from Hacker News

Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

by tmoaad on 7/24/20, 5:29 PM with 15 comments

by tmoaad on 7/24/20, 5:29 PM
Archive link: https://archive.is/KmHGU
by mderazon on 7/24/20, 11:10 PM
We're in the middle of a world health and financial crisis so productivity naturally goes down.
Also a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like that.
These are not normal times, WFH has nothing to do with it
by bleah1000 on 7/25/20, 8:36 AM
I think the one thing that gets lost in the work from home push is that it really takes good managers to make it work. You need a manager skilled at making sure that people are working at a good pace. Doing one-on-ones in person for a good people manager is a lot easier than over a video call where only a portion of you is visible, so a remote manager needs to be really good at remote one-on-ones. You need a manager that can fairly rate their reports so they push for promotions/raises/rewards based on their accomplishments. Without this, good performers get angry and leave. You also need a manager who can figure out if someone is not doing a good job and how to help them or move them out of the org. The manager also needs to have the skills to onboard new hires since mentorship is going to be a bit more difficult when done remotely since nearly no company has good documentation for new hires.
A decent manager might struggle with these skills when going fully remote. It could be easy for them to fall back on some rudimentary metrics of productivity because they have a hard time judging what people are doing. You will probably see managers who have "favorites" lean more heavily on a few people because they are a known quantity to the manager. You'll probably see new hires take a lot longer to get up to speed with merely competent managers.
I wonder if we actually have enough good managers to make work from home scale up.
by ABoldGambit on 7/25/20, 2:37 AM
Lots of anecdotal experiences with no empirical data. I’m gonna chalk this one up to clickbait.
by miga on 7/25/20, 7:34 AM
Some managers find that their goals are reached fasters, some find that they stop seeing certain kinds of issues.
Maybe we should rather say that some managers are skilled at managing all kinds of teams, and some stop getting results with remote teams. Or that some managers find themselves less lazy when communicating with people in person. After all we rely on productivity as reported by managers, not an objective measure per se. So managers must be skilled at measuring productivity in this particular environment.
That may be a common thing: how much of the communication in any team is that of coordination, and how much of it is that of maintaining status?
Also one cannot discard a totally different explanation: maybe it was the _change_ in the mode of work that made people more efficient, instead of remote work by itself. If it was true, then coming back from remote would also increase efficiency for a short time.
by ThrowMeAwayOkay on 7/24/20, 11:20 PM
Well, I refuse to work for anyone else unless it’s remote. Every single colleague I’ve talked to said the same. I’ve been in the professional working world for 22 years across many companies ...I have many colleagues.
by x87678r on 7/25/20, 12:44 AM
Some people in my team are doing barely anything.
by protomok on 7/24/20, 11:59 PM
```
  "One benefit of working together in person, many
  executives said, is the potential for spontaneous 
  interactions. 
  ...
  She noticed that she was soon having conversations 
  with peers that wouldn’t have happened in a remote 
  set up—a discussion sparked by a passing question 
  in the hall"
```
I can relate to this. I miss the impromptu conversation about idea -> whiteboarding session -> JIRAs -> new features, new design, etc.
WFH was great for the first month or so but at this point I find myself missing going into the office. Once the vaccine arrives I plan to switch to around 4 days on site / 1 day WFH.
by jiveturkey on 7/24/20, 8:56 PM
no surprises here