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

Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

scottberkun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 129 posts

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#81

Post by _tk_ »

cajunboi34213 wrote: post #76
sshine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chat is soul-less and leads to a lot of misunderstandings with tone. Chat isn't soulless. Chat being async has benefits over conference calls. > Video is too formal. Phone is interrupt. Work lacks cheap interrupts, which is not a remote-only problem. In my most recent position, when working from home, I've made a habit of writing to people on chat if I can bother them for 5-20 minutes. It works great. I have typica…

The interrupt is where walkie talkie really shines. Instead of asking to bother someone, where they now may feel obliged to engage, you just walkie talkie them with what you want to discuss. They can listen in real time or they can ignore and then listen ore read when they're available. Perhaps it's because our team is global that this works as timezones are hard. The expectation is you manage your notifications, so…

Can you elaborate on the difference between DM'ing someone with "Hey can I call you about problem X/Y/Z?" I'm not sure I understand the benefit of the walkie talkie solution. To me this sounds as or more annoying as a landline.

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#82

Post by cajunboi34213 »

rihegher wrote: post #80
cajunboi34213 wrote: post #20

The hard part about remote is collaboration outside of meetings is hard. Chat is soul-less and leads to a lot of misunderstandings with tone. Video is too formal. Phone is interrupt. For the past 6 months we've been using a walkie-talkie app that transcribes and it's pretty magical. It feels like it's solved some of the issues with unstructured collaboration. Plus the bonus is you can add anyone to a discussion and t…

Could you give us the name this magical walkie talkie app please?

https://www.airwave.us/

Their website is now focused on technicians with a copilot for manuals, but they started as a pure voice/text push to talk / walkie talkie app

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#83

Post by CuriouslyC »

onethought wrote: post #12
jawns wrote: post #9

I am at a point in my career where I can be selective and only consider 100% remote roles. I am also a manager, so I understand some of the management challenges that lead people to dismiss or be skeptical of the claim that remote work can be just as effective as office work. One thing I will admit: It is harder, as a remote manager, to manage low performers or people who show signs of disengagement. You can get more…

Onboarding is harder. Social cohesion is… different. Remote work has just as many issues as in person. But perhaps a lot of the issues are the employers problem more than the employees. Hence the shift and the tension

Onboarding is different. The work you would put into onboarding directly, you mostly put into documentation and architecture so people can achieve goals without having to have a mental model of the whole application. Try to design your application so you can part out components/endpoints/modules to people on Fiverr - you code is decoupled and documented well enough that short term contractors can come on, look at an example/template and fill in the blanks for the current requirements without a ton of direct support. When you're at that level, onboarding basically reduces mostly to a quick task overview/ticket discussion, a few DMs over slack and a code review.

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#84

Post by _tk_ »

robertlagrant wrote: post #50
osigurdson wrote: post #44

One thing that should certainly be considered is the externalities associated with on-premise work as more roads, transit, infrastructure, emissions, etc, is required. Taxes should probably be lower for companies embracing remote work.

Taxes only in theory pay for those things. In reality lots of borrowing from the future, and inflation, pay for them as well, so proportionally it's not that much.

How exactly does inflation pay for infrastructure?

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#85

Post by meindnoch »

jfranche wrote: post #58

Remote work should just be for call center type jobs (where the feed of work is consistent); sales people that constantly visit clients (which doesn't happen much now ); or extremely talented superstars. For everyone else that has a bad commute and wants to be home, they should consider retiring or get one of the jobs above. If people can't don't 5 days in office, they should move to a 4 day work week and get 80% of…

I'm the latter of the three, so I guess I'll keep working 100% remote.

