I have a theory about this, I already know some people hate it, and others totally agree. Basically it is that executives, management types, people who worked their whole career to get ahead and get that corner office, they really like walking around an office, it is like their fiefdom. It's not just the meetings or whatever, it is being a big shot and having people see them that way. It is a big part of what they worked for. This is a generalization, of course, not all executives and managers are completely that way, but, I think all have, if they are completely honest, will admit, they kind of like being the big man on campus and miss that a little bit. I am not casting shade here, it would be human nature, of course, you worked hard to be head of things, you want to walk around and enjoy that, it is completely understandable.
Those of us who do not care about that sort of thing and are happy writing code, developing circuits or network designs and etc. We are completely fine working from home. In fact, not having the distractions of an office is actually really nice.
But if part of your fulfilment is being "the big boss" or whatever, it's just not as satisfying sitting in your basement on Zoom with the rest of us.
Your theory seems to rely on a rather uncharitable set of assumptions.
I wonder if an alternate explanation could be that the manager job role tends to involve a lot of talking to other people, and that there's something advantageous, or at least more fun, about doing that in person?
Or perhaps the type of people that become managers tend to lean more toward extroversion, and thus on average managers enjoy in-person social interaction more?
I often meet and talk with people for 6 hours in a day. Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc. It kind of sucks, like, a lot. Especially for people, like myself, who ended up managing because they simply enjoy being around other people. It's just not that fun to talk to a plastic rectangle all day.
Now, I do still sneak in some IC work from time to time, and it's obviously great to do that remotely. And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
But if you surveyed me, asking whether I'd like to return to the office? Fuck yeah, I'd like to. But my motivation has nothing to do with your ungracious views on managers needing to feel like bigshots. I'm sorry that you've evidently worked with poor management to the extent that this is your worldview.
Yea I agree with this. Ever looked at an executive calendar? All day meetings. That’s almost all they do. Relationships are critical, so of course they’d prefer in person.
The problem is imposing that view on everyone, forgetting their individual contributor roots
C'mon, if you enjoyed social interaction so much, you'd be a salesperson; not a manager talking to the same people all the time. Nope, you like being in charge and 'directing' people.
In 13 years of software development, I've never had a productive meeting where a manager was present. Only when engineers get together to argue and hammer out details is it productive. If a manager is present, he/she makes the decision or just agrees with the lead engineer and no further discussion takes place.
So, my view is that managers are useless and a net drain on the company wallet. Walking around, making decisions you're not qualified to make, approving time off, talking to people for 6 hours, time tracking, pushing employees to work more is the most useless role ever created.
My favorite development job is one that had no manager. The lead communicated with the director, who reported to the CEO. It was great because the lead was an engineer that coded with the rest of us. No meetings or other useless activities. When the company was purchased, the software architect was made the new manager as part of the new structuring. Immediately, he instituted metrics and developer rules. Within a year most engineers had left. Thank you management...
At my last job, we 3 engineers were doing fine without a manager, once again the lead took care of things and reported to the director. But the director's best friend needed a job and became our new manager. And here we go again... Within a year and a half I'm the only engineer left on the team and I end up quiting 3 months after shouldering the load and working 7 days a week.
I don't trust any manager and I go out of my way to avoid them even as far as refusing promotions to avoid more interaction with one.
I'm a manager and I talk people using teleconferencing apps 6+ hours a day. I like it better than doing it at the office, where I comically have to use the same technology to talk to people in other offices.
I'd rather stay 6+ hours in meetings in more comfortable clothes (loose shorts) and sitting in a more comfortable chair - not to mention the lack of people wanting me to leave the meeting room because of THEIR meeting.
Yes, communication suffers to a certain extent, but occasional visits to the office eliminates the problems with 1:1s you mention. And at least in my experience, this small degradation of in-person communication isn't such a big deal.
So if you surveyed me, I'd say "Please let me stay home!". Also, if IC work is "great to do remotely", I'd rather see my team at peak productivity remotely than indulging any possible desire I could have to talk to them in person. As a manager, I exist to unblock and help my team, so what's best for the team is best for me.
I have been the CEO of a successful company for 5+ years and a senior director/manager in others. I very rarely had meetings. If you pick the right people for the job, and make sure they know what the goals/deadline is, then the best thing you can do is to not bother them with meetings. Find ways to measure progress without interrupting the team flow. Make it clear that you expect the team to solve problems themselves without constantly asking for permission etc. It isn’t rocket science. I spent about an hour a day working when managing. The rest was me doing my hardest to not slow down the team that was doing the actual work. It worked really really well.
> where I comically have to use the same technology to talk to people in other offices.
For my current company, I have no team members in my local office. So for the short period where I was going into the office, I never had an in person meeting.
Ahhh, sorry if it came off that way. Honestly, I have good friends that are managers. And I think I work for good managers. I just think it is probably not as satisfying being a manger or executive if you don't have people around you to manage. If everyone is doing their work just fine without all that close supervision, it probably feels like you are not as appreciated. But I was not trying to be uncharitable.
> I just think it is probably not as satisfying being a manger or executive if you don't have people around you to manage
I still get to manage my reports remotely. :P
Now, I like to view myself as helping them succeed, rather than browbeating them into submission to enact my will. But even if I was this caricature of a manager that you posit, why would it be better for me in person?
If anything, my "big shot" factor is higher remotely than it is in person. Physically, I'm just a normal person, made of meat and vulnerable like anyone else. If I am speaking to a large audience, they can actually participate. An audience member might throw out a little joke here and there, a bit of heckling, etc. I can't stop it! (Not that I'd want to, personally.)
