> Microsoft announced a report indicating that workers were indeed productive at home (and sometimes more so), just that managers were failing to have confidence in workers.
Maybe it's down to management style.
It's long known that (at least in somewhat creative and self-directed jobs) workers who are motivated and happy with their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Managers then have to work hard, to keep motivation up and people happy. Let's call this the "supportive" management style.
It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with, and do only as much as they are forced/required to do. Managers than have to work hard to control and monitor everyone, to keep the slack to a minimum. Let's call this the "adversarial" management style.
In one of those styles, WFH employees can be more productive, more happy, and more efficient. In the other, WFH employees can't be monitored closely enough to keep them from slacking.
Some managers prefer one style over the other, and not many are able to switch styles.
It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company.
Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
I don't think it's just about management style. It's also about the preferences of the employees.
Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work.
But this only works if everyone goes to the office.
My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.
The success of WFH is the demonstration that if you treat adults as such, they are going to do their job anyway thus rendering an entire horde of middle managers completely useless.
> It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with
I wouldn't be surprised if that's a LOT of Dell employees.
I recently dealt with their service department and it was the worst warranty service I've had on any product. Reiterates my prior position of never buying Dell products again.
Took two, multi-hour iMessage conversations including taking 5 videos of my product each time, to prove warranty was triggered. Was at the point of asking "should I take a video of putting your product in the garbage as well?"
The craziest part was once that was done, they immediately shipped me a brand new replacement with overnight delivery. Product was already on the way before I realized they actually had granted me service.
Eizo on the other hand was a 5 minute process, but then the monitor was gone for a month being serviced.
Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. I've never had service denied or had to battle for hours.
So the dumbest possible outcome - they are out a new replacement monitor, and I am unhappy enough to never be a customer again.
Nit: They're called "Autocratic" (specifically Authoritarian) or "Democratic" styles. [0]
Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity.
I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them.
It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one.
The "adversarial style" is just an excuse for bad managers/companies.
If you can't tell that a worker is not producing because they are WFH then you are plain and simply incompetent. It's actually much easier to pretend to work in an office than it is at home in my experience.
Another very common excuse to use this "style" (I don't agree it's a stylistic choice at all) is to cover up the real cause that employees are not productive. These can be a ton of reasons including:
- hiring incompetent people
- not paying your employees what they're worth (often the cause for the first one)
- not letting them actually do their job (micromanagement, unnecessary bureaucracy, etc)
- not giving them challenging work
- inability to listen and change (employee's concerns are ignored)
This is correct, except that the two "management styles" presented are the two extremes of a spectrum.
Apart from that, WFH does make management a lot more painful and tedious from a practical perspective. Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications, and their resolution is at the mercy of how long each person in the chain takes to receive each message, acknowledge it, follow up on feedback, make changes, clarify, finalize...
Maybe instead of setting arbitrary broad-brush WFH policies, just divide every role within WHF-able and non-WFH-able baskets under each business head.
I would not distinguish supportive/adversarial management styles as much as the workload chunking, responsibility for delivery and management of it.
Suppose your team consists of individual independent contractors or for example the team members are all spread across multiple offices. Such an arrangement is effectively indistinguishable from WFH arrangement as you do not really have the aforementioned face to face contact anyway.
Can management make it work? WFH may mean slacking in hackernews, office will mean slacking at the water cooler. Do you really need multiple a day face to face conversations "how are WE doing this"? Maybe the workload actually requires intimate contact for efficiency/quality. Maybe you can chunk workload into 40 hour chunks, have workers independently arrive at solutions and just sync once in a while.
On one hand yes, this is management lacking control. On the other hand this is about trust in workers and workload chunking.
It's quite clear to me that tech companies know that reneging on WFH will cause some employees to leave. I think that this is actually the entire point. You can do a soft layoff, without ever having to say the word layoff, and without ever getting "Tech company XYZ announces layoffs" headlines.
The problem, I think, is what kind of employees may leave. If it's the best of the cream, then the company is in trouble. And frankly, the best employees can allow themselves to say "I want to work from home. You don't allow? Then goodbye".
Nokia at one point started handing out very generous severance packages to get people out. The management thought that the bad workers would be the ones to take the deal.
Nope, the oldest and most experienced ones took the money and used it to start their own companies.