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#86

Post by throwaway737max »

willcipriano wrote: post #51
jawns wrote: post #9

I am at a point in my career where I can be selective and only consider 100% remote roles. I am also a manager, so I understand some of the management challenges that lead people to dismiss or be skeptical of the claim that remote work can be just as effective as office work. One thing I will admit: It is harder, as a remote manager, to manage low performers or people who show signs of disengagement. You can get more…

Might be easier to manage if top performers were rewarded in a meaningful way. If the top performer is getting a 3 percent raise this year, the "slacker" is probably higher paid on a per hour basis considering they work less. When the top performers start buying vacation homes and sports cars as a reward for being one, I'd wager the unmotivated might start moving.

It's hard to find a metric that can't be gamed. Otherwise we would not have this issue in the first place. You would also get a lot of office politics and an unfriendly work environment, because everyone would want the projects that would have the highest visibility.

All to often there are invisible "heroes" who quietly fix issues, prevent bugs and makes sure everything runs smoothly. They are simply not as visible as someone who creates high profile features and firefight bugs introduced by their coding. From the management point of view they are hard workers that work late fixing issues.

Management can only recognize what they can see. The quiet dev who just makes things work is a huge value to the company, while the "bro" that master the political game gets all the recognition.

What metrics can they use that are not quickly gamed?

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#87

Post by noashavit »

High-performers will perform regardless of location. If they are constantly unblocking people and being pinged they might have some lags in deliverables and the reason for that might not be as clear as if they were in office and everyone can see them being tapped on the shoulder and being distracted.

Those that lack internal motivation/sense of urgency might perform better on-site, but you as a manager might need to micro manage them. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. The employee and manager will most likely not enjoy the situation, esp if it goes on for a while.

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#88

Post by willcipriano »

throwaway737max wrote: post #86
willcipriano wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be easier to manage if top performers were rewarded in a meaningful way. If the top performer is getting a 3 percent raise this year, the "slacker" is probably higher paid on a per hour basis considering they work less. When the top performers start buying vacation homes and sports cars as a reward for being one, I'd wager the unmotivated might start moving.

It's hard to find a metric that can't be gamed. Otherwise we would not have this issue in the first place. You would also get a lot of office politics and an unfriendly work environment, because everyone would want the projects that would have the highest visibility. All to often there are invisible "heroes" who quietly fix issues, prevent bugs and makes sure everything runs smoothly. They are simply not as visible a…

You can probably see some variation of the logic in your comment on here on a daily basis.

I argue that it's management's job to know what's going on well enough that "invisible heros" don't exist. If they can't, what exactly are they managing?

I've been in the situation you describe and I just find another job, what may be invisible to your current manager may be obvious to your future one.

*Bonus content: I suspect most of the time the reason people don't "see things" is for political/human reasons more so than they are blind. You probably didn't seem as interested in your bosses new Tesla as he would've liked or something.

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#89

Post by cajunboi34213 »

_tk_ wrote: post #81
cajunboi34213 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interrupt is where walkie talkie really shines. Instead of asking to bother someone, where they now may feel obliged to engage, you just walkie talkie them with what you want to discuss. They can listen in real time or they can ignore and then listen ore read when they're available. Perhaps it's because our team is global that this works as timezones are hard. The expectation is you manage your notifications, so…

Can you elaborate on the difference between DM'ing someone with "Hey can I call you about problem X/Y/Z?" I'm not sure I understand the benefit of the walkie talkie solution. To me this sounds as or more annoying as a landline.

Sure. So if you say can I call you about X/Y/Z, you're asking them to stop what they are doing and listen to your monologue in real time. With the walkie talkie, you hit talk and send them your monologue. They can listen in real time (one-way) if they are available or can listen to your audio + read the transcription (later). This puts them in control of when and how they consume and respond. The added benefit is they can relisten or re-read before responding. I find it puts me in control of context switching

Re: Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)

#90

Post by robertlagrant »

_tk_ wrote: post #84
robertlagrant wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes only in theory pay for those things. In reality lots of borrowing from the future, and inflation, pay for them as well, so proportionally it's not that much.

How exactly does inflation pay for infrastructure?

You print more money, devaluing everyone's savings, and you use the wealth transferred to pay back Macquarie.
Post reply on HN