But over video? Well, first, I can make it a live stream. Boom, I am in power, no heckling possible. But even if it's technically a two-way call, once you have a few dozen people, there's no audience banter. I control the conversation, completely. Heck, I'm the only one with my camera on. I'm the center of attention. I have the power to mute people. I'm a God!
> If everyone is doing their work just fine without all that close supervision
That's a pretty good description of my team. And you're right: like anyone else, I enjoy feeling appreciated. But bossing people around in person is not a way to obtain appreciation! Providing useful feedback, helping people ensure they're are working on meaningful projects, helping resolve weird interpersonal situations -- in other words, being a good manager -- is what results in real appreciation.
And all that stuff can be done remotely. But again, it sure is less fun, at least for me. Having a difficult performance conversation with someone over video sucks, for the same reason that it sucks to break up with someone via text message.
Don't you think it's a lot more plausible that extroversion correlates with becoming a manager in the same way that it correlates with wanting to see people in the office? Or that it's simply easier to do the manager job in person than over the internet?
I manage a linux team so this battle was lost for me long ago, but having managed a site-oriented team before, it was a lot easier to build relationships for me and the team members.
I definitely think there is certain personality traits that lend to the "traditional" manger role in an office.
What I think could be interesting over time, if this "new normal" let's call it, of working from home, persists, could that lead to a different set of personality traits being attracted to or being better suited to this new work situation?
I don't know, but it seems like the nature of work is changing rapidly right now and, that could perhaps, lead to a rapid change in the nature of a good manger or perhaps leadership changes because of it in ways ?
> Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc.
Have you ever tried meeting in person for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a different quality of voice so some people sound muffled and I can't "turn the volume up" to understand them. Screen sharing at a desk is awkward and involves huddling close to look at a screen, god forbid I forgot my glasses. Eye contact is annoying because some people like to stare deeeeeeep into my eyes when I'm talking about stuff and I find it distracting. Whiteboards are nice, but I can kinda do the same thing with draw.io or visio on a screen while chatting. And we haven't even begun to talk about people who don't shower enough or like eating stinky food.
lol, see? I can make in-person meetings sound terrible, too!
And then there's the larger in-person meetings in the conference room. I don't get my giant screen, keyboard, and mouse. Nah I gotta have my clumsy laptop, it runs hotter in my lap, the keyboard isn't as nice, and then they probably dimmed the lights a tiny bit because the projector is on. ZZZzzzzzZZZZzZzZZZZzzZZZZZzzzzZ
Okay now I'm just being totally unfair lol.
In person meetings can be nice, but I can totally live without them.
Edit: But I don't totally disagree. There's always gotta be that ONE PERSON who has their microphone like 500 times louder than the other people. And then somebody who has their microphone super quiet. So I either can't hear the quiet person, or get my ears blown out by Loud Howard. And the worst part is hardly anyone knows how to adjust their mic (or my favorite - some idiot in IT forbid adjusting the mic via group policy. WTF?!)
humbledrone made a nice comment explaining why he (a manager) likes going to the office. WWLink's response was a dickish "yeah but I don't", which is irrelevant, because the point of discussion was why managers like to go to the office, not whether or not ICs like going to the office.
Many people are "on the spectrum." The big question is: do those who consider themselves "normal" are going to embrace it or fight against it and insist everything is done in the traditional way? The conclusion of the article is they better be careful if they want to stay competitive.
I know the value I bring to my company. But I can bring this value to another company if the current one seems like they don't respect my feelings and the other one does.
> Now, I do still sneak in some IC work from time to time, and it's obviously great to do that remotely. And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
It is unfortunate that only one group can get what it wants. The people like yourself that enjoy working from the office do so because of the in-person interactions. If the people that want to work from home do so, then those in person interactions are possible.
I'm a big fan of "1-2 days in the office, the rest of the time at home" in order to get _some_ of that in-person interaction. Unfortunately, they requires a VERY specific set of circumstances; specifically, people willing to live close enough to the office to come in (though not necessarily as close as if they had to come in every day).
> I often meet and talk with people for 6 hours in a day. Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc. It kind of sucks, like, a lot.
I actually haven't had o be 5 hours of Zoom and could see that could get old quick. An interesting thought since its the managers inclination for in person meetings - if one could actually organize the 1-1s to be a walking session. But instead of having both the manager and the report driving into the office to walk around the office - perhaps the manager could drive to the report's neighborhood for a 1-1 walking meeting.
I have never in 25+ years of professional development had a productive meeting with a manager. However I have had plenty of productive meetings with engineers. My impression is that most managers mistakenly think they are productive and bringing value when they interrupt the people who are doing the real work. I have been the CEO of a company for 5+ years and in director/management roles for other companies. My teams were way more productive than the competition (according to our customers) and I almost never had meetings. The only rare exception was when a engineer was stuck or spinning his/her wheels. I would then get a few highly respected engineers together and let them help the engineer getting it resolved. All I did was to facilitate the meeting and keep my mouth shut after explaining the problem we needed to get solved. That’s all I needed to do. I probably spent about 1 hour a day on actual work. Mostly fending off bad ideas from other managers, defending the team from clueless managers who wanted to get involved, and making sure our customers stayed informed and happy.
But now think for a bit: are video meetings the only way you can talk to your colleagues?
Here are other ways you could talk or at least do some of the updating work: chat, email, shared doc, quick audio catch-ups (Slack amongst others). Not just to send what can only be sent by those, but why not explore different ways of doing this? Managers seem allergic to trying anything besides "doing a quick call"
Why don't you put a headset and try walking around and having a walking meeting?
