Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, teams?? Basically industry standard
Teams is not reliable. It's a steaming pile of dog shit.
As are the rest of them in my experience. Zoom has been hands down the worst for me, seconded by Teams and then Meet.
CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
321–330 of 345 posts
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
What tools are needed for better remote management?
Soft tools for people. Some individuals need training on how to manage remote vs in-person effectively. General discourse likes to identify the older generation as the ones who lose object permanence. The "if they aren't in a seat, they must not be working" mentality. Well, tomorrow's older generation is here today, learning to follow that same behavioral pattern. We have to begin training the culture today if we wan…
I've found it also needs to work both ways. My manager can only do so much, and if I don't communicate with them, they can't do anything about it. Some of my colleagues have been horrible at remote working, not telling anyone what they're doing, even after being asked multiple times, at appropriate times.
Some people are just really bad at remote working, on both sides of the manager/report relationship. It's not only bad managers at fault here.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teams is not reliable. It's a steaming pile of dog shit.
As are the rest of them in my experience. Zoom has been hands down the worst for me, seconded by Teams and then Meet.
Zoom has been far and away the best of the meeting tech I use. Excellent audio processing and generally reliable. (Also a nice convenient slack interface, so /zoom starts a Zoom meeting and pastes the connection info into the channel.)
Teams was okay. Meet was okay once I figured out how to grant it the MacOS access it needs. Chime started in early pandemic as a terrible, terrible joke of a product and then evolved to being a close 4th place.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally. Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based…
Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.
I think in all team and project rooms/channels/email d-lists, yes, those should be easily readable by managers because they're not contemplated as private. I think DMs and individual emails should not be accessible to managers (absent a very specific legal/compliance/HR concern).
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#325Earlier 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…
Granted, the person who wrote in to the Washington Post is well meaning and all and I know her write in was edited down for brevity, but it seems like this lady is bringing on alot of the problems herself and not seeing that. Also, is there an underlying problem with retention, re this comment: >Developing a rapport with “Bob” could help me anticipate when the lack of promotion opportunity is about to make him jump s…
There are limits to promotion at any company. Probably no limits from fresh-college-grad to the next level of software engineer (SWE-2 or equivalent). That becomes less true at higher levels. If Bob is a Vice President of Tech, reporting to the CTO, Bob may have no realistic prospect to be promoted to any position other than CTO and if the CTO is successful and not leaving, then Bob has a lack of promotion opportunity. If the CTO keeps working out, most companies would be rationally willing to let Bob leave and replace him if that's Bob's choice (and therefore want to know when he's contemplating that seriously).
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could always go to the office by yourself (or a coworking spot, or really anywhere) if the point is just changing your environment and you don’t need to bug others. Everyone gets to be happy and productive, no mandatory RTO needed.
That is what I do. But we'll lose the office or downsize if enough people commit to hybrid or WFH, and I'd probably have look for another job with a firm that has committed to RTO. I'm hoping these things self-select to a happy equilibrium. I'll fill in the folks that left due to RTO, and they can fill in for my company that has a hard time finding talent in a 2nd or 3rd tier city?
If it’s not about your coworkers though you should be able to find a nice coworking spot or cafe even if they close the office. Your company may even be up to pay for it given all the millions they are saving on office space. Hope it works out, though, everyone needs a good place to work.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#327I 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…
Even if they analysed slack+chime log activity. I guess they’ll explain it away with something like “working from office significantly reduces the need for online chatter”.
That is, after all, the entire point of RTO mandates. (I am pro-remote and fortunate to work at a company that isn't RTO, but I will say that it is a breath of fresh air and notably higher-bandwidth conversations that are enabled on the few times per year that we get together in-person in an office.)
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, sometimes these are soft-layoffs, but even under that logic it's a bad idea: your best employees are the ones who have the most options outside of your company. 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 m…
> your best employees are the ones who have the most options outside of your company Aren't these employees the most likely to get exceptions though?
The best 3%? Probably. The best 30%? Probably not.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Required breaks are only for non-exempt roles (typically hourly FTEs with a set schedule).
I've had required breaks at part time jobs and minimum wage jobs (which will never give you >35hrs/wk and your schedule is definitely not consistent). My understanding is it is state law and the 3 west coast states all have unpaid 30min breaks (if you aren't on call during break) for >5hrs work.
I am guessing that all of those previous jobs were non-exempt roles (non-exempt meaning Not exempt from regulations about overtime pay and mandatory breaks). It's worded weird and it took me a long time to even understand what the heck it meant. It is Federal US law, but there are also state laws that apply. I am not a Lawyer, I am just a guy who has had a lot of jobs before so take that for what it's worth.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#330I 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…
Even if they analysed slack+chime log activity. I guess they’ll explain it away with something like “working from office significantly reduces the need for online chatter”.
The important caveat is that we ALMOST ALWAYS need to do Chime meetings/Slack chats because our team is split across three cities -- Seattle, Arlington and Chicago. 2/5 of the team is stationed in Seattle office; 2/5 in Arlington; and 1/5 in Chicago. Not to mention that a bunch of folks from Hyderabad in India that we have to continuously work with. On top of all that, folks who are returning to the office can pick one of any weekday to go into the office (the other two days are agreed upon as Tuesday and Wednesday), so some folks are in the office on Monday, some on Friday (nobody choose to go in on Thursday from my limited observation).