Those headlines are usually associated with a bump in the stock price; it's unclear why they'd be trying to avoid them. Perhaps they think it undermines future hiring or retention, but so does RTO.
The problem is they are leaking talent, as those who know that can pick another offer that suits their needs will do without thinking about it too much.
I’m beginning to think so as well. You can get significant layoffs without having a “layoff” event, and you don’t have to provide any of the support that is required when firing people.
It’s clearly not what an employment lawyer would call “constructive dismissal” but it sure feels like that is the intent.
Working from the office is a management strategy. It goes like this:
If you work remote, you have to actually write down things, like 1. who your workers are, 2. what the teams are, 3. where they are, 4. how to contact them, 5. what they're working on, 6. who else they depend on or who depends on them, etc. There are a lot of new tools to learn, you have to learn how to ask for someones time and schedule time. That's a lot of work that managers don't want to do.
If you work from the office, you mostly have to: 1. walk around the office and ask someone. Interrupt whatever they're doing to ask anything you want anytime. Of course, there may be many offices, but then you call the other offices and ask the secretary to go around and ask people.
It's also very easy when wfh to accidentally leave a paper trail or records of conversations you'd rather stay hidden. In an office you can just talk in person with no record.
Wfh is a right that white collar workers are gonna have to fight for, the way all unions have had to fight for the rights workers deserve. Don't threaten to quit, threaten to unionize.
Much of the discussion is philosophical about commutes and keeping an eye on kids while wfh. But those issues aren't new.
What's egregious to me is companies committing to something which has major life and financial implications to the people that work there and then pulling the rug out.
> Unlike some other companies’ approaches, Dell seems to be asking workers who live within an hour’s commute to work from the office for three days per week, rather than specific job roles.
Hour during rush hour or hour as measured by Google Maps without traffic data?
So they're basically asking people to spend 40 hours a month, unpaid, in their car going to and from work with no compensation?
You say this like it’s a new and offensive idea when in fact this has been the norm for as long as paid workforce has been concept.
With regards to hybrid jobs: you can get a job closer to home, but there is a reason why house prices are more expensive in tech hubs and why wages are lower where housing is cheaper. So you can either have cheaper housing but lower income, higher income but higher house prices, or have both but pay the penalty with you time (ie longer commutes).
This is how it’s always been and why fully remote jobs have been a great life hack. But you can’t really complain about having to spend you own time commuting should you have a hybrid role.
I didn’t see them lowering salaries when WFH was implemented in the first place so I don’t think that they should raise salaries when removing it. A few people I know had WFH written into their contracts so I guess they would be able to renegotiate or keep home working.
In the end this has always been about manager/owner power, not about getting work done or doing the right thing by your employees.
The real bind is fitting travel around family life that changed since 2020, kids going to different schools and spouse changing jobs means work life balance is shared differently for most people. I can see the issue going beyond pay, people can't be into places at once, but you can put the hours in when remote spread over the day.
Why would people suddenly need to take up childcare? Did those employees conflate WFH with skimping on childcare? I know the answer to that.. I had those colleagues. It's a shitty move on their part, their output was definitely less and reflects poorly on people who actually did their hours WFH and outputted more!
Here is the problem, and it's not a technical problem, you guessed it, it's a people problem, and it doesn't have a solution, because people suck:
- It's probably more difficult to do great work WFH than F2F. But I mean "great", properly great stuff, novel, hard, high stakes, high pressure, high coordination, moonshot level.
- It's probably not difficult at all to do mid level boring stuff WFH, and everybody saves time and money on top.
- 99% of orgs do the later kind of work
- 99% of orgs don't like to admit they do the later kind of work
I guess we need to start enforcing WFH policy in our contracts. I have zero trust in companies to respect WFM without it. Something like, if they break the policy, an amount of X months will be paid for the employee.
Neither article gives Dell reasons for telling people to come in more often. The only quotes are from the past, and allude to productivity in new hires being low — the same reason Zuckerberg is bringing Meta back into the office.
I just got laid off in April after months of downtown and getting on bad terms with my manager. Out of the blue he started micromanaging me, and what was once a truely remote frontend job in a completely different timezone (good) became a game where he'd call me in the middle of my day (late evening for him) and then send me passive aggressive slack messages when I wasn't immediately available. There's this managerial idea that people need to be butt in seat ready to go on a video call whenever they feel like initiating it, and that's just one more thing that stripped autonomy away and removed any sense of agency I had in how I got my work done. I was already in a zoom call at 6am most days, so I'd work for a bit, rest or go outside to enjoy the limited daylight, then come back and finish or go to a cafe.