"People have different quality headsets" Ok how much is one of those? I guess it fits the budget. Can't do much about the connection, sure, but maybe the company can think of supporting the employees?
Do all meeting need to be 1h long? I call BS on that one. If the meeting is done it's done, but some people feel like dragging it over.
Linux development has been, for the good part of 20 yrs, done without zoom, phone calls, 1:1 meetings. Mostly through chat (irc, not slack) and email. It's doable
Even with WFH meeting once or twice a month for a meeting works great. Lunch hour and afternoon traffic isn't as bad as rush hour.
I'd say the vast majority of meetings I'm in we are looking at code or documentation anyway so video calls work the best anyway. But I look forward to when using something like VRChat is a viable option as well.
So a manager prioritizing personal minor convenience (single individual) over productivity and comfort of the reports would be considered a charitable interpretation in MBA land? edit: removed "You" as the author is not part of the group that supports the behavior mentioned
I guess you didn't read my whole comment. I'll quote the part that you didn't read:
> So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
By the way, I definitely don't have an MBA. I've written around a million lines of C++ over my career. So I understand what it's like to work as an IC. Have you managed?
I retract the "you" from the above statement the rest of it still stands. I have managed people and had run my own company but will not extrapolate my experience more generally as I am pretty introverted by nature which is not very representative.
> And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
I think it has more to do with the nature of the job. Management is mostly communication and collaborative planning. This type of work benefits from having people together in one place to a much greater degree than most IC work.
I bet it almost entirely comes down to offices. People who have an office don't mind, or are happy to, go back to an office. People who have to work in the open plan would rather work at home.
I believe that the explanation is simply because an executive job is more about managing relationships with clients, partners, stakeholder, suppliers and the first line of management rather than building something or executing some specific task. Or in other words: it's politics. And this "relationship job" is definitely better done in person rather than remotely. Actually I am surprised that the percentage is not higher. The disconnect between the executives and employees is first of all in the kind of job that one is expected to do vs the other. P.S: I am just a mundane employee.
> Actually I am surprised that the percentage is not higher.
I feel like a good amount of executives will end up putting the needs of their own workers above their ego/this desire to play office politics, and the scentiment for keeping remote work will influence how much they'll be for it. After all, management just manages, and the negotiating power of these skilled workers is very high; not offering remote work, while competitors do, means bleeding talent.
Some of us entered management explicitly because they had such a good manager themselves, who truly enabled them, that they want to provide that to others. And are constantly tempted to go back being a developer because of the pain of dealing with the organization. And some of us are enthused about remote, and have spent the pandemic finding new ways of working.
Agreed that we're rare and vastly outnumbered by people with bad motivations though.
Slavoj Zizek has a great bit about how much of the power of bosses stems not just from being able to order you about, but to force you to be their friend also, as he explains in this interview:
Yes, agree, people who seek to be in charge value the feeling of power. That feeling is diminished without physical proximity. That is actually better expressing what I was trying to get at.
Imagine going for a lunch with a group of coworkers, and then your boss joins you... because he is one of you, right?
Nope. Lunch is a precious opportunity to complain about the work (including your boss) with people who understand what you are talking about. Now the workers are losing even this trivial right.
Part of it I’m sure is: the kind of people who become executives tend to be the kind that like work. Nothing wrong with that, there’s a lot to enjoy in “being productive”, accomplishing tasks, feeling like you’re making an impact, optimizing things, or competing in a new market with novel technology and strategies. The kind of people who make it to the top love it in one way or another, or in multiple ways.
Originally I was really looking to find holes in what you said but I do think it's basically the same result but from a different path.
Meritocracy is never totally there, but it is more practiced in the engineering roles.
For management, it's who you know. And who you have beers with at the end of the day.
In a large e-commerce company at which I once worked I was both a manager and an IC. My family grew from 1 kid to 3 during my three plus years there. So I never could stay late to have those beers with the other managers. My career there suffered (in addition to all the other awful stuff).
When you looked around, teams were almost always composed of people that looked the same way. That company was 60% East Asian heritage, either India or largely Chinese immigrants. The teams were often grouped along ethnic lines. It makes sense, if English isn't your first language, you would prefer to work with people who spoke your first language.
But, that's the point. We hire people that look like us. And management isn't a meritocracy, so you want to be in the office to make sure people see your face and get to know you. They will more likely listen to you, consider your opinions, etc. if you are meeting face to face. It is vital for managers to keep their jobs.
The exciting thing is perhaps this will be a Renaissance for a better form of manager. But, of course, the Renaissance also had Machiavelli, and there will be lots of people who will successfully subvert this new reality.
Senior Managers at my work - one of Australia's largest companies - have actually said this. At an all staff meeting one of the exec's near the top, who is - though this will be received sceptically - a genuinely empathetic, good person said: "I miss walking around and seeing my team working, I can't wait to get back in the office"
We are a 100% remote company, have been forever. We have been going through some growth and one of the executives we added recently put a slide deck together where he basically said everything you just wrote - (and kinda saying everyone will be coming to an office even though we all work out of about 6 different states).
The purpose of management is to keep all the stuff employees do actually be useful to the company.
Executives are there to ensure that happens, and having employees onsite makes it easier.
As far as I can tell, Bezos would sack every manager at Amazon if he could, and have every employee work from home, if that was best for Amazon's bottom line. I bet he'd love to save on salaries and office space. Yes, I hear a few Amazon employees are quitting, but it's not because he's just too nice to his employees. As far as I can tell, his entire philosophy in business is to make everyone a replaceable cog, and replaceable cogs don't really need managers or desks (especially if he could make everyone work from home, in some kind of mechanical turk type system). But he hasn't made it work.
