The day after configuring the cluster and giving him the metaphorical keys, we saw low-level alert on one computer in that cluster, some monitoring daemon couldn't be reached but nothing really concerning (could still be pinged, no issues with the virtualisation). We still tried to look at it, but could't ssh on the computer (which explains why our daemons couldn't be reached). We contacted the client, said basically: 'we can remove the monitoring and our access keys if you want, but please tell us before you do this. Do you want it done on the other computers?'.

He came back the day after that saying basically 'what?' then talking about a shard that couldn't be reached (he was nice about it).

Turns out, 'chmod 777 /' is the dumbest way of breaking your workstation I've ever seen. We all hear about 'rm -rf /' but let's be real, no one has ever done it, not outside of school at least. Chmod 777 / because you couldn't manage to understand a Java stacktrace has 100% been done in a professional environment: I had to fix it.

Luckily you can copy the permissions of filesystem A onto filesystem B (can't remember how, but it was easy) so the fix didn't involve any reinstallation and Hadoop wizardry.

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

#249

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

asynchronous wrote: post #107
linotype wrote: post #62

Until people start leaving (and not joining) these companies en masse that have poor and hypocritical leadership, none of this will change.

We had a choice for about half a second, and then the tech industry collapsed and all of our leverage went away again. Makes the tech union concept more attractive.

> We had a choice for about half a second, and then the tech industry collapsed and all of our leverage went away again. Makes the tech union concept more attractive.

To be fair, there was a bunch of people saying that the 10's were the best time to unionize, precisely because tech employees did have leverage.

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

#250

Post by confidantlake »

missedthecue wrote: post #153
confidantlake wrote: post #48

RTO has always been about social hierarchy, not economics.

This isn't an article about WFH. It's an article about long commutes to the office -- in the case of the Starbucks CEO, about 1000 miles.

My comment did not mention WFH. What are you on about?
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