The work-from-home future is destroying bosses' brains

One of my pet hates is meetings without an agenda, or that don't stick to the agenda.

If you're done with the agenda, then the meeting is finished and everyone can leave. If that happens after 5 minutes, then that's good.

I have been in meetings where the organiser has said "well, we've finished, but we've got this room for an hour, so let's just hang out for the rest of the time". That can be tough to respond to. Just saying "Sorry, but no, I've got work to do" can be offensive (though it shouldn't be).

Frankly I think people not being immediately reachable is the big percentage gain of remote work. That's it. They've finally got the space to go and get on with the actual job.

And management hate that.

My solution has been to take nearly every meeting possible outside while on walks. It helps me focus where I would otherwise not be able to focus, and acts as a good way to get some additional exercise throughout the day.

I've found that my remote work meetings neatly break down into 3 categories:

  - direct engagement -- 2-4 participants
  - broad forum -- 5-12 participants
  - fly-on-the-wall -- any number, but my contribution will be 0-4 sentences

I can frequently take fly-on-the-wall meetings (and sometimes even broad forum) while out walking, which is a nice plus.

Well I find this really good. Maybe because I am younger and used to multitasking. But before pandemic just sitting in person meetings and trying to focus for 2 hours to not let my mind wander was really exhausting. Not since everything is remote I can also do some work while 2 hour meetings are being done. And afterwards I don't feel as tired as I did when we had physical meetings

That's the case in traditionaly organised meetings, where I work we pull people in and kick them out pretty quickly. Meetings are 2-5 people max, everyone is contributing, and you get told you can leave if the topic pivots to something that doesn't apply to you.

nobody has ever had a laptop away at any company i’ve worked at in meetings

Lots of egregious violations of #4 and #5 where I work. Leaving a meeting or not even showing up to one even if only to just "observe" comes off as passive aggressive.

"Don't repeat things that were already communicated": This sounds good, but it takes several repetitions for information to sink in with everyone everywhere I've worked. I don't know a way around this.

This is highly dependent on output expectations. I can see this being the case in large corps and FAANGs but not in many startups

I find myself doing the opposite. It's much easier for me to step away at 6pm sharp knowing that if anything happens I can jump back in an instant, vs the worry of being the first to leave the office, and being stuck in a train for a half hour.

As someone who has done full time WFH for more than 5 years one skill you need to pick up is the ability to shut down around 5-6pm and avoid work on the weekends, which actually takes some self-discipline.

Your family must be very different to mine, because when mine are around my productivity is strictly zero.

> It's now much easier to work past 5 or 6pm or whenever you would normally end

It is much easier but I also believe it's something people will get out of the habit of (or at least I hope). It really isn't a difficult habit to break.

Since working from home I do exactly the same as I would in the office: At the same time every day I close the laptop and put it away.

It's actually easier for me to get away because no one is stopping me on the way out to ask me some questions or to just have a quick chat.

"Needing to return home to your family is no longer an excuse to stop working because you can be with your family while at work."

If you have young children or infants you can spend your time caring for them and worrying that those with older kids (or no kids!) will judge you.

It's pretty easy to game "working hours" when you're remote. Even an always on camera probably isn't enough and I wouldn't want my team to work under those conditions.

I'm also curious what productivity measures are being watched, especially for developers.

> a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

Right. A FireFighter or an on-call IT Tech are excellent examples of how we can have 40 hours of presence while only requiring 20 hours of work. Making it acceptable for people to read a book if working 40 hours makes things better.

> love the idea of a 20 hour workweek, but I also understand that the harsh reality is that it would make things like construction, building security, janitorial services, etc. 2x more expensive

I'm not sure that's true. As I understand it, a lot of construction time is spent dealing with looking busy because of blocking tasks. But if we transition those jobs from hourly to piece-rate it solves a lot of problems.

Even building security only doing rounds/checking tapes 1/2 the time seems sufficient.

Nurses, firefighters, and military already work unusually bad hours but they don’t seem to be especially well-paid.

>This is a very HN comment, because it ignores that a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

Are you saying you think most people on HN do piecework? Because I sort of took for granted they were salaried.

At any rate, different companies within an industry area can be quite different.