Maybe I'm wrong about Bezos, or he's wrong about how to make profits (and just happened to luck out getting rich). But surely someone else would just say "get everyone to code at home and don't have managers" and they'd destroy the competition with lower overheads and greater productivity, but there's not many of examples at scale.
Here's how this debate will go:
"Managers are needed to keep employees on task, so it needs to be onsite".
"Wait, can't we just have performance reviews?"
"So why not just have freelancers for everything?"
Employers don't know who is doing the best work. Sometimes it's virtually impossible to judge. But they can know that employees sit in a cube for the right amount of hours, and are apparently trying to get work done.
It might annoy brilliant people (and people who think they're brilliant) that they can't just be judged on the quality of their work, but in reality the company is paying for time, not results, as they really can't just the quality of results all that easily.
Yes, they can have 360 performance reviews, or negotiate everything as some kind of contract, or count lines of code or some kind of function points. There's plenty of problems with all of these, and it also means more work and probably a lot of ugly office politics. But unless it's something where results are easily judged then really just forcing people to be at their desks looking busy is going to be one of the best ways of ensuring that on average they get results.
> The purpose of management is to keep all the stuff employees do actually be useful to the company.
Yes, but I think that's too broad a statement. The purpose of managers is to coordinate work between employees, and ensure employees are working on the company's priorities.
It's telling that smaller companies tend not to have many (or even any) managers. Employees can do a perfectly fine job of coordinating and figuring out the right priorities on their own, up to a point. I'm not sure if this point is hit because after a certain size, coordination would take up all the employees' time (to the point where they wouldn't get any useful work done), or because people start getting political and selfish and can't agree what they should be working on.
I really wish we could find a way to build successful companies without all the layers of management. While they do help with coordination, they also end up abstracting and watering down the company's mission and priorities to the point where the employees end up being so much less efficient than if they had greater control over their destiny. I view the need for management as a symptom of our failure to build better business processes, not as an obvious necessity. Of course, management's paycheck depends on them maintaining the status quo, and they call the shots, so I doubt this will change.
The real trick would be to find a way to get the same economies of scale with a smaller company that let large companies out-compete smaller companies in spite of their drastically larger management overhead.
There's probably a biological basis for these traits. Having a place to go daily and be seen in a positive light, even if achieving near nothing, by a bunch of people is a strong human desire. Then you add the hierarchical superiority as a bonus..
This is completely anecdotal but I there is a friend of mine, he and I have worked together for probably 20 years on and off in various companies and so forth. He moved up the ranks and became a VP for a big company, same one as me now. I never wanted that, I don't like having a lot of responsibility, I like being innovative, developing things but I just don't want the responsibility of having people report to me or anything like that, I am just not comfortable with it, tried it, did not enjoy it. He on the other hand, loves it, he devours it. He is a good guy, we are friends, but just different.
Recently he decided to retire, I joked with him that it was probably not as much fun being a VP now that he can't go into the office and have all the attention. He laughed and said ya, it's just not as much fun anymore, and we are not even allowed now to ask people to turn on their cameras (long story for another thread).
He was joking a bit of course, but you know, sometimes when we joke, there is an element of truth in there. I think that was the case here. He is just one guy but, I am guessing there is a personality trait at work here.
I think the core of this is safety and a selfishness requirement deep in each every one's brain.
Most want to feel they have their spot, that they matter, that they're relevant and that you can't put them out of the net.
The fiefdom-bigshot manager is just one dude who compensate that fear by over-leveraging the natural order in a group of people, most people won't seek that much dominance, but inside of them they have the same need. Things just balance out and most assholes will have their place at the top, the weaker or less favored will be below (all it takes is a diploma).
After a few months at public offices I've seen the social tissue at play. Most people don't do much, they come in their official spot, do the minimum to get by without causing hiccups to others. And they very often talk about how others are, and how they're perceived. As long as the metaphorical food comes regularly people will stay on this pattern.
The "big office" is not just a status symbol. It is also practical. It is essentially an extra room, free from the usual distractions you may have at home, and where you can do almost whatever you want with as long as it is work-related. Lower ranking employees are more likely to have a better setup at home, especially if they work on an open floor plan.
Bosses are also advantaged when it comes to commutes. They may have designated parking space closer to their office, maybe even a car with a driver.
Having more money also open other options, like hiring people to do housework when you are not at home or living in a location closer to your workplace.
Reminds me of this one guy in the analytics office on the floor of my office building who was somehow cordoned off from the other parts of the same business. This guy dressed like total "mover and shaker" dudebro: always business casual with the top 2 buttons undone, sunglasses hanging from his shirt at all times, Michael P. Keaton hairstyle, and a blazer, and ALWAYS wandering around in circles while gesticulating and talking to SOMEBODY via earbud microphones in his office.
Meanwhile, the company president was a friend of a friend, worth 8 figures, and just a normal dude.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to do that as long as this person is providing value. People have their own tastes, some people don’t care much about appearances while others do. In fact it would be a pretty boring office if everyone had the same tastes.
You are absolutely correct. I have recently been in workplaces where, almost without exception, managers (mostly non-tech) at or above a certain level deliberately held loud phone conversations, or 1-on-1 conversations, while slowly walking laps around the roughly O-shaped open office layouts. They know it pisses people off. It is, almost literally, a pissing contest.
I may be partially true, but I think there's a more charitable way to explain it. Managers work with people. For a coder, talking to a manager is a distraction. For a manager, talking to a coder is literally most of what they do. So obviously a manager wants to create the optimal conditions for this - surely you can talk on video, but talking in person is better. Surely, you can manage 20 people by videochats, but getting them in the same room is better. Different work means different preferences, means different approaches.
