[remote_phone]

Here comes the coordinated media campaign trying to tell us that WFH is not good for businesses…

I wonder how much corporations paid to get this article planted so that CEOs can point to it as the reason they want RTO?

[lowmagnet]

It's good for workers and our hiring and I wouldn't give our distributed workforce here up for anything.

[slowmovintarget]

I manage a large software team (developers, analysts, PMs, support, writers)... The actual work we accomplish as a team increased with remote working. No more time wasted fighting our way through traffic, or in the case of people in India, fighting monsoons, to get into an office.

This does make my job harder. The reason for this is that a great deal of my work happens in 30-minute increments, making decisions, in meetings. But that is not how software gets built. Developers work in half-day increments. Flow matters, extended concentration matters (I was a software developer for over two decades). Making my job easier at the expense of my people would be utterly foolish. I think most software-oriented tech companies (or departments) will hold to this. The real challenge, as always, is to find people driven to work hard and who delight in solving problems.

I don't know how this dichotomy of time-boxing translates to other businesses that aren't about crafting software or extended periods of what is essentially thought-work. Restaurateurs must go to the restaurant, factory workers to the factory, but if your job is crafting text in digital form, you can be located anywhere.