I have had jobs involving programming that were:

  - salaried
  - hourly, with overtime
  - required time entry of billable/nonbillable projects worked on in 15 or 6 minute increments
  - required using a time clock (but not intraday time entry)
  - union
  - non-union

Exactly. Like fire fighters. They spend most of there time doing nothing.

Or secretaries. Or HR.

I think it came with an implied /sarc tag

A Big Mac doesn't cost any more in Denmark than in the US, but the workers make twice as much.

> people are too busy spending their time at jobs and not consuming.

You are sitting on a trillion dollar marketing opportunity here.

The problem is that our culture does not strongly encourage consumerism during work hours. Beyond a couple of decorative trinkets on the cubible walls, people don't spend much on or at their workplace.

Capitalism teaches us we must fix that glitch.

The right solution is to create a culture of "office bling". You don't want to be the only person in your office without a gold throne, do you? Are you really writing on the whiteboard with a fucking Expo marker from Office Depot when you could show your worth by using the new $17,000 Montblanc Whiteboard Excelsior? Oh, you had a Starbucks latte on your break? Plebian. I had a flat white made with kopi luwak and gold flakes.

Why should we only burn cash distracting ourselves from our miserable home lives, when we could also burn cash distracting ourselves from our miserable work lives too?

How about..a salary based on the resources you need/want to survive...so that those who work less (indirectly contributing more to society by sharing their job, childcare, volunteering or just being mentally healthy enough to think of the"next big thing" and directly by ecologically diminishing consumption) get paid more ...? Tax the higher earners and subsidise the "work less" ...then suddenly wages and automation go up as businesses have to compete for a diminishing work pool...

I used to work 60-80 hours a week in the summers and 60+ between a full credit load and a couple of part time jobs. I went to bed twice a day for a couple of years because I was working swing shift and going to school.

I now have a 9-5 office job. I am apparently capable of working at least twice as many hours but I choose not to because I don't have to.

There are already people making twice as much (and more) than I do in as much or less time.

I don't think a 20 hour week for knowledge workers would have the effect you claim.

This is called the hedonic treadmill, and is why we don't have a more leisurely lifestyle in general.

John Maynard Keynes famously predicted something like a 10-20 hour work week by the year 2000. You can actually have that today... if you are willing to live at the standard of living of someone in the 1930s.

That would mean a much smaller house, much less technology, a very cheap car or public transit, vanilla food, only a few suits of clothes, and bare bones health care.

Instead we tend to use our gains to get more space (houses today outside dense cities are huge), more tech, more education, better health care, designer hipster food, more entertainment, and so on.

By that logic, you should be enforcing a 60 hour/week, to achieve even better goals.

The problem is that job != job, because different jobs have different requirements.

A doctor needs to be available continuously, but he doesn’t necessarily need to be working continuously. An on-call doctor needs to be available 24/7. A general practitioner may only need to show up for scheduled appointments in strict timeslots.

A programmer on a long term project needs to eventually put in hours, but precisely when he puts in those hours matters less. A senior developer is productive anytime he’s available for advice (and there are others working to be advised — with off-shore resources, this can mean extended availability)

A warehouse worker is productive only when he’s explicitly doing labor. Being available for labor, but not doing any, is worthless.

A programmer on a short term or last-mile phase of a project needs to put in the hours, but on a strict timeline — there’s no room to skip a day and make up for it tomorrow.

Companies already acknowledge this, albeit implicitly. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more valuable your availability and the less your labor. CEOs don’t get to have strict no-work vacations, but they also don’t have strict 9-5 work/life split, because they need to be available all the time. At the same time, they can go normal days without any real work to do, because they aren’t needed for anything.

You're kind of begging the question when you take "The 40 hour/week company will get more done" as a given, because that is exactly what's at stake here, isn't it? People upthread are theorizing that those extra 20 hours a week really don't make us get more done, because (to quote one of the comments above), "the rest is socialization, pointless meetings, lunches, or trying to look busy"

I used to think this. But, I've learned that it assumes a bunch of things that aren't really true at many, many companies:

- Clear goals that the team is bought into

- Productive people who can sustain emotional enthusiasm for extended time periods

- An environment where intrinsically motivated people can thrive, and/or incentives for extrinsically motivated people

- A healthy feedback loop so people know when they're improving and are rewarded for it

- etc

Looked at this way, a team of 5 people working 20 hours per week in this type of company can vastly outperform a team of people working 40 hours per week at a company that lacks the above items. (And I'm probably missing some)

> Also, imagine if your doctor only worked 20 hours a week.