I think it has more to do with the fact that most management has very little "deliverables" for work and most of their work has to do with meeting people and understanding how people feel about things. It's easier to do that type of work face to face as it's extenuating to manage through email and zoom. ICs tend to have more heads down work so going to the office is a net negative for most of them, as there's more interruptions and the commute to account for.
I don’t know about not having deliverables. Aren’t the deliverables of their subordinates their deliverables as well? i.e. If things don’t go well the guy in charge eats the blame as it’s his/her job to make sure it does.
OC compares "executives" and "knowledge workers", does not define "manager".
Spitballing: Director and above are executives, managers remain knowledge workers.
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My observation is that executives at any given publicly traded company are functionally insane. Whatever executive daily activities involve, it's disconnected from real work and real world.
They generally have nicer clothes and hygiene. So it's not all bad.
The transmutation from Manager to Director is kind of fun to watch. The Body Snatchers meets Battle Royale.
> If anything, my "big shot" factor is higher remotely than it is in person. Physically, I'm just a normal person, made of meat and vulnerable like anyone else.
This truth has been caricatured in many movies and TV shows, where the boss speaks from some large screen on the wall. Or think of Star Wars, when the bad guy is talking to the Dark Lord, who shows up as this massive 3-d projects.
I could see this being part of it. Managing people surely has a bit of performance to it, and the physical office is a stage.
Similarly, I quite like working from home and walking around the house (getting drinks/snacks/etc) looking at the garden. That's all something I've worked for - things I planted or bought or paid off - and it's comforting to see it.
This seems plausible to me in theory, but wouldn't that be limited to the head office? If they're happy to outsource things to a different continent, then employees in satelitte offices working from home seems a smaller thing.
yes ... being a boss is for most bosses about being and feeling important. and you can only feel that in personal contact. also employees are less impressed by higher ups when they can hide behind a screen.
Why even propose a theory that makes unfair generalizations? I suppose I don't see how to start a conversation around it when you admit to the flaw in your reasoning.
A theory with generalization can still have value. In this case, I think those who seek to be in charge do so because they value or appreciate having a certain amount of power. The lack of physical proximity diminishes that feeling. It's a theory based on a generalization, I bother to propose it because it is an interesting discussion.
Personally, I am more on the introverted side but I would still like to return to office at least some of the time. It is far easier to zone out at the office. At the house, the 4-year old can be hard to tune out. Right now, a couple of friends of my wife are around and they are talking loudly and I can't tune it out and it would be rude to ask them to tone it down. It is far easier to be rude to co-workers than to your family.
As a manager, I understand that to mean "allow people to decide what works best for them; find ways to enable that and make it successful".
My team understands that to mean "I can decide what works best for me".
My boss, however, understands that to mean "mandate people be in 3 specific days, from specific hour to specific hour, but they can miss if they have a good reason, and they get two days to WFH"
I feel for you, I really like my manager, and he's fighting a losing battle. I guess fighting isn't the right word, its more like he's just there to take abuse from both sides.
Reading this article was like reading a playbook of what my org's senior leadership team is doing.
And yeah, I think it is going to end real well, for me. I was getting comfortable and this RTO plan is the kick in the pants I needed to start looking for a new employer.
I really love my job, but I'm not coming back. Period.
It boils down to this: let me go remote now, or let me go remote later with a salary match. Or don't, I don't care, I'm not coming back in.
'Executives' tend to have their own office and better accommodations as well as (hopefully) believing in the company or at a minimum have some power to implement their own vision.
Employees are treated more like cattle so it is not surprising they would rather stay at home where they have more control.
Are you saying you don't like working below decks in the steerage section?!
In my last (and final?) office job, I worked in an open office environment. One team would have their daily meetings 3 feet behind my head, so I'd have to wear headphones. My coworkers all wore headphones, so I'd have to ping them via Slack or do a dance to get their attention. To have any privacy for meeting, I'd have to book a conference room, sometimes many floors or buildings away from my actual desk. I can't think of anything my desk actually provided for me, other than a place to park my laptop-hauling backpack.
The first 5-6 years of my career were in that kind of environment (though not quite as comically bad).
I went 100% remote but eventually found an opportunity where I had my own office, and after several months there I realized I had never had so much energy at the end of the workday. I was getting more done without working extra hours and feeling better than ever.
Companies pay hundreds of thousands for developers and are usually generous with equipment but pinch pennies with office space. I would be surprised if productivity gains and savings in sick and personal time wouldn't more than cover the cost of the additional space, plus it would be a hell of a recruiting tool since such a high percentage of companies are only offering a desk in a noisy, crowded environment.
I can’t agree enough. Not just offices but Executive Assistants, nice meeting rooms where they can indulge in their favorite habit of public speaking. Taking out their reports/coworkers for lunch on the company’s dime etc.
Working from home lets folks customize their workplace anyway they want. Personally I sunk a lot of my own money into getting a great chair, standing desk and an external monitor setup that I like instead of having to try and get procurement/IT to get something that’s “ok”.
I’ve literally never met the CEO of my small company. I once engaged with him on social media and had no response. Literally doesn’t recognize my name. Yet I built the majority of the product his success complete depends upon. He will get massive rewards if it succeeds and I have no stock.
Employees in tech might win this tug of war due to shortages. Demand for tech things has never been higher - both genuine demand e.g. remote learning and speculative demand e.g. bond yields are negative take my money for your sashimi delivery startup!
There is no "winning" in this tug of war, the more one side wins the less they will pull and ultimately it will settle down where some companies do WFH and some do WFO. So just like before but probably more of them doing WFH.