He was definitely promoted beyond his capability though, and as a "director of engineering" couldn't keep his hands out of the minutiae of day to day code discussion.
I think those that choose to stay at Dell, should now add their commute time to their working hours. Over the past three years we've clearly demonstrated that WFH is effective and productive - shift the cost of travel to the office onto the employers if they want butts in seats so badly.
All the people here saying WFH employees are happier than those who aren't are completely incorrect in the long term. This claim does not account for a very large group of employees: The junior engineer.
A junior learns at a fraction of the pace of a senior and relies on direct 1-1 help, together with learning by observing others. This is quite difficult online and requires a lot of hand-holding which most mid-level / seniors are not willing to do.
So saying that WFH policies should be the norm is no longer an acceptable statement. It sacrifices the longevity of the team and the company if juniors cannot be onboarded quickly.
Easy, in todays market, there are plenty of experienced developers who are being laid off so you don’t have to hire juniors.
There is no statistic longevity in tech. It’s well known that the quickest method to make more money especially when starting out is to change jobs after two or three years.
Salary compression and inversion is real.
Yes I know it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors. It’s a local maximization problem
Not just juniors. I'm a senior engineer (10+ years exp). I recently changed teams, and even with knowing how things work at the company, onboarding has been challenging. It takes a lot more active effort on my end, and the results are still worse than in-person onboarding.
I mean, boo hoo. I taught myself programming by reading docs and stackoverflow while working head down for years at a company that had no other professional developers. 1.5 hours commute each way. I'd 100% have taken a WFH arrangement over that and I'd be just as good.
I don't think the return to office trend will abate until the economy returns to growth mode.
We are in a tightening economy where stock prices are jumping double digit percentages from layoff announcements.
Everyone seems to recognize that forcing employees to return to office will result in attrition (aka soft-layoff).
Perhaps when growth becomes the focus again, companies will switch back to work from home. The public line of reasoning will be something dumb like "eliminating office costs" or "reducing emissions associated with commute".
3 days in the office is fine for me. Though I work sometimes with hardware. Big corp I work for asked to be in the office 4 days and the managers asked in private to be whole week here and they might spare us from next wave of layoffs. Logical solution is job search. I feel very bad for my new subordinate. One year ago I promised him nice salary, good home office rules (he’s doing remote master degree) and rather boring tasks. Salary was reduced half year ago and now full back to the office. Poor guy…
Companies think that a hybrid model is some kind of fair compromise, or perhaps the best of both worlds.
Hybrid means you'll commute to work to arrive in an half-empty office. In this office are people sitting in calls all day.
You cannot have good old fashioned face-to-face meetings in a hybrid model. Because part of the crew will be remote on any given day.
Likewise, you cannot catch up on a project at the coffee corner, because the remote folks won't see that. You need to put all of that in writing, just like you do when everyone is remote.
The work-related stuff does not change back to the old ways when you go hybrid, it will remain in remote mode.
What hybrid does offer is in-person socialization. Breaks, lunch walks, etc.
[+] [-] hooby|2 years ago|reply
Maybe it's down to management style.
It's long known that (at least in somewhat creative and self-directed jobs) workers who are motivated and happy with their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Managers then have to work hard, to keep motivation up and people happy. Let's call this the "supportive" management style.
It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with, and do only as much as they are forced/required to do. Managers than have to work hard to control and monitor everyone, to keep the slack to a minimum. Let's call this the "adversarial" management style.
In one of those styles, WFH employees can be more productive, more happy, and more efficient. In the other, WFH employees can't be monitored closely enough to keep them from slacking.
Some managers prefer one style over the other, and not many are able to switch styles.
[+] [-] kubb|2 years ago|reply
Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
"Efficiency".
[+] [-] newaccount74|2 years ago|reply
Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work.
But this only works if everyone goes to the office.
My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.
[+] [-] thefz|2 years ago|reply
The success of WFH is the demonstration that if you treat adults as such, they are going to do their job anyway thus rendering an entire horde of middle managers completely useless.