That would be fabulous. Much better than doctors working to a regime designed by a cocaine addict that sees them punch-drunk from a lack of sleep by the end of their rosters.

I've come to believe that big software projects are like a marathon. Burning up your maximum energy every step of the way simply isn't going to yield better results. You need to create a pace and keep to it. Sometimes you speed up, sometimes you slow down, but saying 60 hours/week from start to finish is gonna be counterproductive.

> Also, imagine if your doctor only worked 20 hours a week.

I rather imagine I’d have two doctors.

Why would I care about my doctor only working 20h a week? He could work 1h a week as long as he delivers what I need.

> Also, imagine if your doctor only worked 20 hours a week.

The reduction in misdiagnoses and straight up practical errors might give them better throughput overall?

Your hypotheticals seem stretched; I see no reason they should apply. Let's try it and see?

Seconded. I've never had a place where I wasn't supposed to bill a full 40 hours and it's hell. Any distraction or disruption ends up eating into your not work time, or you fudge the numbers and bill for work when you're not working. I could absolutely be fully productive and provide the most value to the client for 20 hours a week.

It's ok. The workers refuse to unionize though, which is a real problem.

Not at the moment. We always post in the Who's Hiring thread when a position opens.

We _love_ side projects --- that's why we started our company, because we didn't want Bezos to own our zombie card game.

> what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.

And if WFH improves output and morale at the cost of more difficult management, isn't that absolutely worth it for managers? Their entire effort is dedicated to enabling contributors, if a policy does just that then they should push for it.

I do mechanical engineering, we design stuff for our manufacturing operators and our customer's operators. Whenever some amount of effort on my side may reduce the operator's burden over the life of the product, it's absolutely worth it. I'm not going to make a subpar design just to save myself an analysis, that's the job.

So if WFH requires more management effort, and results in better output for the team, it should be pushed by management. Managers shouldn't compromise their team's output and morale just to save themselves some remote meetings.

> Consider this: if your home had only a 56k dialup modem and your office had gigabit fiber, would you still prefer to work from home?

Perhaps you underestimate how much I hate being outside of my home. If given a realistic choice, there is no situation where I would ever prefer or enjoy the office. Nothing is worth it, and most of it is an active detriment to my quality of life, especially the people. I'm not asking for everyone to be remote, unlike the many people who want to force everyone to be in-office, I just want the option for myself and others to be remote based on preference.

> it’s brutal to be a people manager in an org that was designed around office work and leading through the conversion to remote-only.

It's brutal to be an introvert/misanthrope forced to sit in a chair 8h a day, and the point is that it's not necessary. Let people who want to be in-office do so, and let the rest stay home. I still haven't heard a convincing or legitimate reason why things should be otherwise except for people who are stuck in the 1940s office mindset.

I appreciate this insight

As an engineer who transitioned to p eople management pre-covid, then back to engineering during covid (after burning out HARD), I gained a ton of empathy for my managers.

It's really shocking just how complex and demoralizing mid-level management can be, especially-so in the remote world.

After seeing just how hard it can be to simply know what your team is doing on a given day (let alone to align them to some vague OKR passed from on-high)... Let's just say it's made me want to adopt some practices that make me easier to manage.

At the very least, I'm putting more effort into keeping my tickets & PRs up-to-date and easy to understand at a glance.

And so instead of the managers adapting, the engineers have to adapt to the 56k equivalent by being in the office?

Funny my managers often wanted me to be more "flexible" to meet absolutely non-flexible deadlines.

I certainly won't mind if my manager has to adapt for once (and don't tell me they adapt to each of us and all situations and that's already taxing)

I'll happily turn the tables.

> and keeping morale high.

My morale has never been lower than when they moved us into an open office where I had to hear everyone jabbering away (plus it was in another state which more than doubled my commute).