I’m not sure.
Once it becomes normal to WFH, coming into the office in the future might be seen like like asking for a sharp 9am start or to wear a suit and tie today.
Imagine commanding 1000 employees and seeing them on a daily basis scurry around like ants, all of whom are making you wealthy. Then all of a sudden they are just numbers on a spread sheet. Must really strip some psychological power
It's really no different than constantly checking your karma/follower/friend count or checking your portfolio. Gotta have those validation boosts or all this work would seem wasteful.
Some things are significantly more effective and productive in person than remote. Empirically I cannot argue otherwise, and I have been working remote for years in various capacities. The discrepancy suggested in the article can likely be explained by the reality that the further up the management ladder you go, the larger the percentage of your work that significantly benefits from being in person.
In that sense, it feels like people are talking past each other.
I don’t think the preferences of one class should be forced on another one. If the higher ups enjoy working in the office, they should just keep enough offices and meeting rooms to allow them to do that. Forcing others to come in is what I don’t really agree with; the reasons provided for wanting to do that have seemed pretty weak and pseudo scientific.
There are a lot of downsides of working from an office that were ignored when everyone had to do it, e.g. time wasted in commute, expensive housing because of the commute, getting colds all the time, being forced to interact with creepy people.
A proper office can be more pleasant than your home office, but most of them are not that great, e.g. you rarely have a quiet place focused on work, instead it is a noisy shared space. The business people say it is because of improving collaboration, but a lot of it is due to cost.
There is certainly value in being able to have face to face meetings, low overhead processes such as daily standups and pair programming, and build relationships with co-workers over lunch.
The biggest value in working from home is that you can fit work into the rest of your life, e.g. taking care of kids and reducing costs. Making people come into the office one or two days a week breaks that value.
The challenge of remote work moving forward is to try to build processes to reduce friction in online collaboration and to explicitly give space for team building and personal aspects.
There is on thing I never see mentioned in these discussions: a lot of employees take advantage of work from home to work as little as possible. I see it in my coworkers, I hear it from management friends from other companies, it is measured.
The reality is not everybody is passionate about their job, office peer pressure pushes people to be more productive, it is harder to measure productivity for remote individuals, and there are not enough remote fit workers to fill all the required positions.
So yes, management pushes for return to the office, but they do have real reasons. It is dishonest to simply paint them as power addicts who just like to see slaves toiling for them.
> So yes, management pushes for return to the office, but they do have real reasons. It is dishonest to simply paint them as power addicts who just like to see slaves toiling for them.
If this is a genuine concern it is profoundly naive. If someone is slacking off at home, they will be doing the same slacking off in the office, just with extra steps of convincing you that they are busy.
If you have no means of evaluating that people are not delivering other than eyeballs on them, then your organization is deeply broken.
> If someone is slacking off at home, they will be doing the same slacking off in the office, just with extra steps of convincing you that they are busy.
I disagree. At home, motivation can be way harder for people. The "buzz" is missing. I've heard this regularly from my devs/ui/ux team. They like coming in. Motivation is lacking at home. You can wash clothes, clean or watch some netflix. Sure people slack off in the office, but the feeling that they are part of something is there and gives motivation.
This whole discussion seems to be about a minority which tries to argue that everyone should do it like they would've liked to have it for themselves. That's plain dishonest.
A lot of people in these discussions should really try different employers. We have a flexible setup. The maximum number of days people would like to stay at home is 2 per week. Most people come in every day.
> A lot of people in these discussions should really try different employers. We have a flexible setup. The maximum number of days people would like to stay at home is 2 per week. Most people come in every day.
How can the factor of people coming in because they need to keep up appearances with others coming in be controlled for in this experiment?
I already addressed your argument: the performance of the workers was measured before and after going remote. It went down, by a significant margin, that is a fact.
As for the reasons, this is all theory: I think it's some kind of peer pressure, seeing everybody around you work and the boss present. Others think it's motivation. Slacking off at home is infinitely easier. But in the end why and how does not really matter. The results stay the same, companies see their productivity going down.
It's dishonest to paint them that way, but it's fair to point out they're trying to solve the wrong problem.
You say "a lot of employees take advantage of work from home to work as little as possible" - I guarantee you that's not what employees are setting out to do. No one went, at the start of the pandemic "oh thank God I am remote; now I can not do my job". What they're facing is a variety of things; reduced social bonds (not just at work but generally), a deviation from normalcy (which creates stress and makes productivity harder), and likely a culture that was transplanted from in person, without figuring out how to make remote work.
But your statement is definitely how a lot of managers think, "people are taking advantage", which is why the fix, according to those managers, is to bring people back in, where they can feel the pressure of being watched.
So you're not wrong in describing motivation...but the implication that these managers have correctly diagnosed and solved the problem is wrong.
What I've noticed is that without going into the office, the -already existing issues- become more apparent and more morale sucking, and it makes it harder to care about (and thus do) the work. Every obstacle feels harder because I don't have social glue to make me feel it needs to be overcome. Etc. The correct solution isn't to reinforce that social glue to better trick people into overlooking the issues, but to identify and fix the issues. But that's harder than mandating people come back into the office.
If you are a manager, and you don’t know how to measure your teams productivity without them being in the office, then you deserve to be fired for incompetency. I have been the CEO of a successful company for 5+ years and in directory/management positions in other companies so I believe I know what I am talking about.
I would be interested to see survey results for this sort of thing based on office design and layout.
I see a lot of people here describing the return to work as not enjoyable because they would be returning to open plan offices in which they have no privacy, in which superiors and coworkers are constantly watching over their shoulder, interrupting them, etc.