[+] [-] steveBK123|2 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be surprised if that's a LOT of Dell employees. I recently dealt with their service department and it was the worst warranty service I've had on any product. Reiterates my prior position of never buying Dell products again.
Took two, multi-hour iMessage conversations including taking 5 videos of my product each time, to prove warranty was triggered. Was at the point of asking "should I take a video of putting your product in the garbage as well?"
The craziest part was once that was done, they immediately shipped me a brand new replacement with overnight delivery. Product was already on the way before I realized they actually had granted me service.
Eizo on the other hand was a 5 minute process, but then the monitor was gone for a month being serviced.
Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. I've never had service denied or had to battle for hours.
So the dumbest possible outcome - they are out a new replacement monitor, and I am unhappy enough to never be a customer again.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|2 years ago|reply
Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity.
I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them.
It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_style
[+] [-] Draiken|2 years ago|reply
If you can't tell that a worker is not producing because they are WFH then you are plain and simply incompetent. It's actually much easier to pretend to work in an office than it is at home in my experience.
Another very common excuse to use this "style" (I don't agree it's a stylistic choice at all) is to cover up the real cause that employees are not productive. These can be a ton of reasons including:
- hiring incompetent people
- not paying your employees what they're worth (often the cause for the first one)
- not letting them actually do their job (micromanagement, unnecessary bureaucracy, etc)
- not giving them challenging work
- inability to listen and change (employee's concerns are ignored)
It's not a style choice at all.
[+] [-] dartharva|2 years ago|reply
Apart from that, WFH does make management a lot more painful and tedious from a practical perspective. Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications, and their resolution is at the mercy of how long each person in the chain takes to receive each message, acknowledge it, follow up on feedback, make changes, clarify, finalize...
Maybe instead of setting arbitrary broad-brush WFH policies, just divide every role within WHF-able and non-WFH-able baskets under each business head.
[+] [-] friendzis|2 years ago|reply
Suppose your team consists of individual independent contractors or for example the team members are all spread across multiple offices. Such an arrangement is effectively indistinguishable from WFH arrangement as you do not really have the aforementioned face to face contact anyway.
Can management make it work? WFH may mean slacking in hackernews, office will mean slacking at the water cooler. Do you really need multiple a day face to face conversations "how are WE doing this"? Maybe the workload actually requires intimate contact for efficiency/quality. Maybe you can chunk workload into 40 hour chunks, have workers independently arrive at solutions and just sync once in a while.
On one hand yes, this is management lacking control. On the other hand this is about trust in workers and workload chunking.
[+] [-] DoctorMckay101|2 years ago|reply
> be me
> wfh as a soft dev for a big tech company
> company tells me to come back to the office
> they claim it is to promote coworking and socialize
> have to wake up an hour earlier
> 1h commute, no real public transport options
> get stuck in traffic, +20 minutes
> arrive late at office
> no matter, no one checks office logs and I turned on my laptop in the car
> half of the workers are wfh
> no one from my team is there
> remember they are not even from the same city lol
> put on my headphones
> zoom meeting, have to book a room
> finish meeting
> put some spotify on
> don't talk to nobody for 6h
> make a greentext in ycombinator
> leave an hour earlier because no one checks office logs
> 1h commute back
[+] [-] dry_soup|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmarcos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theshrike79|2 years ago|reply
Nokia at one point started handing out very generous severance packages to get people out. The management thought that the bad workers would be the ones to take the deal.
Nope, the oldest and most experienced ones took the money and used it to start their own companies.
[+] [-] closeparen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrudham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjaminwootton|2 years ago|reply
It sounds perverse but surely conpanies notice how much the market likes them.
Even the serverance they save is a rounding error compared to a 10% bump in market cap.
[+] [-] thefz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olliej|2 years ago|reply
It’s clearly not what an employment lawyer would call “constructive dismissal” but it sure feels like that is the intent.
[+] [-] throwaway5371|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avnigo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwawaaarrgh|2 years ago|reply
If you work remote, you have to actually write down things, like 1. who your workers are, 2. what the teams are, 3. where they are, 4. how to contact them, 5. what they're working on, 6. who else they depend on or who depends on them, etc. There are a lot of new tools to learn, you have to learn how to ask for someones time and schedule time. That's a lot of work that managers don't want to do.