Hate is a strong word, but if you phrased it as "would prefer not having to be near people, listen to people while trying to focus, or be forced into unwanted face-to-face social interactions" the percentage would be fairly high, especially among developers.

The more extroverted among us get emotionally charged by parties and social interaction.

The more introverted among us get emotionally drained by parties and social interactions.

For the introverts, the draining effect is much less pronounced if the party is among a tight-knit group where being conscious of social norms is not needed.

After a large gathering of people I am not emotionally close to, I need a couple hours alone, without human contact just to decompress.

Majority I would say is anecdotal. People have other lives and priorities. I would rather see my family 40 hours and work.

I can only speak from personal experience, but yes, it was pretty crushing. I knew interacting with people would be required, but I did not foresee the full on panic attacks in the bathroom, trying to calm down so I wouldn't just run out the front door and never come back.

Perhaps, but how is this different from any other soft-skill? A manager with poor reading comprehension who can't do their job unless they require every single person they manage to be physically available seems to be just as ill-suited for their job as an engineer who is incapable of working on a team, or data scientist unable to present their results in a comprehensible way to stake-holders.

Seems to me that remote-work has been a bit of a reckoning for managers, in the sense that our societal work environments have been tailored in a way that unnecessarily hampers employee well-being and productivity, all to cover up the fact that many managers are lacking in some soft-skills that are critical to actual management.

There is also the aspect of being on the record in corporate chat. There is way more on the line when everything is recorded than informal in person talking. People also 'have to be there' with their jobs, doing something they necessarily do not enjoy. On IRC in the 90s when everyone was anonymous and nothing was on the line, you had the social freedom to be more open, and the people who wanted to be there didn't have to be paid to be there.

I would humbly agree, and you make good points. I never thought about why repeating points is so important. I have often wished to some extent that the bar for communication were higher, but I guess that's something most workplaces would rather just plow through than try to really improve.

I agree collaboration is very important. What's interesting to me though is that very early in my career (pre ubiquitous video conferencing), I worked for a large multi-site corp. Me and another developer were the only developers in the local office, yet somehow we were able to collaborate using phone calls and email to build some pretty cool software with other team members in various offices around the US.

I'm not saying that digital tools are always perfect replacements, but there is a large gradient between a single person on an island and sitting shoulder to shoulder at a fold out table (which I have also done).

This claim is commonly made anecdotally by extroverts, but I've never seen real evidence that it is true.

"war rooms" are excellent in three cases:

1) creative brainstorming (ux, ui, branding, early architectural decisions) to ensure everyone can present and validate their ideas, and people are more on board with decisions as they saw democratic backing (or, at the very least, feel that objections they raise were heard!)

2) bringing staff that would normally be spread across multiple buildings and units together - the bigger the org and the more stakeholders involved, the more important a common space for (at least) the leadership team is, especially to cut through red tape and organizational barriers.

3) when you have an immediate problem (outages, GDPR incidents) to solve and secrecy is involved - no need to take care about people not in the loop, seeing stuff they are not supposed to etc.

What "war rooms" often enough end at, unfortunately, is cramped chicken coops. Not enough space, sales/PM people directly sitting and blathering in their phones next to developers, ... for months. That's a farce.

Arg. Screw that noise. I refuse to join these "co working zoom hours" where everybody is on the same zoom call. Or zoom happy hour. Or any of that. That stuff is dystopian as hell.

Remote work is great if you are a contractor with well defined scope. In fact it is ideal. You can set firm boundries with your client.

But being an employee who isn't just a cog in a machine, remote is rife with pitfalls. You lose connection with the greater company. People you used to work with on other teams. New hires. There is no doubt a huge chunk of people within my own little org that were hired over the last 1.5 years that I don't even know existed. I've lost complete track over the greater org.

Naw. A year from now it's gonna be almost exactly like what it was like in 2019. There is a reason why we didn't do this pre-lockdown and it wasn't just because of "micro managers" or "the suits justifying their work". FAANG companies pour huge amount of "HR marketing dollars" into their office environments. It literally helps them attract new talent.

I really just don't see these "hybrid" things panning out long run. We'll revert right back to 2019 before anybody knows it.