In my last job I was fortunate enough to work in a fabulously designed office where each developer had a private office with a closing door. The accommodations were very nice. I looked forward to going to that office and would prefer to work from there vs. my home if given the choice.
My job before that was an open-office layout where people were essentially crammed into a substandard space like livestock. The office environment was one reason I left. If I was working there now? My preference to work from home would be far greater than to be returning to that office.
How much of the desire to WFH is driven by crappy open office design, put in place by companies that could easily afford to give each developer their own private office in a very nice building with amenities?
I'd like to see it based on the walkability of the neighborhood where the office is located. I would much rather work in a vibrant city than a corporate campus miles away from the nearest coffee shop.
My take is that it is a leadership skill weakness. It is an outgrowth of the (poor) management principle of: if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
A lot of executives have little experience working with/managing staff - in real time - they cannot see. I've certainly worked under CEOs whose default mindset was "If I cannot see X at their desk, they are not contributing" etc.
Yes, these execs can look at monthly productivity/output reports and do the math retrospectively, but on a day-to-day basis, they lack the skills/tools to manage what they cannot see.
They can look at the status quo under the pandemic, and say "this would be better if people were in the office". Doesn't matter if things are going well, or things are going poorly; the pre-existing bias determines the conclusion.
Monthly reports aren't helpful there. Really, the only meaningful data point is "what is going to make the company the most successful". And, there, the better execs are looking to enable hybrid workplaces, where people can work remotely or onsite, whichever enables them best, and the technology and practices support that, since they recognize remote is an opportunity, and that it also prevents talent bleed due to poor morale. The worse execs are trying to mandate returning to the office, thinking that that's the only way to be successful, and are completely discounting the effect on morale.
Where I am its the other way around. The executives live in big family houses in the suburbs with their own home office and hate their long commute. The employees live in cramped apartments in the city, working on the sofa or kitchen table, and would much rather take their short commute to a nice air conditioned office.
In a weird and entirely ironic way, I think co-working spaces will become a big deal (again?) over the next decade or two. As People Of Means spread out over the country to lower-cost-of-living cities and towns, we'll start to see services that were concentrated in cities follow; in theory, one of those services could be private office space where you can have workmates and an office life, but still be working whatever remote job.
If small town mayors in middle America really want to bring back the glory days of Main Street, they'd be investing big time in fast internet, fancy co-working spaces with all the trimmings, and property tax incentives (or whatever) for pulling remote workers to move there.
While you’d have company’s at work you would likely not have many colleagues with you as they’d be at their town … so remote challenges would remain. It would be good for 2 things: having silly IT issues fixed easily, and that work/life separation feeling as you cycle home (which hopefully you can safely do not being in big city!)
For an individual, who mostly cares about focus time to complete their tasks, remote works great.
I’m conflicted because I love remote for focus time but my job demands convening large groups and getting consensus and decisions, and that is way easier in person.
Any tasks which require multiple people working together, decision making, reading body language, having small conversations that you might not schedule a call for (which I think all fall into management tasks more than IC) are better in person
The same person might have different body language during an in-person meeting in an uncomfortable office vs their home so if you use that for decision it's already biased. Some people are also more comfortable with casual text chat than casual in-person discussion and if relying on the latter you may miss things.
What's more - it's pretty hilarious (or sad, depending on circumstances) when neurotypical people are trying to judge the body language of people on the spectrum. They usually fail pretty hard and don't realize it.
I don't think any employees will object if executives choose to return to on site rather than remote work.
The problem is that that 44% of execs (who are free to, and in many cases freely do, work from home or elsewhere at will even when everyone else is in the office) actually wants the peons back in their cages,and in an environment where bigger and better located and better furnished cages are a reward that can be doled out (at no net cost because they are given from supply, taking away from others if needed.)
Anyone who has seen what executive do day to day would not be surprised by this in the least.
While a low level worker might be able to quietly work independently and maybe send a few emails and an occasional Zoom call, an executive is pretty much having conversations all day. Zoom sucks for such things and getting face to face can be way more efficient.
You mean the executives that sit in meeting rooms with video conferencing equipment and a couple of other people? Talking to one or more other meeting rooms filled with other groups of people?
Of course you have a certain point when the company is small and in one location and no need to talk to external parties often. It's far from universal. And everyone with their own mic and camera is way better than the dude that's always too far from the mic and only the people that are in his location can understand and converse with him etc.
You just reminded me how long it has been since I had to deal with this. Conference room group video conferencing is one of the most frustrating things about office work.
When I worked closely with the CEO of a large company pre-Covid it's was 80% in person meeting. Typically meeting with other senior leadership in the company, dealing with urgent decisions.
And by nature most CEOs are people persons. I can see why they'd find the idea of sitting in from of a computer clicking from Zoom call to Zoom call their own idea of hell.
I agree with a caveat: to actually produce things, sometimes meetings are not an impediment, they're vital. They're the quickest way to come to a consensus and share exceptions during design quickly
Absolutely. A group meeting weekly, a manager meeting with direct reports weekly, and peers convening ad-hoc meetings / pairing as the situation calls for it... during early phases of a project, actually showing up to a real whiteboard can be nice, but I tend to walk away from such sessions with several days of work. Folks interfacing with external groups naturally pick up a couple more meetings per week, but more than an average of one meeting a day, I have trouble getting quality work done. My preferred schedule has one day stuffed with meetings, and the rest of the week open for work and ad-hoc sessions. Going to the office on that day is fine.
Something I like to point out to people who will listen (not upper management) is that communication is not a good - it's a necessary evil. It has to be done to remove obstacles, but it should be minimized where possible.