If you work from the office, you mostly have to: 1. walk around the office and ask someone. Interrupt whatever they're doing to ask anything you want anytime. Of course, there may be many offices, but then you call the other offices and ask the secretary to go around and ask people.
It's also very easy when wfh to accidentally leave a paper trail or records of conversations you'd rather stay hidden. In an office you can just talk in person with no record.
Wfh is a right that white collar workers are gonna have to fight for, the way all unions have had to fight for the rights workers deserve. Don't threaten to quit, threaten to unionize.
[+] [-] jorlow|2 years ago|reply
What's egregious to me is companies committing to something which has major life and financial implications to the people that work there and then pulling the rug out.
[+] [-] theshrike79|2 years ago|reply
Hour during rush hour or hour as measured by Google Maps without traffic data?
So they're basically asking people to spend 40 hours a month, unpaid, in their car going to and from work with no compensation?
[+] [-] hnlmorg|2 years ago|reply
With regards to hybrid jobs: you can get a job closer to home, but there is a reason why house prices are more expensive in tech hubs and why wages are lower where housing is cheaper. So you can either have cheaper housing but lower income, higher income but higher house prices, or have both but pay the penalty with you time (ie longer commutes).
This is how it’s always been and why fully remote jobs have been a great life hack. But you can’t really complain about having to spend you own time commuting should you have a hybrid role.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|2 years ago|reply
In the end this has always been about manager/owner power, not about getting work done or doing the right thing by your employees.
[+] [-] thepostman0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] u801e|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karolist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WheatMillington|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbogert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrPatan|2 years ago|reply
- It's probably more difficult to do great work WFH than F2F. But I mean "great", properly great stuff, novel, hard, high stakes, high pressure, high coordination, moonshot level.
- It's probably not difficult at all to do mid level boring stuff WFH, and everybody saves time and money on top.
- 99% of orgs do the later kind of work
- 99% of orgs don't like to admit they do the later kind of work
This is why we can't have nice things
[+] [-] deofoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroderf|2 years ago|reply
Sort of like, a gal is by definition your main squeeze if you're with her 4 or more nights out of every 7.
[+] [-] gorgoiler|2 years ago|reply
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/10/dell_remote_work_revi...
Neither article gives Dell reasons for telling people to come in more often. The only quotes are from the past, and allude to productivity in new hires being low — the same reason Zuckerberg is bringing Meta back into the office.
[+] [-] brailsafe|2 years ago|reply
He was definitely promoted beyond his capability though, and as a "director of engineering" couldn't keep his hands out of the minutiae of day to day code discussion.
[+] [-] btbuildem|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judge2020|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cauliflower99|2 years ago|reply
A junior learns at a fraction of the pace of a senior and relies on direct 1-1 help, together with learning by observing others. This is quite difficult online and requires a lot of hand-holding which most mid-level / seniors are not willing to do.
So saying that WFH policies should be the norm is no longer an acceptable statement. It sacrifices the longevity of the team and the company if juniors cannot be onboarded quickly.
[+] [-] scarface74|2 years ago|reply
There is no statistic longevity in tech. It’s well known that the quickest method to make more money especially when starting out is to change jobs after two or three years.
Salary compression and inversion is real.
Yes I know it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors. It’s a local maximization problem
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] threadweaver34|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adammarples|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rybosworld|2 years ago|reply
We are in a tightening economy where stock prices are jumping double digit percentages from layoff announcements.
Everyone seems to recognize that forcing employees to return to office will result in attrition (aka soft-layoff).
Perhaps when growth becomes the focus again, companies will switch back to work from home. The public line of reasoning will be something dumb like "eliminating office costs" or "reducing emissions associated with commute".
[+] [-] mkl95|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnsru|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 49erfangoniners|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jen20|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahwolf|2 years ago|reply
Hybrid means you'll commute to work to arrive in an half-empty office. In this office are people sitting in calls all day.
You cannot have good old fashioned face-to-face meetings in a hybrid model. Because part of the crew will be remote on any given day.
Likewise, you cannot catch up on a project at the coffee corner, because the remote folks won't see that. You need to put all of that in writing, just like you do when everyone is remote.
The work-related stuff does not change back to the old ways when you go hybrid, it will remain in remote mode.
What hybrid does offer is in-person socialization. Breaks, lunch walks, etc.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|2 years ago|reply