I think this kind of attitude says more about the person expressing it than it does about the value good management brings.

They don't necessarily stop but they're...different, I would say. For one thing, if someone is grabbing your attention in the office for a "quick question", it's easy to make a clean break from that interaction and move on. Verbal communication is just more efficient, and it's obvious when you have a legitimate conflict and need to move on from the conversation (On my way out the door, to lunch, to a meeting, etc).

It's also harder to get multiple "quick questions" at the same time, because in office people see when you're physically occupied. And it could be just me, but WFH I've noticed there is more psychological pressure to respond quickly to chats. Don't want people to think you're lounging off! A red "busy" indicator can mean a lot of things, in contrast to someone physically seeing you in conversation with your laptop closed in a meeting room.

In theory you should enforce boundaries "I'll respond to all questions after this virtual meeting is over" or "I have a firm cut off at 5PM and will not respond after that". But that becomes tough when leadership, who should be setting expectations on this stuff, breaks it's own rules and multi-tasks during meetings or has unrealistic availability. Definitely a cultural thing that heavily depends on your exact role and the organization norms.

TL;DR For "Zoom calls and text messaging" are not a drop in replacement for physically talking to someone, especially for people who spend a lot of their day having many small, ad-hoc conversations.

There's entire class of remote internships like Google Summer of Code, ESA Summer of Code, etc. Everyone doing just fine - mentors and interns.

Google measures intern productivity each year and this year remote has been within the amount of typical variation.

Ah, depends on the audience.

A good portion of the workplace population seem, to managers, to be unmanageable. Another good portion seem, to workers, to be unable to manage. It will take real skill to ameliorate that remotely.

Perhaps "remote leadership" is a new skill, a growth area to be exploited by the talented?

...your tone?

Off-topic but weekly 1:1s are nuts. I would’ve gladly taken you up on biweekly. I think for me every 3 weeks would be ideal because I do biweekly and it always feels like just a liiiitle too much.

Yeah, this is my big challenge as well. Hybrid remote is really difficult--if you're not careful it can end up as the worst of both worlds--but not everyone wants a remote work setting and finding a way to be flexible and accommodating to people's preferences is going to be a real challenge going forward.

But, to me, the good news is we can have this conversation now; it's no longer assumed that remote work is inferior. It's just different. Now we get to figure out how to incorporate that into the way we work.

> If you're out at dinner celebrating a new project release (especially if the drinks are flowing)

Haha! More likely that I’ll get a pat on the back and the privilege to come back next week for more. But a dinner? With drinks?? Sheesh, do you think this company is made out of gold, son?

I have been in that position before, and with certain groups it has been difficult. My, perhaps optimistic, hope is that post-COVID even those that return to the office will be more understanding for the challenges of those that are remote, it is an experience we have all lived now.

Frankly there's not much I dislike more than having to be in the office. I'd take the risk any day of the week.

Maybe there are different types of introverts. The pandemic has been by far and away the best time in my adult life, even when I only spent time at home with my partner. As long as I can spend time with her I'm happy never seeing another human.

Is this perhaps a COVID specific issue? Even during COVID I've kept in touch with a group of friends, albeit smaller. I still have the chance to go get a coffee or head to the gym, but I get to decide what those interactions are now.

This already happens in-person and is another example of why most of the problems people point out about working remotely are just problems with poor communication or workflow at a company. Working remotely isn't inherently more or less effective.

Nonsense. When I'm coding I want to be left alone to code. Often I need to talk to people as well, and I can do this very effectively over Slack, video meetings and screen sharing. I work on a team that was mostly in-office before COVID but I was one of a handful of remote people. Everyone was able to collaborate effectively when needed. Prior to that I've also been in the opposite situation where I worked in the office with teammates who were remote. It's really not that hard.

> You're advocating for a position as "a guy in a room"

No they aren't. They just said they want to WFH.

You could, not have to. You would have the option to, while for most people they simply do not.

I think they meant working at a non-colleagues house. At least, that's what I plan to do when it's possible, every now and then. I think the change of pace would be nice, back at university I'd do the same with people not on my course. Being genuinely fond of each other makes time go faster.

Of course, I'd also want to work outside of the office, with my colleagues too. A change of environment every now and then can't hurt.