This is completely counter to a lot of corporate cultures, but it's true; every wasted meeting, every unread email, etc, is a time wasting suck created to further the goal of "communication", without realizing that isn't a worthwhile goal.
This is true, and I'd add that the more fluid and dynamic those meetings are, the better. To me, it seems like video meetings are anything but. Lots of people either interrupting each other or trying too hard not to. Obnoxious repetition. Whiteboarding is a sad joke.
Meetings are not to be abolished. But they are not the end unto itself. It is merely a means to an end. A small piece of the larger pie of "work".
In real life, management shows that their time is packed with meetings while pushing actual production down to reports (who must attend all the meetings + do all the production).
There are very few managers who defend their report's time as precious.
If a meeting doesn't product an actionable set of items at the end of it, then it was a waste of time.
For example, what's a better use of everyone's time: a scrum meeting where everyone sits there and sits like 5 year olds waiting to have their turn at talking about what they want to do today and what they did yesterday, or a slack channel where everyone types the same thing they would have said anyway and then meets if there's something that needs to be discussed?
Yep, this has peeved me the whole time. Everyone's been working since we got sent home at the beginning of the pandemic. Calling it "return to work" rather than "return to office" is disingenuous at best and malicious at worst. It's likely a deliberate phrase meant to make it seem like people can't possibly be productive at home/remote with all the newfound flexibility of such an arrangement.
I’m genuinely curious what reason there is for women and people of colour to not want to return to office.
Parents I get. (Also; why make the ‘working parents’ distinction? Isn’t that implied?) I have multiple colleagues working mostly from home right note because the family situation demands it.
I just wonder why the employee satisfaction and retention would be threatened more for women and people of colour than for people not in those groups.
One of the things I've adopted in the pandemic, and which has shed some light on this, is moving more things that would have been discussions, into collaborative documents. I.e., rather than "let me get the team together and discuss this" I instead write a doc, and then ask people to comment on it, and I seek to resolve the comments.
What I've seen is that people who frequently would speak little in person, will sometimes have a LOT to say on the doc. They're more direct and less self-deprecating too.
The changes that remote has forced in many ways have changed, and potentially removed some of the cultural barriers that were in place before; much like an internet forum allows a level of confidence and directness that a person may not feel in person, so too has that particular change seemed to enable some people to find their voice.
I'd imagine that even for things that are still zoom meetings, it has changed things too; more agenda driven, more need to raise your hand or be polite when you realize multiple people have started to respond and still carve out time for the people who spoke up but aren't going next, rather than just interrupt and now soandso has the floor, etc.
I don't know any of these things to be the reason, but I could easily see it leading to a different and more egalitarian experience for women and people of color.
The methodology says it had 10,000 respondents, but it doesn't break those down into any sort of groups. What qualifies as an executive and how many of them responded to the survey? Given this survey is being carried out by Slack in an effort to convince companies to buy their product, I'm really skeptical of their vague methodology
“The survey was administered by Qualtrics and did not target Slack employees or customers.”
I think from the introduction section they are targeting employees of Fortune 500 companies, but they are restricting the sample to those that don’t use slack… I think this is going to generate a biased sample.
There is also some discussion of “of executives currently working remotely” but they don’t discuss the count of respondents.
The methodology section has some definitions:
“Respondents were all knowledge workers, defined as employed full-time (30 or more hours per week) and either having one of the roles listed below or saying they “work with data, analyze information or think creatively”: Executive Management (e.g., President/Partner, CEO, CFO, C-suite), Senior Management (e.g., Executive VP, Senior VP), Middle Management (e.g., Department/Group Manager, VP), Junior Management (e.g., Manager, Team Leader), Senior Staff (i.e., Non-Management), Skilled Office Worker (e.g., Analyst, Graphic Designer).”
There is some discussion of “executives,” “managers,” and “employees,” it seems a little difficult to tease out from the text which group is being talked about, though.
It defines who was surveyed, you can only guess what they mean by "executive." Their definition could limit it to 10-100 respondents, and how many of them are currently working from home? That 46% may represent like 20 people, making it statistically garbage.
“Companies want their workers back in the office.” Oh, cool…but just to be clear, we are talking about everyone coming back to their very own private rooms when they commute to your special business building, right? Y’know, as in each employee has a semi-private, permanent space where they can control things like random interruptions, the temperature, maybe even dim the harsh florescent lighting. Y’know, a modicum of autonomy?
Oh, right — you meant an open office, as in a big pit of desks where everyone’s subjected to the sights, sounds, and smells of anything and everything that happens to gravitate towards their shared…table. And this should take two unpaid hours of your day to commute back and forth from by car, or longer by public transit…assuming there even is public transit where they live.
Yeah, I’m gonna pass on that one, but good luck filling that fancy building of yours!
The professional managerial class is losing their minds. It's harder to take credit for the work of others when they can insulate themselves working remote.
It also seems to me that many of those who advertise for coming back to the office have a family at home and are fed up with being around them all day long. Let's be honest - most men are bored and annoyed by their wives and children. It's much more pleasant to feel im important at work, get raises and have maybe an affair or two going on.
(having an "own" family somewhat correlates with seniority and career level)
A lot of people are ignoring the real story here. 66% of executives don't want to return to work! What the fuck!? It's literally the offices they paid for. Big changes are coming.
Those of us who do not care about that sort of thing and are happy writing code, developing circuits or network designs and etc. We are completely fine working from home. In fact, not having the distractions of an office is actually really nice.
But if part of your fulfilment is being "the big boss" or whatever, it's just not as satisfying sitting in your basement on Zoom with the rest of us.
Just my little theory.