Just chiming in to say some of us live in the big expensive cities precisely because of the life we lead outside of work. Otherwise, agreed.

Could flying the remote staff to an in-person meeting every 1-2 months be a good balance? As long as the flights are reasonably short (e.g., within the continental U.S. or within the E.U.), it's probably still cheaper than maintaining office space for the remote workers.

Because there is more to life than work and cheap rent. Large cities are cultural hubs with thousands of interesting people and many wonderful things to experience.

I agree that pay stability is new, but that doesn’t mean they were in a contracting relationship. For most of recorded history, most people were engaged in some form of subsistence food production. Many were enslaved. Generally speaking, neither of those economic models are that close to “contracting.”

Tenant farming gets closer (although not really). Itinerant labor probably the closest, but I don’t think they made up much of the population in societies I know about. Skilled craftsman could also count, although they look more like a generalized small business than a “contractor” as at least I think about it.

If you read employment law, they exactly say master and servant actually: https://newworkplace.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/master-and-ser...

So it’s better to put yourself in a position where you are forced to drive an hour to work each day and spend 10 hours away from your infant just to get an hour to yourself?

Also this isn’t about your infant, no one is getting work done while watching an infant.

If you don’t have at least a small office where you can shut the door, I have no idea how you’re getting anything done with small kids running around.

But that’s really a requirement for WFH and companies should start offering some kind of stipend to support that.

Assuming you do though, why can’t you stop work and then spend 30 minutes reading something, or working on a side project? My wife would be fine with me doing that, and she doesn’t keep track of when I finish work that accurately anyway.

> If judges and counter-intel agents regularly fail at this, isn't it foolish to think that eng. managers have some secret sauce?

But I'm not interrogating prisoners about terrorist plots. I'm not regularly dealing with scam artists and criminals.

I'm dealing with people, my staff, folks that I trust and respect; trust and respect based on years of experience working together, building relationships, while solving hard problems.

The question was: "How do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working on a problem that is twice as difficult as everyone thought?"

Well, guess what? I am never, ever, going to have a perfect, 100% guaranteed sense of how productive people are. That's not how the world works. There is no "secret sauce", nor did I claim there was.

Your mistake is in thinking I'm trying to verify, with perfect accuracy, precisely how effectively everyone is performing and whether they're living up to their claims of productivity and effectiveness. I can only guess this is based on a misconception of what management is; that my job is to be a surrogate helicopter parent, policing everyone to make sure they're doing their jobs properly.

But that's not my job. Or, at least, it sure isn't how I do my job.

Rather, my goal is to hire good team members who are independent, driven, focused, and reliable; give them challenging problems and the support they need to solve them; coach them to be effective contributors; identify strengths and amplify them; identify areas for improvement and coach/train; identify long-term aspirations and career goals and set out plans to achieve them; when they achieve those goals, to recognize that fact in changes to title/roles/responsibilities.

In short, I treat them like functioning, responsible adults and not like adversaries or closet criminals.

And so, I talk to them.

As I said before, yes, there is always "the rare possibility that I could end up the victim of a sociopath who deliberately tries to abuse that trust."

And I'm fine with that.

Flexible and future-proof is not the same as quality.

One of my most experienced and respected colleagues likes to say: “when it looks like I’m not working at all that’s when I’m working the most”.

I'm a "middle manager" managing a team of 3 right now, and my team has been all remote since I started in this role 4+ years ago. I have over 20 years of software dev experience and I still contribute to our code base.

It's pretty easy for me to listen to my team's daily updates at our standups and figure out how they're doing without A or B. If something's taker longer than our estimate and they explain why, it's not hard to tell if they're making this up (FWIW, no one who works on this team has ever done that).

And yeah, sometimes their productivity dips because they're tired, distracted by non-work stuff, or they just find this particular piece of work uninspiring. That's ok, no one operates at top productivity all the time.

But all of this just highlights the fact that if you want a manager of a development team to be able to evaluate team members' performance, that person needs to understand the job that those team members are doing.

Any GOOD manager. Probably in collaboration with the team and possibly a PM

Evidence based scheduling includes downtime.

The first part was serious in order to set up the joke.